So I like, wrote an op-ed. And I’m gonna be like, interviewed for something else. And there’s been a lot of developments and awards and events over the last year, I don’t really want to do an update. But it was suggested to me to copypasta the rough draft of what I had written for that op-ed article because so much of my voice is in it and it’s all messy and rambly and has its own timbre within the composure so fuck it. Here goes:
The discussions around gender-affirming healthcare as it pertains to Pride, human rights, policy, and empathy have been increasingly polarizing. This narrative, however, does not need to be an either/or, but rather a both/and. Political developments and barriers around gender-affirming healthcare are horrifying, to say the least. They entail a landscape of doom and gloom. They illustrate how personal intolerance and bigotry can be both overtly and insidiously invested into actions that actively harm our communities on all ends of the spectrum. AND we still have the capacity to love, to understand, and to celebrate our differences as part of what makes our world brighter, more colorful, and more uplifting. In my 15 years of advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community and its individuals, whether through education, mental health, or healthcare, I have learned the many ways in which mutual support grows from ongoing interpersonal connections and broader recognition of the historical efforts to fight for the safety and well-being of our people. “Fight” is the operative word here for sure, as it is a struggle, a push, and a movement.
When I teach people about the LGBTQ+ acronym, I am often asked why the “T” is included in an otherwise sexual orientation-related assortment of letters when it stands for a gender identity. The explanation is both simple AND complex: it is the T, the transgender piece of that umbrella that has been fundamental in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, yet simultaneously the letter representing a community that is constantly rendered less visible, less accepted, and more of a subject for debate rather than an acknowledgement of transgender humanity. Transgender people are not a concept, or a philosophy, or a debate. We are people who deserve basic dignity and respect just like anyone else. People who deserve not just to survive in a world seemingly so hellbent on making survival impossible, we are people who deserve to thrive. You might think that survival is a basic need, but there is a reason both of the following expressions circulate with equal fervor during the month of June: “Love is love,” and “Pride started as a riot.” Love and anger are not mutually exclusive, and as the great lesbian poet Audre Lorde once said regarding anger, “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change… Anger is a source of empowerment we must not fear to tap for energy rather than guilt.”
Gender-affirming healthcare would never have been a reality if not for the efforts from Black and Brown transgender individuals over fifty years ago. With figures like Stormé DeLarverie helping set the 1969 Stonewall Riots in motion in New York City, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera forming Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries to care for unhoused transgender youth, sex workers, and formerly incarcerated people, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy’s creation of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, we must honor and respect the shoulders who lifted up the possibility for gender-affirming healthcare to exist at all. The very first Pride itself was a celebration of the one-year anniversary of Stonewall and everything it set forth to protect the LGBTQ+ community.
Just like the narrative around LGBTQ+ rights and Pride as a “both/and,” gender-affirming healthcare addresses both a patient’s mind AND body as it relates to their overall sense of wellness. Broadly defined, gender-affirming healthcare is healthcare, period. For the purposes of what type of healthcare can be provided for trans and gender diverse patients, it includes things like STI testing, cancer screenings, hormone therapy, regular lab testing, surgical procedures, and linking people with additional services like mental health, just to name a few. Gender-affirming care is all-encompassing and holistic: it takes into account the obstacles many trans and gender diverse folks have had to face or are currently facing to access medical means to help them feel more affirmed in their identity.
To be clear, these obstacles are fueled by hatred on both personal and political levels of federal, state, and local policies. In 2023 alone, a record-breaking 543 and counting anti-transgender bills have been introduced in 49 states preventing and prohibiting gender-affirming care of all kinds. To put this in perspective of the magnitude regarding anti-transgender policy expansions, 2023’s anti-transgender legislation almost doubles the combined bills introduced in 2020, 2021, and 2022. These bills attack everything from transgender youth’s access to safe bathrooms in schools to gender-affirming medical professionals being charged with a felony for providing hormonal treatment to mitigate the distressing and dangerous symptoms of gender dysphoria. Most recently, as of May 17th, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the ability for the state to forcibly remove children from the custody of their families if they are receiving any form of gender-affirming care. The most daunting task of writing this article is knowing that by the time it is published, these policies will increase in both quantity and severity with consequences of incomprehensible harm to the community.
Audre Lorde also once said “Your silence will not protect you.” Anger and love are both kinetic energies that amplify our abilities to break through silence, whether that is having tender discussions with our families about what we can do to help, writing to our local legislators about what they can do to help, speaking up at work meetings, cheering on drag queens at brunch, or singing in joy at Pride parades. It is that liminal space of silence that breeds fear, stagnation, helplessness, confusion, and loss. Love, anger, understanding, and support are just some of the antidotes we can use in our own ways. What will you do to keep the momentum going? What are your intentions to break through this silence, no matter how big or small you feel they might be?
Sources:
Broady, K. E. & Romer, C. (2022, March 9). The black and Brown activists who started Pride. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/06/29/the-black-and-brown-activists-who-started-pride/
2023 Anti-Trans Bills: Trans legislation tracker. 2023 Anti-Trans Bills: Trans Legislation Tracker. (n.d.). https://translegislation.com/
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007).