Researchers Rush to Save US Government Data on Trans Youth—Before It Disappears
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Summary
At a hackathon at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, public health researchers attempted to preserve data from US government websites, amid fears that the current Trump administration is trying to undermine research on topics such as climate change to systemic racism.
Since Trump’s inauguration, words such as “transgender” and “Latinx” have reportedly been removed from government websites, alongside thousands of websites disappearing entirely, while the president’s recent comments have led to a further targeting of gender-related material.
Fears have been raised that certain datasets, such as the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which is one of the only nationally representative surveys that collects data on transgender kids, may not be available for much longer.
Researchers have sought to back up datasets, while archivists have recreated the pre-Trump version of the CDC website and are hosting it in Europe.
