I sowed some beetroot seedlings in my raised raised bed out in my back garden and I remembered to water them during this heatwave and LOOK, there they go!!

is it yet time for a Star Trek that's like Doctor Who, that follows a trill symbiont from host to host, going on adventures around the quadrants

I find phone calls so stressful that I'd rather not even be in the same room with someone making a phone call, and I'm aware that it's slightly ridiculous but there we are.

why, tho

My brain is ChatGPT

I just woke up from a dream where my brother was almost famous, because he was in a reality TV show about specifically decluttering kitchens that was presented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (a UK-famous TV chef and gardener) and a tiny skinny lady in huge rubber gloves whomst no one can ever remember her name because she's less famous than Hugh F-W.

For your appreciation and ongoing increased understanding, here's Hugh:

That episode someone was decluttering their truly ancient French countryside kitchen, and it coincidentally happened to contain some 90s school textbooks about a topic my brother is passionately interested in: Marie-Antoinette de Saint-Éxpury, a French noblewoman from the 17th century who apparently famously wrote numerous horny fanfics about one specific French topic while servants looked after her three children aged under 3, and is so famous for it even today that 16-18 year old French students have to study them as part of the curriculum.

Here is a photo of Marie-Antoinette de Saint-Éxpury from the cover of one of the textbooks my brother picked up:

Yes, that is a famous painting of the more famous Marie-Antoinette flipped horizontally; it was on the cover of the bigger textbook in the dream so who am I to question it.

The ONLY things from this dream that are true: I have a brother, and Hugh F-W is a real TV chef and gardener.

Results of the nonbinary name survey

Hi folks, just thought I'd throw together a quick report about nonbinary names based on the recent survey.

The survey ran from 4th until 13th May, and there were 5,179 usable responses. For this one I won't share the full spreadsheet of all responses, as it contains potentially identifying information. Having said that, you can find a spreadsheet of the information I can share with you here. Every name entered only once has been redacted.

Most popular names

Let's kick it off with the main reason I did this survey, finding the nonbinaryest name:

Alex was #1, with 1.6%, which is 1 in 62 nonbinary people.

Here's the full top 10:

Name length

I'm familiar with the stereotype that nonbinary people choose names by taking 3 letters from a bag of Scrabble tiles, or that nonbinary people take letters off their given names until it's one ungenderable syllable, and I would like to take this opportunity to add that these are both excellent ways to create new names. :D

This graph takes a rolling median name length from the whole list, and it shows that generally speaking the most popular names tended to be shorter:

The average name length was 5.1 characters long.

This seems to support the stereotypes, but I feel it's worth mentioning that we can't know for sure whether it actually does, because for all we know, binary people's names might show these kinds of patterns too.

Number of names per person

Participants could enter as many names as they wanted, in a list separated by commas. That made it pretty easy to count them, and it turned out like this:

That's fairly straightforward, most people have only one name.

Problems with survey design

Overall I definitely feel that the survey had some flaws. I knew in advance that there would be some people who have more than one name that they like more or less equally, but for some reason the first question I came up with assumed that you have one name that you like most and then required a single answer from a list stating how that name happened to you - leading the respondent to a different section based on that answer.

What if you've got two or more names that you like equally, and one was given to you by your parents when you were born that you use for work, one is a nickname based on that name that evolved between you and your family and friends as you were growing up, and one is a name you chose yourself and your closest friends call you that? That's pretty much an impossible question, isn't it?

And there were several other questions in the survey that took that approach, making the data from those questions basically useless.

I didn't think it would cause problems for so many people, but it did, and I have learned my lesson there.

However, there was a question asking you to list all your names, and that's what I used to make the ranked list. I don't see how people with more than one name that they prefer completely equally (i.e. those people who would be thrown out of the survey by an impossible required first question) would prefer different names from people with one name only, so I think the ranked list is probably approximately okay, and same for the number of names per person graph and the average name length.

Implications

I haven't decided yet, but I definitely think there's scope for doing this survey annually - but separately from the identity/titles/pronouns survey, for anonymity reasons. It could be fun to track popular nonbinary names over time, similar to the popular name lists for babies that are usually split by boys'/girls' names. It might be a bit meaningless unless I collect country data as well though, which is why the list currently reads very....... American..........

Now that I've learned a lot from a big and not-so-well-designed survey run on my personal account, I'd feel more comfortable designing something a bit more fit for purpose, and running it from the @gendercensus accounts to hopefully get more participants.

~ Fin ~