tw: suicide stats
I'm very - perhaps too - fond of asking why people so rarely look at
their actions in the context of "what happens next?" As Peter Cook
might have asked, did A Question Of Sport die in vain?
Back
when the same-sex marriage bill was wending its way through parliament,
we heard many arguments for and against. Some were coherent. Some were
respectable. There's a fun venn diagram to be drawn of which were one,
neither or both.
Now, I've just been reading some
research from the USA looking at the impacts of same-sex marriage
legislation there, where change happened in bursts from state to
state over several years.
No, not at the number of weddings and the impact on the sale of top hats and fabulous frocks. One of the other impacts same-sex marriage has had.
It's
based on huge sample sizes and shows one of the effects of allowing
same-sex marriage nationwide was about 134,000 fewer adolescents
attempting suicide each year. Looking at numbers before and after,
there's a 7 percent reduction in the proportion of all high-school
students reporting a suicide attempt over the previous year, and a 14
percent drop among LGB students, when same-sex marriage becomes lawful
where you live.
Often we talk about these kind of
statistics but we rarely pause to turn them round. To consider the "what
if", the "what happens next" of the path not taken. The path we didn't take thanks to the passage of the two
same-sex marriage bills in Wales & England and in Scotland.
US
and UK culture are in very many ways similar. So with about a quarter
of their population we might rule-of-thumb that the impact here is
134,000 divided by four - 33,500 fewer young people attempting to end
their lives each year in the UK. Each year. Our 2013 vote is four
years ago already: so the change is 33,500 upon 33,500 upon 33,500
upon...
What an amazing number.
What a horrifying number. For the 400 MPs who voted to allow same-sex
marriage, what a humbling number. Yes, you let some people get married,
and that was beautiful. But "what happened next" was a huge positive
impact on the mental health and even survival of young people. You let
some people get married and, thanks to an unwritten clause in the Bill,
you saw to it that thousands did not try to end their lives early. An
unknowable number of parents never came home to the horrible ultimate
consequence of social, legal and institutional homophobia.
And
for the 175 MPs (and indeed 148 Peers) who planted their colours
against the tide of history, with numbers like these the nature of their actions and motives is laid bare. We can see what they
were actively, consciously, premeditatedly complicit in, what they were voting for, because let's be
frank: while we didn't have these figures, we and they knew the answer
to the "what happens next" question all along.
A
handful of the 175 have said they'd vote differently today. We have to
conclude that the rest are proud of the future they were voting for, and
take comfort that they didn't get what they wanted.
Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 March 2017
Tuesday, 24 May 2016
10 years on: Fritz Klein
Sexuality researcher Fritz Klein died ten years ago today.
Of all the 'names' in sexuality theory his is probably the second best known to bisexual people and those with a wider interest in research around bisexuality.
Back in the late 70s, as I learned the story, he wanted to do some research and include sexual orientation as one of the variables measured. Yet when he went to look for suitable metrics, the only one on offer was that compiled by Alfred Kinsey back in the late 1940s: the "Kinsey Scale" that grades sexual orientation from 0 to 6 according to whether your attractions are more to members of your own gender or another.
Kinsey's line is pretty easy to understand - add up your partners and divide by the number you first thought of. However this is painfully limiting: for example, by scoring the number of people with whom someone has had sex, you might get quite the wrong idea about someone who found their way into a particular kind of sex work, or who dare not act on their true attractions due to family or legal pressures.
Klein set about devising his own set of measurements, leading in 1978 to the "Klein Grid", a 21-dimensional measure looking at different aspects of life and the past, present and ideal states. It's less a number, more a couple of phone numbers complete with trunk dialling codes, but it does a far better job of accommodating issues such as sexual orientation changing over time, coming out in later life, or being better at pulling with one gender than another. It's still not perfect: like the Kinsey line it's binary in its model of gender and relies on the idea that gender is in some way a factor, and cannot account for things like preferences for a younger or older partner, fetishes, or whether attraction is romantically or sexually driven. But like Kinsey, even where it fails it gives us a language to articulate around sexuality and attractions that we did not have before. For bisexual people especially this was a greatly empowering new lexicon.
