Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Plugging my amateur social science

Have I ever mentioned that I volunteer for the AVEN survey?  It's a big community survey of people in the ace community, launched last October, and hopefully conducted annually thereafter.  We got about 11,000 ace respondents.

We published some preliminary results, and we're currently working on further data analysis to be published on our blog.  The analysis will all be published in a complete report at a later date, but the blog helps me focus on one step at a time.

Most recently, I published a bit of analysis regarding people's gender histories (under the name Siggy).  I'm particularly proud of this chart, which I made in Adobe Illustrator:


The above graphic shows the prevalence of different gender histories in the ace community, with the thickness of each line proportional to the size of the group.  The color indicates the percentage of people who identify as trans.  For the purposes of the color scale, trans people and people unsure whether they identify as trans were lumped together.  Note that "history" does not necessarily mean that people's gender changed over time; [sex assigned at birth] may or may not reflect a person's gender at birth.
 Most of the other graphs I make aren't nearly so fancy.

3 comments:

miller said...

This is a wonderful graphic. The one thing I'm confused about, is that it looks to me like you may have gotten the colors switched for the 2.8% and the 9% who were assigned "male" at birth... I would think that a trans gender identity would always be weaker for those in the "other" category.

miller said...

It looks odd, but it is not an error.

I've heard there are a number of transsexual women who disidentify with "transgender" (and see "trans" as an abbreviation for transgender rather than transsexual) because they have transitioned to such a point where it no longer affects their life much. It's a contentious idea, and occasionally it's associated with anti-transgenderism among transsexuals. Trans politics are really complex!

miller said...

That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification, and great work!