by Scout
Director, Network for LGBT Health Equity
A project of The Fenway Institute in Boston, MA
Williams Institute Convenes Meeting on Gender Identity Surveillance
On behalf of the Network for LGBT Health Equity I’m happy to be working with a few esteemed surveillance scientists as part of a Steering Committee to convene the first Transgender Data Inclusion Roundtable. People probably know how the Williams Institute puts out plenty of juicy policy documents like reviews of same-sex census data, best estimates of the number of LGB (and T) people in the country, and the seminal SMART group report on measuring LGB identity. Well as you probably also know… the issue of health data collection isn’t just about sexual orientation, we’d like gender identity to be routinely collected as well! So that’s why we’re here today.
Kudos to Williams Institute for securing funding to pull together the inaugural roundtable here today and hopefully a paper on data collection to follow. Well… not the type of fine data collection we see on community studies, but the blunter data collection strategies that are specially tailored for the odd world of general population mega-surveys (like.. the Census).
I’ll be reporting on more of the meeting details as the day unfolds, but for now, let me just highlight some of our participants and main goals.
Who’s here?
- Joanne Keatley, UCSF Center for Excellence in Transgender Health
- *Kerith Conron, Northeastern Univ.
- Gunner Scott, Mass. Trans. Political Coalition
- Emilia Lombardi, UPitt
- Diego Sanchez, staff for Rep. Barney Frank
- Kylar Broadus, Trans. People of Color project at National Black Justice Coalition
- Kellan Baker, Center for American Progress
- Phoenix Matthews, Howard Brown Health Center
- Joseph Kosciw, GLSEN
- Susan Stryker, Univ. of Indiana
- Mara Keisling, National Center for Transgender Equality
- *Gary Gates, Williams Institute
- *Jody Herman, Williams Institute
- *Lee Badgett, Williams Institute
- David Chae, Emory University
- *yours truly, Network for LGBT Health Equity at The Fenway Institute
* Steering Committee members
Major Topics/Goals
- Update on federal transgender data collection efforts
- How big a transgender umbrella should we measure?
- Update from National Center for Health Statistics office on LGBT measure testing
- Panel on the current science of best measures
- Working groups to create an action plan to achieve routine transgender inclusion on major surveys
LGBT HealthLink, The Network for Health Equity 
I participate in the IEEE 11073 Personal Health Devices Working Group, which is chartered with creating interoperable data exchange standards between medical devices and upstream data collectors. In many cases, data collected by weight scales, glucometers, blood pressure and ECG monitors will find their way into EMR/EHR systems. A project within this group is about to be initiated that would add identifying metrics such as birth date and gender. This is a timely discussion as I am deeply concerned that this project will not be aware of modeling a gender metric properly, and that will have long lasting consequences.
How can I assist in this effort?
Regards,
– Laurie Kermes