Making Sure We Count: United States Trans Survey is Live

Last week, Americans went to the polls to ensure their voices are heard and the issues most important to them are prioritized in our government. Voting is one of those sacred things that many of us engage in as part of our civic duty but also because we wish to have level of control and influence over those deciding the fate of trillions of our tax dollars. We want our experiences reflected.

While pundits are pouring over data and strategists are autopsying results and turn out and all sorts of data, other data gathered by our government significantly impacts how our government evaluates programs, policy, and spending. The Census, for example, isn’t just active every decade – the Census Bureau engages in all sorts of data gathering, including the National Health Interview Survey and the American Community Survey. These data tell our collective and individual stories in ways the influence government funded programming. These data are critically important to advocacy efforts – if we’re not counted, our issues cannot be considered or weighed in policymaking. Reflecting on this notion, the politicization of transgender identity, manifesting in actions across the country in the vein of Florida’s Board of Medicine issuing rules prohibiting gender affirming care for minors to the Trump Administration omitting information gathering on queer identified residents of the country, has in no small part relied upon gatekeeping these tools – making sure transgender people don’t get counted. If we don’t see any problems, no problems exist which need addressed, right?

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other government agencies have long worked to include data gathering on transgender and non-binary people, those efforts are fractured, often incomplete or not competently delivered, and do not necessarily consider nuances transgender people are all too familiar with. Thus, we rely heavily on privately gathered data, which is sometimes fraught with weaknesses in reach and assessment. For example, the Workplace Wellness Survey evaluated the satisfaction of LGBTQ employees had with their employer benefits compared to their heterosexual and cisgender peers, with top level findings generally showing LGBTQ people are less likely to be eligible for benefit offerings than their non-LGBTQ peers. With employers being the number one source of health insurance coverage in the United States, if employer sponsored health coverage doesn’t meet the needs of queer employees, health disparities will necessarily continue. Economic impacts from this are certain – LGBTQ employees having to spend more dollars out of pocket on getting the health care they need means greater economic insecurity for this demographic.

Despite the weaknesses in private data gathering, it’s what we have. And for transgender people living in the United States, the National Center for Transgender Equality’s (NCTE) United States Trans Survey (USTS) is one of the most essential sources of data on our experiences and interactions with the world around us.

It's been seven years since we’ve gotten new data and, in those seven years, USTS has been cited tens of thousands of times by advocates as to the reasons why more government data needs to be gathered and used to inform programming and policy. The 2015 data has been cited so many times some advocates have memorized significant sections of the 302-page report.

With a goal to reach 32,000 transgender people in the country, NCTE has partnered with several advocacy organizations to recruit participants, host survey parties, and more. The survey takes about 30 minutes to complete on a laptop (I completed mine this last weekend in 20 minutes) but may take longer for some people. As a matter of safety and recognizing the climate we live in today, there are “safe exit” tools incorporated into the survey design so that people who need to exit the survey quickly can.

As we approach Transgender Day of Remembrance and Resilience (TDOR, November 20) and recognizing that HIV disproportionately affects transgender women of color, Community Access National Network would like to encourage our partners and community members to amplify appropriate participation in this year’s US Trans survey.

We cannot count unless we are counted.

You can access NCTE’s US Trans Survey here.