Sheeneneh Smith, a transgender activists, speaks at a Boston rally held in honourof slain transgender community members. Source: Julie Jacobson/AP
A group of people have been identified to be acquiring HIV faster than ever. This population of people have been overlooked causing a dramatic rise in the number of infected. According to recent findings from the World Health Organization that analyzed data from 15 countries, transgender women are nearly 49 times more likely than the general population to contract HIV. This means that, just for being who they are, they are part of the population at highest risk for acquiring HIV.
But according to advocates, the transgender community's HIV problem remains an "invisible" epidemic, as trans women are too often ignored in health advocacy, stigmatized for their diagnosis or criminalized.
Mic spoke to the Human Rights Campaign's Noël Gordon, a senior specialist for HIV prevention and health equity, who argued that transgender women "find themselves at the eye of a perfect storm" when it comes to contracting HIV. "A number of factors are largely out of their control that push them into situations where they're more likely to encounter HIV and less likely to be able to treat it," Gordon told Mic. These factors include transphobia and poverty, as trans people are nearly four times more likely to earn less than $10,000 a year.
Gordon explained that without employment and housing protections, many trans women engage in survival sex work in order to support themselves. "Through no fault of her own," Gordon said, "she's been pushed into a situation where in order to support herself, she effectively has to put herself at risk for contracting HIV."
The other factor is fear of prosecution by the police. These damaging ideas often silence transgender women, keeping them in the closet about their status. "If I'm a transgender woman living with HIV, I [might not] want my partner to know because I fear prosecution from the police," Gordon, of the Human Rights Commission, said. "I might withhold that information or withhold it from a doctor."
Cecilia Chung, a senior strategist for the Transgender Law Center, argued the issue isn't sex work itself but the ways in which trans women's limited options continue to be criminalized. Prostitution is outlawed in all 50 states in the U.S., except for some counties in Nevada, and in over 30 states, people living with HIV can be imprisoned for nondisclosure, according to Chung. "That means that if someone has engaged in sex work and hasn't disclosed their HIV status, they can potentially be charged with a felony," Chung told Mic.
But as Morgan M. Page, a trans activist working on sex work and HIV issues, explained, the threat of imprisonment isn't the only reason trans women living with HIV might not be receiving the care they need. It begins with the lack of information and resources available to trans women. "There are almost no HIV prevention materials directed at trans women, and the ones that are might not be in the right language for people who need them," Page told Mic. "There are very few available in Spanish and only two or three available in English."
Due to the lack of supportive doctors and health providers in too many areas of the country, "trans people have to be our own doctors and our own experts," Morgan explained. "While we do share a lot of important and valid information with each other, sometimes we perpetuate ideas that have no scientific basis, simply because there aren't any doctors there telling us that it's not true."
But as Chung explained, many health care providers, medical professionals and researchers continue to ignore these lived realities of trans women; even the census has yet to include transgender women in the survey. "It continues to tell us that we are second class, that our lives don't matter," Chung said. "It's easy to understand why we would feel angry to be in a room where nobody acknowledges us."
Source: Yahoo!News
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