Developing guidelines to include trans people in research
The Trans Health team will develop guidelines for including trans people in research projects.
Co-designing with trans healthcare experts, researchers and community members, this project aims to develop best-practice guidelines for including trans and gender diverse people in research.
This project is supported by an MDHS Diversity and Inclusion Grant 2022.
A/Professor Ada Cheung, Austin Health and Melbourne Medical School
Trans Health Research team at the University of Melbourne
Trans people are one of the most marginalised groups in our community and the exclusion of trans people often extends to research with inaccurate collection of data on sex and gender. Trans experiences are rarely accurately reflected in data collection. Not only can this be distressing to trans research participants, contributing to poor mental health, but this lack of data, presents a barrier to allocation of resources and inclusive policy for the trans community.
To address this gap, our co-designed project targeted at researchers from all fields, developed a video and written best-practice guidelines for including trans people in research.
In line with the MDHS focus on inclusivity, accountability, and best practice, we developed an easy-to-understand three-minute video and accompanying guidelines targeted towards researchers without any assumed knowledge of transgender health that directly addressed the lack of trans inclusion in research. This project was led by Dr Sav Zwickl (a trans nonbinary researcher) together with the broader Trans Health Research group team (>50% of whom are trans people) and our community advisory group. The Diversity and Inclusion grant enabled us to engage the creative agency Snack Drawer and trans videographer Rudy Jean Rigg to develop the video.
Through an engaging video and written guidelines published here: https://www.transresearch.org.au/including-trans-people
We achieved our aim, to address the importance of trans inclusion in research and how to best achieve this, with recommended best practice for trans data collection. Our recommendations and guidelines included recommendations for wording to capture diverse trans experiences in any research based on the two-step approach recommended in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Standard for Sex, Gender, Variation of Sex Characteristics and Sexual Orientation Variables 2020.