EA Survey Results

[JesusA (imported)]

Below are the basic data from the Eunuch Archive Survey. The survey program aggregates the data such that it is impossible to pull out any single response, though categories with multiple responses can be separated. E.g., we can pull out as a group all 110 respondents who identify as eunuchs (those with no, or physically non-functional, testicles), but we cannot pull out separately the responses of any single person.

The written responses to the open-ended questions cannot be tied to any other response given by that individual. Many respondents asked to be contacted, and some of them gave their names and email addresses in their written responses to the open-ended questions. Those will be kept in strict confidence by the researchers, but unless you specifically wrote your email address into the message where you asked to be contacted, there is no way to find you.

Anyone wishing to add further information can write to the researchers at: [email protected].

Your help in this project is greatly appreciated. We will be analyzing the volumes of data you provided and writing up our analysis over the summer. More extensive results will then be posted on the Eunuch Archive.

Tom Johnson

Richard Wassersug

[JesusA (imported)]

Eunuch Archive Survey

988 total respondants!

What continent do you currently live in?

North America - 67 %

Europe - 22 %

Australia - 5 %

OTHER - 6 %

What is your current age?

Range: From under 18 (hence young enough that they shouldn't have been on the eunuch.org website!) to over 76.

Mean 42.5, standard deviation +/-14.5

Median 43.4

What is your highest education level?

Less than High School diploma - 3 %

High School diploma or GED (diploma equivalent) - 19 %

Trade School Certificate - 9 %

Associate Degree - 13 %

Bachelor Degree - 28 %

Graduate Degree - 19 %

Doctoral Degree - 5 %

What is your birth gender?

Male (XY Chromosomes) - 964

Female (XX Chromosomes) - 19

Other - 10

What is your self-identified gender?

Male - 752

Female - 92

Third gender - 93

Other / Neither - 52

What is your sexual orientation?

Heterosexual (straight) - 28 %

Homosexual (Gay / Lesbian) - 33 %

Bisexual - 32. %

Asexual - 4 %

Other - 2%

Do view yourself as being...

Very feminine - 2 %

Moderately feminine - 16%

Neither very masculine nor feminine - 24%

Moderately masculine - 45 %

Very masculine - 13 %

What religion, if any, were you raised in?

Christianity - 71 %

Judaism - 3 %

Atheist - 3 %

OTHER - 6%

None - 13%

Don’t wish to disclose this information - 4%

Please rate your current sexual desire from 1 to 10 (1 equals no desire, 10 equals overwhelming desire)

1 - 4%

2 - 4%

3 - 6%

4 - 5%

5 - 6%

6 - 7%

7 - 14%

8 - 24%

9 - 16%

10 - 14%

Please rate your current sexual activity from 1 to 10 (1 equals no activity, 10 equals a lot of activity)

1 - 14%

2 - 14%

3 - 10%

4 - 9%

5 - 10%

6 - 8%

7 - 10%

8 - 11%

9 - 7%

10 - 6%

What is your current state?

Eunuch (

no, or physically non-functional, testicles)

- 110

Chemical Eunuch - 47

Penectomised (no penis, have testicles) - 5

Nullified (no penis or testicles) - 21

Wannabe (desire castration / penectomy / nullification) - 741

How long have you been a eunuch?

Less than 1 year - 24

1-2 years - 19

2-3 years - 21

3-4 years - 14

4-5 years - 9

5-10 years - 28

10-15 years - 9

15-20 years - 2

20-30 years - 4

30-40 years - 4

40-50 years - 1

Over 50 years - 1

How long have you been a wannabe?

Less than 1 year - 48

1-2 years - 63

2-3 years - 76

3-4 years - 63

4-5 years - 60

5-10 years - 177

10-20 years - 144

20-30 years - 67

30-40 years - 49

40-50 years - 26

Over 50 years - 18

At what age, in years, did your castration occur?

Range: From under 18 to over 76

Mean 40.5, standard deviation +/-15

Median 40.8.

To whom do you identify yourself as a eunuch?

Family - 14

Close friends - 36

Most friends - 6

Openly to public - 7

Openly to everyone - 15

Others on the Internet - 31

No one - 44

Since being castrated, has your sexual orientation changed?

Yes - 26

No - 92

Unsure - 22

What does your hormone replacement therapy (HRT) involve?

