Post submitted by Kat Skiles, former HRC Senior Marketing Strategist

The Trump Administration has announced it will strike data collection from the 2020 census. But make no mistake: We will be seen, we will be heard and we won't stop fighting until we achieve equality for LGBTQ people. 

Last night, the Census Bureau issued an alarming corrective statement, asserting it had “inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix” of a bureau report. The correction suggests that plans for data collection for the 2020 census had included LGBTQ people, but the Trump Administration has removed them. This is Trump’s latest move in a larger campaign to erase LGBTQ people from federal surveys and disrupt programs that provide direct assistance to the LGBTQ community.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services removed a question about sexual orientation from the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants. Earlier this month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development withdrew two notices impacting data collection and implementation guidelines for a homelessness prevention initiative targeting LGBTQ youth.