rax | Another furry survey --- links, thoughts

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Another furry survey --- links, thoughts

The always wonderful

krinndnz pointed me, over in her LJ (friends-locked, but a lot of you will find this link useful anyway), toward a University of Alaska survey about furries, or furvey. [0] There's rather a history of bad surveys and research done on minority populations, which often makes people nervous about this sort of thing. (A part of me hesitates to class furries as "a minority population" --- but in this circumstance, of researchers saying "Ooh, here are some different people I can go and research," I think it fits.) In recent cases that have a lot of Internet press, there's always that ridiculous slash brain sexuality study (as

ceruleanst points out over on Krinn's blog), and I also just read

tagonist 's post about trans studies recently, and I also also still have PIlar Osario's work (thanks to this conference) about how race is not really a great category for medical studies sitting in the back of my head and percolating. So I approached this furvey with some trepidation, but decided I would go ahead, Google-stalk a little bit, and take a look at the survey itself.

Short, spoiler-free verdict: Actually I don't think it's that bad. One of the two researchers identifies or has identified as a furry (or I suppose is outright lying): "My name is Eric Olson, I am the data gnome and the person who suggested the study in the first place. I think the furry community, for all its weird little quirks is, on the whole, a pretty positive thing. I certainly benifited from it and I suspect quite a few other people have too." [1] That's not necessarily Objective (tm) but it makes me way more comfortable than other surveys have in the past. (I'm hoping

eredien will chime in here on the furry survey that was going around Anthrocon --- I didn't take it, but she did and she talked to the researchers for a while, too. [2]) Also, you're able to click submit, read all the questions, and decide if you want to participate or not; it's just one page (although if you answer "yes" to one question it pops up five text boxes that were invisible before). This is way better than that surveymonkey nonsense that makes you answer two things, click, answer two things... so if you were sitting on the fence about this, you might as well check it out.

I did fill it out, and while I don't think it's nearly as problematic as some of the other surveys on such topics I've taken in the past, I'm not sure how interesting the results will be. Things like "How did joining the furry community change your life?" really seem like they need an hour interview, not two small before and after text boxes; I ended up writing a ton because I didn't want the narrative to be "I used to be sad but then I found furries and now I am happy!" Personally, I don't find that to be true in a meaningful way, and I don't think the question gave room for the intersections of furry and other identity markers or cultural groups to really be explained at all. All of the questions are either "yes/no" or free text entry fields, and I did like that. Also interesting: It didn't ask for gender, age, race, or other identifying markers at all. It really just wanted to know if you were a furry. I'm not skilled enough with this kind of data gathering to know if that's a good idea or a bad idea or what, but it was nice not to have to pick a gender out of two options again.

The things I found most interesting I actually think have very little to do with furry and much more to do with the evolution of social groups across the Internet. Furry is one of the groups out there with a lot of geographic spread and online socialization --- I think more and more groups are like that, but furry has arguably been at it longer than some of those groups, and so the social patterns there could be interesting. There were a bunch of questions about internet and in-person socialization, and the difference between them, and I found my own answers pretty interesting. Personally, I have a bunch of friends in different places, some of whom I've never met, but most of them I try to make a point of meeting, even if I'm going to interact with them primarily online; it real-personifies them for me and that's valuable. I know not everyone does this. I think collecting the different ways and reasons people do or don't do this would be interesting. I don't know if they're going to get that from this survey, but maybe it will make the question apparent to them or some other researcher. Or maybe there's tons on this already! If you know of any, please comment, I'm curious if nothing else. :)

I'm actually curious about how other people respond on this. I'm very lucky --- I have multiple very supportive social groups, and for the most part my answers to questions about support are just "Yup, I'm good. Yup, I'm happy. Yup, lots of friends." Do furry and other such geographically dispersed social groups offer resources to people who would otherwise have difficulty getting them in the places they live or from the people they spend in-person time with? Probably. And I think discussing and studying that --- furry as one example maybe, but not as the thing in itself --- has the potential to be really interesting and valuable.

Thoughts?

[0] Yes, they actually called it a furvey. Furchrissakes.

