Development of an affirming and customizable electronic survey of sexual and reproductive health experiences for transgender and gender nonbinary people.

To address pervasive measurement biases in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) research, our interdisciplinary team created an affirming, customizable electronic survey to measure experiences with contraceptive use, pregnancy, and abortion for transgender and gender nonbinary people assigned female or intersex at birth and cisgender sexual minority women. Between May 2018 and April 2019, we developed a questionnaire with 328 items across 10 domains including gender identity; language used for sexual and reproductive anatomy and events; gender affirmation process history; sexual orientation and sexual activity; contraceptive use and preferences; pregnancy history and desires; abortion history and preferences; priorities for sexual and reproductive health care; family building experiences; and sociodemographic characteristics. Recognizing that the words people use for their sexual and reproductive anatomy can vary, we programmed the survey to allow participants to input the words they use to describe their bodies, and then used those customized words to replace traditional medical terms throughout the survey. This process-oriented paper aims to describe the rationale for and collaborative development of an affirming, customizable survey of the SRH needs and experiences of sexual and gender minorities, and to present summary demographic characteristics of 3,110 people who completed the survey. We also present data on usage of customizable words, and offer the full text of the survey, as well as code for programming the survey and cleaning the data, for others to use directly or as guidelines for how to measure SRH outcomes with greater sensitivity to gender diversity and a range of sexual orientations.

The Imperative for Transgender and Gender Nonbinary Inclusion: Beyond Women's Health.

We aim to make evident that solely referencing cisgender women in the context of sexual and reproductive health-particularly pregnancy planning and care-excludes a diverse group of transgender and gender nonbinary people who have sexual and reproductive health needs and experiences that can be similar to but also unique from those of cisgender women. We call on clinicians and researchers to ensure that all points of sexual and reproductive health access, research, sources of information, and care delivery comprehensively include and are accessible to people of all genders. We describe barriers to sexual and reproductive health care and research participation unique to people of marginalized gender identities, provide examples of harm resulting from these barriers, and offer concrete suggestions for creating inclusive, accurate, and respectful care and research environments-which will lead to higher quality health care and science for people of all genders.