The Census and ACS Excludes Vulnerable Americans. Fix it!

The Census Bureau’s “American Community Survey” (ACS), like the 2020 census before it, excludes many vulnerable people. Like the 2020 census, the ACS requires that respondents categorize every person in their household according to a binary sex or gender (male or female). Non-binary Americans have encountered repeated arbitrary administrative limitations that have prevented participation in this mandatory and important data-gathering exercise. Please fix it. These limitations fly in the face of thousands of years of human history in which people worldwide have lived outside these categories. It ignores the growing recognition by western biologists that the data don’t support this binary categorization of sex or gender. It also happens to be out of step with your administration’s other recent important work—for example, in the State Department’s issuance of passports with X markers—to bring federal data standards into line with current social and scientific (not to mention ancient and traditional) recognition of non-binary people. So that your office understands the problem more fully: in 2020, non-binary Americans attempting to respond to the census called in multiple times, sent emails and mailed in paper forms, and consistently heard (from call center workers, managers, and regional managers alike) that the census bureau couldn’t accept an accurate response to their question about sex or gender. These census workers instructed census-takers to select a binary response to the sex or gender question. When told that would be inaccurate, they asked if census-takers were refusing to answer the question. “No, I’m not refusing,” they would say, “I’m attempting to accurately respond to the question. This member of my household is not male or female; they are non-binary.” Invariably, the census worker would reply that their systems did not allow it. As a result, those who would neither lie nor decline were left out. I believe such households will be left out again for the ACS. Many Americans exist outside the male-female binary, and the census data excludes such persons. (These are not the only people left out by the census; other vulnerable groups are excluded.) When Congress directed the Census Bureau to collect this data per the Constitution, they did not envision excluding so many people: the non-binary, indigenous, disabled, or any of the many other vulnerable populations whose access to services depends on accurate census data. Please repair the census to include everyone in our many communities.