Full standard dosage of testosterone - 39

Lowered/minimal dosage of testosterone - 20

No hormones of any kind - 54

Minimal dosage of estrogen - 13

Transitional levels of estrogen - 13

What do you like most about being castrated?

Slowed or stopped the growth of cancer. - 17

Foolproof birth control. - 22

A sense of control over my sexual urges and/or sexual appetite. - 62

A feeling of calm, often call the eunuch calm. - 53

It allows me to be more submissive. - 32

Freedom of guilt about having too many sexual thoughts and desires. - 28

Release of pressure to be macho. - 33

Cosmetic effect (just like the look). - 44

Advanced my sexual reassignment to female. - 17

Other. - 23

How is your general physical health (1 equals poor, 10 equals excellent)

1 - 1

2 - 1

3 - 7

4 - 8

5 - 23

6 - 20

7 - 32

8 - 66

9 - 60

10 - 32

How is your mental health? (1 equals not stable, 10 equals very stable)

1 - 1

2 - 1

3 - 5

4 - 8

5 - 15

6 - 17

7 - 21

8 - 43

9 - 60

10 - 76

Please rate your level of social interaction. (1 equals shy, isolated, 10 equals very outgoing)

1 - 7

2 - 11

3 - 26

4 - 25

5 - 27

6 - 24

7 - 29

8 - 53

9 - 21

10 - 28

Do you have any regrets about your castration/penectomy/nullification? (1 equals no regrets, 10 equals major regrets)

1 - 57

2 - 18

3 - 7

4 - 5

5 - 1

6 - 5

7 - 5

8 - 1

9 - 4

10 - 3

The origin of my interest in castration/penectomy/nullification involves (check all that apply):

Cannot explain the reasons - 255

To prevent the further possibility of sexually offensive behavior - 80

Religious concerns - 25

To please my partner - 108

Health concerns (testicular / prostate cancer) - 95

Fantasy / curiosity / Cyber play - 456

Male-To-Female transition - 149

Reduction of libido (sex drive) - 265

Esthetic (dysmorphic view of testicles / penis – that is, they are alien, don’t belong) - 208

Just came across topic on the Internet - 127

Other - 118

At what age did you first act on your castration ideas through fantasy, play, research, etc?

60+ - 19

56–60 - 19

51–55 - 17

46–50 - 32

41–45 - 55

36–41 - 57

31–35 - 70

26–30 - 88

21–25 - 96

16–20 - 172

11–15 - 212

10 or younger - 73

If you had not discovered Internet sites, like the Eunuch Archive,Yahoo Groups, or other web sites, do you feel you would have explored an interest in castration nonetheless?

Yes - 578

No - 122

Unsure - 238

How much has the Internet influenced your interest in and desire for castration? Please rate from 1 to 10, (with 1 very little/no influence and 10 being very great/significant influence).

1 - 47

2 - 45

3 - 62

4 - 57

5 - 109

6 - 71

7 - 91

8 - 142

9 - 102

10 - 106

Do you use the Internet (EA, Chat, Yahoo) as a source for fantasy, or as a source for information?

Want to know more, desire castration - 357

Interested in topic - 245

Cyber play (i.e., in chat) - 51

Fantasy - 190

What is your current ambition regarding eunuchism?

I just stumbled across this topic on the Internet - 23

Just interested - 77

Topic stimulates me (fantasy, etc) - 346

Seriously researching possibility - 251

Actively seeking castration/penectomy/nullification - 150

Do you experience any desire to change your gender (i.e., Male-To-Female)?

Yes - 252

No - 595

Do you have children?

Yes, all natural. - 333

Yes, all adopted. - 31

Yes, some natural some adopted. - 21

No, I have no children. - 603

What is your current marital status?

Single. - 417

Married. - 302

Separated. - 29

Divorced. - 71

Partnered to a male but not married. - 116

Partnered to a female but not married. - 51

Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your history and interest in castration?

Total Answers - 372

Some representative answers will be posted below. They will be chosen to give no identifying clues as to the person responding.

Note: If you wrote a comment here asking the researchers to contact you directly, but did not include your regular email address there, they cannot reach you. For confidentiality sake the personalized pin numbers used to access the survey blocked any possible link to your email address. If there is anything further that you would like to tell the researchers or any questions you would like to ask, contact them at [email protected]. Your help in this research is greatly appreciated.

