Are you cisgender? Gender Survey Result: Majority of active Hexbear users say No and Maybe.
Are you cisgender? Gender Survey Result: Majority of active Hexbear users say No and Maybe.
Various thoughts:
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Around 20 people weren't properly covered by the gender categories, obviously we're trying to be as inclusive as possible and a different approach will be tried next time
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There were about 600 respondents, which gives us a accurate sampling of the active userbase. If you multiply any number by 3, you'll get a fairly accurate representation of the full userbase each week. This means there are around 800-900 people who don't identify fully as cis each week on this site.
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Nearly 300 trans/gender diverse/questioning people unanimously agree that hexbear is an inclusive space
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There was so much data on gender that I was really struggling to find a way to convey the data that wasnt a pie chart, graph, or an incomprehensible kalaeidoscope. If you have an idea on how to beautify the data, you can download the raw data here: https://pad.artemislena.eu/file/#/2/file/xzy4pck8on+oZp9yGRUIezR+/ - I further anonymized this data by removing time of response and any specific comments, I don't think it would be easy for anyone to figure out who is who.
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There were a couple of text responses that really needed further elaboration, I noted hexbear's rules next to these comments
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I'll probably be doing a demographics survey sometime in the future, including basic fairly anonymous stuff like "what region were you born in" "where do the languages you speak originate" "would you describe yourself as a POC" "what age range are you in".
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The percentage of people answering they were cisgender increased by 8% than the previous survey. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as cis people being afraid trans people will hunt them down in the public thread and assassinate them. Anonymity may have made them feel safer to respond. Regardless, way more people responded this time, which signifies that people felt safer responding to the cryptpad or it was easier to do. The leading question was a bit more inclusive than last time, but I think I'll include both questions (are you transgender / gender diverse and are you cisgender) to see how people respond.
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We have a lot of people that aren't binary trans on this site.
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Some of the questions were pretty funky and we got a lot of fuzzy responses on them as a result. In particular "After you realized you were trans/gender diverse, how long did it take for you to begin to act on it?" and "At what age did you begin transition?" caused a lot of friction, I think I will ask more vague questions in the future that lead to a path of more specific questions to capture better data, and to save people time. Questions like "Do you feel your gender transition had a defined starting point?" and some further ones.
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Around 20 people each week on this site are cis she/hers, which is very low and roughly the same as last time. I feel like if hexbear ever starts hosting other federated stuff (like a federated tiktok or something) and can hook into it natively with lemmy, we'd see a better ratio.
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I tried to be very sure any data with >2 people on it was clearly legible, I think some people might find it fun that there are others with their same fairly specific classifications per this survey lurking around on the site.
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Overall I feel like the survey was a success despite some bumps.
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You can find the other surveys/links here: https://hexbear.net/post/3016455
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I made these graphs on company time
Someone should post this on /r/mtf and /r/ftm and some of the enby subreddits, just saying. Share it around, maybe we'll get new friends!
And maybe edit the prolewiki https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Hexbear
IRL I assume most people are cis.
On hexbear I assume most people are trans.
Around 20 people each week on this site are cis women
I'm sorry to have to bring this up again, but your survery had no instruments to accurately measure that. It once more had no option to say if you're a woman (i noticed, because that meant that i couldn't accurately state my gender until i picked "other" and used the free text field). Only "are you cis or trans" and "which pronouns do you use", which does not enable you to accurately assess people's genders. PRONOUNS =/= GENDER. Cis women could go with none / use name, comrade or they / them for opsec reasons or because they do not want to be targeted by the many misogynist weirdos on this site or because they want to normalize gender neutral language. I know several cis women IRL who at least sometimes do this in online communities. In this survery, you wouldn't know if they're women. Or she / her may simply not be the pronouns that fit them. There was at least one cis woman with hy / hym pronouns in the replies to the survey.
