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The 2025 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 12th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 30th August 2025.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

If you can't wait for survey numbers, you can click here for a public spreadsheet of non-secret info with graphs as it comes in, updated manually a few times per day.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

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Her name is Valentina Petrillo and she is a visually-impaired sprinter.

Time to support her, because even without the racism element I expect she will be getting some flak from Awful, Awful People.

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Rare day where I’ve found the energy to do some face art for Disabled Pride Month.

It’s a variation on the Disabled Pride Flag. The colours represent:

Red - physical disability

Gold - neurodivergence

White - chronic illness and undiagnosed disability

Blue - mental illness

Green - sensory impairment and differences

Black background - disabled victims of abuse, disableism and eugenics

It’s also about the active claiming of a disabled identity in a world that actively resists this, and most particularly resists disabled people claiming this identity for ourselves, as *we* define it.

Obviously I post a lot about the UK’s plunge towards disableist and eugenicist structural violence so I’m not posting any specific actions to go with these pics other than asking people to remember that this month is as important as Queer Pride, and for the exact same reasons.

I have been really heartened to see a lot of pages belonging to, afaik, nondisabled people posting about Disabled Pride; it is at least good to see awareness of why it is so very necessary rising in response to the huge rise in eugenicist structural violence from the UK, US and French governments (and undoubtedly many, many others).

This is also my first Disabled Pride Month after my formal autism diagnosis 35 years after the possibility was first raised and dismissed with my apparent intelligence and apparent gender as reasons given. I actually finally got my full assessment report in from the Adult Autism Assessment Team just after doing this today. It has been really great to read, if only to assure myself that I haven’t been kidding myself all these years and how much of the diagnosis was based on stuff from my folks and on objective assessment of my interactions and presentation so I can’t do that thing where I convince myself I was somehow lying to them. Yes, this is very connected to the thing I wrote above about how externally policed disabled identities are.

It was also a really good report that was a solid assessment of the actual difficulties I have lived with across my life without dropping into any nonsense about functioning levels.

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ID: a skeet by Dr. Sandra Duffy Golden @sandraduffy.bsky.social

“English political establishment up in arms because an Irish guy said something it didn't like.

Then a Black guy said something it didn't like.

If a dog says something it doesn't like, that's all of us on the sign accounted for.”

Followed by four photos of my lovely Cynthie, a grey and white husky, lying on a sofa with her tongue sticking out, saying things the English political establishment would not like:

“Disabled Doesn’t Mean Disposable”.

“Trans Rights are not anti-Women’s Rights and do not diminish women’s rights. The only people saying otherwise are misogynists as well as transphobes”.

“Free Palestine.”

“In a deeply disableist world, Assisted Dying legislation leads to eugenics, not autonomy.”

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I am incredibly disturbed to have seen more than one person on my FB friendslist calling Bob Vylan’s statement at Glastonbury “not punk but a hate crime”.

Calling for the death of mass murderers of children is resistance. Calling for the death of a genocidal military machine which the British state is supporting, funding and training is about the most punk thing a person can do.

And I am *incredibly* disturbed to see people describing this as “a hate crime”. Because that is, on an incredibly simplified level, the equivalent of calling a black person venting something like “fuckin’ white people” racism.

Acts and speech become hate crimes because they perpetuate ideologies of oppression, marginalisation, eugenics and genocide. A person calling for resistance to such acts, including violent resistance to people *engaging in a live-streamed genocide* including *assassinating small children by shooting them in the head*, *burning disabled people alive in their wheelchairs*, and *kidnapping and executing doctors for the “crime” of saving civilian lives*, *with the active and explicit support of our own government*, is not, and *cannot*, be a hate crime.

It is a single person without power nonetheless calling out the unforgivably horrific behaviour of states and their militaries. It is an artist resisting a *heavy*, political, legal and propagandistic attempt to silence state criticism of their actions. And it is resistance to the idea that physical power in the real world engendered by armies and physical violence can equate to moral power.

I am particularly horrified by statements I have seen comparing this to Trump’s behaviour on July 6. The behaviour of a black artist making a statement of resistance during an artistic performance cannot be meaningfully compared to that of a white supremacist politician actively inviting violent sedition by white supremacist militias. For the reasons I describe above.

It is particularly notable that Bob Vylan is a black man, and everyone I have seen advancing this “hate crime” description is white. That is also material to this situation; not that a BIPOC cannot commit a hate crime, but that a person of a marginalised race that has suffered and is still suffering colonialist violence is being described as doing so for calling out the genocidal behaviour of a settler-colonial state supported by historically settler-colonial states, including the UK and the US.

ID: a black and white still shot of Rob Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode with the text “Imagine if you will a world where calling for the death of death squads is considered more offensive than the existence of death squads”.

A photo of four people in red jumpsuits holding up a Palestine Action banner. One is holding a device trailing red smoke; the others have their fists raised in a gesture of vehement resistance and solidarity.

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I still think about my last pregnancy a lot.

They’d be at primary school now

if they had survived to become a person.

It’s funny how I picture the heartbreak

nearly as much as the other stuff.

I pictured shaking with exhaustion

when they were a tiny baby

and having cracked nipples from breastfeeding

and worrying about painkillers in the breast milk.

Later, I pictured trying to carry them up the stairs on my chairlift,

juggling them squirming in one arm as I kept the lever down to move,

that horrible, ever-present terror of dropping them,

that bit of my brain that hates me

supplying the sound of

soft toddler bones cracking on carpeted stairs,

Juggling my crutches with their pushchair on good days;

trying to manage carrying them in my lap

while propelling my wheelchair on bad ones.

Would they have been resentful that I couldn’t

run around with them as much

as I wanted to?

Of days I had to lie in bed shuddering for hours

after I crawled to the toilet

or had to wait for their dad to get home for proper food

because my hands were shaking too much

to be safe with anything not microwaveable?

Would I have simply been Mummy

Or tried out a variety of ungendered terms

until we found one that worked for us?

Would their nonbinary parent

suddenly have become a terrible

embarrassment to them

at some point?

Or would it have been so obvious and

central to their little world that

screaming terfs would have seemed

beyond nonsensical to them?

Now I picture

phone calls from their school

on days when my other half is out on audit

and I can’t get out of bed without vomiting in pain.

Trying to call them a taxi

lying down with my eyes shut and

nothing coming out

but a jumble of unprocessed word salad.

Fighting for accommodations

we technically won last term

and yet nothing seems to have changed.

It would have been horrendously hard,

and I still very much wish it had happened

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I found some energy to get a chance to plant more veggies today - my folks bought and assembled this mini-greenhouse for me and it has been absolutely incredible.

I have beets, zucchini, tomatoes, chard and rocket growing in there already and today I planted chickpeas, french beans, chillis and green peppers.

Garden time is *ridiculously* good for my MH. I also regard gardening for food, like rewilding, as an act of resistance.

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ID: First image: a post by Sarah: Changing the Narrative on FB reading “Disabled people do not define themselves as incapable of work; systemic barriers, chronic illness, disability, and discrimination do.

Liz Kendall keeps repeating the harmful phrase “perverse incentives of the welfare system”. So now it’s perverse to support those who can’t work?

Timms was forced to admit last week that the welfare bill has remained stable since before 2008, directly contradicting Kendall’s excuses for these cruel and discriminatory cuts.

The DWP’s own recent report found disabled people were consistently overlooked for jobs, and when they did get work, they were bullied or excluded by employers and colleagues.

Kendall also fails to mention that PIP is an in-work benefit. And LCWRA under Universal Credit is not an out of work benefit either. Many people work part-time, run small businesses, or work around fluctuating health, and are still punished by the system.

Everything this government has said to justify these reforms has been misinformation, spin, or a deliberate omission of fact. All of it.

Thank you to everyone still standing with the disabled community. We see you.”

2nd image: A high contrast graphic with bold black text on a white background. The text reads:

“Disabled people don’t define themselves as incapable of work. The system does.”

The word “system” is highlighted in orange.

Below, smaller black text says: “Barriers, discrimination, chronic illness, not ‘perverse incentives’.”

Behind the text is a faint grey image of a person using a wheelchair facing a brick wall with a keyhole, on the other side of which is a work desk and chair.

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I managed to get my answers on the ECHR consultation in just under the wire - two hours ahead of the deadline.

I also emailed the Joint Equalities Committee on the governments proposal of Mary-Ann Stephenson as the new head of the ECHR and copied in my MP, from whom I have received a series of particularly insulting very clearly boilerplate replies to every subject I have ripped my own heart out digging up personal fears, traumas and pain emailing about in detailed letters with both extensive factual references and extremely personal accounts of how I and people I love have been affected.

