Results for the survey on nonbinary and intersex people’s language for genitals

CONTENT WARNING: This report talks about specific terms for genitals that are sometimes considered sexist or slurs, and a lot of the rest are not suitable for polite company! NSFW.

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This survey ran from 25th until 28th October 2018, and there were 171 participants. 165 were nonbinary, 12 were intersex - meaning that 6 were both intersex and nonbinary.

I wanted to investigate the language that nonbinary and intersex people use to talk about their genitals, to find out if there were any words or ideas that were unique to these groups, and to see if I could learn any words that could help me with my own dysphoria too.

I asked people to confirm that they were intersex, nonbinary or both before taking part. That’s because I specifically wanted to hear from people whose genitals don’t or shouldn’t conform to the binary “ideal”. (The binary ideal is like: “you have a penis and testicles that look and work approximately like this, or you have a vagina and uterus and ovaries that look and work approximately like that, there are no other options!”)

My understanding is that a lot of intersex and nonbinary people have fairly binary-typical genitals, but I wanted to take into account:

genital dysphoria and what genitals people felt they should have;



have; the way that people often describe their genitals with words that correspond to their gender regardless of how a doctor would describe them.



I also hoped that people in these two groups would be more aware of language used to describe genitals that aren’t adequately described by the sex binary, even if their own genitals were sex-binary-typical.

First I asked people for the words they use to describe their own genitals, allowing up to ten words, asking how those words are usually gendered and in which contexts the words are used. Then I asked the same questions again, but for words that people are aware of other nonbinary and intersex people using: “Please enter a term that you are aware is used to describe nonbinary or intersex genitals (in whole or in part).”

The following statistics combine the responses to both sets of questions. You can see the full spreadsheet of results here.

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THE TOP TEN WORDS

Lots of very well-known words!

vagina - 25%



junk - 19%



dick - 16%



genitals - 15%



cunt - 11%



pussy - 10%



penis - 9%



bits - 9%



clit - 8%



crotch - 6%



Here’s a graph that includes the above, plus a few more:

There were 496 write-ins in total, which is 2.9 per person on average. There were 204 unique terms entered, of which 39 were entered more than once.

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CONTEXTS

Here’s a visual chart showing which contexts the top 10 words were usually considered appropriate for. The darker the shade of yellow, the higher the percentage, the more appropriate the word is for that context.

The sexiest words were cunt, pussy, clit and dick - mostly words that were gendered female in later questions. These words were all considered not appropriate when talking to children, which is probably not surprising. (Someone less sleepy than me could probably do some statistical magic to investigate whether female-gendered words were more likely to be considered suitable for sexual contexts and less suitable when talking to children, I think that could be interesting.)

The most clinical words were vagina, genitals and penis - all words that scored pretty low on the sexiness scale. There’s one outlier, bits, which was considered 100% casual but very unsexy!

Overall there was a definite trend towards entering casual words in the survey. Maybe the survey felt like quite a casual experience (as opposed to clinical or discrete), or maybe casual genital words felt the most safe/comfortable and least controversial to enter in a survey-ish environment.

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GENDERING OF WORDS

I asked people whether the word they had typed was usually gender-inclusive (can be used to describe anyone’s genitals) or gender-exclusive (had connotations of a particular gender or genders). If they picked “exclusive”, I asked which gender(s) or sex(es) the word was usually associated with. The options were male, female, nonbinary, intersex, and other (with a textbox).

Gosh these screenshots are awkward. If you click through to the spreadsheet of results it shows a lot more clearly!

All the words were either uncontroversially gender-inclusive (any gender) or uncontroversially gender-exclusive (used to describe genitals of specific genders). Vagina and penis were both a little more likely to be considered inclusive words.

The top 10 contained four gender-inclusive words - junk, genitals, bits and crotch. Of the gender-exclusive words, all scored 100% in either male or female, but there were a few that were considered nonbinary: vagina, pussy, and penis. Interestingly, those were also the only words that anyone refused to gender. There were also a couple that were considered intersex: vagina and dick.

