data

Survey Says!

In the summer of 2015 the National Center for Transgender Inequality initiated the largest survey of transgender people ever conducted: The U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS). There were 27,715 participants, including yours truly, representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and American military bases overseas.

If they don't count us, then we don't count

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Laverne Cox appeared Monday at the Social Good Summit on a panel with Shelby Chestnut, co-director of community organizing and public advocacyat the Anti-Violence Project and Cecelia Chung, senior strategist of the Transgender Law Center.

The subject of the Census arose.

Census data has historically focused on the binary gender options: male and female. Emmy-nominated actress and transgender activist Laverne Cox is critical of that fact. The census doesn’t include her, and people like her, by assuming everyone is born into the gender they will forever identify.

I was thinking that visibility is only part of the equation. We must have social policy, systemic change. And then I thought about the census. Systemically, this idea of the gender binary is very much institutionalized in the fact that we just don't count trans people.

--Cox