Count Me In
Why we need more health data on lgbtq communities
Why we need more health data on communities
Early one October, Nick North arrived at a Calgary hospital feeling a mix of fear and excitement. He had long felt that his body did not match who he was inside: he had been assigned female at birth but did not identify as a woman, and the day had finally come for his gender-affirming top surgery, a procedure to masculinize his chest. But, he recalls, when he handed his paperwork to staff, he had to repeatedly request they call him Nick, not the name on his birth certificate. “If Ialready know you can’t figure out my pronouns and call me the right name, then how do I trust you with my unconscious body?”
North says. “How do I go into that not terrified?”
North remembers hospital staff telling him not to take it personally, but “you always take it personally,” he says. It had felt just as personal when his psychiatrist told him to wear a swim top to feel more comfortable at the pool with his kids, leaving North to educate him on why having a body he feels comfortable in — not a swim top — would help his dysphoria.
North believes a federal survey on transgender identity could improve services for men like him. “There are so many more of us than you know, and we’re not getting the proper health care.” Research has suggested that gender and sexual minorities experience worse health outcomes than the rest of the population. Until recently, agencies like Statistics Canada have faced challenges in trying to collect health data on LGBTQ individuals in a manner that is both precise and culturally sensitive. Increasing the amount of publicly available data on the national level could allow health care practitioners to make more-informed decisions about patients. “If you can’t be counted,” says Lori Ross, a professor of public health at the University of Toronto, “then you don’t count in terms of policy.”
Last June, the federal standing committee on health, a small group of MPS with a key role in crafting legislation, produced a landmark report on LGBTQ health in Canada. Tasked with examining the numerous health inequalities for gender and sexual minorities, the committee collected evidence of disparities: bisexual women and lesbians are at greater risk of chronic illnesses such as arthritis, for instance, and LGBTQ individuals in general have disproportionate rates of mental illness. The report emphasized that discrimination and the stress of being a minority affect these health outcomes. In other words, the health care system marginalizes LGBTQ people because it isn’t designed to acknowledge them. Experts like Ross say that simply counting sexual and gender minorities in population-based data would help the health system respond better.
The report made several recommendations relating to data collection. It suggested Statistics Canada change its practices to increase the number of LGBTQ respondents, improve its questions on sexual orientation, and include sexual-orientation and gender-identity questions on all surveys.
As a queer nonbinary person, Brent Saccucci’s sexual and gender identities are integral to understanding their health needs (Saccucci uses he and their pronouns). A PHD student and instructor at the University of Alberta, Saccucci