My main personal memory of him is from BiCon 2002, arguing with me whether the bi movement should still strive for printed publications; he saying no, me saying yes. Broadly his position was that everyone had private internet access so there is no need for the cost and grunt-work of print, while mine was that physical objects have permanence and tangibility. I think our different socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds meant we were coming at the question from two very different perspectives, but it was a happy and friendly argument.
Arguing their case and open to hearing the opposing view: it's a good way to remember someone.
 |
| Fritz on the cover of BCN magazine |
Back in the late 70s, as I learned the story, he wanted to do some research and include sexual orientation as one of the variables measured. Yet when he went to look for suitable metrics, the only one on offer was that compiled by Alfred Kinsey back in the late 1940s: the "Kinsey Scale" that grades sexual orientation from 0 to 6 according to whether your attractions are more to members of your own gender or another.
Kinsey's line is pretty easy to understand - add up your partners and divide by the number you first thought of. However this is painfully limiting: for example, by scoring the number of people with whom someone has had sex, you might get quite the wrong idea about someone who found their way into a particular kind of sex work, or who dare not act on their true attractions due to family or legal pressures.
Klein set about devising his own set of measurements, leading in 1978 to the "Klein Grid", a 21-dimensional measure looking at different aspects of life and the past, present and ideal states. It's less a number, more a couple of phone numbers complete with trunk dialling codes, but it does a far better job of accommodating issues such as sexual orientation changing over time, coming out in later life, or being better at pulling with one gender than another. It's still not perfect: like the Kinsey line it's binary in its model of gender and relies on the idea that gender is in some way a factor, and cannot account for things like preferences for a younger or older partner, fetishes, or whether attraction is romantically or sexually driven. But like Kinsey, even where it fails it gives us a language to articulate around sexuality and attractions that we did not have before. For bisexual people especially this was a greatly empowering new lexicon.
My main personal memory of him is from BiCon 2002, arguing with me whether the bi movement should still strive for printed publications; he saying no, me saying yes. Broadly his position was that everyone had private internet access so there is no need for the cost and grunt-work of print, while mine was that physical objects have permanence and tangibility. I think our different socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds meant we were coming at the question from two very different perspectives, but it was a happy and friendly argument.
Arguing their case and open to hearing the opposing view: it's a good way to remember someone.
Tuesday, 19 January 2016
Stonewall 100 and Bisexuals At Work
Today Stonewall presents its annual list of the UK's top employers for LGBT staff.
The "Workplace Equality Index" is one of the organisations key programmes these days, after 25 years of campaigning for, and sometimes against, legal changes to establish either lesbian and gay or LGBT equality.
Bisexual exclusion in LGB or LGBT spaces is nothing new, though there is an encouraging trend to address it in workplace staff networks. At BiPhoria, the UK's longest-running bisexual organisation, we've been working with employers and voluntary organisations on bisexual inclusion since the late 1990s, when the more switched-on groups started to address this.
Research over the past decade on workplace experience for bi people tells us two key things. First, that simply having an LGBT network in place made a big difference to how comfortable gay and lesbian people were about being out at work; but no difference to bisexual staff. Second, that while around 50% of gay staff feel they can safely be out at work, bi women are half as likely to feel they can be out at work as are lesbians or gay men - and bi men only half as likely again. When seven out of eight bisexual men feel they need to mask their sexual orientation to get by at work, we've still got a lot to do.
To me, that reflects the wider 'gay scene' where in the 80s and 90s there was widespread prejudice towards and exclusion of bi people. Back then Unison's lesbian & gay network expelled bi members, the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard would not let bi volunteers work on its phonelines, and bars on Manchester's Canal Street had "no bisexuals" door policies.
There has been a tendency when moving from "LG" to "LGB" or "LGBT" organising to welcome the "gay side" of bisexual people - which of course we don't have, any more than an English person is just a Welsh side and a Scottish side put together. We're entirely bisexual.
