Frequently Asked Questions

Who is this study for? 
We are looking for folks who are able to complete a survey in English, are over the age of majority in their state or province, are trans, non-binary, Two-Spirit or have transitioned and have had any kind of phalloplasty or metoidioplasty from either Canada or the United States.

Why is this study important? 
For some trans and non-binary people, having surgery to alter their genitals is a necessary aspect of their medical transition process. To date, research has mostly focused on outcomes of these surgeries that are most useful to surgeons who conduct them. So, many aspects of surgery important to patients are not well-documented. To fill this gap, and, more importantly, gather information that our community needs about typical outcomes, we created this survey.

What’s involved? 
The survey includes a series of questions about you, how you prepared for surgery, your surgical experiences, your mental health, body image, sexuality and other surgery-related experiences. The survey will take approximately 45-60 minutes to complete. All questions are optional; you can skip any question you don’t want to answer. All responses are anonymous, no personal contact information or details like your name, address, phone number or email will be collected.

 

Why is there no compensation for research participants?

Based on the small budget we have for this project, we were originally going to offer a $10 (CAD) gift to the first 200 participants who took this survey. We ‘soft launched’ the survey in March 2022 and received an unexpectedly large number of robots (bot) responses to our survey which we believe is because of our offer of the $10 gift card. We then found out this type of survey fraud (seeking gift cards) is very common right now and is impacting research on our community. We deeply care about collecting data about the real experience of our community members and believe continuing to offer gift cards would lead to more bot survey completion that would jeopardize the truthfulness of the data we collect. The $2000 we were going to spend on gift cards will be invested in our community in several other ways instead. We will continue to support the trans members of this project by offering payment for all time they spend working on this project. We will create knowledge translation outputs that are community-focused including infographics, vlogs, podcasts, and workshops for those interested in pursuing these surgeries. Near the end of our data collection, we will put out a call for art related to topics included in our survey that will be featured in community reports we create. We will compensate 5 artists $200 (CAD) for one piece of art and will prioritize artists who are people of colour, are neurodivergent, have disabilities and/or have uncommon surgical experiences (if they choose to disclose such information). We are exploring additional ways to fund community members such as offering compensation to attend our workshops or designing other knowledge translation (KT) products. We will also apply for additional KT grants to support the development of a data dashboard where community members can access data visualizations at any time.

How will my responses be used?
This survey uses Qualtrics as a data collection tool which has many security features to keep your data safe and ensure fraudulent data are not collected. You can read more about the security of data collected by Qualtrics at https://www.qualtrics.com/security-statement/  Our Qualtrics account is licensed to Dr. Nathan Lachowsky, one of Leo’s supervisors. All the responses collected will be stored together in aggregate form, meaning all responses are grouped together. The study will not look at individual responses but rather how groups of people responded to our questions. Data will be stored on encrypted servers at the University of Victoria and only members of the research team will have access to the data.

We will use the results for community-oriented paper and media content and academic papers and publications. On our website and through social media, we will release infographics with some statistical results such as averages and percentages. We will also create reports for community members that interpret the results and provide information about common themes in our data.   We may create media content such as YouTube videos or a podcast showcasing our findings. We will publish academic papers and give conference presentations based on the results as well.

We may use your information for an anonymous data dashboard, similar to the one created by TransPulse Canada https://covid.transpulsecanada.ca/transpulsedash/. Data dashboards allow members of the community to do basic statistical analyses on their own or look at information about how groups of people responded to survey questions. Data dashboards put research data in the hands of community members more readily. Future data analysis may be conducted on data included in the dashboard. Again, all data will be completely anonymous, and no individual responses will be viewable by the public on this dashboard.