<The ways stories are told and accepted as “good” and “proper” and “to a standard” are dictated by the most privileged and, thus, dull.>

Crystal Rasmussen in Diary of a Drag Queen, 2019.

“I’m here to take up space and tell you what it’s like to live these experiences, rather than report on them like some armchair anthropologist”(Rasmussen, 2019, p.158). In their book Diary of a Drag Queen, Rasmussen collects the first-person narratives of a gender-queer individual who is not only telling their story but is also reporting on how societal power structures condition the way of accessing decent housing, health conditions, labor market, and love (Rasmussen, 2019).

Throughout the history of society, the dominant discourses have been told and reinforced by power positioned individuals, marginalizing the discourses that push off from what has been told to be normative. Public health policies cannot be solely proposed and implemented by using a hierarchy of evidence pyramid that does not take into consideration contextual factors and methodological aptness (Dobrow et al., 2006; Freeman, 2019; Parkhurst & Abeysinghe, 2016). This type of approach can lead to limit the number and type of outcomes of a public health policy implementation and disregards the fact that evidence can also be found through lived-experience knowledge and first-person narrative approaches (Freeman, 2019; Parkhurst & Abeysinghe, 2016). Because of this complexity, a whole complex system should be applied where other considerations are also taken into account in order to produce evidence, design interventions, evaluate their performance, identify gaps, and re-start the process again (Dobrow et al., 2006; Glasziou et al., 2004; Parkhurst & Abeysinghe, 2016).

The COVID 19 Other Front Line is an initiative that collects firs-person narratives on how COVID-19 pandemic was lived across the globe and to what extent policies were appropriate, effective and applicable. Stories are widely circulated for policy-makers to learn and take action.

Available at www.otherfrontline.org

To critically assess public health concerns it is very much needed to be aware that populations are dynamic and, inherently, cannot remain static (Freeman, 2019; Hatt et al., 2015; Shelton, 2014, 2015). This is, of course, a challenge to be tackled by uprising methodologies to produce knowledge like Participatory-Action Research and Community-Based Research, as well as methods to assess the quality of evidence, based on what is the problem that it intends to aide, in which context it is occurring and how is it experienced by the population (Freeman, 2019). The latter can be adapted to the typology of evidence matrix suggested by Muir Gray and adapted by Petticrew and Roberts (Petticrew, 2003). It is also worth remarking that different types of evidence comprise different types of objectives, some evidence can guide to the appropriateness of an intervention while other, towards the effectiveness and applicability (Dobrow et al., 2006). Another challenge that can be identified is the systematization of investigation and dissemination strategies to maximize the effectiveness in a collective scale (Dobrow et al., 2006). Here is where the intersecting disciplines lay upon and adapt to the triangulation scheme in a system that can further be dedicated to engage all the stakeholders throughout the entirety of the policy-making process (Freeman, 2019; Hatt et al., 2015; Shelton, 2014, 2015).

Now is the turn for you readers to work along your communities, organizations, professionals, and governments, to promote social justice and health equity for everyone. It is time to acknowledge that evidence production for public health policy-making is the sum of intersecting dynamics, such as gender, ethnicity, social status, nationality, sexual orientation, ZIP code, and many others that have been misbalancing the opportunities and dignity of those whose discourses have been shut throughout historical evolution and revolution.

Reference list:

• Dobrow, M. J., Goel, V., Lemieux-Charles, L., & Black, N. A. (2006). The impact of context on evidence utilization: A framework for expert groups developing health policy recommendations. Social Science and Medicine, 63(7), 1811–1824. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2006.04.020

• Freeman, E. (2019). Feminist Theory and Its Use in Qualitative Research in Education. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193

• Glasziou, P., Vandenbroucke, J., & Chalmers, I. (2004). Education and debate Assessing the quality of research. In BMJ (Vol. 328)

• Hatt, L. E., Chatterji, M., Miles, L., Comfort, A. B., Bellows, B. W., & Okello, F. O. (2015). A false dichotomy: RCTs and their contributions to evidence-based public health. Global Health Science and Practice, 3(1), 138–140. https://doi.org/10.9745/GHSP-D-14-00245

• Parkhurst, J. O., & Abeysinghe, S. (2016). What Constitutes “Good” Evidence for Public Health and Social Policy-making? From Hierarchies to Appropriateness. Social Epistemology, 30(5–6), 665–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2016.1172365

• Petticrew, M. (2003). Evidence, hierarchies, and typologies: horses for courses. In J Epidemiol Community Health (Vol. 57)

• Rasmussen, T. (2019). Diary of a Drag Queen. Ebury Press

• Shelton, J. D. (2014). Evidence-based public health: not only whether it works, but how it can be made to work practicably at scale. In Global Health: Science and Practice (Vol. 2, Issue 3)

• Shelton, J. D. (2015). Response to “a false dichotomy: RCTs and their contributions to evidence-based public health.” In Global Health Science and Practice (Vol. 3, Issue 1, pp. 141–143). Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.9745/GHSP-D-15-00045