Thanks for this post. Until the suggestions below are more widely taken up, and while 'male' continues to be almost universally the first option above 'female' (patriarchy more powerful than the convention of alphabetical order?) my preferred approach when faced with such questions will continue to be to tick 'male' and 'Mr'. 'Mr' seems to be the standard first option in most 'title' drop-down menus, which frequently make 'title' compulsory. My view is usually that if people are that committed to obtaining information on my sex and gender then they can be rewarded with non-information - except in situations where it really matters, which are so few. Even systems in institutions like banks do not crumble when they have incorrect gender/title data, which only reinforces my view that they didn't need the data in the first place.
I feel that there are probably ways that this is directly relevant in a geographical sense, but will leave that to others to suggest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderfuck
Best wishes
Claire
--
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:59:26 -0000
From: Tucker Landesman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Survey live for the next two week!!
Neither 'sex' nor 'gender' are naturally dichotomous categories! I hope,
actually I expect, critical geographers to create welcoming 'spaces' for
transgender, transsexual, gender variant and other gender-non-conforming
persons.
A friendly suggestion to all: while designing surveys, rather than
requiring people to choose from pre-selected identities, allow
respondents to fill in a blank field corresponding to 'sex' or 'gender'
(whichever category best suits the objectives of the survey (in this
case I would argue for 'gender')) and then to categorize the responses
manually. Alternatively the researcher may offer a third identity
category, 'transgender', or the
slightly-demeaning-but-still-better-than-nothing option of 'other'
(ideally with an accompanying blank filled where respondents can specify
their identity).
I assume that no offense was inteded by the creator of the survey. It
may seem like a minor oversight to many (perhaps most), but trans
populations are are literally rendered invsible in our data when we
neglect to even count them.
Tucker
|