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THE INTERSEX WORDS

I wanted to consider words that intersex people entered, because I’m aware that the intersex experience is very different from the nonbinary experience and I wanted to hear what intersex people have to say! I’m nonbinary and I do the Gender Census every year so I feel quite tuned into nonbinary language, but intersex language is a lot less familiar to me.

There were only 12 intersex participants, and half of them were nonbinary as well. It’s such a small sample that I think even though it’s tempting it’s important we don’t read too much into that! My followers definitely skew nonbinary, for starters.

There were 5 words entered more than once by the intersex participants, each of which was entered only twice, so here they are in alphabetical order:

cunt



genitals



gonads



junk



pussy



Nothing about their contexts or genders was strikingly different from the results overall, and if there was it would have to be taken with a pinch of salt because the sample was so small! I would say though that when you go deeper and look at terms that were only entered once there was a greater awareness of the natural variations that occur. Here’s a few:

a vulva with and undeveloped vagina



bigenital



micropenis

phalloclitoris



phallus



xenogenital



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THE INFREQUENTLY MENTIONED

So that’s all the big picture stuff, but what about everything else?

Part of why I ran this survey is because I wanted to find the less common but potentially really helpful language. Those of us with less common genital configurations are a niche within a niche, and people just don’t really talk about genitals much, so there must be a bunch of words that you all use that I would never otherwise hear!

It was fun to dig through the entered-only-once words and see what was going on. I’m particularly interested in words that describe specifically intersex and/or nonbinary genitals and that are not derived from words that are usually used to describe binary genitals - words that describe a third state in their own right.

Here’s a few of my favourite outliers:

bathing suit area - Delightfully 50s, no?



- Delightfully 50s, no? cunt - Okay, 11% of people entered this so it’s hardly an infrequently-mentioned one. But it’s a classic, isn’t it? I’m a fan.

- Okay, 11% of people entered this so it’s hardly an infrequently-mentioned one. But it’s a classic, isn’t it? I’m a fan. dicklet/cocklet - Adorable, yet badass.



- Adorable, yet badass. frits - That’s what I’m talking about! It’s a word in its own right, not derived from words for binary genitals or gendered words, and not an ambiguous word that can refer to binary genitals. We need more words for more contexts, but I have learned one word that meets my needs as a result of this survey, so I deem it a success!



- That’s what I’m talking about! It’s a word in its own right, not derived from words for binary genitals or gendered words, and not an ambiguous word that can refer to binary genitals. We need more words for more contexts, but I have learned one word that meets my needs as a result of this survey, so I deem it a success! hen - It’s a cock, but feminine! Also it reminds me of the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun, so for me this word has nonbinary connotations. Since in English the word is very much gendered female I’m not sure I’d be into it for myself, but I like it.



- It’s a cock, but feminine! Also it reminds me of the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun, so for me this word has nonbinary connotations. Since in English the word is very much gendered female I’m not sure I’d be into it for myself, but I like it. hole of suffering - Mood.



- Mood. pudenda - I had forgotten about this word and it is excellent. I like it because it can refer to any external genitalia, which is both vague and specific.



- I had forgotten about this word and it is excellent. I like it because it can refer to any genitalia, which is both vague and specific. puss - It’s like pussy, but it means business.



- It’s like pussy, but it means business. tomcat - Like “hen”, it’s a gendered word (”pussy”), gender-flipped.



- Like “hen”, it’s a gendered word (”pussy”), gender-flipped. undercarriage - I feel like I should be on a steam train and wearing a big dress with a bustle if I’m going to say this, so I’m into it.



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CONCLUSION

Well, I went in not knowing many terms for genitals, and I came out knowing many more, plus I was reassured that there weren’t any big obvious nonbinary/intersex-specific terms that people are using all the time but to which I am somehow oblivious. Plus, it was all really interesting and I got some lovely feedback, from people who now felt more comfortable talking about this stuff with others like them, from people who have genital dysphoria and are looking for comfortable words they can use in dysphoric situations, and from people who are just genuinely curious about an area of language that doesn’t get enough attention!

Thank you everyone for taking part and for spreading the word about this survey, and for trusting me with such sensitive information. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t get many participants because of the taboo topic, and admittedly the sample was smaller than some of my other surveys, but there’s certainly more than enough in here to satisfy my curiosity and I love it. :D