The census has been used for centuries to determine the gender, race and ages of people across the country. But what about people whose genders change? What about sexual orientation?
The federal government doesn’t currently track those numbers, and members of the LGBT community say that needs to change.
Laverne Cox, the first black transgender woman to play a lead role in a TV series, Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” spoke about the issue at a press conference in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
“Because the federal government does not track LGBT, specifically sexual orientation and gender identity data, the lives of LGBT people in this country, in a very specific way, do not count,” Cox said. “Transgender people specifically are told that we don’t exist, that our lives don’t matter.”
She added that high suicide rates and instances of homicide targeting the transgender and homosexual community could be lessened by the tracking of this data.
“So many of us have tried to take our lives because we exist in a world that tells us our lives don’t matter, that we’re not who we say we are,” she said.
The LGBT Data Inclusion Act of 2016 calls for the federal government to track this data in a uniform way. Seventy-seven members of Congress support it.
“Accurate data is critical to understanding the issues that people in the U.S. face and to developing strategies to address disparities,” reads a post by the Transgender Law Center. “Funding is allocated, services are created, and different communities are prioritized based on government data.”
Cox said this was a step towards inclusion for the LGBT community.
“In 2016, we should all be counted,” Cox said.