“These are sort of the systemic disparities that we observed pre-pandemic, that the pandemic has not only deepened for both groups, but also sort of widened,” said David Schwegman, assistant professor of public policy and administration at American University, who has conducted research on “same-sex couples” and housing discrimination.
Wilson at the Williams Institute said that absent this kind of large-scale data collection about LGBTQ+ people, policymakers couldn’t truly answer big questions about whether attempts to address economic stress exacerbated by the pandemic — like the now-expired federal eviction moratorium — were working for everyone.
But data collection is only one step toward equity.
Dean Spade, an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law who has also advised the upcoming National LGBTQ+ Women*s Community Survey by think tank Justice Work, said that real change requires more than just counting trans and LGBTQ+ people at the federal level.
Counting marginalized people to better understand the issues they face doesn’t necessarily mean their suffering will be addressed through policy, he noted — and trans people are accustomed to social services leaving them out or not being designed with them in mind. It’s why trans people, for example, are helping each other pay for medical procedures that aren’t covered by insurance, housing those experiencing homelessness and creating mutual aid networks, Spade said.
“We’re helping each other survive right now,” he said.
And there are still significant challenges with the data as it is. Samples sizes are small, an issue that has barred marginalized communities, including Asian women, Native Americans and Pacific Islander women, from representation in real-time data on some national surveys.
Those small sample sizes make it difficult to draw big conclusions from the data until months down the line. The Census Bureau declined a request to comment on the LGBTQ+ data, saying “subject experts felt that there’s not enough information available for them to be able to speak on the record about,” though the census did publish a report on the first set of LGBTQ+ data this summer, finding that LGBTQ+ people are more likely than non-LGBTQ+ people to face economic hardship.
The other challenge has been crafting questions in a way that takes into account knowledge gaps people may have about what terminology best describes them.
The census survey, for example, asks respondents to choose which best represents how they think of themselves: “gay or lesbian”; “bisexual”; “something else”; “I don’t know”; or “straight, that is not gay or lesbian.” In past attempts to phrase these questions, heterosexual people have been found to incorrectly mark themselves, economists said, so additional phrases have been added to improve clarity.
The survey also asks if people describe themselves as male, female or transgender, and some transgender people may not want to identify themselves given the rise in anti-trans bills across the country, Schwegman said.
Spade pointed to smaller studies led by advocates as important pools of information that can’t be found anywhere else, since they ask questions about daily threats like over-policing and poverty.
“I think that those kinds of studies can be, to a lot of us, more valuable than something larger that didn’t ask the questions or that missed whole groups of people in our community,” he said.
The real-time data from surveys like the current census one, which will be collecting responses from July 21 to October 11, could help impact policies in real time. The problem for pandemic-related policies being negotiated in Congress this fall is that this data may be coming too late, Wilson said.
“It’s 18 months into the pandemic, and had that been the starting place, we would not be looking at a sample size that would create problems for all the analyses that we want to do to understand a trans-specific experience,” Wilson said.
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