But if your LGBT group is having a women's night out and your lesbian colleagues can bring their girlfriends, do you feel you can bring your husband, or do you feel a bit less welcome?
If your posters and policies in the workplace talk about homophobia and transphobia, are you challenging biphobia - including biphobia from gay and lesbian staff?
What can employee networks do?
- Understand that you don't start with a clean slate: for example Unison's LGBT group spent several years getting from the initial change from LG to LGBT to having a thriving bi network, because they had to undo the effects of past bi exclusion.
- Collaborate with local bi organisations around the country like BiPhoria. There's a list of them on the Bi Community News website.
- Put Bi Visibility Day (September 23rd) squarely on your activity plan for the year alongside events like Trans Day Of Remembrance.
- Be conscious about language; it's easy to slip from "LGBT" into "gay", yet it sends a message about which parts of the LGBT communities are welcome and the centre of your attention.
- Assume some of your staff are bisexual. Including some of the people who you've read as being gay or straight.
- Outreach work such as advertising in bi press like Bi Community News, sponsoring or otherwise supporting events like BiCon and BiReCon.
The "Workplace Equality Index" is one of the organisations key programmes these days, after 25 years of campaigning for, and sometimes against, legal changes to establish either lesbian and gay or LGBT equality.
Bisexual exclusion in LGB or LGBT spaces is nothing new, though there is an encouraging trend to address it in workplace staff networks. At BiPhoria, the UK's longest-running bisexual organisation, we've been working with employers and voluntary organisations on bisexual inclusion since the late 1990s, when the more switched-on groups started to address this.
Research over the past decade on workplace experience for bi people tells us two key things. First, that simply having an LGBT network in place made a big difference to how comfortable gay and lesbian people were about being out at work; but no difference to bisexual staff. Second, that while around 50% of gay staff feel they can safely be out at work, bi women are half as likely to feel they can be out at work as are lesbians or gay men - and bi men only half as likely again. When seven out of eight bisexual men feel they need to mask their sexual orientation to get by at work, we've still got a lot to do.
To me, that reflects the wider 'gay scene' where in the 80s and 90s there was widespread prejudice towards and exclusion of bi people. Back then Unison's lesbian & gay network expelled bi members, the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard would not let bi volunteers work on its phonelines, and bars on Manchester's Canal Street had "no bisexuals" door policies.
There has been a tendency when moving from "LG" to "LGB" or "LGBT" organising to welcome the "gay side" of bisexual people - which of course we don't have, any more than an English person is just a Welsh side and a Scottish side put together. We're entirely bisexual.
But if your LGBT group is having a women's night out and your lesbian colleagues can bring their girlfriends, do you feel you can bring your husband, or do you feel a bit less welcome?
If your posters and policies in the workplace talk about homophobia and transphobia, are you challenging biphobia - including biphobia from gay and lesbian staff?
What can employee networks do?
- Understand that you don't start with a clean slate: for example Unison's LGBT group spent several years getting from the initial change from LG to LGBT to having a thriving bi network, because they had to undo the effects of past bi exclusion.
- Collaborate with local bi organisations around the country like BiPhoria. There's a list of them on the Bi Community News website.
- Put Bi Visibility Day (September 23rd) squarely on your activity plan for the year alongside events like Trans Day Of Remembrance.
- Be conscious about language; it's easy to slip from "LGBT" into "gay", yet it sends a message about which parts of the LGBT communities are welcome and the centre of your attention.
- Assume some of your staff are bisexual. Including some of the people who you've read as being gay or straight.
- Outreach work such as advertising in bi press like Bi Community News, sponsoring or otherwise supporting events like BiCon and BiReCon.
Saturday, 25 April 2015
More Out MPs in 2015?
The 2010 parliament had 27 out LGB members - 13 Conservative (4% of their parliamentary party), 9 Labour (3%), 4 Lib Dem (7%) and 1 Plaid Cymru (33%). Of these, two were bi men (one Lib Dem, one Tory) and two gay women (one Tory, one Labour): the remaining 22 gay men. In the interests of multi-party balance I should add that the DUP are probably most emphatic that none of the 26 are theirs.
