Monthly Archives: September 2013

#GLMA13 Poster Abstract: Questions to Identify Gender Diversity

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Questions to Identify Gender Diversity

Emilia Lombardi, PhD; Swagata Banik, PhD; Jesper Zuber; and Katherine Mitchell
Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio

The study was supported with a grant by the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law as part of the Gender Identity in U.S. Surveillance (GenIUSS) Project

Background

Transgender has been defined generally as not conforming to societal norms of gender, or specifically to having a gender identity and/or expression that is contrary to one’s assigned sex at birth.  The term is used to refer to a broad range of identities and expressions within the United States and other English speaking countries.  There are efforts to identify study measures that are able to identify transgender populations, but little is known about how cisgender men and women will respond to those questions

Methods

The study interviewed 25 cisgender and transgender men and women to cognitively test how individuals respond to questions about transition status, gender nonconformity, and birth-sex assignment (the two-step and gender nonconformity measures).  The results will help assess the utility and understanding of quantitative measures designed to people’s transition status and gender nonconformity.

Results

Factors discussed include the understandability of the questions and participants ability to accurately identify people’s transition status and gender nonconformity in a manner that has high reliability and validity within quantitative analysis.  Generally, participants were able to easily answer questions relating to transition status but had more difficulty regarding gender expression

Discussion/Conclusion

Results will show that measures to identify transgender populations can be effectively used on cisgender populations, while still being able to identify transgender populations.

Lombardi GLMA poster

Trans veterans study finds high rate of suicide related events

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Prevalence of Gender Identity Disorder and Suicide Risk Among Transgender Veterans Utilizing Veterans Health Administration Care

 

The paper is very unique in that the authors are utilizing a database that allowed them to examine trans people along side a cis sample within the Veterans Health Administration database  They identified their trans sample based on those who were given CD-9 diagnosis codes for Gender Identity Disorder (GID) from 2000-2011 (They did not utilize self-identification for their study).  They identified 3177 unique trans people within the time period (the vast majority were military personnel and not dependents).  They report two interesting findings.

The first was the increase in the prevalence of people being given GID diagnoses from 13/100,000 in 2002 to 23/100,000 in 2011.  There measure of prevalence was much higher than estimates made for general populations.  The implication being either that military populations have a greater percentage of trans people then general populations (i.e. Flight into hypermasculinity).  They do not identify the difference between those assigned male and those assigned female, but identify that 95% of the VHA data were assigned male.  This is one issue I have with this study.  Another possibility is that general population estimates under represent trans populations.  This may be true as the number of people given a GID diagnosis have been increasing overtime within the VHA dataset.

The second part of the study was to examine rates of suicide related measures among this population.  They found their sample to have a very high rate of suicide related events, much higher than rates found within general populations (of cis people).  They can’t say if rates are different from non-veteran trans people.

While the study is not perfect it is an important step in the study of the health issues of trans populations.  We need to include population based studies of trans people along with community based convenience samples.  This is the reason why measures are needed to effectively identify trans samples within larger populations, so that studies like this one can be done.  There are those who would question this considering the small number of trans people found within general populations studies, and the percentage of trans people within the VA study itself represented .02%% of the total VA data-set.  However, its important because while trans people represent a small population, they are likely to experience higher levels of social and health disparities that require some sort of intervention.