DETROIT — As politicians battle over gay rights in statehouses across the country, it's difficult to know exactly how many people even identify as LGBTQ — and experts say the missing data could be crucial.
That's because the decennial U.S. census — the gold standard of who exactly makes up the U.S. population — does not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity beyond a strict male/female binary.
There are estimates. Experts at nonprofits estimated in 2020 that there are more than 13 million LGBTQ people nationwide, but estimates can vary wildly based on methodology and likely undercount the total population.
That can be a significant problem in a country where, oftentimes, funding for everything from health care to housing is determined by the number of people it would help in a given area.
“There is a significant amount of resources and decision-making that is connected to the Census Bureau data,” Erin Knott, executive director of Equality Michigan, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group based in Kalamazoo, told The Detroit News. “Being invisible within the system, being only partially counted, is problematic.”
Experts agree it’s time for questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, but getting there might not be as easy as throwing a question on a form.
LGBTQ identity is oftentimes a complex thing for people to put a specific label on, and the idea of effectively “coming out” in a government census, particularly with the passage of increasingly anti-LGBTQ laws around the country, can be frightening.
“It’s really difficult to get enthusiastic about the opportunity of completing a questionnaire like the census while their privacy and human rights are actively being violated by state governments and institutions,” Knott said.
What LGBTQ census questions do exist?
Certain surveys from the Census Bureau do ask specific questions about a person’s LGBTQ identity. The Bureau points to products like the American Housing Survey, the National Crime Victimization Survey, and the Household Pulse Survey. There are also questions on several products on “same-sex couple households.”
But those surveys are not as expansive as the decennial census, which seeks to measure every person in the country every 10 years. Questions on same-sex couple households, for instance, don’t count LGBTQ people who aren’t living together, or families where one or both partners may be queer, but they aren’t the same sex.
“We know that only, at most, 20% of LGBT people are living in same-sex couple households,” said Kerith Conron, research director at UCLA’s Williams Institute, the leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity as it relates to law and public policy. “We don’t know about the other 80% or so.”
Having the same-sex couple household data has been helpful, Conron said, but LGBTQ people tend to skew younger, which limits the number of people who would be married in the first place, Conron said.
Questions like that also tend to make trans people “invisible,” she said, by only asking about a person’s male or female identity.
“At this point, many people feel like what we often refer to as SOGI — sexual orientation, gender identity — is just another demographic characteristic,” she said. “There’s no reason not to include it as a core question on every form and survey, particularly those that are anonymous, collected by federal and state agencies because we should be tracking outcomes and wellbeing for LGBTQ people just like everybody else.”
The Census Bureau says it is conducting research into how it can measure LGBTQ populations in the U.S., including “actively and consistently engaging with leaders and stakeholders in the LGBTQI+ communities to better understand their needs and concerns.”
Questions on the decennial census come from a variety of sources, according to the bureau, including congressional mandates, feedback from the public, guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget and more. The bureau did not say whether it was planning to add new questions to the decennial census but noted it had gotten $10 million to research adding questions on sexuality and gender identity to the American Community Survey and that it was testing proxy responses (when a single person at an address answers questions for everyone living there) in the American Housing Survey.
Until a question appears on all questionnaires, though, it can be hard to properly allocate resources at the federal level or even to track things like health disparities and civil rights enforcement fully.
How can we ask about LGBTQ identity on the census?
Experts agree that one of the best ways to get people to answer questions about their identity would be to better publicize the fact that data collected by the Census Bureau is confidential, as is the law. Nothing identifiable is released for 72 years after a decennial census, and the Census Bureau noted in a statement to The News that census and surveys “cannot be used for law enforcement or any other purposes that are not statistical.”
But fear can lead people not to answer questions truthfully, or otherwise skip census questionnaires entirely. Many experts and advocates worried that, after former President Donald Trump’s administration tried to put a question asking about citizenship on the 2020 census (a move later blocked by the Supreme Court), Hispanic residents in several states were undercounted.
To ensure queer people feel comfortable answering truthfully, Shoshana Goldberg, director of public education and research for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said that she would want to see a push for public education on how census data is used.
That would include information on how data is kept private and what measures are taken to ensure that no one can be identified personally from what is publicly released in the months and years immediately after the census is taken. Other important points would be how specific questions helps to benefit a community — in this case, how answering a question about sexual orientation could help ensure necessary funding for health programs in the respondent's area.
Knowing not only that one's information is safe but also that answering the questions serves to benefit them and their community is crucial, Goldberg said.
“It’s important to have these conversations so it doesn’t feel like it’s just coming from up high and has nothing to do with anything,” she added.
For the most part, it’s not that people don’t want to answer honestly about LGBTQ identity, Goldberg said, although she noted that may change as some states pass laws that are increasingly hostile to queer and trans people — it’s a matter that the questions are oftentimes not even asked.
But it’s still important to put careful thought into how questions are asked. Not everyone understands the term ‘cisgender,’ used to describe someone whose gender identity matches the one they were born with (and often used as the opposite of transgender), Goldberg said, so offering an explanation of the term could help make sure that people answer correctly.
There is also the problem of how to make sure a wide variety of identities are covered. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not as simple as just being gay or straight, and there are a wide variety of labels people use for themselves. Ensuring there is a label that allows everyone to share their identity fully would be a big step toward accurate counts, Goldberg said.
"It is very clear to me that people do not want to go back into the closet. They want to be open and proud and live that way in everything from how they answer surveys to how they show up at work and at school and in their lives," Goldberg said. "The more we ask, the more information we'll get."
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