Vocabulary Survey

[JesusA (imported)]

I have received a request to seek additional people who are willing to participate in a brief survey on vocabulary related to gender identity and to transgendered individuals. Below is the request as I received it.

If, after completing the survey, you have any thoughts that you want to convey to Jamison Green and his colleagues anonymously, please make a post to this thread. I will compile your thoughts and send them to Jamison. He is one of the most effective advocates for transgender rights among professionals in the field. What he says makes a great difference. He needs to be educated further, though, on the range of gender identities outside “male” and “female.”

>>•••••••<<

Greetings!

Ten years ago, we conducted a short survey of our community’s reactions to the 
use of descriptive terminology in the professional literature of gender identity 
issues. Basically, we were interested in reforming the literature so it could 
speak respectfully about transsexual and transgender persons. To do that, we 
wanted to find out which terms transsexual and transgender people liked, and 
which they didn't like. The results of our study were reported at the 2001 
scientific symposium of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria 
Association (HBIGDA), and had an immediate impact on the hundreds of medical and 
social scientists who were present.

A lot has changed since 2001, and we thought it would be interesting to re-open 
the survey, collect new data, compare the results 10 years later with the 
original results, and present our analysis at the 2011 scientific symposium of 
the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (formerly HBIGDA) this 
September.

We are asking community members to rate and give us their opinions of certain 
terms which have been used in the literature, and some of the terms put forth by 
the community itself, so we can communicate the community's opinions to the 
members of WPATH and (we hope) more widely in a subsequent academic publication.

There are no physical or psychological risks associated with responding to this 
survey, and there are no age restrictions for respondents, though we caution 
participants that some terms offered for your evaluation may be offensive to you 
or other individuals. The survey has only 8 questions (though most questions 
have many options to choose from) and should take less than 20 minutes to 
complete. Please complete it all in one sitting – if you exit the survey before 
you complete it, your answers will not be saved. The survey is scheduled to 
close June 28, 2011, so please respond soon!

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the paper which will eventually 
come from this, you will be given an email address at the end of the survey so 
you can contact the researchers separate from your responses to this survey. Any 
communication you initiate with us will not be associated with your survey 
answers, and no identifying information will be retained. We will treat your 
email address as confidential and will use it only for distribution of the paper 
to you. Your answers to the survey also will be treated confidentially, and no 
data reported in our analysis will be traceable to you.

Here’s the link to the survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8RGBH25

Thank you VERY MUCH for participating in this survey and helping us with our 
research!!

With Gratitude,

Jamison Green, Jason Cromwell, & Dallas Denny

.

[Cainanite (imported)]

I completed the survey, and have to admit I was a little surprised by the types of questions there. It seems to me like we should be further along with gender blurring issues than we are.

I thought the answer to, what do you call a man living as a woman was already answered long ago. Call her whatever she wants. Just don't call her last for dodge-ball.

I realize that people have a desire to label things and put them in neat boxes. It just seems disingenuous to me to try and find the conforming language of a community that is built on non-conformity.

No where in the survey was I given the option to select - "Call them whatever they feel most comfortable with."

If you tell me you associate yourself as a purple aardvark, and feel most comfortable being called "Your Highness", then who am I to judge?

TL;DR - I am uncomfortable with labels.

[Losethem (imported)]

It also doesn't address MtE issues at all. I had to work those references into the comment boxes.