27 is a significant slice of the 36 out bi or gay MPs we've ever had. If you were ever an out-LGB MP, the chances are you still are one. There haven't been any openly trans MPs in the UK yet, and though there are trans candidates for most of the mainland parties - indeed one of them currently being splashed over the papers as trans, queer and poly - alas none look likely to break through. Sorry Zoe.
For all that the polls suggest another hung parliament, they also suggest one with a swing to the right: we will have a different bunch of MPs running the show. It looks like fewer Lib Dem MPs and more SNP members, and a huge switcharound of Labour MPs as they lose a swathe of seats in Scotland and gain others in England. Probably quite some turnover of Tory MPs too.
All sides, pretty much, have out candidates. There are 38 for the Liberal Democrats, 35 Labour, 28 Tory, 22 Green, 5 UKIP, 3 Plaid Cymru, 1 SNP and 1 Alliance. The latter three parties only stand in 40, 59 and 18 seats respectively.
That said, in UK elections most candidates don't get elected. There's not many openly-LGBT potential new MPs in Tory-gain or SNP-gain type seats, but there are a few in Labour-gain seats. If the polls turn around for the Lib Dems, the seats they'd gain would add a little to the tally too. So we can look forward to fresh queer faces on the green benches after May 7th.
To keep bisexual geeks on their toes, both existing seats with bi MPs - and the one that might gain a new out bi MP - are seats that might change hands. The Conservative seat of Shrewsbury and Atcham has been in blue, gold and red columns in the last fifteen years, while the Liberal seat of Southwark and Old Bermondsey has been a Labour target at every election since 1983. Labour hope to gain Stockton South: on current polls they should do as it's a very Labour seat that flipped blue in 2010.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Manchester Council takes another step in recognising bisexuality
Until not so long ago Manchester City Council had the non-existence of bisexuals as a matter of policy. No, really: in service use monitoring, equal opportunities policies and suchlike, the official line was "at those times a bisexual is lesbian or gay they are covered by those policies and at those times they are heterosexual..."
Things are improving.
They've just published the annual Communities Of Interest report, which is a kind of "here is the evidence base" document on diversity concerns for the council and for voluntary and private sector organisations they work with. This has been published for many years now, and each time has a section on LG(B)(T).
This is the first time there's been a bi section. Previously we were a subset of lesbians, which, hmmm.
Full report here. Flick past the first 64 pages and you come to:
It's fun to see my "four flavours of biphobia" model, albeit in very condensed form, in a council document. It's also a bit scary to think that I wrote it about twenty years ago, citing certain Manchester City Council services as examples of institutional and structural biphobia.
Though it is frustrating that there are no specific actions for the council and its partner organisations to take up, I hope this sets a good marker down illustrating some of the key issues for bis and the evidence base underpinning those on which to build in future years.
Things are improving.
They've just published the annual Communities Of Interest report, which is a kind of "here is the evidence base" document on diversity concerns for the council and for voluntary and private sector organisations they work with. This has been published for many years now, and each time has a section on LG(B)(T).
This is the first time there's been a bi section. Previously we were a subset of lesbians, which, hmmm.
Full report here. Flick past the first 64 pages and you come to:
9.3 Bisexual community
Recent research carried out by BiPhoria in Manchester has suggested that being visible, being included and being acknowledged are some of the main issues for Manchester’s bisexual community. Bisexual people can often experience discrimination from both the gay and heterosexual communities, and at an LGBT Discussion Day event, hosted by the Council in 2011, BiPhoria found that people wanted bisexuality to be referenced explicitly in literature and wanted services to engage more with the bisexual community. This has been a key action for the group since 2011. Bisexual ‘invisibility’, along with bi-erasure and biphobia are recognised as the most common challenges for bisexual people.
Biphobia may be characterised as taking four key forms:
––Similar to homophobia
––Similar to heterophobia
––Structural or institutional biphobia
––Internalised biphobia absorbed from a culture of the first three.
