Queer Data

Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action

Kevin Guyan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350230750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Data has never mattered more. Our lives are increasingly shaped by it and how it is defined, collected and used. But who counts in the collection, analysis and application of data? This important book is the first to look at queer data – defined as data relating to gender, sex, sexual orientation and trans identity/history. The author shows us how current data practices reflect an incomplete account of LGBTQ lives and helps us understand how data biases are used to delegitimise the everyday experiences of queer people. Guyan demonstrates why it is important to understand, collect and analyse queer data, the benefits and challenges involved in doing so, and how we might better use queer data in our work. Arming us with the tools for action, this book shows how greater knowledge about queer identities is instrumental in informing decisions about resource allocation, changes to legislation, access to services, representation and visibility.

PART I

COLLECTING QUEER DATA

CHAPTER 1

GAPS AND ABSENCES: A HISTORY OF QUEER DATA

I did not know where to start. I wanted to explore historical approaches to the collection of data about individuals considered ‘gender and sexual outliers’ in the societies where they lived but identifying a point in time or an event to anchor these stories seemed impossible to pin-down. Perhaps it was a result of my research background in history but I felt magnetically drawn to begin this journey in the archives. I sat down, open-text box on the screen, and typed in the keywords: ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘survey’, ‘prevalence’ and ‘data’. My limited enquiry focused on twentieth-century Britain and, although thousands of results were identified, only a handful related to research into the lives and experiences of homosexual men and lesbians. One particular entry that caught my attention was the Social Needs Survey conducted by an organization called The Albany Trust in 1970.¹ The Albany Trust was established in London in 1958 to support the psychological welfare of homosexuals, lesbians and sexual minorities in Britain. The survey was completed by 2,082 men and 588 women and asked participants to disclose their sexual orientation using a five-point scale from ‘entirely homosexual’ to ‘entirely heterosexual’. It collected data about participants’ age, marital status, education level, occupation, income and location, as well as questions about their same-sex experiences. The survey also asked if participants had sought advice concerning their homosexuality and the question ‘Do you regard yourself as well adjusted to your homosexuality?’, to which the majority of participants responded ‘well adjusted’.

Although the social situation for many homosexual men and lesbians in Britain has improved in the past fifty years, several issues associated with the collection of survey data seemed familiar. The study overwhelmingly represented the views of men and, although the authors noted the low number of female participants, other markers of difference (such as race or disability) were overlooked. Furthermore, at the time of the survey, The Albany Trust and other organizations established in the 1950s faced opposition from a new wave of gay rights organizations, such as the Gay Liberation Front, which criticized the conservative tactics and upper-middle-class interests of their predecessors.² Although The Albany Trust succeeded in constructing new knowledge about the lives of homosexuals and lesbians, the results of the survey were never formally published. The research had intended to raise awareness of the social lives of sexual minorities and create an evidence base to initiate change but, as something kept hidden from the general public, it is unclear to what extent these ambitions were achieved.

My return to the archives reminded me of the historical specificities of homosexual and lesbian lives in Britain as well as similarities and differences in the use of research tools to demonstrate the prevalence of same-sex acts, desires and identities. The Albany Trust’s Social Needs Survey sparked my interest as it was an example of data collection predominantly about homosexual men conducted by homosexual men to document the social needs of a minority community.³ This differs from many of the historical sources discussed in this chapter, which are top-down ‘expert’ accounts of LGBTQ people that were not intended to improve the lives of those about whom the data related. However, while exploring the archive, I also questioned where we might look to find data sources from LGBTQ people intended exclusively for other LGBTQ individuals or audiences? What data might we find in love letters, poetry and art that – as a result of their qualitative and personal focus – were not preserved for the archive? With these limitations in mind, had gendered biases about what constituted ‘data’ disproportionately preserved sources that focus on cis, male and homosexual subjects?

* * *

Any history of data about LGBTQ people in Britain is one of gaps and absences. What I present here is one history of queer data. Rather than a comprehensive account of the disparate and multilayered legacies of queer data, my focus is limited to a selective genealogy of data collection methods used to conceptualize and categorize LGBTQ people. It is not possible to trace a history of LGBTQ people using today’s terms to look back into the past: the actions, desires and identities encapsulated by the LGBTQ acronym are relatively recent and have changed over time and across different cultures. For these reasons, this chapter references terms used by people to describe themselves at the time and/or assigned by others as labels, such as ‘homosexual’ and ‘transsexual’, even though the acceptability of these terms has since changed. When discussing history in general, I use the anachronistic term LGBTQ to describe people that transgressed normative expectations about gender, sex and sexuality.

