Op-ed

New Federal Survey Cuts Intentionally Ignore LGBTQ+ Discrimination

This piece is written by MAP’s 2025 Policy Research Fellow, Gautham Sharma.

Since returning to office in January 2025, President Trump has used executive orders and the power of federal agencies to roll back protections for the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender people. But he’s also launched a far more subtle — yet equally devastating — form of attack: quietly removing questions about gender identity and, increasingly, sexual orientation from critical federal surveys. The goal is to make queer and transgender people invisible in public data and policy. But this data erasure extends far beyond transgender people alone — it’s part of a broader campaign to redefine who deserves government recognition, resources, and protection.

At first glance, participating in a survey may seem relatively insignificant. However, federal surveys are one of the most fundamental tools used to determine community needs and resource distribution in our country. Federal survey data often dictate who is heard, protected, and prioritized in the eyes of the government. From funding mental health and housing programs to civil rights enforcement, policymakers rely on this data to shape the policies that govern people’s lives. These aren’t small decisions — trillions of dollars are annually distributed to communities across the country, all determined by data from these surveys.

Since the start of his second term, the Trump administration has eliminated gender identity questions from at least 60 critical surveys, while also beginning to target sexual orientation measures, according to internal tracking by The Williams Institute and Movement Advancement Project. These cuts are calculated, intentional moves that make it difficult for researchers, advocates, and policymakers to create policies that address the needs of these communities.

If this sounds like the government wishes we didn’t exist, that’s the point.

These changes aren’t happening in a vacuum — they’re working in tandem with a slew of public rhetoric crafted to villainize queer and transgender people, particularly transgender women. Trump’s anti-trans executive order, signed on inauguration day and cited to justify these changes, is framed as a defense of “women’s rights” against “gender ideology extremism.” This narrative is used to erode nondiscrimination protection and other basic rights for transgender people, and to halt federal funding for gender-affirming care and other inclusive programs. It rationalizes the exclusion of queer and transgender people from public life — and therefore, the democratic process — by pathologizing transness while masking the administration’s agenda as protective.

The harmful effects of this exclusion are evident:

• The 2021 Household Pulse Survey (HPS) revealed that transgender people faced disproportionately high rates of job loss, housing instability, and food insecurity during the pandemic. These data were used to advocate for targeted economic support, ensuring that transgender people have equitable access to economic resources. The Trump administration recently announced that the newest version of this survey, the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey (HTOPS), is stripped of sexual orientation and gender identity questions, depriving advocates and community-based organizations of vital data needed to support the transgender community.
• The 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) showed that 26% of transgender youth had attempted suicide, compared to 5–11% of their cisgender counterparts. Instead of addressing the disparity, the administration has removed gender identity questions from the survey, and has dismantled critical support systems, including specialized support for young LGBTQ+ callers on the 988 national suicide prevention hotline.
• Data from the 2022 and 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) found that transgender people experience violent victimization at a rate of 93.7 per 1000 people and LGBTQ+ people at a rate of 106.4 per 1000, compared to 21.1 per 1000 for non-LGBTQ+ people. The data help drive advocacy for supportive policies and services for the LGBTQ+ community, but the Trump administration has chosen to eliminate gender identity questions from the survey, erasing visibility of these experiences from federal crime surveys.

Advocates for the LGBTQ+ community have spent decades building a foundation of federal data that helps to document our disproportionate challenges and resulting needs. Rather than responding to these inequalities, the White House is choosing to eliminate the evidence. This isn’t passive neglect — it’s active erasure, deliberately severing the connection between lived experience and policy.

What we are seeing is the politicization of information. The recent firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, a historically nonpartisan position tasked with analyzing our country’s labor data, shows that this administration will reject the validity of any data that challenges its agenda. The message is clear: unwanted data get scrubbed, and unwanted communities get ignored.

This administration is selectively choosing which Americans deserve recognition. They’re asserting that LGBTQ+ lives aren’t worth measuring, our needs aren’t worth fulfilling, and our experiences aren’t worth documenting. It is vital for researchers, advocates, and the public to support the routine inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation questions on these surveys to ensure that all communities are accurately represented, and that public policy reflects the full scope of the populations it serves.