Quantitative Reasoning for Social Justice An Active Learning Workbook

Activity 1.

1. What is the first thing you notice?
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2. Scroll down to the graph displaying the number of anti-transgender bills that were considered versus the number that were passed. What are your initial thoughts on the way this data is presented?
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3. Now, scroll down to the section that displays the types of bills that are being proposed. What different pieces of information are you able to gather from this section? Try to name at least two.
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4. For the map-based visualization of anti-transgender bills, select one or more states. What do you notice across the different states you selected? Feel free to comment on the data and information itself or also on the way it is displayed.
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5. Navigate to the “Previous Years” tab on the navigation bar. Select a past year and compare your findings.
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Activity 2.

1. What does this data tell us?

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   1. Download the CSVs of this data (there is a link to do so at the bottom of the table).
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   2. Review the dataset. What do you notice? What is interesting about this data?
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   3. Choose a state. How many bills were defeated in that state? How many bills were passed into law? Are there issues that are more likely to be defeated? Are there issues that are more likely to be passed into law?
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   4. Compare what your group discovered to what other groups discovered about their states. What do you wonder?
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   5. Use the data to try to explore your questions that you wondered in the preactivity or what you are wondering now.
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2. Graphs and charts are a powerful way to explore data. Using data from your state, create a graph to revisualize the data. For example, you can explore the status of the bills or the issues of the bills.
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3. What is missing from this data?
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4. What stories are told by the sites, vs what stories are your visuals telling us.
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5. What are the other ways this story could be told?
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Activity 3.

Activity 4.

1. The Pew Research Center is a well-respected nonpartisan think tank. In 2025 they released a study about attitudes toward transgender rights in the United States

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   www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/26/americans-have-grown-more-supportive-of-restrictions-for-trans-people-in-recent-years/

   . Read through this study. What stories does this data tell us?

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2. The Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles studies sex and gender issues in public policy. In 2022 they released a study on the makeup and concerns of the transgender population in the United States

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   williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf

   . Read through this study. What stories does the data tell us?

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3. How do the stories from these studies differ? How are they the same?

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4. Think about your own lived experiences around these issues. How did this impact how you read and interpreted the data?

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5. Think about the data you saw in the previous section and the data in this section. How did the story you read from those studies differ from what you read today?

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6. Data is a valuable tool for understanding complicated issues and helping us make decisions. When we look at data about people, though, we always need to remember the people behind the data.

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   1. When we collect survey data, the researchers choose which questions they ask. How can the questions we choose erase people’s identities?

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   2. How can we collect data about vulnerable people in a way that is ethical?

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