In future surverys, i'd abandon the approach to infer gender from pronouns, stick with the option to tick multiple boxes, but just add man and woman to the list.
the jokes about Xi save us and defense/denial of worker/minority abuse in China make us look bad, (etc etc) No different than libs defending Klanmala "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" (etc etc) Han supremacism no more acceptable than white supremacism (no shit), Dengism killed wholesome chungus communism, China surveillance state
Wew. Also no one is defending worker/minority abuse (the surveillance state in China I will defend, let's not kid ourselves socialist societies are under siege, were born under siege, etc etc) or claiming China is a utopia. And comparing support of AES to Klanmala support is straight up lib shit (and crying about Dengism is both ignoring dialectal materialism, and your western lowkey chauvinist, dogmatist opinion of AES). cringe
As for the comment about transmisogynism (while I'm not the one who mentioned it), somewhat yeah. And there's def an issue of orientalist attitudes towards anime (as someone who is Asian), there is shit but wypipo/westerners' and other cultures' shit has its own issues. "Asian (specifically Asian) cartoon bad because (insert stereotypes here)" is tired y'all
And yeah I called out people who posted their opinions, anonymously, who I don't know who they are... deal with it
Great work! Re: low cis women, I know one of them IRL, and she's trying to basically wean off all Social Media, so she very rarely posts or comments here (but she did respond to the survey). Not sure how to get more ciswomen or transmen to join, honestly, but it's great to see that everyone feels safe here!
Edit: it's clear that misogyny is one of the most commonly pointed out issues with this site, based on reading replies and input from other comrades. I am fully in favor of a purge, even if it would be unpopular, it's better to confront issues and remove the problem elements. It's important for every user to feel as safe and comfortable in every bit of this site (except the EM/POC community threads for whites and trans community threads for cis, obviously safe spaces would be maintained as such). Maybe another weekly megathread as a safe space? A Feminism community sounds cool too and would be a good place to hold that, I think. Maybe include comm sidebars with feminist literature and theory? Just spitballing here.
On that note, if anyone has felt that I have been guilty of misogyny, I'd greatly appreciate being re-educated so I can be a better comrade and make this a safer space for women, enbies, and other non-masculine comrades.
you can tell it's from a leftist forum because one of the genders is a whole paragraph
The jokes about Xi save us...
Jokes?
I put “maybe” as my answer for if I would recommend hexbear to my trans friends. It’s still true, but I think that because of the answer I put I didn’t get to talk about the caveats I would have to tell them first, so I’ll put them here. It’s really more of a “maybe leaning towards no” answer for the following reasons.
misogyny, anti-fatness/weight, anti-plural shit
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The obvious one that other people have already mentioned — misogyny. There is a culture of misogyny that permeates through this site. It has honestly turned me off from engaging with the majority of it and now I mostly stick to the trans mega. We seriously need a purge, and said purge would affect a lot of long-time posters and be very very unpopular (though not among us trans mega folks!)
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There is a lot of discussion of weight on this site, and while it is usually under a spoiler it is still overwhelmingly about losing weight and that can be a triggering topic for a lot of people. It has, in fact, started affecting me and my own relationship to my body in a bad way. I know that weight can be a source of dysphoria and it’s not on me to dictate what people do about their bodies, but also constantly talking about dieting and wanting to lose weight creates a culture of anti-fatness whether we want it to or not. I think the solution to that is to have conversations about anti-fatness and not to ignore that it exists and is the primary driver behind dieting culture, which hexbear currently does. As a caveat: I have thin privilege, but I would definitely be very wary of recommending hexbear to the fat trans people in my life.
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I have seen anti-system shit on hexbear before and I do not feel that this is a safe space to openly discuss plurality or present as plural. I think the trans mega is much better than the rest of the site, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist in a vacuum from the rest of the site. I would be very wary of recommending hexbear to my trans plural and system friends.
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what gender type/category best describes you
Dyke and a half
:wheeze:
This is amazing work. Thank you for putting this all together.
excited to see this! thanks for all the labor you've put into running this whole thing and then putting the data into a more readable format for us
the blade that performs DIY bottom surgery on the patriarchy
There's a small percentage chance that you'll crack an egg with a badpost, but it's never 0.
Also anonymous my ass, y'all will know exactly who this is :3
You're anonymous to me, Comrade.
Have fun and take care out there.
more questions for cises
Quizzies for cissies
Allow more than two sets of pronouns
My people! (None of those are me, I didn't answer)
Never thought I'd say this, but we really gotta start breaking up all that pink. Really funny counterpoint to the NB side of the chart. Let a million splits bloom!
And to all the "custom pronouns please" respondents: an attempt was made, and it was almost exclusively used to be shitty about neopronouns. A nice request process would be pleasant, though.
