On June 11th, CHAMP held another of our monthly community forums in New York City – Does Gender Engender HIV? Vulnerability and Resilience Across the Gender Spectrum. The forum was a great success, attracting a good-sized crowd despite occurring smack in the middle of Pride month! Our panelists were Vanessa Brocato of GMHC, Nathan Levitt of Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, and Kim Watson of the Community Healthcare Network – each one dynamic and informative. CHAMP's very own Coco Jervis facilitated a lively discussion about ways that the social, economic and political aspects of gender and gender expression are entwined with the HIV epidemic.
Violence Against Women
Vanessa focused on the various kinds of violence perpetrated against women that heightens their vulnerability to HIV. She discussed childhood sexual abuse and incest, which can result in trauma around sexuality in adulthood. Stranger violence, rape and street harassment – violent, societal enforcement of gender norms – often link with queer bashing, and marginalized women are more likely to suffer such violence, further increasing their vulnerability to HIV. Vanessa also talked about state violence against women as exemplified by incarceration and violence within women's prisons.
Vanessa ended her presentation with a call to action, insisting that change is possible, inevitable, and absolutely necessary. She offered a statement by Thoraya A. Obaid, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund – “It has become clear that culture is not a sort of ‘primordial constraint' from the past that hinders economic and social progress. Culture is constantly being changed by the people who construct it in the first place.”
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Click here to download Vanessa's presentation.
Barriers to Services & Healthcare for Trans People
Nathan discussed the barriers that many transgender people confront – lack of adequate social services, health care, basic access to employment and housing, discrimination, ignorance, poverty, prejudice and fear. Very few health providers and clinics provide supportive and sensitive health services. Trans people are disproportionately affected by HIV and their needs, rates of infection, and issues aren't well understood or documented.
Addressing vulnerability to HIV, Nathan described The General Theory of Risk Reduction in Transgender Populations – “If trans people can safely change their bodies to become who they truly are, they will protect those bodies because people who are happier in their bodies tend to take better care of them.”
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Click here to download Nathan's presentation.
Personal Experience
Kim shared some provocative insights into her own experiences navigating the public health workforce as a person of transgender experience. She talked about the survival skills she's been able to pass on to the younger generation that she now works with at the Transgender Program of the Community Healthcare Network in the Bronx. She also discussed the critical inroads she's made advocating for CDC-funded HIV prevention research in and about the transgender community.
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At the heart of the evening's discussion was the necessity of collaboration among people of all gender expressions to fight sexism, transphobia and the gender panic behind homophobia, all root causes of social injustice and marginalization that fuel the epidemic.
CHAMP's forum series, The Politics of HIV Prevention, is co-sponsored by The LGBT Center. Other co-sponsors for the forum in June were Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), Center for HIV Law and Policy, FIERCE!, GMHC, Harlem United, HIV Law Project, Manhattan HIV CARE Network, New York City AIDS Housing Network, Queers for Economic Justice, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Thank you all!
Our Next Forum
Join us Wednesday, June 9, 6-30-8:30pm at The LGBT Center. The topic is Latin@ Lives and the Next Generation of HIV Prevention: Policies, Politics and Research. See you there!
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