On the pronunciation of Mx
In this post I’ll be summarising the results of a survey I ran for eight days, from 15th to 23rd April 2016.
The survey sought to find out how Mx is pronounced, splitting results by group. It asked people how they pronounced Mx, and it also asked whether the participant’s title was Mx, about gender identity, about location (UK and outside UK), where the participant identified on the trans/cis spectrum (if anywhere), and where the participant identified on the nonbinary/binary spectrum (if anywhere).
It was promoted mainly through Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit - and some participants told me that they would share with interested friends too. After removing 4 abusive responses there were 505 usable responses.
You can see the full results here on Google Sheets.
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Here are two more visual summaries of the responses:
I recently blogged a link to someone else’s informal results analysis of their survey into neopronouns, and they rightly said that sometimes you have to prove things that everyone already knows. This survey is no exception.
We learned that:
- Cis and binary people are far less likely to know how to pronounce Mx, topped only by people whose title is not Mx.
- Trans and nonbinary people are more confident about its pronunciation, and people whose title is Mx are most confident.
- My experience that UK folks like the schwa and non-UK folks prefer Mix was confirmed, but I was interested to find that people in the UK are far more confident of its pronunciation generally.
And finally, out of curiosity I put together a table to compare various groups.
[Note: “Are Mx” includes people whose title is sometimes or always Mx.]
These results appear to support the hypothesis that nonbinary and trans people are much more likely to use the title Mx for themselves, which is perhaps not surprising.
It is also worth noting that 20% of nonbinary people don’t use Mx as their title, and that number is likely to be higher outside of this survey - there will have been bias due to Mx being mentioned in promotion of the survey, resulting in a disproportionate number of people taking part who use Mx as their title.
There are other curious snippets to be gleaned from this table - such as:
- Nonbinary participants were much more likely to feel that the cis/trans spectrum didn’t fit them. (3% of binary respondents identified as neither cis nor trans, whereas 29% of nonbinary respondents did.)
- People whose title is Mx are apparently more likely to identify with the cis/trans spectrum. (18% of participants whose title was not Mx didn’t feel the cis/trans spectrum fit them, whereas only 16% of participants who were Mx didn’t fit that spectrum.)
- The 9 binary people who use Mx do so “sometimes”, but of the 10 cis people who use Mx, 3 do so “always”. These numbers are not high enough to be representative, but I found them interesting anyway.
And finally, I was reassured that there were several responses in the feedback box telling me that they had never heard of Mx. It told me that the survey had made it out of the usual small circle of nonbinary and trans followers, which I think makes the data more useful.
Thank you everyone for your support, promotion and participation! These results are more useful and more detailed than the last set, and I am grateful for everyone’s efforts. I hope this summary has been helpful and/or interesting.
