Data is Visibility

On National Coming Out Day, we usually think of visibility as personal — who knows us, where we feel safe and what it means to live openly. But visibility also means appearing in the data that tells the story of who lives in this country and what our lives are like.

For years, LGBTQ+ advocates used a simple phrase in the fight for better government data: If you don’t count us, we don’t count. It was never just about making sure the questions were asked. It was about power. When federal surveys omit LGBTQ+ people, policymakers lose the evidence needed to understand our health, work, families, education and economic security — and our experiences become easier to ignore.

We fought hard to change that. And for a time, we made real progress. In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey began asking about both sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). These questions gave researchers something valuable: a large federal dataset where LGBTQ+ people could finally be seen.

For the HRC Foundation’s Community Insights, my team analyzed four years of that data and found that about 12% of U.S. adults — roughly 25.6 million people — are LGBTQ+. But millions of LGBTQ+ people didn’t suddenly appear. We were already here. What changed was the quality of the data: by asking the SOGI questions, researchers could see our community more clearly.

Decades of movement-building expanded legal protections, social acceptance and the freedom to live openly. At the same time, advocates pushed researchers and government agencies to ask about sexual orientation and gender identity. The movement did not create LGBTQ+ people. It helped create the conditions that allowed more of us to be visible in our families, our workplaces, our communities and, finally, in the data. 

Our newest research for National Coming Out Day shows how powerful that visibility remains, even as LGBTQ+ people perceive declining social acceptance and face very real risks.

LGBTQ+ people keep choosing to be visible, even as the federal government chooses to see less of us.

The progress we made in data collection has been reversed. Since President Trump returned to office, the Williams Institute has documented approximately 360 federal data collections that removed at least one measure of sexual orientation or gender identity, including the Household Pulse Survey.

When data disappears, institutions become harder to hold accountable. A community can be present throughout American life and still become statistically invisible. The damage also extends beyond LGBTQ+ people: shrinking federal data collection puts at risk the information researchers, policymakers and communities need to understand health, education, poverty and economic security.

Deleting SOGI questions from a survey can make us harder to see and make it easier to act as if our needs do not exist. But absence from the data is not absence from the country. We are still here in every state, every generation, every kind of family and every kind of community. We are still building our lives, supporting each other and choosing to live openly whenever we can.

That is why the HRC Foundation’s investment in Community Insights matters now. Drawing on more than three decades of LGBTQ+ research, Community Insights maintains a trusted panel that keeps our community represented in the studies that shape how we are understood. It cannot replace a federal statistical system responsible for counting everyone. But as government institutions collect less information about us, we must ensure that our stories, experiences and needs do not disappear with the questions.

Coming out has always meant more than individual visibility: every person who lives openly makes it harder to deny our place in this country. The same is true of our visibility in the data.

For decades, our movement fought to be counted because we understood something fundamental: being counted is one way of refusing to be erased. We were here before government surveys counted us, and we are still here as this administration removes the questions that put our lives in the public record. Deleting a question does not delete a community. We will keep coming out, speaking up and making ourselves visible — in our communities and in the data. We will keep building the evidence, telling the truth about our lives and demanding to be counted.