When people we might now describe as LGBTQ were counted in datasets, it was often a result of observable actions understood as criminal (including male same-sex activities and cross-dressing), information bodies and minds were thought to provide about illness or disease, or as a means to confirm differences and cement the privileges of the majority group. My narrow focus foregrounds material about LGBTQ people (including actions, desires and identities) in England, Wales and Scotland. The data sources investigated mainly relate to legal, medical and scientific practices, which reflect the interests of those who had the power to survey, categorize and implement actions to control the behaviours of others. With these limitations in mind, there is little value in sharing a history of LGBTQ data collection in isolation. We already know the story. Although there are examples where data was collected to positively demonstrate the existence of gender, sex and sexuality minorities, data was most often collected to provide evidence of a ‘problem’ and used to justify further marginalization. The use of data to inflict violence on LGBTQ people was mirrored by violence directed towards archives and datasets that contained information about LGBTQ people.⁴ As a result, data sources from the past that survived until today present a selective account of the potential richness of LGBTQ data and are skewed in favour of phenomena that reflect patriarchal ideas about law, medicine and science.

I instead want this chapter to tell a different story that blends a history of data about LGBTQ people with a history of the collection methods used to gather this information. When analysed together, this queer data history and queer history of data provide an account of what was known about people who transgressed societal expectations about gender, sex and sexuality, as well as the forces that shaped the research methods used to represent data ‘outliers’.⁵ My first line of enquiry considers data collected about people who did not fit expected ideas about gender, sex or sexuality, with a particular focus on the emergence of contemporary LGBTQ identities in twentieth-century Britain. Scholarship reveals the presence of people who transgressed normative expectations throughout history: from those in same-sex ‘marriages’ to those engaged in same-sex intercourse, from cross-dressers to people who underwent medical procedures to change their bodies from one sex to another.⁶

My second line of enquiry relates to the research methods used to collect this data. This history goes beyond the collection of data about gender, sex and sexuality to consider what researchers thought methods could reveal about the social world, the purpose of researching marginalized communities, and a growing awareness that methods bring with them biases that impact the data collected. Although I opened this chapter with the example of The Albany Trust’s Social Needs Survey, which provided a window into how some homosexual men and lesbians made sense of themselves and their communities, most historical examples are top-down studies conducted by researchers and government officials that provide ‘expert’ accounts of the (predominantly male) homosexual subject. Both LGBTQ people and data collection methods, such as surveys and one-to-one interviews, possess particular histories. Tracing a history of data collection methods therefore offers more than an account of how people were counted but also why these studies were conducted and how results were used to fix in time and place particular ideas about gender, sex and sexuality.

Counting a population

Identifying where to commence a history of data about LGBTQ people, the methods used to collect this data and what to include and exclude from this scope is difficult. Butler has noted how the material characteristics used by societies to mark differences between genders and sexes – such as genitals, body size, voice and hair – are historical and ‘that the history of matter is in part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference’.⁷ For example, Thomas Laqueur has documented that before the proliferation of a binary model of sexual difference, a one-sex model existed where male and female bodies were understood as different points on the same scale.⁸ Rather than opposites, female bodies were an imperfect version of male bodies (for example, the ovaries were internal testes and the vagina an inside-out penis). Bodies could traverse the one-sex scale so that a person’s gender, their social role, aligned with their physical sex (for example, there exist accounts of masculine women who develop a penis).⁹ The history of people crossing these binaries or positioning themselves outside the poles of man/male and woman/female, as an individual or member of a community, has an equally long past that continues to inform contemporary ideas about gender, sex and sexuality.¹⁰ Emma Donoghue notes how ‘key early modern texts about same-sex possibilities are marked by convoluted structures, inconsistent theories, semantic confusion, coy disclaimers, denials, and jokes’ and although ‘we will never find a frame that will fit all the jigsaw pieces together. This is exactly what keeps bringing us back to take another look’.¹¹

When looking back into the more distant past, what was understood as ‘data’ has implications for the historical presence or absence of LGBTQ figures, particularly women who engaged in same-sex activities and relationships. For example, Anne Lister (1791–1840) was an entrepreneur and land owner from the North of England and is often described as ‘the first modern lesbian’.¹² Lister kept extensive diaries, which run to over four million words, that detail her sexual relations with other women and a network of female relationships across upper-class society. Lillian Faderman’s book Surpassing the Love of Men examines romantic friendships between women in the nineteenth-century and argues that because of how information about these encounters was recorded (if at all), figures such as Lister were unlikely to appear in what we might now understand as a ‘dataset’.¹³ More recently, and through the prism of the male ‘expert’, the sexological studies of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis attempted to describe and categorize the features of a lesbian identity using selective case studies (including Ellis’s lesbian wife, Edith).¹⁴ Although the motivations for the production of diaries, letters, poetry and case studies might differ, the exclusion of these sources from a historical review of ‘data’ means that lesbian, bisexual and queer women appear negligible or absent. As a result, the gendered history of data collection means that attempts to use existing and available sources to uncover LGBTQ figures cannot paint a comprehensive picture of the past. Although a broader investigation of qualitative sources is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is vital to underscore how the efforts of lawyers, medical professionals and scientists in the nineteenth-century to define, categorize and control sexuality were the product of patriarch...