A mutual on Bluesky borrowed one of my Rooks from Dragon Age: The Veilguard for Rookanis fanart purposes! 💕

She had a specific art ref as a brain worm and needed to borrow someone else's Rook to use it on, so I got some lovely art of one of my Crow Rooks, Gianna de Riva.

I've participated in the National Consumer Panel since January 2014, which involved scanning my grocery purchases and doing the occasional survey in exchange for gifts cards and such. Unfortunately, I've finally had to break down and delete my account due to their continued transphobia.

When participating, you have the list the demographic information of the shopper, and the only gender options listed are Male or Female. Which, you know, is an issue if you're legally nonbinary. Especially since X is a valid gender option on US passports as well as driver's licenses in many states. In addition, they have an annual demographic survey each year where you provide more information about yourself, and - once again - the only gender options are Male or Female. If you want to participate, you have to intentionally misgender yourself, or you cannot proceed forward through the survey.

I've been reaching out to the National Consumer Panel about this issue since 2021. In both 2021 and 2022, my messages were acknowledged, and they point-blank stated that the issue was that their parent companies (NielsenIQ and Circana) dictated what gender options they were allowed to list.

In December 2022, I received the following email:



That email? Was the last communication that I received from NCP one way or another. I've continued to reach out each year when the annual demographic survey goes out with only Male and Female as the gender options listed, but I haven't received any response from NCP at all since 2022.

It's very clear at this point that the blatant transphobia of forcing nonbinary individuals to misgender themselves to use their site is intentional and won't be changing. Maybe it is the parent companies that are to blame, but the fact that NCP sent me an email in 2022 saying they were working to fix the issue and then ignored every single message that I've sent since then? Well, that says a lot. If nothing else, they're the ones who chose to simply stay quiet.

At this point, I'm done. I deleted my account earlier today, and I sent them an email making it clear why I've done so. With the current state of the world, I can't in good conscience continue to participate with an organization that's not even pretending to try to not to be transphobic.

I honestly doubt this post is going to do much of anything in the grand scheme of things (and the same's true of the thread that I posted over on Bluesky). Still, I wanted to at least make a public post about it just in case it lets even one person out there know that the National Consumer Panel shouldn't be trusted if you're LGBTIQA+.