Everyone Counts

This year brings a new decade (sort of) and with it a brand new census! Yes, the great counting of America means short questionnaires will soon be arriving in people's mailboxes and on their doorsteps. The necessity of the census, and all the positive consequences of it being conducted accurately, are well known and unnecessary to explicate. Equally well known and unnecessary to examine is the insanity that bubbles in the bosoms of your more conspiratorially minded, far-right, anti-government town idiot in reaction to this simple, non-invasive exercise that actually makes government MORE representative of all, even idiots like him. (And its always a him.)

The census reminds us of our common membership in a political community, and as such can bring up many questions about how we choose to identify ourselves within that community.

For example, LGBT issues and the census have been intertwined, and have hit facebook (or my facebook, at least) with a vengeance. I've been repeatedly invited to the group/page/event/whatever that beckons me to support some sort of petition on Change.org (a website that seems to mimic the Obama campaign's fonts and such..) and to check out "Queer the Census", a project of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, to get a question about sexual orientation added to the NEXT census, in 2020. So many of my facebook friends like this, that facebook has even taken it upon itself to "suggest" these things to me.

No, thank you.

For one, this is an intrusive and unnecessary question. The census doesn't ask about my religion (nor should it), so don't ask me about my sexuality. I suppose knowing how many LGB people there are would make it more obvious why marriage inequality and other discriminatory legal regimes are unfair. Other than that, I don't see any pressing need or reason to include a question of sexual orientation on a census form. It really is none of the state's business who I, or anyone else, loves or what we do in our bedrooms or elsewhere. Not to get all Glenn Beck on you, but the Nazis were also overly interested in finding out the sexuality of the citizenry. It just isn't information the state must, or even should, have. I for one would decline to answer.

Which brings me to another point: asking this question on the census would provide data that no statistician of repute would consider representative of the full array of sexuality present within such a large and complex society. Not everyone will answer the question, others will lie, others (such as minors) will go uncounted. You're not going to get really great data this way, so it seems more like you'd be including the question on principle, rather than on pragmatism. I'm all for principles, but when there are other compelling reasons NOT to include this, the principles don't seem all that compelling.

Finally, while I don't believe anyone can, via strength of will or effort, "change" their sexuality, sexuality is not like one's biological sex. [Which can, through strength of hormone injections and a skilled surgeon, be changed, sort of.] To troupe out the well-worn "Sex and Gender 101" clichés, sexuality is: fluid, evolving, exists along a spectrum, and is ascribed meaning and identity implications by a given society. Before the late 1800s, homosexuality as we know it was unthinkable. This is not to say that same-sex physical and/or romantic relationships didn't exist before this time, but simply that there was no conception of a stable identity category based around who one chooses to sleep with and/or fall in love with. Even up through the mid-20th Century, in Western societies at least, sexuality was something you did, not something you were. So, it seems to me, to ask questions about your "sexual orientation" on a census form would be to ignore both contemporary sexuality/gender theory, and also the bulk of historical and sociological evidence which shows us that sexuality is not so neat as "Check Box A for Straight, Box B for Gay..." and so on. How to account for the self-identified lesbian who is currently dating a man, or the asexual, or the bisexual who by the time the next census comes around will call themself gay, or the man-who-has-sex-with-men who is married and thinks of himself as straight? The variation even across one individual's lifetime is so great, that it seems to me that a decennial census would not really provide a meaningful representation of a whole society's sexuality.

So, I understand, my liberal minded people, I really do.  Everyone wants to say "We're here, we're queer, get used to it." This just isn't a very good way of doing it. Rather than "queering" the census, providing three sexual categories in which one must shove oneself seems to me rather un-queer and regressive. Sexuality is simply too complex, and intensely personal, a phenomenon to be captured accurately or appropriately by a one page census form.