CHICAGO — After struggling to secure funding for years, a trans-led team of researchers launched a survey to collect much-needed data on the Chicago area’s trans and non-binary community.
The Chicago Area Trans Survey was created through a partnership between Brave Space Alliance, a trans-led South Side LGBTQ+ center, and researchers from Northwestern University’s EDIT Team, an organization that leverages its research expertise to improve the wellness of marginalized groups
The survey launched in late November and can be accessed here. More than 200 trans and nonbinary people living in Cook County have already participated, said Gregory Phillips, founder of the Northwestern team.
Researchers and advocates started designing the survey together in 2021 because there’s hardly any data that reflects the unique experiences of trans and nonbinary people in Chicago, said Stephanie Skora, co-founder of Brave Space Alliance.
This means the scope of trans Chicagoans’ experiences hasn’t truly been captured, which makes it harder for advocates to properly support them, said Ava Wells-Quantrell, an EDIT Team member who led the research project.
The team initially planned to launch the survey in 2021 in hopes of hearing from 30,000 people, but researchers struggled to secure the funding, Wells-Quantrell said.
Some potential donors said they’d rather fund research on trans and non-binary people living in states governed by Republicans because they assumed “things are much better for trans people living in Chicago,” Phillips said.
“Trans people have a lot to deal with regardless of which political party is the majority in the state,” Wells-Quantrell said. “The reality is there are still trans and non-binary people in Chicago who are having a hard time making ends meet, finding a job, finishing school. There are so many different barriers, not only on an individual level but also on a structural level.”
So, the research team scaled back their initial plans and released a shorter survey in order to gather some initial data on a smaller sample of Chicago’s trans and non-binary community so that they can demonstrate the need for larger-scale studies in the future, Wells-Quantrell and Phillips said.
“It’s a profoundly frustrating chicken and egg situation,” Skora said. “There’s no funding for the research, so it doesn’t get done, and without research, we can’t justify why we need funding.
“It’s this brutal cycle that’s left us in a situation where we only have national surveys and occasional efforts to survey small pockets of the community, but we need a more representative sample.”
In addition to justifying the need for further studies, the survey’s key findings will help local organizations create “improved services” that are “better tailored” to the specific needs of trans and non-binary people in Chicago, Wells-Quantrell said.
A lot of community agencies, including Brave Space Alliance, need this data in order to design and fund programs, but they didn’t have a way to collect it, Phillips said.
“With this data, we’ll be able to go to our funders and say, ‘The research shows people need XYZ, which means we need funding to do XYZ,’” Skora said. “We’ll be able to learn more about who’s in our community and what they need and prove that to donors without needing to rely on anecdotes.”
Powered by a $15,000 grant from the Chicago Foundation for Women, the research team designed the survey to show “how multifaceted and varied the experiences of trans and non-binary individuals are,” Wells-Quantrell said.
“Everyone on the research team except for me is trans or non-binary, and that’s intentional because we want to show that people from the community are the ones who should be reporting on their community and designing the questions,” Phillips said.
The survey collects demographic data, including age, race, ethnicity, income and language, Phillips and Wells-Quantrell said. It includes questions about people’s experiences with transitioning socially, medically and legally, but it also asks people to share their feelings about the process and how they’ve been treated, Wells-Quantrell said.
Another section of the survey focuses on people’s families and close relationships. There are also questions about people’s housing, health, education and religion.
“What we’re really trying to do is see the entire scope and all the variations of these experiences trans and nonbinary people have,” Wells-Quantrell said. “It’s not limited to their physical experience, but it’s also about their emotional experience and their psychological experience of themselves and the exterior world.”
A significant portion of the survey focuses on the ways trans and non-binary people find joy within their lives, which is often excluded from efforts to understand the trans community, Phillips said.
“People are used to questions like, ‘What are you going to die or get sick from? How are you going to be victimized? And that’s terrible,” Phillips said. “We want to capture that there are things that make people happy within their lives too.”
The survey doesn’t include all the questions the team wanted to ask, but they hope that their findings will provide some “jumping off points” for further studies, Phillips said.
Researchers hope to get at least 500 responses over the next six months. Then the data will be shared with community organizations and presented to foundations that could fund further studies. The survey is here.
“When I think about what I’m most excited for, it’s seeing the community actually represented in numbers on a page in front of me,” Skora said. “I won’t have to dig three levels deep into someone else’s national data. I want us to be able to describe ourselves in our own terms, in our own county, in a way that centers our dignity and experiences.”
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