A rant about LGB(T)Q+ health research: the Squeakquel

Hello all, I hope you like some gossip because it's integrated into this rant. 

This guy I've only ever seen or talked to like three times, contacted me because [insert person we both know] told him I could help him out. He (cis person) is doing research for his doctoral degree on trans & nonbinary folks & their experiences getting misgendered in healthcare settings. Getting people to participate has been tough. After all, this was a qualitative study where participants had to give much over 30mins in virtual interviews. 

I swear I'm doomed to forever have interactions like these because I'm a public health worker who's specialized in lgbtq+ health, especially trans health issues. This person expected me to promote the study too... I'm way past the point of blindly promoting studies just because they include trans people as the study topic. So I gave some healthcare organization names (orgs that openly serve trans people) for him to check out in case they could help promote the study. He said he didn't know about some of them and that he'd contact them. I asked him if there was any kind of incentive for study participants & he said no, but that he would ask at the uni to see what could be done about that. He said he appreciated the help because he wanted to finish his degree and shared how passionate he is about the topic.

 Alright, here are a few red flags I spotted at a glance:

- Study consists of 30+mins worth of interviews with no incentives for participants

- The research topic itself...

- He's wants to finish his doctoral degree...

It's pretty clear to me when someone wants to study us but doesn't even have us as their friends. Trans and nonbinary people can be incredible guinea pigs for cis (queer or het) researchers. This person hasn't turned their passion for the topic into informed action. A doctoral student should be more than capable of finding the organizations I mentioned to him all on his own! If, for starters, he had trans friends, he wouldn't have needed to reach out to me for help. I just know it. It's more usual than not that a lot of trans adults where I live know each other and know where to get the types of healthcare they need. Asking me for help isn't bad in itself, and I swear i wasn't mean to this person, but I just can't blindly support every single doctoral student's study on trans people. We are not cis people's guinea pigs!

I highly dislike how academia / academic research functions, but I know a thing or two about it. Especially qualitative studies. Asking people for anything more than 30 minutes of their time in interviews is a whole other way of complicating your existence. Especially for a doctoral thesis! How many participants do you want? Do you truly have the time to listen, code, connect ideas, go back and forth on the info and analyze it all? On top of that... no incentives? It's already asking too much of us, a minority population, that often has a billion things going on at the same time. Very few of us are so well off we have an hour to potentially retraumatize ourselves talking about how we've been mistreated in healthcare settings. He had the gall to say our time is valuable... make it so that it is! Incentives don't have all to be money, and there could be other rewarding ways to include trans folks in a study.

For one, seek our help when designing your research. It may seem good on paper to talk study how misgendering in healthcare settings affects us but isn't it obvious?! Of course, it fucks with our mental health and livelihood to have who we are denied! I wonder how he would interpret trans folks who use more than one pronoun or purposefully choose to omit their preferred pronouns or identity in healthcare settings due to the disrespect we often face. I feel like this topic has been talked to death among trans spaces. The topic only informs me this study is for cis academics and healthcare workers, not done in benefit for trans people. Begging for empathy from cis people is truly sickening at this point, because this is how academics go about it! (I hate this kind of research, can y'all tell?)

And lastly, he exposed the missing piece, the one true motivation behind all of this. He wants to finish his doctoral degree. Don't get me wrong, that's the nature of a doctoral thesis. You make a study in hopes that you can finally graduate & get your degree. But for the love of god, stop portraying your research as altruism. I do think his passion is genuine. But it's ultimately ill-informed. Misplaced. He wants to study a population he can't even access on his own and there are plenty of ways he can meet trans people here. I know stepping out of the academic bubble isn't easy, but it's what he'd need to do if he wants to gain our trust and truly do this for us.

I'm tired of holding cis researchers' hands on this topic. I won't do their recruitment work for free just to "support the cause" when the cause is this guy getting his degree! He could've chosen any other topic or prepared himself better for this one, but he hasn't yet. I hope he's got time to correct this kinda stuff, get participants, and honestly represent their points of view. Funny enough, he didn't ask if I wanted to participate... which was for the best because I would've said no lmao.

End of rant! Thanks for reading if you got this far. I really needed to get this outta my chest wow.

Total trans stranger goes kinda hard... quick, someone make a band!!