Survey process: the nitty-gritty

As a part of this project, i wanted feedback and ideas from queer and trans youth and younger adults. But living in a remote, rural community, i knew i couldn't just put up fliers at the library and local GSAs and assemble a group of young folx to advise me.

So i settled on a survey as the best way of reaching the most folx and, hopefully, getting the largest possible number of responses. This approach yielded way better, more wide-ranging results than i would have had if i would've done something only locally.

I decided to offer the chance to win one of two $25 gift cards to all survey-takers, in the hopes that it would encourage some more folx to participate. I chose Amazon not because it's a fantastic company; it's not great at all. But i figured that pretty much everyone has access to Amazon. In a complete lapse in logic, i forgot about the online existence of much better stores, like Costco. I have no explanation or excuse. Because, yes, not everyone has access to a physical Target. But if you can access Amazon.com, you can also find Target.com.

I didn't even realize this moment of illogic until reading through the survey results, when one respondent wrote, "Im glad you have offered gift cards for this study. However I urge you to take part in a boycott of Amazon as it is potentially the most important boycott at this moment in time. Any other gift card would be good, even walmart :)"

Sigh. It was not one of my brighter moments. So, thanks, survey-taker. I'll do better next time.

I generated survey questions and put them into Google Forms, which is free and pretty intuitive to use. In December of 2022, i ran the draft survey by a half-dozen queer and trans folx, who spanned from 12 years old to their mid-twenties. I had their feedback by mid-January 2023 and incorporated it. They made a huge difference. The survey is 100 times stronger due to their suggestions.

Presto! A survey ready to go. But how to get it out there?

I started off looking for college groups, not because college students are representative of their peers nationally but because college is the easiest place to find and contact a critical mass of young people without necessarily having to go through gate-keepers like teachers.

I then branched out to community-based organizations in the hopes of getting a more diverse set of respondents.

If you're itching for more details, read on!

Below is the process i took to find queer and trans student organizations to contact.

I gathered schools in the following order:

1. Each historically Black college and university (HBCU), for a total of 109 schools.
2. All 35 tribal colleges and universities (TCUs).
3. Colleges with the highest percentage of Asian students.
   
   • I want to note that i did not look into all schools on this list, which is hundreds of entries long.
   • Instead, i started out with the school with the highest percentage and worked my way down, yielding 69 schools with the highest percentage of AAPI students in the US.
   • Why 69? Because i just kept adding schools until i got tired of looking at this list. So i was not in any way intentional about this number; i only counted well after the fact. If i would have been more intentional, i probably would have stopped at 75 — or, at the very least, 70. I blame this at least partly on covid, which was ruling my life during this time and sapping any energy i might have had to be more thorough here. It was the sickest i'd ever been in my life. (Seriously, get vaccinated. And boosted. And then do it again the next time a new dose is available.)
4. Universities with the highest number of "Hispanic" degrees given, which yielded 94 additional schools.
   
   • Ditto the explanation above for how accidental this number was.

Through this process, i came up with 286 unique schools focused on BIPOC students. However, a total of 21 schools ended up on two lists; counting them twice yields a duplicated total of 307 schools.

I'll refer to these schools collectively as "BIPOC schools." Although that's not 100% accurate, it's shorthand that will make the discussion below much easier.

I then searched for queer and trans student groups at each school, in this order:

1. Each university's website.
   
   • I was so glad each time this happened. Thanks to all of you with a helpful, easy-to-navigate website!
2. Google, by using a variety of search terms.
   
   • I generally reviewed 50-100 search results per school in an attempt to see what relevant groups a college may have had.
   • However, i should add that i clicked through to results only if it seemed like it would have helpful information and was from no earlier than 2018. This meant that i passed over the majority of links that Google returned.

From this work, i ended up with the numbers below. (FYI, if you're on a smart phone, the table will look better in landscape mode.)

* As noted above, 21 schools fell into two BIPOC categories. So those schools are counted twice in this table, in each appropriate column. (No school showed up on more than 2 lists.)

You'll note that, as shown in the table, only a small minority of HBCUs and TCUs have queer and trans groups that i was able to find. (TCUs are often so small that they have no student clubs at all.) The others, colleges with the highest percentage of AAPI students and universities with the highest number of Latine/Latinx/Hispanic degrees given, fared much better.