Around 20 people each week on this site are cis she/hers, which is very low and roughly the same as last time
Yeah this has been very obvious.
Not too long ago there was a thread by a user complaining about his girlfriend telling him that “she doesn’t think of him as someone she would hook up with, but someone whom she’d like to marry” and all the he/hims came out in full force agreeing that a woman “who doesn’t think of her boyfriend as a mere sex toy but as an actual companion she’d like to spend the rest of her life with” was somehow an insult, not the highest compliment, to men.
That experience really made me realize that even misogyny incel shit does not escape an explicitly leftist forum, despite all the optics about being an ally to women and feminists. I agree with the other users on this thread who have commented that Hexbear has a serious misogyny problem that likely repels cis women from participating in this forum.
me speculating about why the ratio is so off both quite long and could be dumb, thoughts have been ruminating on it since this thread dropped and I want to see if they have any merit to them or not.
(a note before reading. when I say "most important reason", i dont mean that another reason isn't someone's personal reason for leaving the site, I'm more just saying I'm not sure if you surveyed everyone who left the site that they would check "misogyny" as the reason or that the site gets exposed to so few cis women and trans men that even if the majority of those who leave the site choose misogyny on said hypothetical survey, that if got exposed a similar amount of times as it was exposed to cis men and trans femmes the ratios would be much closer to being normal.)in my (potentially dumb cis guy) opinion you can't point to any one factor for why there is such a lack of cis women and trans mascs compared to trans femmes and cis men. The main factors I could think of that need to be considered are as follows: legacy of CTH, latent misogyny because of the same thing/legacy of chauvinist socialist organizing in general, impact of the transphobe purges and having a very active dedicated trans community, and where people have come in after the site's founding like VCJ or the reddit exodus and what the composition of those people were.
(i know the AGAB terms can be tricky to use especially as a dumb cis man so for brevity's sake if i'm going to use CWTM as a shorthand for cis women and transmascs.) I've seen misogyny be mentioned more than once as a reason in this thread, but I'm not 100% certain if this can be pointed to as the most important reason despite that. before I get crucified, hear me out. my current thinking, is that for this to be the most major reason, it would have to mean to me that CWTM come in and think this community is more misogynistic than reddit and I'm sorry but I find that very hard to believe, the amount of outright misogyny I've seen and still seen on frontpage reddit pages is fucking insane. and in the case of incel central on reddit (r/tinder), i still used to see plenty of cis women (i dont think I ever saw any trans people using r/tinder tbh), using it in the past, so for cis women specifically I find it hard to believe the incel dating threads that pop up here on occasion are keeping them away. additionally, like it's been pointed out no matter how trans positive the community is I feel like it's hard for me to believe that there would be so many trans women on the site if misogyny was anywhere near as omnipresent as on reddit. like already mentioned, CTH was almost certainly cis male dominated, but we are 4 years out from that and with more than one wave of new people (plus whatever small continuous trickle of new users there was), i dont think it has much explanatory power anymore, and I seriously doubt anywhere near 50% of the site was trans at the time either. one thing that's important to keep in mind though is still has a strong effect on the culture of the site even besides any misogyny, which could potentially be turning CWTM away. all this to say I dont want to deny that misogony on the site is a serious problem that needs fixing, but saying it's the reason why has uncomfortable and frankly quite confusing implications for me.
It seems like having a trans admin that went to war against transphobes of any stripe ended up creating one of the most militant, active, and trans positive communities on the web. this is a very attractive prospect to any trans people who stumble across the site, even more so than a generic cis male socialist would which means more trans people that find the site stick around than even cis men do. the problem with this is it doesnt explain why so few transmascs are on the site comparatively, so I dont think this can be the most important reason either. one thing I know is that there's been attempts at reaching out to trans communities on other sites to get them here (and maybe even one focused on trying to get more trans mascs here?), i would be curious to see where these attempts took place, how successful they were, and what the breakdown of trans femmes vs mascs that ended up getting onboarded.
