A conversation between Yvette Taylor and Kevin Guyan on the topic Queer Data in/as Crisis, which took place as part of the Royal Society of Edinburgh funded Queer and the Cost of Living Crisis Seminar Series.

By Yvette Taylor and Kevin Guyan

The Queer and the Cost of Living Crisis Seminar Series thinks through how queer lives, investments and resistances – materially, socially and emotionally – might help inform solutions to, or ways through, living with and beyond crisis. These solutions might involve working inside or outside the state. How might we think about those contexts as a way into and out of crisis, including our institutional context of the university? The Series is part of a RSE Personal Fellowship on Queer Social Justice.

What follows are extracts from a conversation that took place between Yvette Taylor and Kevin Guyan at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow on 30 November 2023 on the topic Queer Data in/as Crisis.

Yvette Taylor is a professor in the Strathclyde Institute of Education, a queer feminist sociologist, and author of Working-Class Queers (Pluto, 2023). Yvette researches intersecting social inequalities, often including social class, gender and sexuality, and is now editing a collection titled Queer in A Wee Place (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Kevin Guyan is a researcher whose work explores the intersection of data and identity. He is the author of Queer Data (Bloomsbury, 2022) and is currently writing his second book, which explores queer encounters with different classification systems in the UK, from hate crime reporting to dating apps. In March 2024, Kevin joins the University of Edinburgh Business School as a Chancellor’s Fellow.

The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. The original version of the transcript is available to access here.

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Yvette Taylor: In thinking about the series and who to invite, Kevin and his book Queer Data came straight to mind. Data pervades our lives and our research: as a cure, as knowledge generation, and as concern or risk. I was compelled by one of Kevin’s openers, ‘What happens when you’re assigned a category but denied a say?’ You might be able to tick a box but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you fully appear beyond the page. So in the process of gathering data about our lives and the many different ways we try to engage and do data differently, how do we best situate ourselves and do that? Or are we always failing in that generation of data?

Kevin Guyan: An example that came to mind when you were speaking was the census in Scotland. I remember about five years ago when decisions were taking place about what questions to ask and thinking, ‘There’s something up here’. There’s something not being discussed about who is designing these questions and why the Scottish Government and Parliament felt that now is the moment to count LGBTQ communities. The census was the first time questions on sexual orientation and trans status were asked in a Scottish census. For me, there were a lot of assumptions being made around the design of these data-gathering tools, particularly quantitative data-gathering tools.

I wanted to dig a bit deeper into this counting process and very quickly it became clear that a one-dimensional account of queer life was being brought into view. The census counts people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans but – at the same time – other parts of the queer community were not being counted (for example, people who identify as non-binary). The task of shining light on communities who are further marginalised by the data collection exercise becomes harder because we’re pushing against something that now has this veneer of inclusion. We see that across many different data collection tools, where some parts of the broader queer community are counted – they’re recognised, they’re legible, they’re seen by the state as worth counting. But, at the same time, it makes it trickier for communities that aren’t deemed legible or worthy of counting.

YT: It makes me think about my data-gathering practices. My book, Working-class Queers, is ‘based on two hundred and fifty plus interviews’ over a twenty-year period. It’s a lot of data, it surpasses the book, it can’t be contained within it, it shouldn’t be contained within it. So, it’s always already an act of failure.

KG: Any work on gender, sex and sexuality data is always going to be a failure in some way because there’s always going to be imperfections, there’s always going to be something missing and – as researchers – it’s hard sometimes to acknowledge that in our work. In a survey of people’s sexual orientation, there’s always going to be an undercount. For a variety of reasons, people will not wish to disclose data about certain aspects of their identity, and nor should they have to disclose.

“Any work on gender, sex and sexuality data is always going to be a failure in some way”

Kevin Guyan

So built into the design of these tools is failure. It’s quite hard to vocalise and present percentages in a table, for example, with the caveat that people are missing. I’m intrigued by the response option ‘prefer not to say’ on surveys and who is included within that box. Can we make any assumptions about who ticks that box? Sometimes we assume it’s closeted LGBTQ people, but maybe not. It might be straight people who don’t agree with the question being asked, it could be a mix of people. That ‘missingness’ is exciting and interesting. It also invites the question: how can we acknowledge and value that data? Often, as researchers we discard the voids, discard the ‘prefer not to says’, discard the ‘others’ but contained within those categories are a lot of potential insights.

