Well, it is now on Diversity Atlas, thanks initially to a recommendation from Martin Stark, founder and CEO of the World Gay Boxing Championship, taking place in Sydney early next year (please visit www.wgbc.org.au for more information).  In partnership with the team at WGBC, Cultural Infusion will be deploying their flagship product Diversity Atlas to the competitors, participators, stakeholders and allies of this exciting international boxing tournament. World Gay Boxing Championships (WGBC) is an Australian not-for-profit disrupting homophobia and transphobia enabling everyone to compete in boxing in a friendly environment. 

Muhammad Ali said, “It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe,” and who would ever dare question the GOAT?  As Martin says, “We want to replace the pebbles with shining diamonds showing the best of humanity and our love for the sport of boxing where everyone is welcome.”

With any deployment, part of the process of survey preparation (and my personal favourite part) is examining:  What are the questions we will ask? What are the potential answers?  Our aim has always been to offer the world’s most inclusive dataset of humanity (hence, almost 9000 ethnic / people-groups for instance) and our gender list looked like this:

• Man
• Woman
• Transgendered Man
• Transgendered Woman
• Non-binary
• Transgendered non-binary
• Not listed
• Prefer not to say

Martin made the suggestion of adding gender non-conforming, citing not just his own depth of experience and travels, but also the National LGBT Health Education Centre (US) who define Gender Non-Conforming as:  

“People who express their gender differently than what is culturally expected of them. A gender non-conforming person is not necessarily transgender (for example, a woman who dresses in a masculine style but who identifies as female; a boy who likes to play with girl dolls but identifies himself as a boy, etc.).”

Our Cultural Ambassador Arnaud Gallois then conferred with multiple SMEs and advocacy groups, including Rainbow Health Australia, which has lead to the addition of the field to our Gender drop-down.  It should be noted that our research finds that someone identifying as ‘non-binary’ might also identify as gender non-conforming, but this is not a necessity or a given, hence, having both entries available.  

More to the point:  As we continue to deploy our survey around the globe, more genders will be suggested to us, and we look forward to these recommendations and insights.  The beautiful complexity of humanity and identity is an ever-going wonder.  

Other database additions this month also include:

• Black British as a cultural group (as distinct from British)
• Black African as a cultural group (as distinct from African)
• Hermetism (standalone) and Hermetecism (occult) as Worldviews
• Sahrawi as the correct term for the majority Western Saharan ethnic group

If you’d like to put your feet up and have me take you on a 30-40 minute tour of the survey, send me an email: [email protected]