sincere post

Not going to get too specific here but I work at a place that isn't about profits and we are being cooked. Like I'm asked to work crazy fucking hours (for much better wages at least thank god) just to keep things working. A lot of these services were us helping with the holes in the government. Now there's basically no government so we're the new one This used to be such a chill job!

This has been taking all of my time and to make matters worse our mutual aid stuff is being hammered cause of all the rampant queerphobia right now. I have basically zero time to manage it, same with my friends. This post is from a toilet at work. I hate America. Back to the mines.

Various thoughts:

• Around 20 people weren't properly covered by the gender categories, obviously we're trying to be as inclusive as possible and a different approach will be tried next time

• There were about 600 respondents, which gives us a accurate sampling of the active userbase. If you multiply any number by 3, you'll get a fairly accurate representation of the full userbase each week. This means there are around 800-900 people who don't identify fully as cis each week on this site.

• Nearly 300 trans/gender diverse/questioning people unanimously agree that hexbear is an inclusive space

• There was so much data on gender that I was really struggling to find a way to convey the data that wasnt a pie chart, graph, or an incomprehensible kalaeidoscope. If you have an idea on how to beautify the data, you can download the raw data here: https://pad.artemislena.eu/file/#/2/file/xzy4pck8on%20oZp9yGRUIezR%20/ - I further anonymized this data by removing time of response and any specific comments, I don't think it would be easy for anyone to figure out who is who.

• There were a couple of text responses that really needed further elaboration, I noted hexbear's rules next to these comments

• I'll probably be doing a demographics survey sometime in the future, including basic fairly anonymous stuff like "what region were you born in" "where do the languages you speak originate" "would you describe yourself as a POC" "what age range are you in".

• The percentage of people answering they were cisgender increased by 8% than the previous survey. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as cis people being afraid trans people will hunt them down in the public thread and assassinate them. Anonymity may have made them feel safer to respond. Regardless, way more people responded this time, which signifies that people felt safer responding to the cryptpad or it was easier to do. The leading question was a bit more inclusive than last time, but I think I'll include both questions (are you transgender / gender diverse and are you cisgender) to see how people respond.

• We have a lot of people that aren't binary trans on this site.

• Some of the questions were pretty funky and we got a lot of fuzzy responses on them as a result. In particular "After you realized you were trans/gender diverse, how long did it take for you to begin to act on it?" and "At what age did you begin transition?" caused a lot of friction, I think I will ask more vague questions in the future that lead to a path of more specific questions to capture better data, and to save people time. Questions like "Do you feel your gender transition had a defined starting point?" and some further ones.

• Around 20 people each week on this site are cis she/hers, which is very low and roughly the same as last time. I feel like if hexbear ever starts hosting other federated stuff (like a federated tiktok or something) and can hook into it natively with lemmy, we'd see a better ratio.

• I tried to be very sure any data with >2 people on it was clearly legible, I think some people might find it fun that there are others with their same fairly specific classifications per this survey lurking around on the site.

• Overall I feel like the survey was a success despite some bumps.

• You can find the other surveys/links here: https://hexbear.net/post/3016455

• I made these graphs on company time

Took me a bit and I am a little drunk but here are the totals. We had a good showing.

Note: some comments got cut out because the server doesn't like displaying more than 300 from what I can tell. I did my best with what it would show, I just sorted them by new. This should be fairly representative of the currently active userbase. As an aside, I believe we did a similar survey a looong time ago, and we had only 33% of the active userbase as trans.

Random thoughts:

A lot of people were very very cute and confused and essentially asked me to decide their gender for them. Eggs? Probably. This isn't Harry Potter and I'm not a hat so I just went with what they were sounding more convinced of.

A lot of people are even cuter and don't understand how to follow instructions, though some of this is my fault. Made this a little harder to organize.

Some people were not cis and did not identify with the words 'transgender' or 'gender diverse'. If I ever do a trans/adjacent survey again, I think I will ask 'Are you cis?'

I may do a survey for queer people overall eventually, and the question will be 'Are you cishet?'

I would love to do more scientific, inclusive polling and have better and more questions and options, but we need some good secure polling tech for that, which we don't have. So I just have to ask simple questions and get a handful of answers.

Next time I will look into how feasible it is to post a couple of comments and get responders to upvote certain ones. This might fix the issue of the display of comments being limited.

Since some people have two sets of pronouns, both of their pronouns are included separately.

Since the poll was public, some marginalized groups probably shied away from answering. If we ever get a secure way to poll people, we would get more realistic estimates of the trans and cis women userbase.

#Tallies

Yes: 121 
No: 137
Maybe: 37 
Total: 295

If you think something is fucked, you can do it yourself, the thread is public. Hope you like pie!