Manchester has one of the highest profile bisexual communities in the UK and is home to BiPhoria, and the bisexual magazine Bi Community News. As with any other group that experiences oppression, bisexual people may also encounter additional prejudice due to intersectional marginalised identities, for example bi women, black bisexuals, or bisexual genderqueer people.
Stonewall’s 2009 report ‘Bisexual People In The Workplace’ reflected that the positive impact of LGBT Staff Networks on lesbian and gay employees does not extend to bisexual staff. Research published by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency in 2013 showed that bisexual staff are significantly less likely to feel they can be ‘out’ in the workplace than lesbians or gay men:
The Bisexuality Report (Open University, 2012) reflected that these challenges for many bisexual people also extend into areas such as crime and policing, where homophobic hate crime monitoring may fail to address and recognise bisexuals’ experience of biphobia and homophobia.
It's fun to see my "four flavours of biphobia" model, albeit in very condensed form, in a council document. It's also a bit scary to think that I wrote it about twenty years ago, citing certain Manchester City Council services as examples of institutional and structural biphobia.
Though it is frustrating that there are no specific actions for the council and its partner organisations to take up, I hope this sets a good marker down illustrating some of the key issues for bis and the evidence base underpinning those on which to build in future years.
Thursday, 30 August 2012
Selling to bisexuals
The first (that I have seen) market research about the buying habits
of bisexuals has been published in the USA. In the fine traditional comedic trope, I hereby present the next 12 months' bi news.
October. With polls still close in the Presidential election, and polling showing bis split 12:1 in his favour, Barack Obama railroads the "Bis Vote Twice" bill through Congress. The plan comes unstuck in November when bisexuals with a preference are nonetheless allowed to vote both ways.
November. Prof Debunked of the Dodgy Research University publishes his latest findings about bisexuality. He explains that subjects were shown gay and straight porn on different smartphones while sensors attached to their genitalia recorded whether that type of phone was doing it for them.
December. The New York Times retracts its "iPhoneite, Androidite or lying" headline admitting the findings related more to how attractive the research assistant looked in a white lab coat.
January. Apple announce their response to the findings that bisexuals are more likely to buy £100 android phones than functionally-similar £400 iPhones. "Clearly the problem is in our marketing feeling excluding to bi people," says a spokesPad, "and so we will be updating our rainbow striped apple logo to include a pink stripe next to the purple and blue ones." The new biPhone will cost just £75 extra, and is available in five shades of purple.
February. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne slaps 20% VAT on valentines cards purchased by bisexuals, thus milking the Purple Pound for all it is worth. "Woody Allen told me the bisexuals have twice the chance of a date on Friday night, and that means they must be buying twice as many valentines cards" he explains in an emergency budget statement.
Stung by Apple's cornering of the bi market, Google releases a customised version of its phone operating system called pandroid.
March. Not to be outdone by cheap pandroids, Apple launch the new biPhone2, with an extra button that speed-dials the complaints department at Stonewall. A new app for smartphones lets biphobic people automatically block calls from biPhones.
April. After the quarterly economic figures reveal the valentines card ruse failed to raise a single extra penny, on account of the bis all being far too busy playing on their biPhones to remember to send one another cards, George Osborne goes on television to admit he's not the real Chancellor, just to be a schoolboy on a really long Jim'll Fix It.
May. Apple takes Google to court over pandroid phones, claiming they are a blatant rip-off of the biPhone. Google's lawyers defend the clear and vast difference between the two: "it is not just another word for the same thing. The pandroid phones are a touchscreen with a suffusion of purple, whereas biPhones are a suffusion of purple with a touchscreen". The judge listens carefully and throws the case out of court on the grounds that everyone knows there is no such thing as a bisexual.
June. Concerned that it is missing out on the purple pound and that the bi- and pan- prefixes have already been snapped up, Microsoft launches Windows Mobile Omnishambles. Following the flop of a youtube 'viral' ad campaign where Gerald Ratner observes "people ask me how Microsoft can sell a phone this cheap, and I say: it's because it's total ...er, totally purple" it is reviewed as both completely unusable and the best implementation of Windows yet.