[1] I don't know why "benifited" reads as such a furry typo to me, but it does. Also my cite for this is http://uafurvey.org/question.html Also also, if that's the Eric Olson who I was able to find attached to UAlaska on Google, he has a usenet history. I didn't read it, because I don't care that much, but it at least suggests "not a fresh grad student, probably someone who's been attached to the university forever." But I haven't verified that it's the same person, because I have work to get to. ;)

[2] What she said about it made me nervous; from my recollected conversation, it seemed to her that they were looking to find a diagnosis parallel to gender identity disorder or something similar. That diagnosis itself makes me nervous --- Who are you calling disordered? --- but I'm torn about completely discarding it because it's actually afforded me and other people I can point to cheaper access to valuable medical resources. I'm not sure how that would help furries, unless insurance companies are going to start covering full-body leopard print tattoos or surface piercings for whisker mounts. Although there's totally a Blue Cross/Blue Shield Approved Fursuit! racket in here waiting to happen. Other people had other objections that I don't feel qualified to comment on. Wikifur also has articles on other furry surveys for people who really want to dig into this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

One of the reasons I took the Gerbasi furry survey is because you were able to read all the questions beforehand and then if you didn't want to take it you didn't have to. One of the other reasons is because it was 'vetted' first by an IRB, and one of the other reasons is because it's hard to get any statistically valid data on furries at all unless you catch them in a large group like that. Another reason is that it had more categories than just "furry," specifically including "therian" and "otherkin" in its questionnaire.

One of the concerns I had was that it only had two (I believe just two) gender boxes, which was annoying. It had a slightly larger range of sexual orientation boxes but I had to write "genderqueer!" in large letters on the side, especially because the way I view my own sex and gender is complicated so intensely by my otherkin-ness that it would have felt like lying about something essential to leave it out. That--lack of useful gender ID boxes--was the main thing I talked to Dr. Gerbasi about and only briefly about the pathologizing aspect, which in retrospect--especially as "SID" is explicitly based on GID, another disorder with known troubling aspects--makes me leery of participating again.
She does have comments on the outdated gender modes of some of the scales she used in the research, but my philosophy is--instead of using outdated gender modes and complaining about their outdatedness, aren't there any new ones accepted by the psych community (maybe not, but that's a problem all on its own, and we can't expect all psych researchers to tackle all problems at once).

She explains some of her methodology and reservations about it here--if you read one of these links read this one as she encourages folks to ask questions about her metholody and explains she's a social psych person not a medical one.

It it also unclear what Dr. G's furry identity or lack thereof is. Apparently she got dressed up in a fox suit and played ball with little kids for Halloweeen this year (awww). I wonder if disclosing furry status skews a survey unacceptably?

The fact that a scale apparently used to study autisim spectrum disorders was used to measure the sociability of furries also struck an off note with me, but maybe someone who's more into psychology than I who reads here can comment on whether it's common to use such scales to measure sociability over a wide range of disparate groups as common measure of sociability or not. The researchers defended that decision as giving validity to their data in the eyes of the community of other researchers, and I recognize there has to be a common point of reference somewhere, but is the use of a particular scale or measure of sociability a point of reference in common use among psychologists and researchers as a whole? I need more data on that before I can make an informed opinion.

Here is a link to the article, "Furries from A-Z," which Dr. Gerbasi wrote in the (peer-reviewed) Society & Animals journal. It's a PDF.

It's really interesting for how it both destigmatizes furries (trying to prove that they are not asocial freaks and doing that, statistically), and also at the same time stigmatizes furries medically by introducing this diagnosis of SID for *some* furries ("distorted unattained") but not all, which is introduced as having "striking" similarities to GID, is going to do...what, exactly, to benefit the furry community and those who self-identify as furs, otherkin, or therians, especially since there is no nod toward the problematics of GID itself? (It's interesting, how I could have substituted "self-diagnosed" for "self-identify" in there and my meaning would also have been clear, but skewed toward a certain medicality, don't you think?) For people such as myself, who think there might be a certain purpose in not being able to actually be furs even though/if we want to, that's really problematic.

Also: this data can be used by the furry community itself. Why are we an 89% white fandom, folks? What can we do to change that?