YT: It makes me think about how we name, categorise and question the categories that are normative, like whiteness or middle-classness? Who comes forward? Who responds to the call for papers versus a hesitancy? One of my respondents stands out because she said something like ‘Well, I’m working-class and queer but I’m not sure that I’m British enough yet’ because she hadn’t lived long in the UK.

When we talk about whiteness [in the project’s advisory group], because my sample was predominantly white, it became a bit of an embarrassing conversation, and the conversation then shifted to the metric measure of Scotland –  ‘Well, Scotland is ninety-six per cent white’. And it makes me pause because if we had said that about sexuality it would definitely not have been sufficient, if we said, ‘Okay, well queers are only ten per cent, five per cent’, whatever minority per cent, we wouldn’t be satisfied with that kind of analysis.

I know one of the things we wanted to talk about was the complicity or connection between queer and capitalism, or where does the left fit in our critiques of queerness? Is a queer approach always a radical or progressive position?

KG: No… I’ll say more. One thing that annoyed me while researching and writing Queer Data was an assumption that counting LGBTQ communities is an intrinsic good and that just doing a survey of how many queer students or staff or employees exist within an organisation, on its own, was going to change the world in a positive way. We can already see, with the census in England and Wales where some data’s been published, that data about queer communities can both be good and bad. It can help LGBTQ rights. It can also help opponents of LGBTQ rights. Data, on its own, isn’t necessarily going to help shift the dial, change people’s material conditions or make people’s lives better.

In England and Wales, where data on the size of the LGBT population has now been released, as I predicted, the number of trans people is both too big and too small at the same time. Right-wing media and anti-trans campaign groups are simultaneously arguing there are too many trans people and too few trans people, according to the data. So trans people are caught in this lose-lose situation, which then begs the question, ‘Should these communities participate in the data gathering exercise if it’s only going to consume time, labour and energy responding to this endless stream of pushback?’

The misuse of data is one strand of it. But also how queer complicity in larger projects can benefit some within the community at the expense of others. For example, a business case rationale for doing equality, diversity and inclusion work can benefit some – often those who are closest to privilege in the first place – but it doesn’t benefit everyone. The diversity, equality and inclusion industry uses data and evidence as its fuel. A lot of that time, money and energy could be used in other ways that might have bigger impacts. We are spending a lot of resources gathering data – more and more data – and I’m not yet convinced that all of that data is necessarily reaching those who need help the most.

YT: It makes me think about the idea of repetition, and this kind of repeated labour over a long term, that sometimes you can do the work, and that you might think your idea is complex and multi-faceted, varied and challenges ideas of working-classness, and you can feel that reduction. It can be seen as excessive and niche, ‘Are you still working on working-class queers? When are you going to do something else?’ Or, you know, that inability to be seen, even though you think you’re doing interdisciplinary work, and you think there are multiple audiences, you can hear and almost feel that as a reduction. So it forces you to repeat again.

KG: And it can function as a stalling mechanism as well. I’m thinking of Sara Ahmed’s work on DEI policies, and how – particularly within the context of a university – it’s relatively easy to write a DEI policy, but it’s really hard to turn that into action. This demand for more and more – whether it’s policies, data or evidence – this repetition of that cycle can serve to maintain the status quo. Data plays a big role in that stalling, that distraction from actually solving the problem.

YT: That appetite for proliferating identity categories can be good and bad, right? I was thinking about one of the respondents, and I give him a bit of a hard time in the book about queer left politics appearing and even having a certain sort of cultural capital, like in the celebration of mutual aid groups as another queer possibility, so queer’s out there in the world and people are claiming it for themselves.

I was also thinking about the way that some respondents are talking about themselves in new and old ways, that repetition of old issues in new language and through new debates, like intersectionality as a hashtag. That move into you owning or being or having intersectionality as something you are rather than something you do is an interesting sign of our times.

KG: That’s really interesting and perhaps a bit controversial as well. I’m thinking of the work of the academic Kadji Amin, based in the US, who’s written about how we are living through a taxonomical renaissance and speaks to this idea of ever-expanding lists of intersecting identity categories. But how, in some spaces and places, this approach doesn’t necessarily help. Just adding more and more options to a list isn’t getting into the fundamentals of what’s wrong with a system or what’s wrong with a data collection tool. We particularly see this in tech spaces, where social media platforms just think ‘If we add more sexualities and more gender options then great’. But the inner workings of the system remain unchanged.

