#i still have the survey running at. over 400 responses. I don't really know when I'll stop it.

[elijah-terry]

I’d like to address some comments and questions I’ve gotten about the survey! I don’t know if anyone will see these, but in case other people have thoughts about this, here are some answers. This got kind of long, so it’s under the cut.

1. “Why is assigned sex at birth a required question? Doesn’t the gender identities question give you the information you need?”

So, this is a study on the way people use pronouns to construct/reinforce ideologies, right? So what I am trying to study is the way other people perceive you, and how they use labels for you to reinforce and construct their ideas of language and gender. Three things.

The first thing is that it’s not really a required question! Yes, you have to answer that specific question on the survey; however, there are “prefer not to say” and “other” options so you don’t have to actually tell me this if you’re not comfortable doing so.

The second thing is that no, the gender identities question does not actually give me the info I need, by itself. This question in combination with the assigned sex at birth question are the two most important questions on this survey, because how people view your trans identity in relation to your assigned sex at birth is a huge component of how they are using labels to reinforce a gendered perception of a trans person. Sure, the gender identities question is enough info on its own if you tell me you are transmasc/trans man, or transfemme/trans woman, but most of the answers actually don’t say things like that. Most of the answers are nonbinary, agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, or other answers that don’t have any bearing on that.

The third thing is that, again, these two questions are the most important questions on this survey. Specifically, the assigned sex question is probably the single most relevant question to my actual research question and hypothesis. I probably won’t be able to use most of the data from responders who haven’t listed an asab or other way to tell what their asab might have been, because of the specific scope of my research question. That doesn’t mean the data given by those individuals is useless; this is a large and detailed corpus of very fascinating information, and I could definitely use any of this data for a number of other research questions and topics! Moving on.

2. I hope being closeted didn’t hurt the statistics / I hope answering as a system didn’t hurt the statistics

Don’t worry about it! Any and all data you gave is extremely important in trans sociolinguistics, and while I may not be able to use it in this particular study, it will most likely be useful in other studies! Thank you so much for sharing these things!

3. It would be helpful to have a question about being intersex!

I completely agree! When designing this survey, I thought about that and asked someone else in my connections about that, and I struggled with how to implement that. He suggested adding the ‘other’ option to the assigned sex question for people to fill in more specifically, and I do have the add anything you’d like to add section; outside of that, I wasn’t sure what to do. If I create another survey like this, I will do some more research, ask intersex people, and try to include their experiences in a better way!

4. It might be helpful to have a question about where people are out

The question about where you use your pronouns was meant to address this, but I see how that could have been unclear! I will take this under advisement for future surveys, if any.

5. Sorry for adding more afab data!

Don’t be! All data is helpful and appreciated, I am just worried I won’t be able to draw as much of a conclusion about the experiences of amab people. I have a good number of amab data, it’s just only about 8% of the data; considering that I have over 400 responses so far, that’s still a pretty good number!

6. There's a lot of options to list people in connection with school, but not work / not all trans people are students

My bad! I missed a couple of things when adding options to the "who is doing this" question. A lot of people have used the fill in the blank option to add coworkers and a lot of other categories of people! The reason there is a big focus on school-related categories is because this survey was originally meant to be shared primarily in the queer groups on my university campus. I got a very small number of responses, so I shared it online. I also could have sworn I had options for coworkers and bosses and etc but I see now that I don't! I meant to, and missed it. Fortunately, there's a fill in the blank option and a follow up question to elaborate.

7. This has made me more aware of how my friends are or aren't using my pronouns. I think I'm going to try to communicate with them about this more.

I hope that they're responsive and that you can be referred to in the way you want to be. Everyone deserves that same respect and courtesy.

I'm glad that this survey has helped a lot of people think more about pronouns than they might have been, and I hope that the answers you all gave me help you just as much as they'll help me.

Also, if anyone has any other questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me here on Tumblr! This paper is going to be done sometime around end of April, early May. A lot of people have expressed being interested in the results; I will try to attach it to this post in some way or another!

Thank you everyone who has responded! Thank you also to everyone giving me feedback on how the survey itself is!

linguistics survey on pronouns

Hi! My name is Gabe, and I’m a linguistics student. In my graduate course, I am doing a research project on the way people use pronouns to construct/reinforce language and gender ideologies, looking specifically at the way people with multiple sets of pronouns are referred to by others.

If you use more than one set of pronouns (i.e. she/they, he/it/ae, etc), please consider filling this survey out! it takes about 15-20 minutes depending on your level of detail, though as much detail as possible is encouraged!

here is the link to the survey!