Research on gender identity, expression and mental health

[Thivija]

We are looking for LGBT+ volunteers over the age of 16 for a research study on bullying and well-being. The study will involve one online survey (which includes questions which ask about your sexuality and gender identity).You are under no obligation to reply to this advertisement or the online survey. However if you choose to, participation in this research is voluntary and you may withdraw at anytime. The study is approved by King’s College London Psychiatry, Nursing and Midwifery Research Ethics Subcommittee reference HR-16/17-3969.

We are conducting a research study looking at the link between experiences of bullying and psychological well-being in LGBT+ people. Your participation will increase our knowledge about mental health issues affecting the LGBT community. You will be asked to complete a set of questionnaires about your gender identity, sexual identity, age, gender expression, bullying experiences, outness and well-being levels. Overall, this study should last no longer than 20 minutes.

kings.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/victimisation-in-lgbt-populations

For more details please contact Grace Robinson ([e-mail]) or Thivija Sabanathan ([e-mail]).

[Trinity]

I took the survey. I appreciate the work you put into it.

Some suggestions:

For genderfluid people presenting in different ways, the survey seems to expect a lineal or binary gender expression. So it does not easily take into account those of us that live in multiple presentations or realities of gender.

It referenced bullying over the last 12 months. The bullying I recieved was consistant, brutal, life theatening and the worst of it took place over 40 years ago. The results have been horrific
Alcohol, substance abuse, sexual functions that have gone wrong, attempting to fit into a society that will not accept... there are many other aspects that can be explored.

This is meant to be positive input into your survey. It would be interesting to question our forum to ask what kinds of questions would be of benefit to us, since many of us do suffer from chronic mental pain as a result of the bullying.

For me, it was life theatening, and the continued bullying we see in the media of television and news and legalized bullying of transgender people has made it increasingly difficult for us to function socially.

The persecution of transgender people is becoming extreme. Personally, the damage to me has been redlined for quite a while, and its a miracle I am still alive.

Good luck with the project, hope it opens your eyes and is useful in helping others.

Society's brutality is the thing that hurts us the most. It is extremely hard to be transgender, and it absolutely affects us mentally in many ways, or at least it has me.

Thank you for your efforts trying to raise awareness of the problem.

I wish the younger generation does not have to endure the literal mental torture those of us born in the 50's and 60's have gone through, as well as everyone else regardless of the decade they were born.

Its been raw hell. Its better now that I have come out, but even so, God knows what is going to happen to us.

Meanwhile this forum is here as support to any that come needing help and a caring ear.

Trinity.

[Thivija]

Thank you for your reply and feedback! The questionnaire is indeed imperfect and we value this important point you have made regarding gender expression. We will aim to account for this in future studies.

As for the bullying time period, we decided that this was the best option because the standardised measures of depression and anxiety are current, so we felt as though using lifetime bullying wouldn't make as much sense. This also can be improved, and once we understand the basic relationships between these factors, future research will hopefully look at lifetime bullying and its long term implications.

I am sorry for what you and this community have been through, and I do believe that it will be better for younger generations.

Thank you once more for your time and contribution to this survey!

[Trinity]

I am classifying as bullying the terrible negative impact of the media's and governments anti trans movement.

This encouragement to activelyvstrip us of our human rights is extremely damaging psychologically.

If you raise awareness of this, it might help us.

[Thivija]

Yes of course! I understand! Hopefully this research (and raised awareness) can have a positive impact.

Please share the survey with others if possible as it will greatly help!

Thanks

[Trinity]

Jan 17, 2017 22:42:32 GMT 8 Thivija said:

Yes of course! I understand! Hopefully this research (and raised awareness) can have a positive impact.

Please share the survey with others if possible as it will greatly help!

Thanks

I would suggest you launch a new thread asking us what questions we would like asked concerning the effects of bullying on us.

Many of us are in therapy and are very clear on cause and effect.

It may not affect this project but it might a future one.

Also needed to be asked is our experiences with the mental health professionals.

Keep in mind this is a nonbinary forum, a marginalized group that is incredibly under represented and ignored in favor of more high profile high percentage binary populations.


If this was done and you had an ear, the results could be passed on to the psyche community to raise awareness.

Once that community understands thay can then continue to strengthen the fact that our issues are caused ny social oppression and laws, not by mental illness.

Solve the root cause, expose it, publish iy, and leverage it until we have the same rights as every other human being.

We dont.  It is perfectly legal to inflict maximum pain on trans by denying us homes, jobs, safe bathrooms, basic healthcare, and treatment as human beings.

To say nothing about the tendency to look away when physical violence is added in.

We need every allie we can get.

Trinity

[Ativan Prescribed]

Just looking at the responses here, the back and forth, the indications of some parts of the survey, I decline.
The last 12 months has nothing at all to do with the effects of bullying, not after a lifetime of outright and subtle bullying on a constant basis.

It isn't the instances, it's the lifetime of being told by individuals, by the media, by society, by the gov'ts laws.
I think if you really want to know about this group of Non Binary people, you need to look and study the comments made since the very beginning of this forum.

This forum was created out of the bullying of a well known transgender forum, one that refused to accept what we had to say.
All because we couldn't and have no reason to follow the 'plan' they present as the only way to be transgender.
We got bully'd by the very group of people who you would think would understand and be supportive.

Bullying is a constant thing, it is all encompassing from our point of view, we simply don't exist in this binary existence that we call the matrix.
We have escaped it by creating this forest, which is a story in itself of the bullying we as a group have received.

