The results for the 2021 Gender Census are in! And they've given us plenty of new data to pore through.
The survey went out to over 44k non-binary people (up from around 25k last year), with the largest single group of them finding it via Tumblr.
Respondants were asked (among other things), which words they used to describe their gender (they could select more than one option). Nonbinary, queer, enby, trans and gender-nonconforming were the top 5, in that order.
Edit: And I've just noticed 'boy' is more popular than 'girl' among enbies, even though 'woman' is more popular than 'man'. Yet at the same time, 'demigirl' is more popular than 'demiboy', although the differences between all of these are really very slight (10-20% at most). The same however cannot be said of 'transmasculine' (a non-binary way of saying FtM), which is one of the more popular options, despite the fact that 'transfeminine' is nowhere to be seen on this graph.
There was also a write-in option, for which 7994 unique identities were entered. The top 5 write-ins all had the word 'void' in them, which was weird.
- gendervoid – 226 (0.51%)
- void – 188
- voidgender – 40
- voidpunk – 25
- gender void – 16
Even though one of the options for the question was “none/I do not describe my gender”, that didn't stop people from writing variations of "myself", "I'm just me" etc as write-ins.
Respondants were also asked for their ages. As you can see, the group skews disproportionately under 30, with the modal category being 16-20 inclusive.
It looks a lot like the population pyramid for an undeveloped country.
If you look closer, you'll see there are about as many people aged 56-60 as the number (37) who declined to mention their age. And an even smaller number (I'd say more than 10) were over 60.
Some of the survey answers were broken down into over-30s and 30-and-under, but there wasn't a huge difference between them.
Notice how when you start to find people with 4 or more distinct pronoun sets, the line tapers off, but takes at least that long again to reach zero.
Respondants were of course asked about their pronouns, but the results are actually kinda boring. For all the talk in the community about new and exciting pronouns, the most popular
by far was singular they at nearly 80% (most people chose more than one option), followed by she and he in 2nd and 3rd place.
4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th are not pronouns at all but ways of
not specifying a pronoun. No other pronoun has more than 10%, with the most popular non-standard pronoun being 'it', coming in at 7th place,
This result hasn't really changed much over the years:
Rescaling the axis for the less popular pronoun sets offers an insight into how fashions change.
Avoiding pronouns altogether was popular for a year but could be falling out of favour. Using 'it' as a pronoun is on the rise (driven mostly by the under-30s). Whereas 'a priori' pronoun sets that are complete new additions to the English language seem to be on the decline (perhaps because non-binary people realised how impractical they are to use).
There were also write-in options for pronouns, which some respondants misunderstood to the point where they wrote pronouns already available as one of the multiple choices.
Also, the person analysing the data makes the mistake of thinking singular they and plural they somehow conjugate differently. They don't.
Some of those they/thems are people who somehow missed singular theyin the checkbox list and are entering it again, which is reasonably commonish even with pronouns like she/her and he/him. But a lot of them were participants entering plural they – it’s just they when referring to multiple people, exactly the same as singular they but the reflexive is themselves rather than themself.
Both singular and plural 'they's take 'themselves' and not 'themself'. Although the latter is allowed in some cases, grammarians still recommend the former, and most people still understand 'themselves' to mean a single person in the right context. But I love that this person's conclusion is that no, these people are deliberately using plural pronouns because they're more than one person or something?
Archive link.
The full reports for this year and every other year can be found at
the Gender Census website, in addition to reports on other minutiae such as whether or not non-binary should be spelt with a hyphen.