Also: amused to finally have statistical evidence to cooberate my personal experience of very few to no lesbians in the fandom, but LOTS of bisexual folks of all genders.

For people such as myself, who think there might be a certain purpose in not being able to actually be furs even though/if we want to, that's really problematic.

I wanted to mention that this seems especially problematic to me given that the existing definition of SID is explicitly based on GID. If there is some medical treatment or surgery in 50 or 200 years for SID, will medical or psychological treatment be denied those people who choose not to take it, or will a dichotomy of pre-op/post-op furs emerge, the way it has for the trans community? For myself, I feel like the attitude of "don't deny that you want wings but don't spend all your time thinking about it" has been very helpful, in terms of allowing myself to keep my species identity and in terms of allowing myself to let go of my teenaged misanthropy and tendency to asociability and in allowing me to see my depression as separate from depression/longing caused by species or body image issues (and even allowed me to separate some human body image issues from species body image issues).
I feel like this middle road is the best attitude to take in the current human world if you're not willing to disavow entirely your wish to change your body to match your species (as so many people do, with age and responsibility), but don't want to spend your entire life dreaming about a goal that's not yet medically possible (as some furs do).

Also: this data can be used by the furry community itself. Why are we an 89% white fandom, folks? What can we do to change that?

There is another rant in here if "species" is often used as a stand-in for race in furry literature (for intance, in Brian Jacques' work, I seem to remember that often (though not always) the fur color of a certain character is mentioned only when a mean or threatening animal is being described), but I'm not well-versed enough in furry literature as a genre to actually do the idea justice, because I think it would be a big one with a lot of reading needed to cooberate or deny my half-baked thought.

I'm not sure whether we should seek to actively change the racial makeup of the fandom, any more than we should actively seek to bring - say - more women into it. It would be interesting to know why it was like that, though.

Gerbasi's survey is not perfect with regards to lesbians - I know of at least one who was at Anthrocon. The sample size was small enough to be cautious about the aspects relating to females. Hopefully results from future years with a larger sample size will clarify this.

Er, I think my point about "what can we do to change that?" would have been better expressed as--"there are already more than 2 non-white people in this fandom, doing stuff. Why don't I see more than 2 of them at cons that otherwise draw thousands of people across a ~somewhat wide class and geographical background? Why are the demographics of this con--one of the largest to represent the fandom as a whole--skewed such that the overwhelming majority of people present to answer this survey self-identified as white?"

I'm certainly not suggesting that furries need to somehow import more minorities of whatever type in to make furry conventions more diverse; that'd be tokenism. I am suggesting that people of many different kinds of minorities are *already there* in the fandom, and already active in art or fursuiting or whatever. The social forums are already actively changing themselves (see: the women in furry fandom panel at Anthrocon (which I could not attend, but which I noted was present)).

I'm just wondering why more people of color, or more lesbians, say, didn't seem to be visibly present in any noticable numbers in the physical space of the furry conventions I've been to (noting that, of course, members of any minority are not always going to visibly constitute a minority, and are no less minorities for that). What is keeping more lesbians, women, people of color, etc., away from a space devoted to the fandom that so many of them are already interested in and active in?

Past surveys had a larger sample size, but due to the way that the surveys were distributed this year (the IRB asked that they not be distributed to those under 18, and so the surveys were not put in the packets handed out at registration) the sample size was smaller in '09. I would hope there is a larger sample size this next year.

I was about to say that most of the furries I know are lesbians, but then I thought about it and was like, well, I don't know that many furries really and I don't know how some of them are self-identifying lately.

(Myself: still a lesbian. The political identity is very important to me.)

I don't like identifying as "bisexual" anymore because I am trying to do my bit to break down the gender binary, but I also feel uncomfortable identifying solely as a lesbian since I think that correlates very strongly in many (though not all) sexual, political, and social circles to "only likes to sleep with women ever," which is not true for me, and so people can feel betrayed or confused if I identify as a lesbian and then introduce the guy I'm seeing. That would be their problem to deal with, but more to the point I don't feel comfortable identifying solely as a lesbian for several reasons:

1.) Some militant lesbians won't believe, for a variety of reasons, that I am not a lesbian (even if chose to forgo seeing men). I am hesitant to identify using a label that will force me out of it if others with that label don't think I've got a right to assign it to myself. I'm not interested in partnering myself with movements, especially political ones, that won't let me self-define because I'm too complicated for their label.