You don't need a survey to study, you have a perfectly good forum right here that answers questions you haven't even begun to think up.
If you want to do a study, I suggest you begin here and first study the freely spoken words of the most misunderstood group of people when it comes to gender.

Surveys are only as good as the questions they ask, if you don't know what to ask, the survey is an exercise in futility, something we have seen before.
You have the opportunity to sit back and study the comments on a variety of subjects, from over 200 people...

It isn't any harder to go through this than it is to go through hundreds of peoples comments to the questions you have thought up already.
Right here is a great opportunity for you and others if they wish, to look at and begin to understand what it is to be this group of wonderful people.
The opportunity to be able to ask the right questions, the ones that matter, the ones that will lead you to a better understanding of what it is to be NonBinary.
Ativan

[Jennifer (Tink)]

I agree with Ativan. The effort is appreciated but we as Non-Binary really don't fit into the trans narrative.

If you look at our posts you will see the struggles we face everyday. Even the trans community discounts who we are which is ironic.

The survey will give a small glimpse into the narrative but if you want to truly get an understanding of what it means to be non-binary then I would suggest hanging around here for a month or two.

We are misunderstood. As an example. I am a non-binary non-op trans women (lesbian). Most people can't understand what that means and when I talk to trans people they don't consider my gender "real" because I don't fit into the(ironically) binary norm.

We appreciate your efforts but there is much more to learn.

:hugs:

-- Jenn

[Viridian]

Yes! I agree with Ativan and Jenn, and what Trinity says about those of us born in the 50s and 60s.

This sounds like a well-meaning but misconceived study in that it focuses on mental health in relation to instances of bullying. Like Ativan says, that will produce certain data for you because you are looking for it but it's not the point!

Bullying for us doesn't just come in discrete events, it is global and unending in the constant policing of binary gender. How many cis people feel bullied when they settle down in front of their TV? But anyone outside the binary is being subjected to a whole stream of images of 'men' and 'women', and how they are supposed to look and talk and behave and we never see anyone like ourselves so we are being told that we are wrong or we don't exist. That is bullying that started from birth and is relentless and everywhere we look. How can you measure that and its effects? We don't have 'mental health problems', we have natural human responses to being treated like outcasts or freaks.

As for the 12 months thing - I was so traumatised by hate crimes in my youth that I have learnt to keep such a low profile that I can feel invisible. So you might conclude from my lack of bullying in the last 12 months and my lack of a diagnosed mental illness that I live happily in an accepting community. How wrong you would be! I live a sort of half life, hidden away, with a host of physical health problems caused by stress. Would that show in your survey?

I think for it to be meaningful we would need to devise our own survey. Though I think Ativan has got it right in that we have this forum and you couldn't have better information than that as it is honest and real and in our own terms.

[Thivija]

Thank you all for your feedback! I unfortunately cannot change the survey at this point, but asking the non-binary community about research they personally would like using this forum is a great idea and I'll pass this information back to the university who will continue to do research after my one is complete.

Please don't feel pressured into doing the survey! I thought that I could just quickly explain that there is very little scientific research focusing on gender minorities. My main focus is see whether differing levels of gender expression have an impact on mental health and whether bullying contributes that. I appreciate that there is so much more to explore, more than I realised because I cannot understand the struggles that you have gone through. However, this is just one piece of research to try to grow this field and it is not perfect but I do hope that it can help in some way. It will be a unique set of data and many inferences can be made using it, which can perhaps be used to guide future research.

I've never even thought about bullying through media, I've thought about the lack of representation, but I now appreciate that it's even more difficult! The reason I chose the more basic sense of the word 'bullying' was because different people experience different levels of this and so it can be used to see if there is a correlation with mental health.

When doing research, it's good to use standardised, well tested measures, and as the measures for depression and anxiety are current, we felt as though more recent bullying would make more sense. We considered lifelong bulling too, but it was simply too much for one research project, but in the conclusion where you can give ideas for further research, I will definitely bring this up.

Once again, thank you all for your comments!

[Jennifer (Tink)]

Jan 21, 2017 18:34:27 GMT 8 Thivija said:

Thank you all for your feedback! I unfortunately cannot change the survey at this point, but asking the non-binary community about research they personally would like using this forum is a great idea and I'll pass this information back to the university who will continue to do research after my one is complete.

Please don't feel pressured into doing the survey! I thought that I could just quickly explain that there is very little scientific research focusing on gender minorities. My main focus is see whether differing levels of gender expression have an impact on mental health and whether bullying contributes that. I appreciate that there is so much more to explore, more than I realised because I cannot understand the struggles that you have gone through. However, this is just one piece of research to try to grow this field and it is not perfect but I do hope that it can help in some way. It will be a unique set of data and many inferences can be made using it, which can perhaps be used to guide future research.

I've never even thought about bullying through media, I've thought about the lack of representation, but I now appreciate that it's even more difficult! The reason I chose the more basic sense of the word 'bullying' was because different people experience different levels of this and so it can be used to see if there is a correlation with mental health.

When doing research, it's good to use standardised, well tested measures, and as the measures for depression and anxiety are current, we felt as though more recent bullying would make more sense. We considered lifelong bulling too, but it was simply too much for one research project, but in the conclusion where you can give ideas for further research, I will definitely bring this up.

Once again, thank you all for your comments!

And thank you for your efforts

Anything that helps move us forward to living normal, happy lives is always welcome

:hugs:

-- Jenn