With these ever-expanding lists, they also enshrine or reify certain things, which aren’t always reflective of the outside world. In Queer Data I caution that ‘we’re not going to fix problems just by adding more and more identity categories’. There’s a need to think about different coalitions –  and this is what your book does really well – across categories of race, gender, disability and class, rather than trying to disaggregate and disaggregate and disaggregate, where we’ve diluted our connections down to little beyond our individual self.

YT: We’re both interested in seemingly successful stories of sexual citizenship: the rights that we’ve got and we’re told that these battles are won, we’re in a post-equalities or a Rainbow Europe or however you want to imagine it. We have rights, we can take up space. However, as with any apparent move forward, questions remain as to who’s left behind. What do you think are the new battlegrounds for sexual citizenship?

KG: It’s really hard. If you take Scotland, for example, there’s a lot of activity around LGBTQ rights: the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which was passed by the Scottish Parliament and then torpedoed by the UK government, there’s legislation coming into force in 2024 on hate crimes and coverage for LGBTQ people, and both of these developments have positives but also negatives. I think LGBTQ communities don’t speak enough about the negatives. We don’t speak enough about what something like gender recognition reform means for people who don’t wish to have their sex registered by the state or who don’t wish to be counted and classified by these top-down institutions.

With hate crime reform, expanding hate crime legislation invites the police into more and more aspects of our lives and involves determining groups who are covered and not covered by the legislation. For those people who are not covered, where are they left in this LGBTQ-inclusive Scotland?

With this legislation, which is presented as progressive, some people are positioned as winners and losers and I don’t think there’s enough critical discussion about whether we need or want more hate crime laws. Will that actually address the problem of hate directed towards queer people, or will it just provide more funding and resources to the police and law enforcement?’ With the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, what about queer people who don’t wish to register with the state? Where are they left in this new administrative arrangement?

YT: It makes me think about the promise of civic nationalism and Scotland’s grand claims about being ‘world-leading’. It sort of disappears a history that is felt very present across a wide range of lives. That message of being ‘world-leading’ can be felt as a sort of interruption and an unreality.

It’s Alisha [an interviewee] in the book who says something about Scottish independence and the hopefulness for a different kind of state, where queers have long been sceptical of the state and the promise that it protects us. Alisha’s quote is ringing in my ears because she says something like, ‘But it’s just another structure. You’ve just replaced a structure with another structure and it’ll be more of the same and we’ll call it different things, we’ll rename it, but my life likely won’t get materially different’.

“Being ‘world-leading’ can be felt as a sort of interruption and an unreality”

Yvette Taylor

KG: Particularly the promise of representation. Having representation of minoritised groups within the structure doesn’t necessarily make the situation better. It can become harder because you’re now being told that the structure is representative, it’s diverse, it’s inclusive, while the politics it pursues is extremely harmful. There are risks in seeing representation as a be all and end all. Data plays a role in that as well, as we see lots of DEI projects focused on the diversity breakdowns of the workforce of organisations or institutions. But I think that’s only one part of a far larger project in the fight for change.

YT: You’ve taken us to that question of ‘what to do?’ That fight that we’re both invested in – in terms of taking up space, inhabiting the university, particularly in terms of what that means in a classroom, in a space as part of a learning community, our reading lists are political, they’re activist, they should be activated by different readers. We’ve looped right back around to research agency and reflexivity but I wonder if you could say more about doing and being a researcher?

KG: It’s a question I get a lot, ‘This is all great, these ideas, these concepts but what do we do about them in our day-to-day life?’ What I hope is that, although my work doesn’t always provide answers, it provides moments for thinking differently about things. For example, on numbers let’s think about the politics of counting, the politics of quantitative data and how these types of data have histories, politics and engage questions of power.

The book doesn’t say it’s bad to design inclusive surveys or inclusive research methods, but it does say we might reach a point where we decide, ‘Actually, these systems can’t be fixed, we need to change course and instruct people to refuse to participate in surveys or censuses or those types of things’. I try and prompt critical ideas rather than provide a blueprint for what happens next. I wrote the book over three years ago now and the world has changed a lot in that time.

YT: That’s interesting, that we are already out of time when we’re writing, we’ve already lost our data as we’re putting words to the page. I was reading Queer Data during the pandemic period when we were getting inundated with different kinds of bad data but it made me think more hopefully as well, in terms of what to do next.

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Texts referenced in the conversation

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Amin, Kadji. ‘Taxonomically Queer?: Sexology and New Queer, Trans, and Asexual Identities’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 29, no. 1 (1 January 2023): 91–107.

Guyan, Kevin. Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Taylor, Yvette. Working-Class Queers: Time, Place and Politics. London: Pluto Press, 2023.