July. At a star-studded television awards ceremony, the heads of Sky, BBC and Virgin make a joint statement on the findings that 73% of bi women and 44% of bi men regularly see biphobia in the mainstream media. They pledge to make the negative portrayal of bi men that bit more obvious to help the boys catch up.
August. Despite the market research claims of a year earlier, sales figures of biPhone, pandroid and omnishambles handsets reveal the purple pound to be as yet a myth and the bisexual community resolves to go back to taking all research about itself with a pinch of salt.
September. Market research work begins to find out what kind of salt bisexuals find most reassuring.
October. With polls still close in the Presidential election, and polling showing bis split 12:1 in his favour, Barack Obama railroads the "Bis Vote Twice" bill through Congress. The plan comes unstuck in November when bisexuals with a preference are nonetheless allowed to vote both ways.
November. Prof Debunked of the Dodgy Research University publishes his latest findings about bisexuality. He explains that subjects were shown gay and straight porn on different smartphones while sensors attached to their genitalia recorded whether that type of phone was doing it for them.
December. The New York Times retracts its "iPhoneite, Androidite or lying" headline admitting the findings related more to how attractive the research assistant looked in a white lab coat.
January. Apple announce their response to the findings that bisexuals are more likely to buy £100 android phones than functionally-similar £400 iPhones. "Clearly the problem is in our marketing feeling excluding to bi people," says a spokesPad, "and so we will be updating our rainbow striped apple logo to include a pink stripe next to the purple and blue ones." The new biPhone will cost just £75 extra, and is available in five shades of purple.
February. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne slaps 20% VAT on valentines cards purchased by bisexuals, thus milking the Purple Pound for all it is worth. "Woody Allen told me the bisexuals have twice the chance of a date on Friday night, and that means they must be buying twice as many valentines cards" he explains in an emergency budget statement.
Stung by Apple's cornering of the bi market, Google releases a customised version of its phone operating system called pandroid.
March. Not to be outdone by cheap pandroids, Apple launch the new biPhone2, with an extra button that speed-dials the complaints department at Stonewall. A new app for smartphones lets biphobic people automatically block calls from biPhones.
April. After the quarterly economic figures reveal the valentines card ruse failed to raise a single extra penny, on account of the bis all being far too busy playing on their biPhones to remember to send one another cards, George Osborne goes on television to admit he's not the real Chancellor, just to be a schoolboy on a really long Jim'll Fix It.
May. Apple takes Google to court over pandroid phones, claiming they are a blatant rip-off of the biPhone. Google's lawyers defend the clear and vast difference between the two: "it is not just another word for the same thing. The pandroid phones are a touchscreen with a suffusion of purple, whereas biPhones are a suffusion of purple with a touchscreen". The judge listens carefully and throws the case out of court on the grounds that everyone knows there is no such thing as a bisexual.
June. Concerned that it is missing out on the purple pound and that the bi- and pan- prefixes have already been snapped up, Microsoft launches Windows Mobile Omnishambles. Following the flop of a youtube 'viral' ad campaign where Gerald Ratner observes "people ask me how Microsoft can sell a phone this cheap, and I say: it's because it's total ...er, totally purple" it is reviewed as both completely unusable and the best implementation of Windows yet.
July. At a star-studded television awards ceremony, the heads of Sky, BBC and Virgin make a joint statement on the findings that 73% of bi women and 44% of bi men regularly see biphobia in the mainstream media. They pledge to make the negative portrayal of bi men that bit more obvious to help the boys catch up.
August. Despite the market research claims of a year earlier, sales figures of biPhone, pandroid and omnishambles handsets reveal the purple pound to be as yet a myth and the bisexual community resolves to go back to taking all research about itself with a pinch of salt.
September. Market research work begins to find out what kind of salt bisexuals find most reassuring.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Bisexual men health stats from Gay & Bi Men's Health Report
There's lots of good stuff in there, by which I mean lots of quite bad stuff but important data to have available for NHS planning and so forth.