I’m writing one more email to him today regarding the Disability “Reforms” - intense and very clearly ideologically-driven cuts filled with measures that are *horrifically cruel* and, while referring to the need to “cut the benefits bill*, are full of measures that will horrifically impact millions of disabled people’s capacity to work and pay taxes because the vote on these is *tomorrow*.

I have been in a massive health flare-up since March after I broadly crashed out of the Nuffield Joint Pain programme in a storm of PEM - post-exertional malaise, a common effect of chronic fatigue conditions where one can handle a period of exertion which can be extended by careful pacing, but one will eventually will absolutely crash out and experience a period of limited function - sometimes so limited that one cannot even care for oneself in the most basic ways - that is usually at least twice the period of exertion and can be many times it.

I am not discounting the effect the absolute political war on every marginalised person in the UK and the ongoing horrific, genocidal complicity of the UK government to the actions of the Israeli government has had on me during this, tbh. I have such limited energy and I’m spending everything I’m not using on survival and the limited part of caring I do for my brother on the parts of campaigning abled people often dismiss as “slacktivism” - writing letters to my own MP and government ministers, campaigning on my FB group, Tumblr and BlueSky, sharing petitions, even calling government ministers and MPs occasionally on the phone despite the truly ridiculous effect this has on my energy levels, and, of course, giving mutual aid from my own limited finances - mostly to families in Palestine.

I still haven’t made it to an in-person protest yet because of quite how much the sensory overstimulation and energy expenditure of being upright in a load public space without rest, even in my wheelchair, would have on me. I try extremely hard not to feel bad about this.

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My hair is currently in its overgrown floppy-haired public schoolboy phase because I haven't had the spoons to sit while they cut it

At some point I will find the spoons and it will get shaven up the sides again

Though I think gender has currently fluxed to either femmeish or just low dysphoria because I managed to sleep minus pjs last night without wanting to rip my tits off and throw them out the window. Which might just be the heat, but actually I did not end up even wanting to do that for the first time in some years.

So who knows what that will do to hairstyles?!? I have a terrible urge to put in green streaks but odds of managing that myself when I lack the spoons to sit for a basic haircut seem…low.

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Abled folk who work in the NHS, I’m going to ask you to talk to your colleagues.

Please for the love of all the gods tell your colleagues that when disabled folks are forced to use any NHS services we are not being disabled to make their lives more difficult.

We do not want to be there.

But when we are there we do in fact deserve the same basic care abled people do.

We deserve to have our most basic needs met in the way abled people do.

We are not lying, making things up or being “entitled” by having medical needs or very basic care needs we can’t meet ourselves.

This particular status is not specifically about me, but for the trans wheelchair user friend I have been up all night talking to and supporting because of the escalating and truly sickening disableist mistreatment, gaslighting and verbal abuse he is suffering for *daring* to be a disabled person with access needs needing treatment in A&E at night.

We need you to talk to your colleagues, because they very clearly don’t think any of us are even human enough to listen to.

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Yall I hate to break it to you but sometimes disability isn’t the most eco-friendly sustainable practices 100% ethically sourced thing.

I have no idea where the metal in my leg is from. Or where all of the surgical instruments or medications i’ve taken are from.

I can guarantee the knee brace I rely on, my cane, my (future) wheelchair, etc aren’t made in the best ways either.

I use single-use things. KT tape for my joints, individually packaged things, etc. I would love to use something more sustainable but that’s not an option for me.

In an ideal world some of this stuff could be better (like sourcing materials in a more ethical way), but some stuff wouldn’t change (needing single use products). Stop holding disabled folks to impossibly high standards, especially ones that majority of ableds can’t even live up to.

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This is something I wrote a while back.

It’s getting to me even more now because all of this is, if anything, getting *worse* under Labour. And now people, including people I know, including people working in social care, just seem to be celebrating the Assisted Dying Bill.

I’ve had to cut my friendslist quite substantially and I’m spending less time on FB because this is not, in any way, an abstract issue for me. I need care which I’m currently, because I’m very lucky, able to get from family including my partner. This may not be the case forever. I would *not* be getting it from statutory services rn because I am capable of using a toilet with a support thing I got from Occupational Health and I manage to dress myself several days a week. And my brother’s care is once again under threat due to issues with the statutory provider providing it.

I will be responsible for being his sole care manager when my parents are no longer around because it is unthinkable to leave this to statutory services these days. And I am a disabled person myself with an energy-limiting illness that can leave me with cognitive impairment some of the time out of sheer fatigue. I will be responsible for his safety and quality of life in a country that does not value the lives of disabled people and has legal means to allow medical and social care workers to pressure people into killing themselves. When we’ve already seen how effectively the DWP has compelled disabled peopke into killing themselves and dying of stress without that.

