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Abstract

Cisheterosexism in LGBTQIA+ Health Resource Guides Vanessa Kitzie, Amirezza Kalantari, Olivia Reed University of South Carolina, School of Information Science [email protected] Limited healthcare resources lead many LGBTQIA+ people to peer networks, often accessed via search engines to find community-created health resource websites [1–3]. Academic library guides benefit privileged LGBTQIA+ identities [4], but little is known about community guides, which may reinforce cisheterosexist narratives, causing stigma and stress [5, 6]. This study addresses this gap by scraping Google results for LGBTQIA+ health resources across US states, examining how cisheterosexism shapes health topics, geography, and representation of LGBTQIA+ populations. We hypothesize that LGBTQIA+ organizations may unintentionally reinforce cisheterosexist narratives through the resources they highlight. We used the Serper.dev API [7] to collect and filter Google search results for ‘lgbtqia health resources [state]’ in each US state, retaining 2,667 pages. Automated content analysis [8–12] used 87 binary codes (e.g., creator, audience, health topics), based on a prior codebook [3]. Most guides were authored by LGBTQIA+ organizations and non-profits, all exhibiting cisheterosexism across issues, geography, and identities. Mental health, especially crisis and suicide, dominated, but reproductive health was rare. This imbalance risks pathologizing communities and reinforcing the idea that queer people lack reproductive needs [13-18]. Gender-affirming care resources were more common in restrictive states, possibly reflecting defensive information sharing and community resilience [19]. Telehealth and affordable services for rural areas remained scarce, suggesting rural queer life erasure [20]. Resources for gay, lesbian, and transgender people were more common than for bisexual, nonbinary, intersex, or asexual/aromantic groups. Youth-targeted resources outnumbered those for other marginalized subgroups. These results underscore the need to address cisheterosexism in LGBTQIA+ resource access [21]. Our findings inform the development of a national digital consumer health resource for LGBTQIA+ communities. By identifying current resource limitations, we pinpoint which voices to engage and which health issues to address in our forthcoming resource, guided by nationally representative community forums across the US. Reference List 1.de la Cruz J, Winfrey A, Solomon S. Navigating the Network: An Exploratory Study of LGBTQIA+ Information Practices at Two Single-Sex HBCUs. College & Research Libraries. 2022 2022;83(2):278. 2.Jonas A, Vargas S, Hardy J. 'Better than Google': Information Activism for LGBTQ+ Young Adults in a Rural Community. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 2024 8(CSCW2):1-29. 3.Carter L, Kitzie V, Kauffman S. Digital Health Information Access for LGBTQIA+ Communities: A Content Analysis of Community and Institutional Guides. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 2025 62(1):1376-8. 4.Stevens GA, Fajardo FJ. LGBTQ+ health research guides at North American health sciences libraries: a survey and content analysis. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA. 2021 109(3):406. 5.Drazdowski TK, Perrin PB, Trujillo M, Sutter M, Benotsch EG, Snipes DJ. Structural equation modeling of the effects of racism, LGBTQ discrimination, and internalized oppression on illicit drug use in LGBTQ people of color. Drug and alcohol dependence. 2016 159:255- 62.. 6.Puckett JA, Aboussouan AB, Ralston AL, Mustanski B, Newcomb ME. Systems of cissexism and the daily production of stress for transgender and gender diverse people. International Journal of Transgender Health. 2023 24(1):113-26. 7.The World's Fastest & Cheapest Google Search API. https://serper.dev/. 8.Drisko JW, Maschi T. Content analysis. Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN 0190215496. 9.Krippendorff, K. Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Sage Publications, 2018. ISBN 1506395678. 10.Grimmer J, Stewart BM. Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political analysis. 2013 21(3):267-97. 11.Stone PJ, Dunphy DC, Smith MS. The general inquirer: A computer approach to content analysis. MIT Press; 1966. 12.Young L, Soroka S. Affective news: The automated coding of sentiment in political texts. Political communication. 2012 29(2):205-31. 13.Hectors A. Homosexuality in the DSM: A critique of depathologisation and heteronormativity. New Zealand Sociology. 2023 38(1):18-28. 14.Kirby M. The 1973 deletion of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder: 30 years on. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 2003 37(6):674-7. 15.Margolin L. The third backdoor: How the DSM casebooks pathologized homosexuality. Journal of Homosexuality. 2023 70(2):291-306. 16.Foucault M. The History of sexuality volume I. Routledge; 1978. 17.Epstein R. Space invaders: Queer and trans bodies in fertility clinics. Sexualities. 2018 21(7):1039-58. 18.Smietana M, Thompson C, Twine FW. Making and breaking families–reading queer reproductions, stratified reproduction and reproductive justice together. Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online. 2018 7:112. 19.Kitzie V, Wagner TL, Vera AN, editors. “In the beginning, it was little whispers… now, we’re almost a roar”: Conceptualizing a model for community and self in LGBTQ+ health information practices. International Conference on Information; 2020 2020: Springer. 20.Halberstam J. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. NYU Press; 2005. ISBN 0814735851. 21.Parmenter JG, Winter SD. Inequity within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community as a distal stressor: An extension of minority stress theory. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. 2025 12(2):308.

APA Citation

Kitzie, V., Reed, R., & Kalantari, A. (2026). Cisheterosexism in LGBTQIA+ health resource guides [Conference presentation]. Southern Chapter of the Medical Library Association (SCMLA) Annual Meeting. https://southernchaptermla.wildapricot.org/2026-SCMLA-Annual-Meeting

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