Visualising the UK’s LGBTQ+ population

rainbowR workshop

Author

Kirstie Ken English & Nicola Rennie

Published

February 25, 2026

In 2021/2022 the UK censuses represented LGBTQ+ people in new ways. The aim of this workshop is to introduce participants to this data and encourage them to produce visualisations utilising it. This workshop is ran in association with the University of Edinburgh’s Gender and Sexuality Data Lab and is heavily inspired by TidyTuesday. In the first part of this workshop queer feminist researcher and educator, Kirstie Ken English, will explain how LGBTQ+ populations were represented in the UK censuses and discuss the data available. In the second half data visualisation expert, Nicola Rennie, will walk participants through the code of an example visualisation of the census data. This workshop is a jumping off activity as participants will be prompted to design their own visualisations and share them in the weeks following the conference on Bluesky and LinkedIn via the #VisLGBTQ. Alongside discussions of the value of visualisations the workshop will be a space to recognise the limitations in how LGBTQ+ census data has been shared. Data sets and example code will be provided to all participants.

More information on the conference website.

Contributing

If you can’t attend the workshop but still want to take part, then between the 25th February and 13th March you can create a visualisation using the data in the data folder. Your visualisations can include other variables and use data from any of the three UK censuses. Post your visualisation on social media using the hashtag #VisLGBTQ and share your code!

The data available is currently quite limited so feel free to use the hashtag to discuss said limitations or outline visualisations you would do if more data was available.

If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your visualisation on social media, you can make a pull request to add it to the contributions folder in the GitHub repository. Create a new subfolder inside contributions which contains an image file with your chart, code, and a README if you want to include any additional commentary.