It’s probably not surprising I can’t close my eyes without nightmares atm.

I know I’m not doing well rn because a fucking advert from Scope I read yesterday has been going round my head and going sour in my stomach for about 18 hours rn.

It said some variant on “disability doesn’t stop people doing things”.

Before we even get into the difference between societal barriers and personal impairments etc etc - I’m just so *sick* of the level of toxic positivity the whole disability sector seems to be *increasingly* full of.

Particularly while more and more people who depend on social care for things other than intimate care seem to be getting their care packages just cut suddenly without any explanation or warning. This is for things like “keeping your house at basic levels of cleanliness and hygiene”, “washing clothing” and “cooking”. I’ve seen this from friends and strangers on groups I’m in, all across the UK. As if the entire sector has just decided that if you can toilet and get clothing on without needing physical aid to do those things nothing else in your life matters, including being able to eat, wear clean clothing or get rid of rubbish.

We have already seen care packages for leaving your home get whittled away, despite these being still legally guaranteed under the Care Act. The idea that it’s fine to be completely socially isolated as long as someone came to help you with the basics of home care has been largely accepted in so many councils for some years now; that exercising, maintaining relationships with friends and family and getting fresh air was some sort of ridiculous luxury. *Despite* the legal guarantees remaining; the sector just made a pact to mostly ignore them.

And now that seems to have been redefined once again to “if you’re not physically lying in your own filth, the idea that your home should meet basic hygiene standards and you should be able to eat hot food is a ridiculous luxury”.

And I’m lying in my bed feeling like a total failure because getting Cynthie out for a rollator walk and going downstairs to eat dinner 3-4 days a week turns me into being incoherent through fatigue by about 6pm atm. I managed to play Pendragon on Discord last night for the first time in a fortnight and that felt a huge achievement.

And Scope are chirping away about disability not preventing anyone from achieving anything.

*screams*

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from @.mprnews on Instagram.

Not sure how many of y'all saw this, but the combined misogyny-ableism-transphobia was off the charts. I am glad that he did get his top surgery, has support, and that its pursuing it's goals to advocate for other disabled + trans people.

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So, big thing I need to say here, not least because *disabled trans people exist*.

The Supreme Court ruling is, very broadly, putting abled trans people into the situation disabled people of all genders have lived in for a very long time.

- Toilet access is suddenly a huge potential issue - yup. Accessible toilet provision is better than it used to be, but I cannot go into a restaurant, cafe or many other places knowing if I’ll be able to access a toilet. Plenty of the ones marked accessible are down flights of stairs, used as cupboards so practically not available for use, etc etc. And I can at least physically use *some* standard toilets. Wheelchair users, and, particularly, disabled people needing to use a Changing Places bathroom, are much worse off.

And the only reason that all toilets are not built to be accessible, where they would be just as usable by abled people, is because of societal disableism. That is just as manufactured a barrier as this horrific ruling is. Accessibility is, broadly, not considered in construction and the needs of disabled people are actively not taken into account. This is the reason why abled trans folk using radar keys to access accessible toilets is absolutely a necessary and essential thing for safety, but is going to highlight even further how inadequate accessible toilet provision actually is.

- Travel is suddenly much more dangerous for abled trans people due to the BTP ruling about strip searching. Not only are the vast majority of buses, trains and planes in the U.K. incredibly physically inaccessible, often putting all kinds of disabled people in danger for simply travelling, but this is also the situation that visibly seriously mentally ill, learning disabled and neurodivergent people unable to mask live in daily, especially if they need or want to do it unaccompanied by abled or abled-passing people. They are always in danger of having police called on them simply for behaving outside certain social norms, always in danger of strip search and assault by any cop who wants to do it, and at the highest risk of death in custody of anyone in the UK.

- Abled trans people are, very reasonably, deeply afraid of losing jobs and being excluded from the job market.

Just to personalise this a little, I have repeatedly been turned down for jobs at the interview stage because I was visibly disabled. Back when I only ever used a single crutch and/or knee braces, I’d get interviews for jobs I was monumentally well-qualified for, see an interviewer's face crumple at the sight of me, and know I had zero chance. There are now far fewer jobs I can do at all because I need part-time and at least hybrid if not totally remote working. I was contacted by a recruitment agent this week about a part-time, hybrid job in a surveyor’s office asking me to arrange a phone call. I asked them to find out the accessibility of the office when giving my availability. The recruiter has utterly ghosted me since.

