UC research group assesses area transgender community needs

The University of Cincinnati research collaborative, the Cincinnati Project, reached out to a group of sociology students in 2020 with an idea to create an assessment of the needs of the Cincinnati transgender community. The intent was for local governments and organizations to use the report to identify points of weakness and strength of health care, housing and transportation.

Stef Murawsky, a PhD student in sociology in UC's College of Arts and Sciences, was immediately on board. Murawsky, whose research and dissertation are focused on trans health care, had interviewed roughly 30 people at the time in the Cincinnati area about their health care experiences before the Cincinnati Project even reached out to them.

“It was a very obvious ‘yes’ to the project,” Murawsky says. “But then there was a desperate need for other people.”  

Murawsky and Aalap Bommaraju recruited Juliana Madzia and Zoe Muzyczka to the project. All A&S doctoral students and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, the group was quick to join the effort. Madzia, who is working toward a dual MD and sociology PhD, wants to go into trans healthcare doing gender-affirming procedures as a plastic surgeon. “It’s a community that I care a lot about, and I see that there a lot of unmet needs here in Cincinnati,” Madzia says. 

The assessment will aim to provide local advocacy groups with data to help them make a case to receive funding. “The assessment can provide a data set so that local organizations can actually point to tangible things to say that there is a known issue,” Murawsky says. “It’s not just anecdotal.”  

While the Cincinnati Project funded the trans needs assessment, the Transgender Advocacy Council of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky worked closely in providing guidance. The two organizations agreed that it was important to address not only access to healthcare, but also housing and transportation needs.

In the national 2015 U.S. transgender survey, nearly one third of respondents had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, and more than one-quarter of those who experienced homelessness in the past year avoided staying in a shelter because they feared being mistreated as a transgender person.   

The advocacy council focuses on these problems in its work with adult trans care and housing, which becomes particularly critical when services for trans children become unavailable at the age of 18.

“Once you age out of the system, people forget about you,” says council secretary Cathy Allison. “In Cincinnati, the biggest problem appears to be housing for trans people.” 

Sociology professor Danielle Bessett took note of the group’s work quickly. “They’re all excellent,” she says. “They all have a real commitment to the things that I think really matter, like students doing collaborative and ethical work—focused work that matters to real people.”  

In addition to working on the assessment, each student has other responsibilities. Some are still in classes, some are up for Ph.D. candidacy, and some have full-time jobs. “It’s been piecing it together, where we can, like squeezing out that one or two hours a week to do this,” Murawsky says.  

The group split up the work: Murawsky worked on advertising and design, Madzia worked on recruitment and data analysis, Bommaraju created the survey tool and Muzyczka served as project manager, keeping the team on task and assembling a final report. 

So far, the response rate to the trans needs survey has been significant since its launch in June 2021. The group has been focused on determining demographic components of who is filling out the survey, looking at race and income level to see if the survey is getting a diverse group of people in the community, according to Muzyczka.  

Beyond data collection, Bommaraju notes that a community outcome of the assessment has been creating an infrastructure that will allow TAC to partner with funding sources with the city.