SURVEY: Autism and Gender Determinism Study

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Hello WrongPlanet community!

My name is Maddy Vega and I’m a student at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. I am conducting research examining the relationship between autism or similar neurodivergences and gender determinism and expression. As you may know, there is already a lot of research investigating this relationship, but unfortunately most of it is heavily medicalized, focused on children, and often quite condescending towards real autistic people.

I have Sensory Processing Disorder and suggested Asperger’s myself, and think it is important to root research on the relationship between autism/neurodivergence and gender identity in the actual words and experiences of the community. To do so, I have created a questionnaire that asks approximately 20 questions about topics such as the way you present your gender, how you learned to perform your gender, and how you think your gender interacts with your autism/other neurodivergence, among other topics. There is a link to this questionnaire at the bottom of this post.

All of your answers will be completely anonymous. You will not have to sign in with your name, username, or email to participate in this survey. However, you must be 18 years or older, and are required to read and agree to a Certificate of Informed Consent before beginning the questionnaire. You may skip any questions that make you uncomfortable, but please provide thorough responses to all questions that you do answer.

Please feel free to contact me with questions about this questionnaire or my broader research. You can contact me via Wrong Planet’s personal messaging system or through email at [email protected].

Thank you so much for your consideration!


Questionnaire link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-4v5GD ... I/viewform

Did the thing.

I would do it but I'm not eighteen. orz

Thank you very much!




Thank you for your interest anyway!

Another new member survey posted without prior clearance from Alex. Joining a support site purely to access samples for a personal project is an unauthorised action. It happens so often that it is clear that many people feel entitled to use WP for purposes other than what it was set up to do and achieve.

Eh, I'm happy to respond anonymously, and took the survey anyway. Hope that's helpful, and much luck in your research.
One note about its structure, though - I'm unsure if it is the same on PC but if using an iPad/tablet, the answers scroll upwards and become invisible, and unable to read back without attempting to scroll the specific touch-sensitive section back again. Even then, the window to read back is very small, only a line or two. I know many autistic people who need to read over / review written responses several times before being satisfied with it. You may wish to alter the structure so the whole response can be viewed at once, for greater ease.

Thanks for your participation. And, hmm. That problem doesn't appear on PC, from what I've seen, although it might be possible for me to edit the code so that scrollboxes don't appear at all and the answer boxes just adjust to the size of the response (which might help). I don't know if that would fix the problem for mobile, since that probably uses its own standard format? Google forms isn't necessarily a very customizable experience, unfortunately, but I'll see if there's anything I can do. Thanks for pointing that out.

Regarding my being a new member/getting this study cleared by Alex, I am currently working this out with moderators, since I was under the impression that there was nothing at all against the rules about doing this in this way, but I realize now that I may have misinterpreted that. There's also the problem of adhering to the ethical guidelines of my institution which can be kind of sticky and make general interaction on forums such as this sort of difficult.

I do want to be clear though that I'm not at all intending to simply "use" people and be done with it, nor do I at all want to appear like I feel entitled to anyone's time. Participation, even if it's only to answer some of the questions, is totally voluntary. After the study is done I want to come back with a summary of the results and start a discussion about the topic, which I know (both from my personal experiences being on the spectrum/being queer, and from seeing topics about this on these forums) is important to many people. However, I realize that I am a newcomer to this community and that that puts me in a different "place" than established members of the community. I do want to thank everybody who's participated so far. Your input is so appreciated.

Your response and sensitivity is also appreciated

Took the test, I hope its helpful (:

Yes, incredibly! Thank you so much!

I looked into making the study easier to read/fill out on mobile but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the Google Forms app when it comes to changing or restructuring the questions. I'll keep poking around the internet to see if anyone has any solutions to this problem, but for now I would say it might be easiest to fill out the questionnaire on a computer if you have the option to do so.

The study is still taking responses (and will be for some time). Thanks again to everyone who's already taken the time to fill out the questionnaire.

Did it just now, was rather interesting. Got me thinking a bit on a few things, too.

Ah, I'm happy to hear it. Thank you for your participation, it means a lot.

I think posting this under LGBT Discussion is likely to skew results. People who are LGBT are more likely to see this topic and take the survey rather than heterosexual people.

Yeah, that's definitely true, unfortuately. The demographics of the people who have taken the survey are certainly not representative of the broader autistic population as a whole (although several heterosexual/cisgender people have responded as well).

Part of the reason why I put it in this forum was because I believed it would be off-topic anywhere else, but I also did have an interest in learning about the strategies for navigating society employed by people who are not only autistic but also LGBTQ, and people who are not necessarily LGBTQ but might "differ" from heteronormative social norms in some way. I think people who read this forum even if they aren't LGBTQ themselves may have put more thought into their gender/gender norms in general than the average person, who doesn't necessarily have to think about any of that stuff because they more or less "conform" to societal norms.

That's also why I'm not really trying to answer the question of "are there more LGBTQ folks in the autistic community than in the neurotypical community?" as previous research has attempted to do -- I wouldn't be able to accurately make a statement like that about trends in the broader autistic community.


Having said all that, as it is the end of the summer (at least, getting there), the survey is no longer taking additional respondents. I want to thank all the awesome people who have participated -- your answers have been incredibly insightful and helpful. Thank you.

Ok, I see now. I tried to take the quiz, but I found most of the questions hard to answer because they didn't really apply to me. So, it makes sense to post it in this forum.