Femme erasure: An open letter on the US Trans Survey

[winterkoninkje]

Hi NCTE,

I took the US Trans Survey a while back and had some feedback, though I forgot to include it in the survey itself. In particular, my comment is about the gender/identity portion of the survey (question 2.2). It's great that you include a variety of nonbinary identities (fa'afafine, mahu, genderqueer, genderfluid, two-spirit, third gender,...) but I noticed a severe bias in terms of the more binary options. You offer a variety of options for masculine-of-center folks (AG, butch, stud,...) but you offer zero options for feminine-of-center folks. This contributes to the ongoing problem of femme/feminine erasure in feminist and LGBT communities. I identify very strongly as femme, in fact it's one of the few labels I "identify" with— far moreso than I "identify" with trans, fwiw.

While I did write in under the "other" option, I worry that this only serves to contribute to the ongoing erasure and underrepresentation of feminine identities. Having worked on a number of these sorts of surveys, here's a short list of reasons why:

• Feminine-of-center folks will be undercounted because many will not feel strongly enough to write in.
• The presentation of specific choices for masculine-of-center identities helps to funnel people towards particular terms, improving their statistical significance; whereas the lack of explicit options for feminine-of-center folks will result in a larger diversity of terms, thus decreasing each term's likelihood of reaching significance.
• Attempting to correct for the previous point by aggregating all feminine-of-center identities serves to erase the diversity of femme/feminine identities: "femme" forms no more a singular identity than AG/butch/stud/etc forms a singular identity. The distinctions between high femme, hard femme, tomboy femme, etc are just as important as the distinctions between varieties of nonbinary or masculine-of-center identities.

While it is too late now to correct the 2015 survey, I do hope you take this into consideration when choosing how to report your results and when designing future surveys.

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