This Pride Month, the Fight for LGBTQ Equality Continues
By Dustin Cox | March 16, 2022
Is it time for another Stonewall? Progress, as LGBTQ folks have learned, is often hard fought. Recent events have reminded us that equality is still elusive in places across the United States, and progress is far from inevitable. Limitations on how we talk about, categorize, and analyze data are a little-understood front in GOP culture wars targeting LGBTQ people at various levels of government. These limitations fundamentally undermine the ability for researchers, public policy makers, and data scientists to understand the LGBTQ community, craft effective measures to promote general welfare, and design effective AI and machine-learning-powered capabilities for good.
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis recently rammed through Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which will “prohibit instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity” and goes into effect just two weeks from now on July 1st (CBS, 2022). This chilling limitation on speech is a stark reminder that many on the political right desire to take us back to a time where LGBTQ people are relegated to the closet, marginalized, and even criminalized in society. It threatens LGBTQ youths’ safety by ensuring they have less knowledge and feel more isolated; jeopardizes LGBTQ teachers’ jobs and livelihoods if they let slip that they have spouses who aren’t straight; and demeans LGBTQ families in Florida. And that’s the point. No discussing data, no studying it, and certainly no progress if it has anything to do with LGBTQ topics.
It’s not only at the state level that we see such policies being enacted. The federal government, under Former President Donald J. Trump, advanced various changes that were aimed at erasing LGBTQ people from critical data sources used for a wide array of government initiatives. The Health and Human Services Department removed sexual orientation from their data collection activities, most notably the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants and the Annual Program Performance Report for the Centers for Independent Living, which will limit the ability to serve LGBTQ seniors (Kozuch, 2017). The US Census Bureau even altered a report to congress by literally erasing their plans to measure sexual orientation and gender identity in the America Community Survey (HRC, 2017).
As many data scientists will tell you, “more data beats better algorithms.” That is to say that – embarrassingly often – simply having higher quality or more training data will yield more accurate predictions than new algorithms do. The right-wing push to suppress, eliminate, and criminalize data and speech about LGBTQ people strikes at the very core of our ability to utilize AI and machine learning techniques to categorize, understand, model, and predict in ways that would benefit LGBTQ communities. When LGBTQ people are categorized incorrectly, lumped together with broader groups, or thrown away as “residual,” it makes for worse health outcomes, fewer government resources, inequitable public policy, and more. Again… that’s the point.
While these policies are more abstract in nature, they discriminate, harass, and abuse the LGBTQ community like police officers did decades ago in New York City. Drag queens, trans women of color, lesbians, and gays rose up against their antagonists in the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 and demanded equality (History.com, 2022)… it just may be time to rise up against this new wave of oppressors who would see us erased.
References
[1] CBS Miami Team (2022). CBS Broadcasting, Inc. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/gov-ron-desantis-addresses-woke-gender-ideology-dont-say-gay-law/
[2] Kozuch, Elliott (2017). Human Rights Campaign. https://www.hrc.org/news/hrc-calls-on-trump-admin-to-reinstate-sexual-orientation-question
[3] HRC Staff (2017). Human Rights Campaign. https://www.hrc.org/news/trump-administration-eliminates-lgbtq-data-collection-from-census
[4] Schnoebelen, Tyler (2016). More Data Beats Better Algorithms. Data Science Central. https://www.datasciencecentral.com/more-data-beats-better-algorithms-by-tyler-schnoebelen/
[5] History.com Editors (2022). History.com. https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/the-stonewall-riots
Images
Image 1: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/06/harvard-scholars-reflect-on-the-history-and-legacy-of-the-stonewall-riots/
Image 2: https://cbs4indy.com/news/bill-passes-in-senate-would-allow-businesses-to-deny-service-to-gay-couples/
Image 3: https://www.documentarytube.com/articles/stonewall-riots-the-protest-that-inspired-modern-pride-parades