[docs (imported)]

OK so now we have the poll results. BTW I participated in it. Now my question is:What are the two pollsters going to do with all the raw data?

I ask this out of respect for the two men involved but also my academic curiosity is raised.

[An Onymus (imported)]

Tom --

As you of course know, the one thing which would jump out from this survey, for any social sciences researcher, is the fact that your figures indicate that a third of the respondents identify themselves as gay or lesbian, and nearly as many identify themselves as bisexual.

I'm not sure how the data from the survey are to be used, or what the degree of accuracy intended was (in terms of the survey being typical of those who desire to be desexed, or who have already been desexed); but, for most social sciences researchers, a red flag would go up as soon as they saw how heavily the respondent base is skewed toward homosexuals and bisexuals. By some surveys, the percentage of homosexuals in the general population is less than two and a half percent. Since there is no obvious reason why there should be an orientation imbalance, vis a vis a random sample, in this survey, I have to think that most academic professionals in fields associated with this type of survey, would look very skeptically at the data. Perhaps no high level of accuracy was intended, but this mix of respondent orientations would seem to be too far from the sociological norm, for it to be considered representative of the group it is (I would presume) intended to profile.

The only reason I could think of, offhand, for a sample profile of the kind your figures indicate, is, that heterosexuals would repress their desires for orchiectomy, because of the desire to retain the potential for reproduction--gay persons, as far as I know, typically don't envision having children, and, if they do wish to start families, my impression is, that they go the adoption route. But that really doesn't seem to be a convincing reason for an apparent imbalance of the type indicated.

I wonder if you can apply some statistical methods to see if there is a geographical bias, an age bias, or any other correlation between variables which might explain the high percentage of homophile respondents. Of course, Bboy apparently intended the website to be somewhat gay-oriented, in the beginning, and a substantial number of the administrative officers of the website, are gay or bisexual--though there is no obvious homophile orientation in the website.

It looks like, to the extent possible, you've produced a survey which explores a wide range of issues related to the website's theme, and you got more respondents than I would have expected. Hope it will be useful to yourself and others, despite the apparent anomaly I've mentioned.

Don't know how it would be done, but you might try to do a random sample in the general population, of those who feel a desire for orchiectomy, to see if you get the same level of skewing toward one orientation.

Again, I'm not trying to be critical, but the skewing I've mentioned would be considered by most researchers to compromise the study, right from the start.

[chrys (imported)]

Just making a guess from my anthopology classes, but I doubt that the researchers were expecting this community to reflect an American "sociological norm." Instead, I would expect that they are interested in investigating what the sociological norm *of* the community is, and then maybe trying to analyze why that should be.

I also doubt that this data will be used for the kind of systematic, mathematical analysis that - say - psychological data is used to provide. In my experience, anthropologists are deeply distrustful of statistics.

What people say about themselves in this kind of self-report tends to be generally wrong anyway... it usually begs a kind of double-layered analysis in which the questions are not just "What are these people like?" but "Why do these people say/think they are like this?"

That said, I'd be interested in how the anthropologists are planning to analyze the data from a theoretical perspective... where they situate themselves in the various anthropological discourses, etc.

[Blaise (imported)]

Thank you for posting the results. The first thing that I noticed was the large percentage of gay and bisexual people responding. I do not know if that surprised me--just an intuitive sense about the forum. I suspect that interest in eunuch related issues is wider than the forum. However, I have not thought much about this in several months. My HRT took effect and just reading posts here reduced my involvement in thinking about the issues.

Anyway, thank you for the poll and for posting the results.

[SplitDik (imported)]

Since many of the results were presented in form of a distribution, I expect that some comparison to distribution of "average" online society would be the next step.

What impressed me most was that it seems to span a very broad set of people. That is kinda cool, although it would also be very interesting if there was an obvious factor in eunuch desire.

Actually, the number of gays/bisexuals did not seem that different than normal society. First of all, that question wasn't asked right because it is not clear how a transsexual would answer. Without having the numbers, I'd guess that sexual orientation is not that strong of a correlating factor.

Otherwise, looks like eunch desire can start at about any age, for people of any educationlevel, any orientation, any marital status, and be precipated by a multitude of reasons not necessarily transsexual.

The good news I saw was that most respondants considered themselves healthy in body and mind, so at least from our own perspective this is a sane desire.