Who Answers “Non-Binary”? First Insights into the Responses to the New Answer Category on Gender Identity in German Panel Data

Nadja Milewski , Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), Germany
Detlev Lück, Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB)

Quantitative surveys in Germany have begun to offer possibilities to measure gender identities beyond the binary concept as of 2019. In 2021, the panel “FReDA – The German Family Demography Panel Study” has started and meanwhile released its first data, collected in 2021. The data of the recruitment interview in Spring 2021 has more than 37,000 respondents, aged 18 to 50. In total, 125 respondents in the first wave have chosen the third answer category “non-binary, intersex” for the question on gender identity. On the one hand, it seems obvious that this question should identify people who do not identify with the sex categories male or female. On the other hand, the question on sex (together with the questions on birth year and month) has been inserted in FReDA mainly for identifying interviews which have been filled out by a wrong person, since the sex (and birth date) is already known for the gross sample from the population register. We disentangle to what extent the question is actually capturing an empirical fact and to what extent it may present a measurement problem. Our contributions are threefold: First, we describe how diversity in gender identity was measured in the FReDA survey and the patterns of response behavior. Second, we compare the response behavior of “non-binary” respondents to cases with contradictory information on gender and to “male” and “female” respondents. Third, we give a bivariate description of socio-demographic characteristics of persons of a “non-binary” gender identity.

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 Presented in Session 4. Same-sex Couples and Queer Identities