It's census time again, folks, and you know what that means! Lots and lots of us trying to fit ourselves into a limited range of government-defined categories, whether on race, family structure, or goodness knows what else.
Let me preface this by saying that even though it's going to be a long time before my family is accurately captured by the census, I am actually more sympathetic to the challenges of the Census Bureau than many. I've had to use Census data a lot, and one of the main uses for it is to study changes over time. But if you keep changing the categories, you can't do that, at least not as well. Thus, when you add "mixed-race" as a category, and then you try to determine the shifting racial composition of an area, you can't really do it, because you don't know what the people identifying as mixed race previously identified as, etc. This doesn't mean I don't think the categories should change to reflect reality (and please someone, kill the whole "female-headed household" claptrap already!); the census should be about describing what is, not what someone thinks ought to be. But I understand why they are awfully feet-dragging about making big changes.
Such caveats aside, it does seem like some easy chances to get more useful data have been skipped this time through. Choosing to identify same-sex legally married couples as "unmarried partners" seems more lazy than anything—here's new information and we won't record it. It's not like this one would screw up the data anyway—you can always sort those couples separately using gender. Mombian, in a roundup of census issues for queer families, notes an important take-away: If you record yourself as "wife and wife" or "husband and husband" at least some hard-working researchers might be able to pull the info out later. So if it applies, by all means do it.
And then there's defining parenthood. What are you: biological parent, adoptive parent, or stepparent?
Those are your choices. How about non-bio parent, married to a bio parent, on the birth certificate so didn't have to adopt? (Could be a same-sex couple, could be a surrogate/donor kind of situation.) Or how about non-bio parent not able to adopt for some reason? (For example, laws against same-sex parents adoption or having more than two legal parents.) Will Cat Cora and her wife's data be thrown out if they both declare themselves bio parents?
If this applies to you, what will you put down?
Photo by takomabibelot.
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