Survey questionnaires regularly ask respondents' sex or gender, and mostly offer only the binary options:
When presented with such a survey on paper, I typically add and then select a third option: “Fuck you”. (Similarly, I do the same with race/ethnicity questions when asked to choose one out of four or five options).
However, we increasingly answer surveys online, making this write-in approach unavailable. Furthermore, scrawling profanities onto survey forms fails to positively address the very serious problem underlying my anger: That the binary sex/gender classification erases folks who, for a variety of reasons, do not fit within it.
In what I perceive as an honest attempt at inclusion—and I sincerely appreciate the effort—Google offered (at least when I originally drafted this article) an “Other” option in its Google+ profile form:
But simply adding an “other” option still emphasizes the binary classification system; it reminds respondents that they either fit in, or don’t. Very few of those who don’t fit in enjoy that interjection when it involves something as fundamental as gender identity.
I recommend the following alternative for collecting gender and sex data from survey respondents:
Here the use of sliders reflects the continuous natures of sex and gender, while the division of the query into separate, orthogonal dimensions accounts for the distinctness of biology (sex) from social artifact (gender).
Certainly this scheme fails to capture all the nuances of gender identity, particularly its flux within individuals, but it reaches for a more honest and inclusive world.