State Sen. Scott Wiener has introduced 52 bills this session, but he’s annoyed that he had to author one in particular.
“I’m gonna be honest that it’s frustrating that I had to bring this bill,” he told the Assembly Public Health Committee this week. “I should not have had to bring it.”
The legislation that irks the San Francisco Democrat is his Senate Bill 957, 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.
For years, other Californians have been asked to voluntarily declare their race, age and whether they’re a man or a woman on various health care forms, providing researchers with important demographic data that helps inform treatments and responses to public health crises, Wiener said.
“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,” Wiener told the health committee. “Because when people would go seek health services, they were asked demographic questions.”
But 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. A big reason: state law, he said, gives health officials the option to place LGBTQ demographic questions on state and local health forms.
Wiener’s bill would require it.
He said it would close a loophole that he describes as “a massive blind spot in the system”…
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