However, these two pairs are not the same. There is a defined number of HBCUs and TCUs. But the schools that showed up in the AAPI and Latine lists come from the broad category of all colleges and universities in the US; to my knowledge, there are no schools dedicated exclusively to educating AAPI and Latinx/Latine students. So this is a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

Back to the process.…

3. If these steps did not yield at least 2 schools with at least one queer/trans group in each state and territory (plus Washington, DC), i Googled the largest schools in each state/territory, picked the top 2 results in Google (which were not necessarily the largest of the largest), and added the queer and trans student groups from each to my list.
4. Finally, i manually added in my college (Vassar) and my graduate school (George Washington University). They didn't meet any of the criteria above. But, ya' know, i still wanted to include the schools i'd attended -- especially Vassar, which i dearly love (although there is this gender discrimination lawsuit these days, which i don't love and which is so very disappointing).
5. After all of these steps, i ended up with a list of 377 colleges and universities and a total of 579 groups (more details below).

The plurality of schools i contacted were in California (59), Texas (29), and Alabama (17). The states with the largest number of queer and trans student groups were California (115), Texas (61), New York (39), Florida (38), and Arizona (30).

All the schools on my list in the following states are in the BIPOC categories (i.e., i did not need to use Google to find additional colleges to contact). Not coincidentally, each of these states has large BIPOC communities:

1. Arizona
2. California
3. Colorado
4. Florida
5. Georgia
6. Illinois
7. Maryland
8. Massachusetts
9. Nevada
10. New Jersey
11. New York (or, at least, it was in this list until i manually Vassar)
12. North Carolina
13. Tennessee
14. Texas
15. Virginia
16. Washington

None of the schools in the following states are in any BIPOC category. Also not coincidentally, these states overall have smaller communities of color:

1. Connecticut
2. Idaho
3. Indiana
4. Iowa
5. Maine
6. New Hampshire
7. Oregon
8. Pennsylvania
9. Rhode Island
10. Vermont
11. Wyoming

No schools in the following territories showed up in any of the BIPOC websites. That's almost certainly because territories are ignored as being part of the US in so many reports and lists:

1. Guam
2. Marshall Islands
3. Micronesia
4. Northern Mariana Islands
5. Palau
6. Puerto Rico — if nothing else, this territory should have shown up toward the top of the Latine list. It not being there is a shocking oversight.

Two important caveats on the list i created:

• While thorough, this process meant that i often missed student groups that aren't sanctioned by their universities and, hence, may not to show up in a moderately thorough Google search.
  
  • As an aside, i was surprised to find a total of 5 groups for students at conservative Brigham Young University, 4 of which are not affiliated with the school. The one that is officially sanctioned isn't queer- or trans-specific, although the fact that it's openly queer- and trans-inclusive is, in & of itself, noteworthy.
• Additionally, i undoubtedly missed student organizations that may have been listed on a university's website but without a description or a name that flagged itself to me as queer- or trans-related.

I was hoping that this detailed process would give me a list of schools with a disproportionate number of BIPOC students. And to my surprise, i actually succeeded. As mentioned, i ended up with a list of 377 universities in all 50 states, DC, and each of the US's 8 territories. Of those, 60% (228 schools) had a total of 579 relevant student groups. Of those 228 colleges and universities, 182 (79.8%) are BIPOC schools. And a total of 403 of those 579 groups (69.6%) are at BIPOC schools.

I contacted each of those 579 student groups about the survey between mid-January and the end of February 2023. Everyone got a message with an explanation of the project, a link to an "about me and this survey" webpage, and links both to the survey itself and to a Dropbox folder with images sized specifically for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which had not yet changed its name to "X." I then followed up 6-8 weeks later with those organizations i hadn't heard from or from which i hadn't received any survey submissions -- minus, of course, those with email addresses that had bounced.

(Facebook promo images, including alt-text, are available at the bottom of this page. The Insta and Twitter ones were the same, just sized differently.)

My next step was reaching out to local non-profits. Foxr this phase of the survey, i looked for community-based organizations (CBOs) in the 31 states and all eight US territories for which i ended up with 3 or fewer colleges.

The state-by-state/territory-by-territory search for CBOs was not as comprehensive as my college search since, as described in that section, i began that outreach with a defined list of schools. Finding queer- and trans-focused youth groups is much more open-ended.

I started with the fantastic resource list of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, which "protects and defends the human rights of BLACK transgender people." I branched out from there in situations where the institute either had no listings, as was the case for all US territories, or where they had a small enough number that i figured Google could help in finding some more.

I focused on finding three kinds of organizations:

1. Those that work exclusively with queer and trans young people (which are, ideally, also run by queer and trans youth or younger adults);
2. Those that include queer and trans young people as part of an organization's broader work in the LGBTQA+ community; and
3. Those cis-het organizations that serve queer and trans tweens and teens as part of broader work with young people.

In the instance of these last two, i generally required an organization to have at least some acknowledgment of queer and trans young people on its website. I did make a few exceptions, specifically to reach teenagers and younger adults in US territories (particularly fa'afafine young people) and/or on Native lands. I hoped these tweens and teens could be reached by a more generic, adult-run and -focused organization in the absence of, or in addition to, groups focused on young people.