Mostly it combines bi and gay data together, however two snippets:
"In the last year, 27 per cent of gay men thought about taking their own life even if they would not do it. This increases to 38 per cent for bisexual men" (p9)
That's a bit of a jump - what, about a third higher?
"One in five (21 per cent) gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 19 have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year. One in six (15 per cent) gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 24 have deliberately harmed themselves in the last year. Seven per cent of men in general aged 16 to 24 have ever deliberately harmed themselves.
"Rates of self-harm are also higher among bisexual men; eleven per cent of bisexual men have self-harmed in the last year." (p11)That one feels like one of those simultaneous equations lessons in maths when I was at school - we don't know how many gay men they have or how many bisexual men but the scores are 7%, 11% and 15%, solve for x and y... but it makes for about 50% higher rates of self-harm among bi men than among the male population as a whole. A sobering thought.
www.stonewall.org.uk/documents/stonewall_gay_mens_health_final.pdf
Friday, 25 November 2011
How LGBT is your LGBT Pride?
About ten to fifteen years ago, there was a trend of "lesbian and gay" organisations and events in the UK shuffling over to calling themselves LGBT, or "lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender".
London L&G Pride and the L&G wing of the Lib Dems were the first I noticed make this change, around 1996. Slowly other Prides and LG(B)(T) organisations around the country followed suit. We've advanced to the point that now, fifteen years on, it looks a little peculiar when you see something that is, at least on the label, LG rather than LGB or LGBT.
But changing the label on the tin is one thing, how far have we changed what's in the tin?
This came back into my mind as I was bumbling around the Manchester Pride website this week. I'd never noticed their Pride Surveys before, but here were some remarkable results.
At the 2008 and 2010 Manchester LGBT Prides, they conducted some kind of survey of attendees. Each time the best part of 1000 people were interviewed, so you would imagine there was some degree of statistical validity to the findings.
I'm going to put trans/cis matters to one side for a moment and ask: what did they show on sexuality?
Lesbians and gay men form the lion's share - 80%+ - of those attending. The next largest sexuality grouping is heterosexual people. Bisexuals only make up about 7% of those attending - a tenth of the attendance by gay and lesbian people.
A remarkable statistic, that hugely underlines the need for bi work and bi visibility at that event, given every study of sexuality worth reading finds more bisexuals - especially when it comes to women - than gay and lesbian people. It is on a par with the stats from Kairos' London LGBT Almanac, which suggested that of all LGBT service users in London, only about 6% were bi.
It would seem we have a long way to go yet before the label "LGBT" really means it.
London L&G Pride and the L&G wing of the Lib Dems were the first I noticed make this change, around 1996. Slowly other Prides and LG(B)(T) organisations around the country followed suit. We've advanced to the point that now, fifteen years on, it looks a little peculiar when you see something that is, at least on the label, LG rather than LGB or LGBT.
But changing the label on the tin is one thing, how far have we changed what's in the tin?
This came back into my mind as I was bumbling around the Manchester Pride website this week. I'd never noticed their Pride Surveys before, but here were some remarkable results.
At the 2008 and 2010 Manchester LGBT Prides, they conducted some kind of survey of attendees. Each time the best part of 1000 people were interviewed, so you would imagine there was some degree of statistical validity to the findings.
I'm going to put trans/cis matters to one side for a moment and ask: what did they show on sexuality?
Lesbians and gay men form the lion's share - 80%+ - of those attending. The next largest sexuality grouping is heterosexual people. Bisexuals only make up about 7% of those attending - a tenth of the attendance by gay and lesbian people.
A remarkable statistic, that hugely underlines the need for bi work and bi visibility at that event, given every study of sexuality worth reading finds more bisexuals - especially when it comes to women - than gay and lesbian people. It is on a par with the stats from Kairos' London LGBT Almanac, which suggested that of all LGBT service users in London, only about 6% were bi.
It would seem we have a long way to go yet before the label "LGBT" really means it.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Are bis boring?
