ey has a word for it

Happy nonbinary day, everyone! :)

Who? Everyone whose gender doesn’t tidily fit into the female/male binary.

What? An online survey asking participants how they describe themselves and how they would like other people to refer to them.

When? July to August 2025.

Participants: 43,096

The full report: click here

Raw data and summary tables: Google Sheets:

Unprocessed responses

Processed responses – warning, this will take a long time to load!

2013-2025 trends

~

Identity words

The top 5 were:

nonbinary: 61.7% (up 1.3%)

queer: 56.1% (up 2.5%)

trans: 46.5% (up 1.8%)

transgender: 41.1% (up 2.3%)

a person / human / [my name] / “I’m just me”: 39.7% (up 0.6%)

~

Titles

The top 5 were:

No title at all: 42.6% (up 0.4%)

Mx: 14.7% (down 2.7%)

Mr: 11.0% (down 0.3%)

Non-gendered prof/acad.: 8.9% (down 0.3%)

Ms: 5.6% (down 0.2%)

~

Formal address (sir/ma'am)

Here’s the top 5:

No title at all: 66.9% (up 2.0%)

Friend: 35.9% (up 0.9%)

Sir: 32.4% (down 0.8%)

Comrade: 23.5% (down 0.6%)

Mx: 18.1% (down 2.5%)

~

Pronouns

Here’s the top 5:

They - they/them/their/theirs/themself: 75.0% (down 0.5%)

He - he/him/his/his/himself: 40.6% (down 1.4%)

She - she/her/her/hers/herself: 34.1% (down 1.9%)

It - it/it/its/its/itself: 22.8% (up 2.5%)

Avoid pronouns / use name as pronoun: 14.4% (up 0.5%)

~

Transcript: A newspaper article titled “Ey has a word for it,” by Judie Black, which says:

As women have grown freer, the English language has grown more tangled: What’s a chairperson and who is a Ms.? But help may be on the way in the form of ey, eir, and em.

Those are the winning entries in the Chicago Association of Business Communicators’ contest to find pronouns to replace she and he (ey), him and her (em), his and hers (eir).

“It,” a neuter pronoun, already exists, but contest winner Christine M. Elverson of Skokie says her words are “transgender pronouns.” She formed them by dropping “the” from the familiar plural pronouns, they, them, and their.

For example, a speaker might use these new transgender pronouns when ey addresses an audience of both men and women. Eir sentences would sound smoother since ey wouldn’t clutter them with the old sexist pronouns. And if ey should trip up in the new usage, ey would have only emself to blame.

“There’s a definite need for transgender pronouns,” says Mrs, Elverson, editor of the employee newsletter of the G.D. Searle Co.

“It gets cumbersome when you don’t know whether you’re talking or writing about a man or a woman.”

A contestant from California entered the word “uh” because “if it isn’t a he or a she, it’s uh, something else.”

You can see a spreadsheet of participation (including a little bit of demographic data) here.

We just passed 3,179 responses, which probably sounds too specific. It's the number of responses this survey got last time I did it, in 2019. That means I consider this survey a success. :D

As you can see, the participation rate has slowed down a lot:

Click here to participate!

So, I'm working on generating the pronouns checkbox list for next year using the multiplier system.

The following options that are not actually pronoun sets have to be on the list:

I want people to frequently change the pronouns they use for me

My pronouns vary depending on specific conditions

Any

Avoid pronouns / use name as pronoun

A pronoun set not listed here

Questioning or unknown

For comparison, the identity checkbox list is 20 long, in two columns (10 per column), which seems to work. That looks like this:

This year's pronoun list was 15 long. It can't be over two columns because the options are a bit too long. On the same screen, 15 checkboxes look like this:

(Bear in mind the "preview" black bar at the top won't be there for everyone else!)

What do you think is a good length for a pronoun list in one column? Think: Plenty to choose from, but not so many that you have to scroll too much and can't easily find what you're looking for.

[ Link to survey ]

The 10th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 9th May 2023.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

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 - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

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.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

[ Link to survey ]

The 10th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 9th May 2023.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

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 - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

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.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

If you would like to contribute financially to this year's annual survey of everyone whose genders defy and transcend the limited binary model, please click here:

So far:

Manager carefully wrote down spelling and pronunciation of my pronouns and told everyone on the team to respect them.

Coworker apologized privately for misgendering me (I hadn't told her yet) and said she will practice.

Guy on another team valiantly tried to use my pronouns and ended up saying something like zirzs-zhizz (I DM'd him and thanked him for trying and linked him to a practice site).

Teammate told me he has written out my pronouns and how to use them in a sentence and literally taped it to his monitor so he can practice.

Teammate also referred to me as compañere after I linked to a comic about gender-neutral endings in Spanish (whole team except me + 1 other person speaks Spanish as first language and they held all meetings in Spanish before the two of us started).

The US is doing a trans survey which is being released on the 19th of October (12 days away).

A LOT of the statistics about trans people are from 2015. Between that time and now, I've seen an fucking EXPLOSION in the trans community.

It's important to have up-to-date and a large sample size of statistics, so sign up below to be notified when it drops:

relate their gender to concepts, but not necessarily objects

are cis, and just like it

are just some guy/girl/person