The National LGBTQ+ Women*s Community Survey is the first large-scale, national survey seeking to learn from the life experiences of all women who partner with other women. Be a part of this groundbreaking effort (and if you don’t qualify, share with someone who does)!
The survey, which was “born of a frustration at the lack of accurate, joyful, resilient, policy-influencing data about our expansive and beautiful community,” according to its creators, is a community-based research and organizing effort led by veteran queer, lesbian, bi, trans, and nonbinary researchers and activists. Comprised of more than 100 questions, the survey seeks “a holistic understanding” of LGBTQ+ women’s lives in the United States today. The project website explains, “The hard truths of our lives—how we survive every day at the intersections of sexism, racism, ableism, homo-, bi-, queer- and transphobias—somehow these barely register in the public policy arena. This is often true even in our own LGBTQ+ movement spaces.”
Among other topics, the project explicitly wants to look at how LGBTQ+ women choose, configure, and grow our families. I believe it is vitally important to have a significant number of us who are parents or prospective parents take this survey.
The initiative will use its findings to ensure that community organizations, healthcare systems, and rights organizations can better serve LGBTQ+ women who partner with women. The project has garnered 5,200 respondents to date, with a goal of 20,000.
Justice Work, the think-tank and action lab led by former National LGBTQ Task Force Executive Director Urvashi Vaid, organized the survey project over the past three years, recruiting a team led by Research Director Dr. Jaime Grant. whose groundbreaking work includes the National Transgender Discrimination Study (2011); Principal Investigator Dr. Alyasah Ali Sewell, Emory University; Dr. Carla Sutherland, an international and domestic researcher in social policy; and an experienced advisory team of leading LGBTQ+ activists, scholars, and researchers.
“Our study has deep, community-centered questions about identity, so that we can see people in all their nuances. We want to be able to report on what’s happening in the collective as well as point out specific vulnerabilities,” said Dr. Grant in a press statement
Vaid noted, “Our goal is to bring forward real life experience to inform policy change, service delivery and action to support LGBTQ+ women.”
Dr. Sewell, whose work has focused on race and policing, added, “We don’t want just the largest sample of LGBTQ+ women’s experiences—we need a truly representative sample. We intend to reach into LGBTQ+ women’s communities that are largely unseen or dismissed.”
The survey is distributed online in English and Spanish, and is for anyone who has identified as an LGBTQ+ woman who partners with women at any point in their lives, including lesbian, bi, pansexual, trans, intersex, asexual, and queer womxn who partner with womxn; trans men who want to report on their experience of partnering with womxn when they identified as or were perceived to be girls or womxn; and non-binary people who partner with or have partnered with womxn. The survey is also available to distribute to community groups, social networks, book groups, faith communities, sports leagues, support groups, and institutions. All data gathered is completely anonymous and confidential. Take the survey online here before December 15, 2021.