I’m wading through the statistics gleaned from the survey on trans travel I ran earlier in the year. Aside from doing a crash course in how to get what I need from Excel, I’m finding some interesting stats in there amongst the more immediately arresting answers to open-ended questions, like “Why is it necessary for you to travel in relation to gender identity?” It feels odd, sort of Enlightenment social science-y, to have this package of ‘data’ that can be caused to ‘reveal’ information. Except that with 300 participants, this is a tiny sample, and even then, I wouldn’t want to regard it as proper social ’science’. Plus, a surprisingly large number of people either got bored and didn’t finish the survey, or just didn’t feel like telling me the gender they’d been assigned at birth. Which is kinda great, actually. I would be disappointed if it was possible to neatly categorise everyone’s answers according to a binary system that I don’t actually believe in.

Anyhow, on to my ‘findings’… Tonight, pace issues with binary gender, I compared gender assigned at birth with limitations on travel, and in particular, financial limitations. Financial hardship is one of the biggest themes of the survey, in fact: about three quaters of the participants said their financial status would have an affect on their ability to be mobile. I was wondering whether there would be a skew towards male-id’d folks or female-id’d folks in this question, and there was: more of those who said they’d been assigned male at birth (70%) felt their economic status affected their ability to be mobile than those assigned female at birth (50%). Crazy, huh.

At some point in the next three months I plan on releasing some findings, statistical and qualitative. This will be independent of the thesis (which doesn’t use stats much — I’m more focusing on profiles of participants and their experiences.) Anyhow, I have a mailing list, so if anyone’s interested in reading the results, leave a comment here or email me.