finally, we have the waves of people joining hexbear post 2020. I'm unsure if genzedong had any meaningful influx into this site, from what I remember they mostly went to grad but of those who did I remember genzedong being pretty male dominated so i would imagine whatever growth came from that didn't help the ratio (although I wasnt a user of genzedong at the time and reddit had gotten better about some of its gender splits over the height of the panedmic so i cant be certain about this). I know almost nothing about VCJ but i think if they were more evenly skewed it will bolster the argument of something being wrong with the site's culture so if anyone reading this who makes it this far it would be helpful to my thoughts on this! finally, there was the massive reddit exodus. this i am also relatively unsure about, many of those who fled were some of the users who had very old accounts, which means that they skew even more heavily cis male. it also depends on what the split of who was using 3rd party apps, because those with 3rd party apps were typically those looking to leave reddit. I think this skew was probably more likely to be cis male dominated too, just by the simple fact that from my understanding over the years more and more people came to use the first party app over the third party app and cis women (again not sure about trans mascs never saw any data about them vs trans femmes) again were less likely to use reddit the further back in time you go ergo the more skewed the ratio is of angry 3rd party app users was of men. finally there were the socialists on socialist subreddit who got alerted to hexbears existence. now, i dont know what the gender ratio of the socialist subreddits left, but I will say I personally think there is way more and way more blatant misogyny in those subreddits than on hexbear, and combined with the gender chauvinism known to also be present in many if not most IRL western organizations, i could see this keep cis women and trans mascs and femmes both away. my best evidence of this is only anecdotal, but I have had to argue with dudes on there that it's misogynistic to call women the b or w slur more than once, and while I can't guarantee there arent cis men lurking who think it's fine to use those words at the very least i think the slur filter lets them know that it's not tolerated here. all this to say, if I had to guess what is happening and choose the biggest reason it would be that, that during the reddit exodus and even outside of big waves the most likely people to join are ultimately socialists, and if most of the people coming here find their way from reddit in one way or another from reddit socialist communities and if those communities are cis male dominated like i suspect, that would explain a lot of it. i think my theory is only viable though depending 1) on how effective the general "advertisement" the dedicated trans community does on here and 2) how many trans women got ripped away even if they werent explicitly socialist.
ultimately this is a lot of speculation from me as someone who is 99.9% missing the experience to pick up on certain bigotries, but these thoughts have been rattling around on my head and i wanted to put them in a comment. the best way to figure this out would be through polling, but I don't think we have enough data to figure everything, I think we would have to find a way to get a poll to some CWTM who have topped using the site, and we also need to figure out how most people find out about the site. speculation may be the best we have for now.
check modlog the cheating thread got nuked, hopefully this means admins will begin paying closer attention and will be cracking down on the more subtle misogyny that has managed to slip through the cracks.
While a lot has been said about the lack of cisgender women on here, I'm going to just add one thing that hasn't been said yet, and it might be controversial but here goes: there are a lot more socially conservative cisgender women out there than you think, and a lot of them do not like AMAB LGBT people, who make up probably a majority of this website. TERF thought is a lot more mainstream than most people would care to admit sadly. I remember looking a a couple of polls recently which asked women if they would be comfortable dating a bisexual man, and consistently, pretty much 60-80% of women said no, which goes to show how common casual biphobia is, yet alone transphobia or homophobia.
But there are obviously still a ton of socially progressive cisgender women out there, so why are they not on hexbear? While the weird/sexist way our users, mainly the male cohort, act about women is definitely a factor (I still remember some idiots commenting on a woman's physical appearance on a post in the food community of all places) and has been discussed to death already, I don't think it's the only reason. I also think our foreign policy views are a serious no no for most socially progressive cisgender women in Western countries. One user already commented about how they tried to get multiple women to join the website, but they didn't like it because we were "pro Iran and pro Russia". These countries are commonly viewed as theocratic misogynistic dictatorships in socially progressive circles in the West. So amongst the demographic we should be popular with, we have that massive stumbling block to try get over.
Lastly, I think the topics that are mainly discussed on hexbear really do not cater to cisgender women at all. It's basically the same things that get discussed at a college fraternity by "fratbros" or "hot couch guys", but from a leftist perspective. I mean we mostly talk about war, AAA videogames, computers/technology, obscure esoteric political beliefs, and personal LGBT issues. While there are definitely cis women willing to discuss those kind of topics with strangers on the internet, on a whole it's not a lot.
Are undercuts considered generic now?
Oh no, do I need to change my haircut?!
