When David’s employers didn’t invite him to work outings because he’s gay, he didn’t take it up to higher-ups. Instead, he changed himself.
“I couldn’t be fired for being gay,” David, who works at a Fortune 500 company with a formal nondiscrimination policy for LGBTQ people, said. But, he added, “When partners at the firm invite straight men to squash or drinks, they don’t invite the women or gay men. I’m being passed over for opportunities that could lead to being promoted.”
So David took matters into his own hands: “I’m trying to minimize the bias against me by changing my presentation in the corporate world,” he said. “I lower my voice in meetings to make it sound less feminine and avoid wearing anything but a black suit. … When you’re perceived as feminine — whether you’re a woman or a gay man — you get excluded from relationships that improve your career.”
A new survey by the Center for American Progress (CAP), which David was interviewed for, looks at this type of discrimination and how it changes behaviors.
Based on the survey, David’s experience matches how many LGBTQ people see day-to-day discrimination. It’s not always an employer using anti-gay slurs before firing an employee, though it does still occur sometimes. It’s often more subtle biases that lead people to hide or change, at least outwardly, who they are.
But this has serious consequences: If people are pushed back into the closet, they’re obviously much less likely to be open about their lives as LGBTQ people. And given that people coming out and sharing their stories is one of the key reasons the US has become friendlier to LGBTQ rights in recent years, this can foster a self-perpetuating cycle of discrimination. Surveys, after all, have found that people who know someone who’s gay are more likely to support marriage equality, as they learn to empathize with a gay person’s lived experiences.
“Discrimination is doing its dirty work,” Laura Durso, vice president of the LGBT Research and Communications Project at CAP, told me. “It’s trying to keep us from talking about our lives [and] from talking about solutions that are needed in order to address discrimination. And that really stood out for me.”
CAP’s survey finds that despite progress in recent years, anti-LGBTQ discrimination is still fairly common. And very often, the discrimination leads people to change their behaviors in a way to placate the homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted attitudes behind day-to-day discrimination.
One in four LGBTQ people reported discrimination in 2016
The major conclusion of the survey, which reached nearly 900 people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender in January, was that one in four of these people reported discrimination due to their sexual orientation or gender identity in the past year.
Among these people, 68.5 percent said the discrimination at least somewhat negatively affected their psychological well-being, and 43.7 percent said it impacted their physical well-being. More than half — 52.8 percent — said it negatively impacted their work environment, 56.6 percent said it negatively impacted their neighborhood and community environment, and 38.5 percent said it negatively impacted their school environment.
Perhaps most alarming, the survey found that discrimination pushed LGBTQ people back into the closet. For example, 32.4 percent of those who have not experienced discrimination in the past year acknowledged using “vague language when talking about relationships,” while 70.4 percent of those who faced discrimination admitted to this. Similarly, 23.7 percent of LGBTQ respondents who didn’t face discrimination avoided speaking about LGBTQ issues in social situations, while 53.5 percent of those who faced discrimination did.
These are only two examples. From their private to public lives, people took many kinds of steps to shield themselves from discrimination.
Maria, a queer woman in North Carolina who participated in the survey, explained that she takes a long commute so she can live in a city (Durham) that she described as more friendly to LGBTQ people, while working in a town that isn’t friendly. “I wonder whether I would be let go if the higher-ups knew about my sexuality,” she said.
Again, this sort of re-closeting can perpetuate more discrimination. One of the key ways to combat prejudice is by getting a person to empathize with its horrors. A 2016 study, for example, found that canvassing people’s homes and having a 10-minute, nonconfrontational conversation about transgender rights — in which people’s lived experiences were relayed so they could understand how prejudice feels personally — managed to reduce voters’ anti-trans attitudes for at least three months.
Our day-to-day interactions can produce these kinds of changes — hence why people coming out to friends and family is widely credited as a key driver in growing support for marriage equality.
“Social scientists, political scientists, and others have made the argument and shown with data that telling stories, that coming out narratives, [and] talking about who LGBT people are and how they live their lives has been so important to our victories thus far,” Durso said. “But in our data, more than half of LGBT people who experienced discrimination in the past year avoided talking about LGBT issues in social situations.”
Among LGBTQ people, some groups have it worse
What’s worse, the CAP survey found that trans people, respondents with disabilities, and racial minorities faced even greater problems.
For example, in light of North Carolina’s anti-LGBTQ law (which banned trans people from using the bathroom in schools and government buildings that corresponds with their gender identity), 25.7 percent of trans respondents in the CAP survey said they had avoided public places such as stores and restaurants, compared to 9.9 percent of cisgender (non-trans) LGB respondents. Similar disparities between trans and cis LGB respondents were reported in experiences with the health care system, with trans people generally facing much more discrimination due to their gender identity.
LGBTQ people with disabilities reported disparities as well, with 20.4 percent avoiding public places versus 9.1 percent of LGBTQ respondents without disabilities. Other disparities were reported among LGBTQ people with disabilities when it came to the workplace, health care, public transportation, getting services they or their family needed, and making decisions about where to shop.
LGBTQ people of color, meanwhile, were more than twice as likely to avoid a doctor’s office as white LGBTQ respondents. And they were 50 percent more likely to remove items from their résumé to avoid LGBTQ references.
As Rafael, a student in California who went out of his way to only apply to law schools in LGBTQ-safe cities or states, told CAP, “I did not think I would be safe being an openly gay man — especially a gay man of color — in some places.”
This is typical of these kinds of surveys: Different forms of discrimination can often compound each other to produce even worse results.
“These findings are consistent with research that has also identified patterns of health care discrimination against people of color and disabled people,” the report stated. “For example, one survey of health care practices in five major cities found that more than one in five practices were inaccessible to patients who used wheelchairs.”
LGBTQ people aren’t protected from discrimination in most states
The CAP report concludes that the survey shows the need for civil rights laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. Its release comes on the same day that Democrats in Congress plan to reintroduce the Equality Act, a federal law that would ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace, housing, public accommodations (hotels, stores, and similar public places), education, and various other settings.
As it stands, most states and the federal government do not have laws that explicitly ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination in any setting. This means that a person can be fired from a job, evicted from a home, kicked out of a business, or denied the right school bathroom just because an employer, landlord, business owner, or principal doesn’t approve of the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Some advocates argue that federal law should already protect LGBTQ people. They say that bans on sex discrimination, which exist under federal law, should cover LGBTQ people, because discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity is fundamentally rooted in sex. For example, if someone discriminates against a gay man, that’s largely based on the expectation that a man should only love or have sex with a woman — a belief built on the idea of what a person of a certain sex should be like.
But not all courts have legally validated this argument. So for the time being, LGBTQ people aren’t explicitly protected under the law in most states.
CAP argues this needs to change. Durso said she doesn’t expect nondiscrimination laws to prevent all anti-LGBTQ discrimination, but they could help — just like past legal protections for women, racial minorities, and people with disabilities. (Indeed, some studies have found that LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws can decrease discrimination.)
“The civil rights struggle is a constant one,” Durso told me. But, she added, “I do think that [nondiscrimination laws] help to marginalize the idea of discrimination against LGBT people and move us toward a world in which that discrimination just happens less often.”