Because I'm a hip, happening, party animal kind of a person, I've been reading the research findings of the Government Equalities Office's work on "experiences of and barriers to participation in public and political life for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people". Now it's a huuuge great long report and there are some useful and interesting things in there both as a queer activist and as a left-wing politico. But there was one thing that really leapt out at me after a while.
They aimed to recruit 80 interviewees. 20 L, 20 G, 20 B, 20 T. That in itself is a bit iffy - there are for instance almost certainly more bi people than lesbian and gay put together - but let's accept it as a way of getting a broad L+G+B+T cross-section for now.
They recruited 20 lesbians, 22 gay men, 21 transgender people, and ...13 bisexuals. Apparently, we were really hard to find. So they gave up looking?
And then they interviewed this group of 76 people (apparently no-one was both B and T, or what have you) and picked the most pertinent quotes from the panel to intersperse through the report, as you do when a long wordy publication needs a bit of colour. Quotes were anonymous but tagged [G] for a quote from a gay man, and so on. I thought there seemed to be a bit of a dearth of [B] so counted them up, as I had a long train journey to pass.
Gosh. L, G or T, get interviewed and we'll use on average one and a half snippets of what you contributed. Bis? One quote each, form an orderly soundbite queue please.
So: are bis boring, is this within normal statistical distribution, or is this a somewhat suspicious bit of subediting from GEO?
They aimed to recruit 80 interviewees. 20 L, 20 G, 20 B, 20 T. That in itself is a bit iffy - there are for instance almost certainly more bi people than lesbian and gay put together - but let's accept it as a way of getting a broad L+G+B+T cross-section for now.
They recruited 20 lesbians, 22 gay men, 21 transgender people, and ...13 bisexuals. Apparently, we were really hard to find. So they gave up looking?
And then they interviewed this group of 76 people (apparently no-one was both B and T, or what have you) and picked the most pertinent quotes from the panel to intersperse through the report, as you do when a long wordy publication needs a bit of colour. Quotes were anonymous but tagged [G] for a quote from a gay man, and so on. I thought there seemed to be a bit of a dearth of [B] so counted them up, as I had a long train journey to pass.
Lesbian: 20 people, 31 quotes
Gay: 22 people, 32 quotes
Transgender: 21 people, 27 quotes
Bisexual: 13 people, 12 quotes
Gosh. L, G or T, get interviewed and we'll use on average one and a half snippets of what you contributed. Bis? One quote each, form an orderly soundbite queue please.
So: are bis boring, is this within normal statistical distribution, or is this a somewhat suspicious bit of subediting from GEO?
Sunday, 27 January 2008
1 in 100?
This weekend's newspapers are reporting - with an undertone of homophobic glee - that an Office for National Statistics poll of 4,000 people found that "only" 1 in 100 described themselves as gay or lesbian. So that's the 1 in 10 figure squished, and the 6% the government used when planning for Civil Partnerships.
Read more closely and it becomes a little clearer.
A further 1 in 100 identified as bisexual and 1 in 200 as "other", while 15% were not recorded because the interviewer chose not to ask the question. Yup, this was not some safely anonymous survey by form with layers of anonymising the interviewees in place, it was members of the public being asked directly by a complete stranger whether they were bi, straight or gay.
The real story here is not "only 1 in 100". It's a remarkable 1 in 40 non-heterosexuals who are so comfortably out about their sexual orientation that they don't feel they have to lie when being interviewed by a complete stranger.
Read more closely and it becomes a little clearer.
A further 1 in 100 identified as bisexual and 1 in 200 as "other", while 15% were not recorded because the interviewer chose not to ask the question. Yup, this was not some safely anonymous survey by form with layers of anonymising the interviewees in place, it was members of the public being asked directly by a complete stranger whether they were bi, straight or gay.
The real story here is not "only 1 in 100". It's a remarkable 1 in 40 non-heterosexuals who are so comfortably out about their sexual orientation that they don't feel they have to lie when being interviewed by a complete stranger.
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