And despite multiple lies on the subject, a recent FOI request re the PIP cuts suggested the measures would mean about 90% of the people currently receiving PIP losing it.

Please believe that none of this is intended to belittle the feelings of *anyone* feeling sick and terrified by the Supreme Court ruling and resultant clusterfucks. Please be assured that I am *absolutely* feeling all of that too.

What it *is* intended to do is

a) reassure anyone feeling this way that it does not mean life is impossible under these conditions. It’s rather a long way from fun quite a lot of the time, but it is also *far* from unendurable. We do, in fact, endure.

b) make it clear that these two fights are, in fact, the *same damn fight*.

Disabled and trans people are both under attack by fascists, fascist apologists, and people who claim to be anti-fascist but that the only way to keep fascists out of power is to become…fascists in power wearing a different colour of tie because we are *visible, easily-demonised marginalised groups*.

Fascism actively depends on having internal marginalised groups to persecute so that inadequacies in government, service provision and all the things people actually need or want from a government can be blamed on that marginalised group, and that persecution can be used as a distraction from the actual rights, supports and opportunities people are losing.

We really, *really* need mutual solidarity here. We need to look after mutual interests, the more so the more privileged we are. The people in power are intensely keen on having us fight each other for any scraps of safety, peace and happiness they deign to allow us. Our only weapon in this is solidarity with each other and centering of each other’s needs as well as our own, and particularly those of the most intersectionally-marginalised people in both groups; disabled trans people, and BIPOC, older, younger, institutionalised and homeless disabled and/or trans people.

And this *must* apply to everyone under these umbrellas; learning disabled people, seriously mentally ill people, nonbinary and agender trans people need to be welcomed and supported too. And the needs of people centered even when they, for whatever reason, cannot champion their own.

Love to you all. We shouldn’t *have* to be in this fight, but we *do* have to.

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In the wake of the UK Supreme Court ruling, I am seeing a lot more of the “sex is immutable and it’s from chromosomes; any variations are just disorders” from the usual suspects (transphobes and fascists). So I would like to make something clear; karyotyping is less expensive than it used to be and thus is more widespread, so we are just beginning to discover just how common intersex variations are, and how the phenotypes of even primary sex characteristics - genitalia - are not XX equals vagina and XY equals penis. Just to pick one intriguing example; we are just beginning to discover the prevalence of XY people with vaginas who are fertile; the main reason it was previously believed XY people with vaginas were so rare was because they were primarily detected by karyotyping when diagnosing reasons for infertility.

And, as a disabled person with a genetic disorder; it doesn’t actually *matter* if every intersex variation was “a disorder” in medical terms. Because intersex *people* exist. And intersex *people* live in a world where sex being treated as binary has been used to hurt and oppress them. It has meant imposition of medical interventions without informed consent or caring about what that has meant for the individual’s own understanding of or relationship with their own body; often in infancy and then lifelong, in ways that have imposed lifelong pain and impairment on people. It has meant societal marginalisation, violence and fear. It has meant erasure too, in the exact way the Supreme Court ruling actively perpetuated last week.

On a broader scale, treating sex as irrevocably binary has been used to create and enforce a worldview where having a vagina or a penis means *everything* about those people is different from each other. It has been used for millennia to oppress women in a whole variety of ways, from treating menstrual bodily fluids as in some way toxic, to preventing women from entering more powerful positions and professions, however that is understood in a given society, and paying them less for every job they are permitted to do, chaining them economically into legal relationships to men who that society gives greater legal and economic power, or facing economic, societal and legal hardship and marginalisation. Thus it has historically been feminism that has challenged the idea of the gender binary.

The fact that a number of people have leapt into fascist views about “biological essentialism” when it comes to sex and gender, and tried to appropriate the language of feminism to make this seem more acceptable, simply points to the willingness of fascists to do this, in the same way the Nazis were happy to appropriate the language of socialism while attempting to gain power and popularity. Which they of course immediately used to target actual socialists.

The fact this is being used to target trans people under the facade of feminism while the issues that actually oppress women - pay disparities, lack of affordable childcare, misogynistic disparities in medical care, sexual assault and harassment on the streets and in the workplace, and domestic abuse - continue unheeded by the political class does not make biological essentialism on sex and gender any more accurate than it is on race.