Muslim respondents to the 2014 asexual community census

The following analysis was performed by Laura, originally posted here and here.  It has been reproduced with permission of the author.

The asexual census team were kind enough to provide me with the data from the 2014 AVEN community survey for the Muslim respondents (the data for 2015 is not yet available for analysis by outside researchers). [The survey team adds: since time of writing, 2015 data has become available.]  The analysis provided in this post in my own derivation and is not an official result. All errors are my own.

“Muslim respondents” are defined as those who selected “Muslim” as their religious preference. Here is some information about the Muslim respondents:

  • 71 respondents selected Muslim as their religious preference. For context, there were a total of 14,210 respondents. This means that 0.5% of respondents were Muslim.
  • 32 Muslim respondents were residents of the United States. The next most common country of residence was the United Kingdom, with 5 respondents. 20 respondents reside in countries with majority Muslim populations. The Muslim-majority country with the largest number of respondents is Indonesia, which had 3 respondents. (Fun fact: Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country.) A total of 23 countries were listed.
  • 42 Muslim respondents (59%) gave their gender identity as woman/female. 11 Muslim respondents (16%) identified as man/male . For comparison, 62.1% of all respondents identified as woman/female and 13.3% of all respondents as man/male.
  • 20 Muslim respondents (28%) listed a non-binary gender identity. The most common response was agender, which had 6 respondents (9%). For comparison, 24.6% of all respondents listed a non-binary gender identify, and 8.5% were agender specifically.
  • 32 Muslim respondents identified as asexual (45%), 16 as gray-A (23%), and 11 as demisexual (16%). 12 Muslim respondents (17%) did not identify as on the asexual spectrum. For comparison, 49% of all respondents identified as asexual, 16.2% as gray-A, 11% as demisexual, and 23.4% as non-ace.
  • Of the non-ace Muslim respondents, 5 identified as straight and the other 7 as various non-straight identities. The most common of these identities was bisexual, with 4 respondents.

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Identity in the AVEN Census and AVENes Survey of 2014

Originally posted in Spanish in Chrysocolla Town’s blog. It was translated by the author and posted here with permission.

Here we have an attempt to compare the AVEN Community Census 2014 and the AVENes Survey 2014 for asexuals, regarding asexual identities, gender identities, and romantic orientations. And I say attempt because, although some data may be comparable, a big chunk isn’t since the instruments didn’t ask the same questions (in form or substance), didn’t give the same response options, nor were they aimed at the same populations.

My original idea was to wait until the results of the 2015 surveys before writing about identity diversity in the asexual community, but that’s going to take months and I’m racing against time here, so I made this quick review on what I was most interested with what data I had.

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Transgender and assigned sex

Question:  How many people in the ace community are transgender, and how many are a different gender from the one assigned at birth?

“Transgender” is sometimes defined as having a gender which is distinct from the sex assigned at birth (SAAB). However, this definition fails on a large scale, particularly among people who neither identify as women nor men (non-binary people).  We already know from previous surveys that the ace community is dominated by women and non-binary people.  What remains is an analysis of SAAB and trans identity.

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Mini History Lesson: Previous Asexual Community Surveys

The 2014 AceCommunity Census was far from the first asexual community survey to be conducted. Asexual community surveys have been conducted at least as far back as 2008.  Here we present a brief history lesson on various surveys, and what we learned from them.  If you’re just interested in the results, see the end of the post. Continue reading

Cross-orientations among non-aces

Question: Are non-asexual respondents identifying with mismatching sexual and romantic orientation labels?

The asexual community has long recognized the possibility of any combination of romantic and sexual orientations, such as heteroromantic asexual or biromantic homosexual.  And in recent years, there’s been a push for the aromantic spectrum to be recognized independently from the asexual spectrum.  We’d like to estimate the number of non-aces who have applied these ideas to themselves. Continue reading

Moving Forward: What analysis would YOU like to see?

Now that the first phase of data analysis for the 2014 Survey has been completed (the preliminary report for Asexual Awareness Week), it’s time to move on to the next phase, which consists of beginning to take a look at specific topics and variable interactions at a more detailed level. We’ll be posting periodic updates to the blog with snippets of this kind of analysis.

Of course, with the number of questions in this survey and the number of responses we got, there’s a whole lot of options for comparisons and correlations we can check – enough that we could probably spend months and months analyzing things from different perspectives (and probably will!). There’s so many interesting avenues of investigation that it can be hard to choose which ones to start on first – but that’s where you all come in:

What kind topics or comparisons would you most like to see analyzed?

Please make suggestions in the comments!

If you need a refresher of what kinds of things we asked about in the survey, you can see the survey text here.

Examples of possible suggestions for analysis could include:

  1. Breakdowns of one question based on responses to another question: e.g. “Were gender identity ratios different among people with different romantic orientations?”
  2. Analysis of questions not included in the preliminary report: e.g. “What were the race breakdowns for Canada?”
  3. Analysis of more specific subsets: e.g. “What about the average age for just people who post on AVEN?”
  4. Anything else you can think of!

While some results will take longer depending on the difficulty of analyzing them (for example, write-ins take a fair amount of time to backcode), knowing which things people are most interested in helps us figure out what to prioritize!

We do ask though that you keep requests limited to information we actually have from the 2014 survey, not suggestions for future surveys – for example, we can’t answer questions like “what are asexuals’ favorite colors” because we didn’t ask about favorite colors. We’ll make a call for future survey topics in the future, so save those ideas for then 🙂

It also helps when you have specific requests – for example, “analyze every question with splits by race and gender and orientation!” is something we’d love to do eventually, but “can you look at how answers to the question “do you feel welcome in LGBTQ and Queer communities” differs based on the respondents race?” is something we can actually answer in a reasonable amount of time.

Preliminary Findings from the 2014 AVEN Community Census

Just in time to wrap up Asexual Awareness Week, preliminary results from the census are now available!

The Preliminary Findings Report is a brief summary of some of the raw data from the survey, to give you an early glimpse of some of the results – it doesn’t contain finalized numbers and it doesn’t address all topics from the survey, but it should be just enough to whet your appetite for more!

We will also begin posting some more shorter snippets of analysis here in the form of blog posts.

Also, many thanks to everyone who took the survey! We couldn’t have done it without you.