Practical Androgyny

United Kingdom Nonbinary Election Campaign results and final analysis blog post and bar charts, analysing the performance of the UK Trans Info campaign in light of the general election result.

As encouraging as the 809 candidates pledging support were, the 33 of them that actually got elected didn’t include the 2 Lib Dem MPs who previously showed the most support for nonbinary people in parliament.

This means that it’s important that those 33 who were elected are kept to their word and asked to show active support, and that more MPs are told why these issues deserve consideration.

33 out of the 809 candidates who took the nonbinary pledge were elected to parliament.

Despite winning the majority of seats, only 3 of the elected Conservative Party MPs pledged support - only 0.9% of Tory MPs.

Every general election candidate who pledged to support nonbinary rights and recognition in 2015 is listed here

[LINK]

When interacting with the government you often have to provide a title from a preset list of options. Many people prefer to use no title, or a gender-neutral title: government bodies should offer gender-neutral options e.g. “Mx”, as well as the option to use no title at all.

[Image: a screenshot of a green and grey progress bar from the petition website showing that the petition has 292 of 10,000 required signatures.]

This is so important, and for a few minutes I wasn’t going to promote it, because I already have Mx on all my government paperwork and records. But then I realised that if this gets to 10,000 signatures, the Government will have to release an official statement saying that titles aren’t legally binding and that they already accept Mx on records.

That would be a HUGE victory for nonbinary people and people who don’t want to indicate a gender with their title. So please, if you are in the UK or might have followers who are, consider reblogging this. <3

Thank you for your time!

Anybody who has had, considered, or thought about top surgery should take this survey. All questions are optional, time to complete is 10-20mins.

Help us gather lots of data! Spread the word by sharing widely.

[LINK]

Twice now I have surveyed nonbinary people to get a general idea of preferences when it comes to language to describe us. In 2015, nonbinary and genderqueer identities were much more visible (in fiction and non-fiction), and trans issues have been thoroughly discussed in the media.

This time I’ll attempt to improve on the last survey by including some options that were missed out last time, plus any responses that were written into the “other” boxes over 1% of the time. As before, you will not be asked for your name, age, email address, specific location, legal gender, or gender assigned at birth.

What the results will be used for.

It will close at 12pm (noon GMT/UTC London) on Friday 15th January 2016 or thereabouts. (If there’s still plenty of responses coming in, I’ll announce a new closing time.)

Thank you,

Cassian

[LINK]

PS: Last year there were almost 3,000 responses, with some interesting results. If you want to help us to repeat (or exceed) that, please consider sharing in your various social media places!

Tweet

[LINK]

Twice now I have surveyed nonbinary people to get a general idea of preferences when it comes to language to describe us. In 2015, nonbinary and genderqueer identities were much more visible (in fiction and non-fiction), and trans issues have been thoroughly discussed in the media.

This time I’ll attempt to improve on the last survey by including some options that were missed out last time, plus any responses that were written into the “other” boxes over 1% of the time. As before, you will not be asked for your name, age, email address, specific location, legal gender, or gender assigned at birth.

It will close at 12pm (noon GMT/UTC London) on Friday 15th January 2016 or thereabouts. (If there’s still plenty of responses coming in, I’ll announce a new closing time.)

Thank you,

Cassian

[LINK]

PS: Last year there were almost 3,000 responses, with some interesting results. If you want to help us to repeat (or exceed) that, please consider sharing in your various social media places!

Tweet

Over 800 General Election candidates have now made our non-binary pledge. That’s over 20% of all candidates! New pledges can be made until polls close at 10pm tonight, so it’s not too late to ask your local candidates to pledge.

[LINK]

Nat’s gone and done the research, it must’ve taken ages, and it is really interesting and helpful: When was the Mx gender-inclusive title created?

The Google Groups Usenet archive extends back to 1981 and the earliest example I found of someone suggesting and using Mx (albeit as a one off) was in July 1982 on the newsgroup net.nlang during one of their frequent discussions of gender neutral pronouns (intended to be used to refer to anyone without giving their gender) and nonsexist gender neutral language (such as ‘chairperson’ and  ‘womyn’)

Nat’s article goes on to document more mentions online, and the first serious mention of its practical application in 1998:

Subject: Re: Vegetarianism and B12 deficiency (was Re: Organic GE) Newsgroups: uk.misc,soc.culture.british,rec.food.veg,uk.politics.animals, uk.people.teens,soc.culture.scottish,uk.environment Date: 1998/10/19

[…] Occasionally I have used the title ‘Mx’ before my name, with the idea that it leaves in question whether I a woman or a man or somethinng in between and gives no idea of my maritial status.

– Gnome 11

Excellent and highly recommended response to the flawed NY Mag Agender article from The Frisky:

It’s a common assumption that non-binary people were all assumed female at birth, i.e. born with the body parts we typically associate with girls. With the exception of Pejic, who doesn’t have a pronoun preference and has de-emphasized the importance of gender in interviews, there are few visible examples of assumed-male-at-birth non-binary people. Kopas explained how this narrow POV can harm assumed-male-at-birth people and others who fall outside the typical presentation:

It seems that we’ve started treating the most visible examples of non-binary people as if they represented the full range of ways of being. […] Who does this leave out? People of color, fat people, male-assigned people… As a male-assigned non-binary person, it’s sometimes felt like a struggle for me to have that part of my identity recognized even by other gender-variant folks. People want to place me as either as a man because of my physical features, or a woman because of how I dress or because I’m on [hormone replacement therapy]. But there’s no non-binary uniform or medical regimen — nothing says that someone can’t dress femme and still identify outside of a gender binary. So if non-binary is to mean more than a particular kind of androgynous expression, then we need to talk about the range of ways that it can look and feel.

In short? “Agender” may sound like a tidy little label — but that would be an underestimation of every agender person that you meet.