Finally, i intentionally avoided groups that are or had been grantees of my employer at the time, AIDS United. The power inherent in working for a funder means that an organization might see a solicitation from me and think that, if they shared it with their participants, they would be more likely to receive a grant in the future. Fortunately, this is not the way AIDS United does its grantmaking.

But the hope of increasing one's chances of getting a desperately needed grant would be understandable. Nothing that i could say or do would eliminate the power difference between me being a funder and someone else working for an organization that needs grant funding. That dynamic is critical to bear in mind for all of us who work in philanthropy.

Ultimately, i added 143 groups in 39 states and territories to my outreach list and contacted them in March of 2023. The number of groups varied by state or territory, from one each in Delaware, Hawai'i, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Palau, to seven in Tennessee, Vermont, and West Virginia. These new organizations are divided by region below:

• Midwest: 6 states
• Mountain West: 6 states
• New England: 6 states
• Pacific: 2 states
• South: 11 states
• Territories: 8

Unfortunately, i couldn't find any groups at all in Micronesia or the US Virgin Islands. Also, that even distribution of six states in three regions was a complete coincidence.

As with the college groups, everyone got a message with an explanation of the project, a link to an "about me/this survey" webpage, and links both to the survey itself and to a Dropbox folder with images sized specifically for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which had not yet changed its name to "X." I then followed up 6-8 weeks later with those organizations i hadn't heard from or from which i hadn’t received any survey submissions -- minus, of course, those with email addresses that had bounced.

(Facebook promo images, including alt-text, are available at the bottom of this page. The Insta and Twitter ones were the same, just sized differently.)

I also reached out via email or Facebook to many of the people i know — friends, family, current-at-the-time and former colleagues, and acquaintances. This ended up being about 95 people via email and around 100 via Facebook, plus some Facebook groups for alums of Vassar. I also posted to Instagram directly a few times but got very little from it.

I also reached out to 12 miscellaneous LGBTQA+/SGL groups.

I started this step before anything else, actually, mostly in January and early February. So there ended up being some overlap with college outreach.

I also wrote all 28 listed chapters of the GSA (Genders & Sexualities Alliance) Network and the same for 40 GLSEN chapters, although it took some hunting to find email addresses for some of them. I didn't try to contact even a few of the 400+ chapter of PFLAG because there was no way to download information for all of them at once; i wrote to the national organization's director of chapter engagement instead, although i didn't get a reply — something that was true for 95% or more of all the places i wrote.

Between the GSA Network, GLSEN, and the dozen other groups, i added additional outreach in the following states:

1. Alabama
2. Arizona
3. Arkansas
4. California
5. Connecticut
6. Florida
7. Georgia
8. Illinois
9. Indiana
10. Kansas
11. Kentucky
12. Louisiana
13. Maryland
14. Massachusetts
15. Michigan
16. Missouri
17. Montana
18. Nebraska
19. New Hampshire
20. New Jersey
21. New Mexico
22. New York
23. North Carolina
24. Ohio
25. Oklahoma
26. Oregon
27. Pennsylvania
28. South Carolina
29. Tennessee
30. Texas
31. Utah
32. Vermont
33. Virginia
34. Washington
35. Wisconsin

As when i reached out to university and community groups, everyone got a message with an explanation of the project, a link to an "about me/this survey" webpage, and links both to the survey itself and to a Dropbox folder with images sized specifically for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which had not yet changed its name to "X." I then followed up 6-8 weeks later with those organizations i hadn't heard from or from which i hadn’t received any survey submissions (minus, of course, those with email addresses that had bounced).

(Facebook promo images, including alt-text, are available at the bottom of this page. The Insta and Twitter ones were the same, just sized differently.)

At the end of March 2023, i rounded out my outreach by buying two, week-long ads for about $35 each from Meta for both Facebook and Instagram.

One ad was meant for 13-18 year-olds and one for those 18 and older. Per Meta's rules, advertisers can do no "targeting" (for lack of a better word) of young people under 18 beyond specifying the age of people to be reached and their location. So to be more specific about whom i wanted to see my ads, i created a separate ad for folx who are 18+. (Yep, that put 18-year-olds in both groups. But if that meant that they were more likely to see an ad, i was all for it.)

