Shouting into the Void

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

It started with someone listing "places with uncanny energy," like gas stations on a road trip, empty movie theaters, etc.

Then someone reblogged it and said those are called "liminal spaces," defining liminal as in-between, neither one thing nor another.

Tomorrow (July 4th, 2026) is the 10 year anniversary of the-crepes-of-wrath's comment, which:

Predates the 2020 spike in interest by four years

Predates the original backrooms post, and the the creation of r/liminalspaces by three years

Predates the earliest mention that KnowYourMeme attributes to Twitter by two years

I'm pretty sure this is the moment the term "liminal spaces" was attached to this sort of imagery, and it's TEN YEARS OLD TOMORROW!

the-crepes-of-wrath did not invent the concept nor did they claim to! liminality was conceptualized by folklorists / anthropologists, initially to describe a three-part process of rites of passage. the wikipedia page goes into all kinds of contexts liminality has been applied in. unfortunately a lot of people do not know this & think "liminal" is just a word for "spooky or uncanny." a shame imo!

It came from “diamoric”, which describes the non-straight, non-same-gender but intrinsically queer nature of relationships involving a nonbinary person (or multiple nonbinary people).

So like, a relationship between a girl and an agender person is diamoric and the agender person is the girl’s diamour!

Or, an androgyne and a genderfluid person dating are diamours!