2.) I don't believe that I'm really a lesbian and have felt uncomfortable identifying solely as such in the past. I feel really uncomfortable being labelled as such by others. When people (not anyone I know in the Boston area, generally) have seen me partnered with a woman and automatically assumed my gender identity was "lesbian" were just as frustrating as the times when I wasn't partnered with anyone or was dating a man and it was assumed that I was straight. Being labelled a lesbian also seems wrong to me in terms of my understanding of dragon sexuality, but that's a different rant.

What I want is an identity that is "mostly likes sleeping with and living with self-identified women 85% of the time, although also enjoys the company, sexual and social, of genderqueer or gender-non-identified or transsexual people, and male-identified people." I would use the word "pansexual" except that seems to imply a kind of "I have an equal chance of sleeping with anyone of any gender identification," which in my case at least, is not true, and also can be construed to leave out the people who don't identify as any gender orientation or identify as between genders, to whom I am attracted to more strongly than men but less strongly than women, on the whole.

I feel like I should give a percentage breakdown or something, but that just gets ridiculous.

I wish there was just one word, but then that would give the opportunity for somebody else to tell me I wasn't authentic; at least the long explanation is the true one. Once I'm done with my own 5-minute spiel, nobody can tell me I've not got enough street cred if they've managed to stick around long enough to listen. Which is the hard part. :)

I've been just giving in and using "queer." I don't think anyone can tell me I am not queer. :)

I've been just giving in and using "queer." I don't think anyone can tell me I am not queer. :)

Ditto! Ever-so-ditto.

Because in some ways "lesbian" is much more accurate as a description of me, and in other ways, not so much.

The politics is an interesting question. Are queer politics inherently different from lesbian politics, because the latter have more to do with feminism and the position of women in our culture? Or are queer politics, in fact, inclusive of that because they involve a critique of the entire system of gender roles in our culture entirely?

For that matter, does a critique of all gender roles address the same things as an attack on the specific problems women face that men don't?

I should throw Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer at you sometime. I don't agree with everything in it, but it does an excellent job of laying out gender-related activist movements as a narrative.

"Kinsey 5"?

Reading Gerbasi's paper, it sounds like part of the thrust of her research was "some of the stuff furries say about their furry identity sounds like what transpeople say about their gender, I would like to have some real data on this to consider that". Which… doesn't bug me, to be honest. I look at my own feelings of gender stuff over the course of my transition, and I look at what Otherkin say about themselves, and I see something in common; I'm lucky in that my identity/body differences are simpler to reconcile. I think it is appropriate to begin to ask questions about Otherkin using the methods that have been developed to classify gender issues.

I have such mixed feelings about this, but they tend to loop in on themselves and go nowhere. I've been working on a comment since yesterday and can't get it to coalesce, so I'm just going to write about failing to get it to coalesce instead.

My engineer brain's objection to this is that being trans is feeling the identity of something that exists (man, woman) while being otherkin is feeling the identity of something that doesn't exist (talking fox-person, dragon, &c.)*. I can construct a number of explanations for how brain chemistry or hormones or some sort of physical system could lead to trans identity --- of course I have no idea if any of them are true, and I think it doesn't matter, but Engineer Brain has much more difficulty coming up with a reason for otherkin.

Theory Brain steps in and is all "Who says men and women exist? Aren't those also socially constructed identities, and the only difference is that more people are publically inhabiting them and they're deeper ingrained into the culture?" And this is a very good point --- while clearly people are born with penises or vaginas, we don't really have reliable data points on people being born with wings. Of course, this is awfully body-essentialist, isn't it? I don't have a problem with people identifying as genderqueer, why should I have a problem with people identifying as speciesqueer? Theory brain and engineer brain are largely able to agree that they don't have a problem with that, but aren't sure if it's the same phenomenon or not. Theory brain likes using the same methodology and engineer brain doesn't, but they figure they can hash that one out if they ever find themselves doing the research.