For those 18 and older, here are the criteria i selected for my ad to be displayed:

• Interests: Teen Vogue, Youth subculture, High school, Current events, Social change, or Middle school
• Education level: In high school, In college, College grad, High school grad, Some college, Associate degree, In grad school, Some grad school, Master's degree, Professional degree, Doctorate degree, or Some high school
• Employers: High School Teacher
• Job title: Middle School Counselor, High School Counselor, or Middle School Teacher
• Relationship status: Civil Union, Domestic Partnership, or Open Relationship
• Parents: Parents with teenagers (13-17 years)
• Life event: Away from family or Away from hometown

Unfortunately, none of that is demographic; Meta doesn't allow ads to be limited to folx who are, say, queer or trans, which would have been the most obvious groups to focus on. So i was hoping the specifications above would get my ad seen by the folx who were the most likely to be in touch with queer and trans youth or those who are themselves 18-25. And that might have been the case; i don't know how many adult allies or queer and trans younger adults saw the ads, although i know some did because they told me in their survey responses (of which, much more in this section).

But what i did discover is that queer- and trans-antagonistic adults suck (this was not news, actually). Once my ad went live, i received several posts every day spewing hateful things about queer and trans young people and/or about me. I won't repeat any of them here -- and actually couldn't if i wanted to because i deleted them all.

I also got a lot of "laugh" reactions, which seemed odd. All of the other ones (like, love, anger, sadness, surprise, care) made sense. But laughter? Is this like you think i'm a joke? You think queer and trans young people are a joke? You think we're all hopelessly brainwashed by the "liberal media" and are laughing at us? As the king says in "The King and I" (a not unproblematic musical), " 'Tis a puzzlement.”

For better or worse, Meta does not allow people to turn off all comments. So i set up a series of rules to block comments from showing, mostly around the use of certain words, which was quite successful. And, fortunately, Meta makes people who want to place an ad build a Facebook page, which means that none of the comments came to my personal Facebook account since the page doesn't mention or link to it. Having a page also allowed me to invite many Facebook friends to like/follow it. (Thanks, Meta. I was annoyed at first. But that page rule worked to my advantage. And i retooled it once this website went live to further publicize the R2T2's existence.)

After a few days of dealing with insulting and offensive comments, i pinned the following post this to the top of the page:

"FYI, folx, this is not an open debate page. Any comments that are unsupportive or hateful will be summarily deleted. (Pro-tip: unsupportive or hateful comments are not a good way for adults to affirm queer and trans youth.) #DontBeAJackass."

Unsurprisingly, that didn't make a difference — and i hadn't thought that it would. So i added to that pinned post:

"Alright, so appealing to people's basic decency clearly didn't have any impact. So i'm working on disabling all comments. #AdultsBehavingBadly."

At that point, i created my posting rules. And, presto!, very few additional hateful comments made it through.

The ad for youth audiences, however, was wildly successful. I had 56 survey responses the day before my ad went live. Within about 12 hours of the ad launching, i had 109 surveys submitted. I skimmed the new responses that night, and they all seemed to be legit. One or two people had submitted nonsensical combinations of letters instead of real answers. But no one seemed to have submitted anything hateful. That increase didn't continue on subsequent days, which i've heard is common: you get a large boost on the first day of an ad and then get shown to fewer account holders afterwards.

After 7 days, i renewed the ad for youth for an additional week but let the one for adults expire. Bam! In that ensuing week, i received one negative comment, as well as only one or two "laughter" reactions and a couple "angry" ones. Everything else was positive. So, clearly and perhaps unsurprisingly, the ones behaving badly in this situation were the adults.

I had considered having a forum on this website where people could post ideas, questions, and resources. But my experience with those Meta ads nixed that idea: adults cannot be trusted to behave appropriately. So any website comments folx have need to come to me via my contact form so i can weed out all the hateful ones and then field questions and incorporate any helpful suggestions. Queer and trans tweens and teens, their parents, and their other supportive adult do not need to be reading that garbage.

Also, the immediate cessation of the negative comments and reactions after my ads finished running indicates that i'm not important enough to have my name and contact information shared online among queer- and trans-antagonistic people so they can keep harassing me. Once my ads stopped showing up in adult feeds, they forgot i existed. And i am perfectly okay with that situation.

I'd started out this venture thinking that, if i got 2 or 3 dozen survey responses, i'd be happy. But as i realized how much work creating my college outreach list was, i decided that i wanted 50+ responses and, as surveys started to roll in, 100 became my stretch goal. Then when i was approaching 100, i wondered if i could reach 150. And then i upped that stretch goal to 200 after my first youth Facebook ad went live. Jackass adults aside, i'm super excited that i received as many survey responses as i did.

(Facebook promo images, including alt-text, are available at the bottom of this page. The Insta and Twitter ones were the same, just sized differently.)

• Total organizations i reached out to: 805
• Total number of states with organizations i reached out to: 50 + Washington, DC
• Total number of US territories with organizations i reached out to: 6
• Total reach of Meta ads:
  
  • Number of times an ad showed on someone's screen (a duplicated count): 53,914
  • Number of clicks on my survey's bit.ly: 567
  • Number of those people who submitted a survey: unknown