In the calm, dark hours after we’d put our baby to bed, we were cleaning our house and organising ourselves for the next morning.

After we finished washing the dishes and sterilising bottles, we closed the door to the kitchen and opened the laptop.

We began to fill out the 2021 Census. We’d been parents for just over six months, and were excited to be recorded in our new role. To be counted. To be acknowledged. We were doing this parenting thing too.

But as we moved through the screens and waited for the questions to load, we soon found that the people being recorded weren’t us at all.

Image: Taken by the author, Georgia Mill

The start of the Census contained questions asking for our basic information, and about whether we were in a relationship.

The form asked us what our relationship to our baby was, so we selected “child of both of us”.

On the next screen, it asked us, “In which country was [our baby’s]’s mother born?” Directly below it asked, “In which country was [our baby]’s father born?”

We turned to each other with eyebrows raised. In the instructions of the question, it explained that if the child has same-sex parents, we should “only include the country of birth of one of the two parents”, as if that was somehow an appropriate substitution. 

For a form designed to collect “specific” data, somehow our truth felt irrelevant.

It was clear that it didn’t matter what we put here, because the Census wasn’t interested in the reality of our family. We were being stretched to fit within a system that didn’t really want to accommodate us.

My attention began to drift around the room: to the pile of nappies that needed stuffing, to the dog that needed walking, to the sound of the washing machine finishing its first wash of the night. 

I was annoyed with how limited the functionality of the survey was. There seemed to be no conditional logic.

Most surveys have a ‘logic’, which tailors the questions to the information already given; a simple IF that > THEN this function.

This logic allows surveys to collect more meaningful and relevant data, and allows the participant to have a better experience. 

In August 2023, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) issued a statement of regret to members of the LGBTIQ+ community who experienced hurt as a result of the harmful framing of questions, and the omission of certain topics in the 2021 Census.

The statement came after a complaint was made to the Australian Human Rights Commission by Equality Australia and non-binary Newcastle resident April Long.

Long had experienced a similar frustration to us when trying to fill out the Census for their family and, as is common in our community, they’d submitted a complaint to help address it.

I refer to this practice as “queer admin”: a form of bureaucratic self-advocacy that many LGBTQIA+ people perform in order to fit within (or correct) established systems and outdated paperwork.

I’ve engaged in queer admin every time our family doesn’t fit on a form, or when I spend hours on the phone to a service provider to correct an error that wasn’t our fault to begin with.

Queer admin is about refusing to be forced into categories you don’t belong in. It’s squeezing your identity onto the side of an A4 registration form.

Queer admin is exhausting and empowering. It’s aggressive and defensive. It’s fine and it’s not fine. 

Queer admin might seem trivial to some people, or even a luxury to be able to perform it. But it is needed, because policies and laws are informed by the data collected.

Plus, our history is partially told through archives, which need to be accurate. What is the cost to us, our children, and to all LGBTIQA+ people, of denying the existence of our families?

We’re encouraged to believe that with all the administrative power and impartiality that government services are supposed to have, we will at the very least be acknowledged. But the burden of accurate record keeping often falls to us.

We are so often in the act of “queering paperwork”. 

When our first baby was born, they were admitted to special care for an infection in their lungs.

In a postpartum haze, my partner and I stood over the tiny plastic bassinet, noticing how it looked more like a classroom drawer that should be filled with tired Crayola markers than something designed for freshly born humans.

We watched their little chest labour up and down. A nurse told us that due to COVID-19 restrictions, only the parents should be in the room.

We stared back at her, too tired to fight. We were waiting for someone else to do the work.

It’s often in the most vulnerable of times that we’re confronted with these obstacles. What other people may see as a simple mistake on a form, or a slip of the tongue, means more to us, because our existence and identity feel at stake.

Writer and trans advocate (and former Archer contributor) Liz Duck-Chong has previously written about how bureaucratic inertia is failing non-binary people.

I spoke to Liz about her research and experience as a queer trans woman. She highlighted the relentless difficulty in dealing with these processes, in particular when it comes to updating identity documents like driver’s licences and birth certificates.

Having documentation that correctly matches your identity can mean that people are safer and at less risk of violence and intimidation.

Although, Liz pointed out that the key factor is choice. Some people may wish to update their identity marker to an X, as is now possible on Australian passports, whereas others may feel safer travelling overseas and not being identifiable on documents as trans or gender diverse.

Liz shared a general frustration around the carelessness of surveys.

“There are ways to ask these questions that aren’t de-legitimising of people’s identities,” she said. 

She also questioned the perceived ‘neutrality’ of administrative processes, arguing that they’re not neutral “because [LGBTQIA+] people are not seen as neutral”. 

Administrative restrictions are often seen as more important than the wellbeing of individuals. Bureaucratic apathy is often used as an excuse to justify the status quo.

I recently spoke to a friend of mine about their experience with queer admin.

They told me they once took their child to the emergency department with their partner, and were told that they couldn’t both be noted as the child’s mother, because the form didn’t have space.

“I don’t know what to tell you, we’re standing right in front of you. He’s got two mums,” they said.

It’s the lack of imagination (and perhaps empathy) that bothers me. It’s as if people can’t seem to imagine a reality different from their own.

Another friend told me that she recently applied for a mortgage with her wife. On the paperwork, they both indicated their gender and preferred titles.

Despite clearly articulating that they both identified as female, the bank assumed that one of them must be a man, addressing all correspondence to a “Mr”.

Her wife was already a customer of the bank, so they had her honourifics on file. It took them months to correct the error, but they occasionally still receive correspondence addressed to “Mr”.

I spoke to another parent with a young baby, who told me that her employer didn’t have a parental leave option for birthing parents that weren’t going to be primary carers.

Her partner would be the primary carer, but they couldn’t fill out the forms for this arrangement. 

Is it so outrageous to think that we would be considered in the design of forms and surveys?

Tacking us onto existing forms and processes designed to only fit heteronormativity will never accurately capture our realities. These structures only seek to reinforce the status quo and highlight our existence outside of it.

They also limit people’s ability to reimagine family structures, childcare arrangements, financial security, identity documentation and workplace participation.

We need to seriously rethink how we collect data – and what is actually necessary to deliver services and entitlements. 

Meaningful, more inclusive changes to forms and processes would benefit everyone.

Recently, the gender-neutral term “birth parent” was reverted back to “mother” on Medicare forms.

Neutral language is perceived as some kind of threat to a God-given right to call yourself Mum or Dad at every possible opportunity, rather than providing an option that will accommodate more people.

We’re not looking to forms and paperwork to create our identity. We want the choice to have it recorded and reflected, and for these forms not to be a barrier to us accessing services safely.

Despite not filling out the Census accurately, we still hit the submit button and closed the laptop.

We sighed, turned on the TV, did the next batch of washing and listened to the wind sneak through the gaps in the windows.