Terms that people really want on the checkbox list
This was going to go in this year's annual report, but I think it belongs here instead.
I would like to take a moment to talk about some terms that people bring up in the feedback box a lot. Specifically, they’re words that participants frequently tell me I should put in the checkbox list. It's not a lot of people, but the people who want it are passionate enough to contact me and be pretty forthright about it.
I’ll start by giving some context. The purpose of the checkbox list is not to recognise or provide representation for particular identities. A checkbox in this survey ensures that a particular term is entered the same way every time, making it easier to count. It also speeds up the survey process for the people who can check that box, which is why the checkboxes are mostly based on popularity. The two downsides that I’ve seen are:
When the checkbox list is too long, people aren’t able to find what they’re looking for and then checkbox terms get written into textboxes a lot when they don’t need to be. The checkbox list needs to be kept under a specific length for this reason.
Checkbox terms get chosen more often than they would have been written in, because they prompt the participant and remind them of the term’s existence, unlike an empty textbox that relies on the participant’s recall.
Honorable mention to a downside that has been suggested to me several times over the years by intersex and indigenous people:
When there's a marginalised identity on offer, apparently there are often people who (aspirationally?) check that box even though they may not actually "qualify" or be entitled to do so. [I don't have any evidence either way on this issue, so I reserve judgement and bear it in mind.]
A question with 20 checkbox answers to choose from is almost a list of 20 questions in one: “Do I identify with this word? Y/N”, asked 20 times. This means that people who wouldn’t write a term into a textbox might see it in the checkbox list, may be a bit unsure about what it means or whether it fits them, err on the positive side, and choose it anyway.
The terms that people often ask me to include in the identity checkbox list are:
Various terms that I group roughly into plural/multiple/alter/system
Specific native/indigenous terms, especially two-spirit
I have a policy of not overriding the statistical system for choosing the checkbox list, outside of very specific circumstances. The above terms are either not typically words used to describe a gender identity (even though they may influence one’s gender identity or one’s experience of one’s gender), or they are region-specific. For any of that, I wouldn’t start to consider adding something to the checkbox list unless one was typed in often enough that it could rival something already on the checkbox list. Even then I might have to apply careful scrutiny if it’s not typically a word used to describe a gender. (For example, I didn’t add queer and lesbian to the checkbox list until I was sure that people were typing them in as words that represented their genders, not just their sexual/relationship orientations.)
But every write-in is counted superficially, and when I notice a more popular write-in being entered with many different spellings I try to find ways to aggregate them and count them a little more thoroughly, just in case it needs a checkbox – though I should note that this is not a flawless process!
This means that anyone can find the statistics for the above terms in the spreadsheet of responses. For convenience, I’ll put them here:
intersex and some spelling variations: entered 234 times, 0.54% of all participants, #42 on the write-in list
plural/system/alter/multiple: entered 340 times, 0.79% of all participants, #30 on the write-in list
two-spirit and some spelling variations: entered 130 times, 0.30% of participants, #67 on the write-in list
otherkin/therian: entered 182 times, 0.42% of participants, #54 on the write-in list
Mostly identity write-ins don’t make it into the checkbox list unless they’re within the top 5, though there could in theory be an exception to this rule based on disproportionate popularity within a specific age group. [The selection system takes into account each 5-year age group so that people of all ages see something somewhat relatable in the list, so if a term is particularly popular in a specific age group it might make it onto the checkbox list even if it’s not entered very much overall.] So these terms’ positions on the write-in list may hint at how likely they are to break into the checkbox list, roughly.
Despite them not making it into the checkbox list, these terms are all well-represented in the textbox list. They’re in the top 100 (or even the top 50) of almost 12,000 unique textbox entries in an international survey, usually only falling below write-ins for genders like man, woman, demigirl, guy, transsexual, and butch. They have been entered often enough that someone could copy the Google Sheet and do a bit of statistical analysis on the data. That’s significant!
I would encourage people with marginalised identities to share the survey within their communities, so that anyone who wants to do a bit of data exploration of a particular subgroup will see you all the way you want to be seen. If someone wanted to analyse the USA data, I’m sure they would be very interested to see two-spirit in there.
And if you’re not happy with the way I do things, I would absolutely love for you to run your own research survey, your way. Citizen science rules, it’s totally legal, they can’t stop you! And I will boost your promotional posts to Gender Census followers if you bloop me about it, provided you meet my very basic ethical standards, like “don’t collect names and addresses and email addresses”, etc.
Edit 2025-10-08: A follow-up, with the best statistics I can summon (which are not very good).