Activist brain, though. Activist Brain is all "You guys are missing the point." (Enlighten us, O Activist Brain.) "The point here is that the way people study trans is broken to begin with! This whole `gender identity disorder' thing is a bunch of garbage. Continuing to use these models and methods to study trans people is doing harm by reinforcing problematic narratives! Why would we take that harm and superimpose it onto a new community just for the convenience of some academics?" And the whole time Theory Brain is taking notes like crazy, but Engineer Brain is just sitting in the corner muttering something about second system syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect).

And this is why I usually keep my internal monologue internal. :) But I think both "Are these phenomena actually similar enough to study this way?" and "Is this a valid way to study even the first phenomenon?" are both valid questions. The answer to one or both might be yes, but I don't know.

*One could argue this point, but not with Engineer Brain.

I really like this comment. :)

Scientist Brain (mine) wants to know what models and methods Activist Brain (yours) thinks should be used to study trans, even if they are just kind of speculative ideas rather than fully-developed models and methods.

Scientist Brain always seems to run into sticking points in these sorts of conversations because most other people seem to be thinking solely from the perspective of their Theory and/or Activist Brains, and Scientist Brain finds this terribly unsatisfying. Activist Brain (mine) reminds Scientist Brain that it's not actually other people's obligation to satisfy her about the nature of their experiences, and Scientist Brain knows this, but wishes that there was more constructive dialogue going on between Scientist Brains and Activist/Theory Brains, because they often seem to be off in their own little worlds unproductively creating echo chambers with each other, especially Theory Brains. Scientist Brain is privately dubious sometimes about the Theory Brains' little world's relationship with the real one.

Why not study and try to prevent transphobia in cis people? :) I mean in general Activist Brain wants to make trans lives (as a subset of all lives, but I tend to focus on trans and genderqueer lives for a variety of reasons) more livable and one of the best ways to do that is to combat transphobia.

Why not study and try to prevent transphobia in cis people?

Some people appear to actually be doing this.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/q124gu26164651m1/
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909392359&db=all
http://www.psy.surrey.ac.uk/people/staff/p.hegarty/LGBT/2005%20Hill%20Transphobia.pdf

But not as many as ought to be. A lot of the work on transphobia seems to be centered around understanding its effects on trans people, or on helping trans people to cope with it. Which are worthwhile endeavors, but addressing the symptoms rather than the causes.

Do you think that understanding the phenomena of cis and trans (e.g. what model should be used to frame gender identity, what causes cis and trans identities) is at all worthwhile? Or do you think that it's beside the point since it doesn't directly help trans people?

I do think it's worthwhile but it's also worrying. In some ways it's beside the point because it doesn't directly help trans people, but in some ways it certianly has the potential to indirectly help trans people. On the other hand, it also has the potential to be harmful. Have you read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay"? It's an essay in Fear of a Queer Planet, which I can lend to you. One of the things she does is agitate against finding a "cause for homosexuality," because she doesn't think that there should be a cure for homosexuality or an effort made to bring kids up not gay. (After all, if one knew how to bring your kids up gay or straight, wouldn't one pick straight? Even for the theoretically-high-minded reason of protecting the children from the homophobic world?)

I have the same worries about trans research, with the additional caveat that if many people are trans because of brain chemistry but a few people are trans for some other reason, and "brain chemistry" becomes the standard for authenticity, that will suck in different ways from current standards of authenticity. (And is harder for people to fake; right now it's fairly easy to spew bullshit at shrinks until they give you hormones, it would be much harder to fake a CAT scan.)

The brief answer in my experience of reading recent psych articles to two of those questions: no, there really aren't any non-outdated gender modes widely accepted by the psych community; there is a significant vocab and concept lag between the researchers/theoreticians who have this as an interest and the other psych researchers (and not as much of a shared-field between psych research and queer and feminist theoreticians as one might want). And there's another vocab/concept lag between psych researchers in general and practitioners/therapists. If she's aware that the gender modes she's using are outdated, that is... really good, and kind of unusual.

