The LGBT community cannot continue to use anecdotal evidence when asking for policy changes from the government, said Adrian Shanker, executive director of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown.
“Saying 37 percent of LGBT people smoke in the Lehigh Valley, compared with 20 percent of the general population, is a lot more impactful than saying our bars are really smoky,” he said.
A lot of conversation at the White House LGBT Summit Aug. 30 in Pittsburgh centered on data collection, Shanker said. He presented some health-disparity research his center has overseen and attended other panels with officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The White House sponsored the summit, while Equality Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh co-hosted it. More than 130 LGBT advocates from across the state attended.
Levana Layendecker, deputy director of Equality Pennsylvania, said the Obama administration had hosted a White House summit in Philadelphia during the president’s first term.
“There have been a lot of changes over the last eight years,” Layendecker said. “We wanted to help educate stakeholders.”
She said Equality Pennsylvania shared information with federal officials about the state’s updated policies for transgender people to receive accurate birth certificates and equal access to health care, whether through Medicare and Medicaid or private insurers under the jurisdiction of the Insurance Department.
In turn, federal officials from the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, among others, shared information about their current initiatives.
Layendecker said panels addressed violence in the transgender community, the future of nondiscrimination and LGBT aging issues. Equality Pennsylvania is working to gather feedback from participants and expects to make a summary of the White House summit available online soon.
“This presidential administration has done a great job of getting LGBT people added to more data collection efforts,” Shanker said.
But, he added, no uniform policy exists detailing how to account for LGBT experiences in all data initiatives. Shanker said the LGBT Data Inclusion Act could resolve that issue. The bill, introduced in the House in May and the Senate in July, remains in committees.
“We certainly hope more members of Congress take a look at the bill,” Shanker said.
He’s not alone in advocating for more LGBT data collection. Heshie Zinman has said since last year that his work with the LGBT Elder Initiative would run more smoothly if he could reference specific data.
“We need to get a true sense of the number of LGBT people using the aging-services network so we can begin to allocate funds for programs for LGBT people,” Zinman told PGN in January. “Data drives policy and policy drives funding.”
He said nondiscrimination laws would have to come first, so that people do not fear self-identifying as LGBT on a government form for data collection.