When creating an anonymous survey for students to complete, I wanted to collect some basic demographic information for the purpose of creating a pivot table and comparing results by group membership. For example, how do the answers from 9th grade boys compare to the answers of 9th grade girls or 12th grade boys? To do that, I need to collect two pieces of information: grade and gender.
In creating the questions, I was struck – rather suddenly – by a feeling that I had to be more inclusive in my language. Gender does not occur on a simple binary, nor do individuals agree with the gender they may have been born with. As such, I had to make that gender question more fluid.
One article on the subject that I read showed how a list of 17 categories could be used for gender. That article was actually very helpful, but 17 gender categories was a bit much for my purposes. I settled on the following:
While not complete, I still feel better about being more inclusive — not just in the list itself, but also in the language around self-identifying gender.