Yes, the scale for spectrum disorders has started being used for other sociability measures, because it turns out that divorced from its original context it's really good for that, one of the best tools people have to work on that sort of thing, and the data is widely recognized as meaningful. I think any connotations of medicalization in the wrong direction in that particular thing are because that's where the tool happened to originate, but I do worry a bit about the medicalization a la GID.

Yeah, re: medicalization.

Here is the thing that worries me. Among the psych community, the three camps around GID are:

1) "GID" is a disorder manufactured by a culture trying to enforce gender roles on people. The person isn't the problem, the culture is, and so it is important to accept the person's own beliefs on their gender and help them do whatever they need to to live the life they want.
2) There is a medical problem, related to hormone levels etc, which leads to people having feelings/identity which do not fit their biological sex. Therefore, until/unless we can come up with some sort of medication to fix the identity problem, people should have surgery etc. to correct their bodies to better fit their innate, biological identity.
3) Some people have issues with their self-image and desires, related to their past experiences and relationships with important people (sometimes related to the overall culture's sexism), which manifest in discomfort with their gender identity. These people should be helped to overcome their feelings about their "natural" gender so they feel more comfortable with them.

So, like, I find the third of these very problematic, and the second a bit essentialist for my taste. (I'm not saying there might not be some people for whom they're true, but I don't like going in with them as a baseline assumption.) But at least around gender, there's enough politics for there to be a dialogue.

Around furrydom, there's less politics. And while I'd be fascinated to find a biochemical reason for it, I'm dubious. Which divides shrinks into the first or third camp, and I think most of the ones I know would jump for third. And I'm not sure I want to see "FID" used by such people as an argument about why they're right about "GID." Which they could do more easily, because I think (I could be wrong) that while the average person has more emotions about the gender binary, they are more objectively sure about the species binary. If that makes sense.

Though the arguments would be interesting...

Also interesting: It didn't ask for gender, age, race, or other identifying markers at all. It really just wanted to know if you were a furry. I'm not skilled enough with this kind of data gathering to know if that's a good idea or a bad idea or what, but it was nice not to have to pick a gender out of two options again.

I would consider this bad, on the whole, because it kills the ability to look at intersectionality in the survey. I mean, maybe furries of color, or older furries, or rural furries, or whomever, have different experiences of the furry community on the whole than whomever is considered the mainstream/dominant subgroup of the furry community, but if you don't know that they're members of those subgroups, the patterns of their experiences as subgroups will be erased.

It also makes it hard to ensure that you're getting a remotely representative sample, since you can't keep track of the demographics that you already have. You could end up with a sample consisting entirely of white middle/upper-middle-class urban furries between the ages of 20 and 35 who live in the Northeast or on the West Coast, and not have any way to realize that maybe something is wrong with this sample. They could try to counter this by making targeted efforts to get people in specific demographic groups to take the survey (e.g. by going to a convention aimed at furries of color and handing out copies), but they're still going to have trouble telling if they've succeeded.

I have nothing to add to this comment, but you're totally right, thank you for pointing that out.

It seems nice that all the little essay fields allow every respondent to express their answers as fully and with as much nuance as they can, but the problem with that is that the only way to draw mass information out of it is by the researcher reading and personally interpreting it. And that's not science.

It's not number-crunching science, but I've read good papers based on interpreting and collecting the results of interviews. I don't think they're not science so much as they're a different kind of research from a survey that's all numbers. I do worry about how they're going to reduce down this data, but trying to do so doesn't seem intrinsically bad to me.

I can talk at length on this topic, but the short version is: The essay response fields aren't for analysis in terms of "We need to prove something significant is different from this population and a differen one." They are however useful for shaping future surveys to cover more nuanced survey answers that CAN be quantified, and also for further fields of study. Ancedotes aren't data, but they can be useful for figuring out what you should test or observe next.

Personally, I have a bunch of friends in different places, some of whom I've never met, but most of them I try to make a point of meeting, even if I'm going to interact with them primarily online; it real-personifies them for me and that's valuable. I know not everyone does this.

There's certain advantages to never meeting IRL. I've had amazing tinysex partners kinda stop working for me due to meeting them in the flesh. My current virtual inamorata makes rather a point of not talking much about hir RL, and at this point I'm fine with that - I do care about the person behind the text stream, I worry about a few things that make it through from behind the mask, but I don't want to risk ruining what is frankly totally fucking amazing ts.

