A Democratic senator’s bill would require California health care forms to ask people to provide LGBTQ demographic information. , which would force California’s health officials to do what Wiener says they should have been doing anyway: provide a place on health care forms for people who identify as LGBTQ to voluntarily note their gender identity and sexual orientation.
“If we’ll recall back to the beginning of the pandemic, when we realized that older people were much more likely to die from COVID and when we realized that there were much higher rates of infection and death in Black and brown communities, the only reason we knew that was because we had demographic data,” WienerBut Wiener, who is gay, said there’s not much data available for researchers when it comes to folks like him or lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer Californians.
Sen. Scott Wiener, seen here in 2022 announcing a bill to protect transgender kids, has a bill now to ensure LGBTQ questions on health forms. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters