Lesbian and bisexual women and LGBTQ couples

My work focuses on the health of LGBT couples, and my career now feels like it is over before it even really started. I’m on the tenure track, and on March 21, I learned that my two NIH grants were terminated due to “gender ideology.”

One was a K99/R00 [NIH Pathway to Independence Award for early career scientists] focused on women in relationships with women and how alcohol use affects these relationships. Women are much more likely than men to drink when they are feeling relationship stress, and drinking can impact relationship satisfaction, end a relationship, and even be a precursor to abuse and violence. Research among gay and bisexual men far outpaces that among lesbian and bisexual women. Most research among LGBTQ women has been descriptive in nature, which limits what we know about the causes of some of the whopping health disparities we see. To try to push research among LGBTQ women forward, we were exploring the mechanisms of action for LGBTQ women that might potentiate risk to use alcohol to cope. We can’t develop interventions until we know why LGBTQ women are drinking at such higher rates than straight women. To pinpoint potential mechanisms that could serve as targets for interventions, we were planning to look at factors such as emotion regulation, coping, and attachment styles. We were also interested in childhood factors that might heighten later risk, such as parents’ substance use history, when the woman came out, childhood stressors, and relationship history.

I also lost NIH funding for my first R01 grant [research projects that are hypothesis-driven with strong preliminary data] focused on family formation in LGBTQ couples, who typically have many challenges with forming families. For some couples, using in vitro fertilization or surrogacy may be prohibitively expensive. In some states, it may be difficult for LGBTQ couples to foster or adopt a child due to stigma against LGBTQ people. Relationships are good for health, and when couples cannot have children due to external barriers, this can impact their well-being. The goal of the study was to identify the multiple kinds of barriers—like societal stigma, laws and policies, role models, and finances—to having children for LGBTQ couples and develop interventions to reduce these barriers.

I was also preparing to hire my first PhD student along with a postdoctoral fellow, but I can no longer do that due to the termination of my NIH funding. There are very few psychologists who study LGBTQ women, and I was excited to train others to do this work. I only have enough faculty start-up funding to last through March for me, my research manager, and my research assistant.

I appealed both grant terminations and recently resubmitted two NIH grants that hopefully are within the NIH’s priority health areas.

One of my major concerns going forward is that our nation will not be collecting health data on vulnerable LGBTQ populations for the foreseeable future. In addition to terminating studies like mine, I would anticipate that national studies such as the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System will likely take out measures of sexual identity and gender. All of this means we are losing the ability to track the health of groups that are already disproportionately affected by health disparities. The pipeline for future researchers who do this work is also being cut off. We have made so many inroads in LGBTQ research in the last decade, and I worry that with the loss of funding, the next generation of researchers will not be able to continue this area of study.