I think that's an entirely legit take, but it's not one I share right now. For me, right now, sexuality is somatic enough that I'm not sure I'd be comfortable doing that with someone I hadn't met in person. ...Of course, at this point, the question is mostly academic for me. My take might change if the academicality of the question changes? ;) I don't know.

The stuff I do in text these days tickles an entirely different part of the brain than the stuff I do in bed. When I had no RL romance VR sex filled that void, and was generally pretty rooted in typing about fleshy stuff; nowadays I can get a mouth full of dick pretty much any day I like - and my text sex is much more abstract.

That makes a lot of sense to me --- I think the difference is that the abstract stuff (largely, and I'll spare my readership the exceptions) doesn't register as terribly sexual to me. Then it's more "Would I do an art project with someone I hadn't met in person?" and the reasons I mightn't are more about worrying the person would be a flake or something than whether or not we'd held hands. :)

Completely unrelated, do y'all have any bits of fake fur left over from making ears for the catgirl rave? I want to make a couple pairs of raccoon ears for something Nick and I will be doing soon.

Most of the abstract stuff I do includes an element of transformation, which is of course a GIANT BUTTON for pretty much every tranny I've known. It's… hard to define it without going into a level of detail I dunno if you actually care about. *grin*

I've got tons of fake fur of various sorts, and you are welcome to as much of it as you need for whatever you need it for. :) I don't know if I have raccoon colors specifically, but I can poke through it this weekend, or you can come by and I can give you giant bags of fabric to play with.

Personally, I don't find transformation a button at all. (Then again, I also don't identify as "tranny," which actually it would be awesome if you could ease up on using in general here; I have complicated feelings about the whole slur/reclamation thing, and while I don't have a problem if that's a way you want to identify yourself, it makes me uncomfortable when it seems like it's being applied to me. Thanks!)

I shall have to look at it for future consideration sometime very soon!

Not a button at all? Huh. I wonder what's wired differently. Also, mostly referring to myself with that use of 'tranny'.

I'm not sure I count as part of "y'all", but I also have fake fur. Large amounts of white, black, and grey with black tiger stripes, scraps of tan and leopard print.

Sew Low and Sewphisticated both have a lot of fake fur in awesome colors.

I recently read a paper about using free text boxes for gender and then sorting the results to group people by either self-declared performance or self-declared identification (both of which had more than three categories). Of course, I haven't actually seen any studies actually using the approach, but I should make sure to track that down while I remember and bookmark it, so that in future studies with binary gender options I can fill in a link.

I've generally had problems with subculture research in that frequently it either seems to be self-congratulatory (see: most scifi studies) or super-othering (bdsm studies tend towards this end). I would love to do work on gender, intersectionality and the subcultures I'm involved with, but it's not the sort of thing that fits neatly into existing realms of interest.

I would love to see that cite when you dig it up, please. :)

(And yes I'm with you on most of the subcultural studies; I'd like to see some alternate methodologies or some interesting writing even and I think this edges in the right direction at least compared to some other things I've seen, which is why I bothered writing about it.)

On reading through it again it is far from perfect, but it's something that lazy researchers could look at and maybe think, "well, that's not too hard..." http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=60

On all but very large surveys, the transgendered respondents will be so few in number that it will be hard to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about them as a population. However, a write-in system at least segregates those responses, so that they do not get erroneously included in male or female categories.

*dies, rises from the dead to go* AUUUUUGHHHHH *, dies again*

Oh man, i missed that in the long-winded survey-babble crap. ickickugh. if they said genderqueer they might possibly not have defeated the supposed purpose of their paper...

i was looking for neuropsych stuff at the time, saw the "find and replace with multiple interpretations" and though "hey, cool, not check boxes!" *sigh* that'll teach me to skip over the poorly-written jargon.

The idea is interesting and I can imagine a specific type of study where that would be a useful distinction but in general, grrr argh.

Although I rarely have anything to add, I always like reading your Theory-related posts.

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Another furry survey --- links, thoughts

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Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will

Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will

Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will

Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will

Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will

Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will

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