On June 9, the Howard Brown Health Center (HBHC) held the penultimate in its series of town-hall meetings at the soon to be relocating Brown Elephant in Lake View. Hosted by HBHC Manager of Transgender Services Taylor Casey and Blue, The HRSA Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS) Program Manager, the evening focused upon health and other needs within the trans* community.
“We want to hear from all of you about ways that health can be improved for the transgender population.” HBHC President and CEO David Ernesto Munar told the audience which included trans*men and women from across the city. “We want to understand better some of the barriers to good health outcomes and the forces that promote good health.”
Among the issues raised were many health providers confusing or not respecting a person’s gender. “We’re talking about being brought into hospitals, when providers segregate you based on your genitals verses who you are what your identity is,” Blue said.
This and other abuses have led to concerns about access to health care for the trans* community.
Trans* people avoid health care access because of an innate fear of having a negative experience, having their privacy compromised, being mispronounced or rejected completely.
While they can find access to health care at city-based organizations such as HBHC, attendees said that—in the suburbs and rural areas of the state—there is next to nothing. One trans*woman noted that her doctors in the suburbs have refused to provide her with hormone treatments and monitoring. “I was very lucky when I came back to Chicago and found Howard Brown,” she said. “If I hadn’t, I would have been stuck with a doctor in the suburbs and I wouldn’t have been able to be treated. The information out there about which doctors will help you is piecemeal. You have to know where to look to find it.”
While the work of organizations like Lurie Children’s Gender and Sex Development Program was lauded as an exceptional facility for trans* youth, the consensus was reached was that trans* people can’t assume that a health care provider has had any experience working with or will be welcoming to them. Even providers who identify as LGBTQ friendly often lack mechanisms specifically for trans*people.
There is a need to both educate health care providers and collect data on trans* people—something sorely lacking on the medical community even as Medicare now permits gender reassignment surgeries and corporations and colleges have begun to add health insurance plans that cover trans*care.
“It seems like a lot of trans* people—especially trans* women—have to turn tricks to make a living, which leads to HIV,” Another attendee named Stephanie said. “Lack of access to health care means they can’t get the treatment which leads to full blown AIDS. I think we also need to talk about how we get our people employed.”
Another tremendous concern revolves around a lack of support services for trans* men. “There’s nothing for us!,” one trans* man said. “We weren’t on the cover of TIME magazine. [Trans woman Laverne Cox was recently on the publication’s cover.] In fact, we tend to be invisible in society.”
Across the street, the Center on Halsted hosted “Sisters that Love with Pride” June 14. This event offered a free and comprehensive workshop that addressed health risks facing lesbian, bisexual, trans* and queer women. A lineup of distinguished speakers and experts in their field addressed issues that included everything from HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infection prevention—especially in youth—to intimate partner abuse to insurance concerns.
Joy Davis is the president of Sisters that Love with Pride, a social club that gives back to the community. “We are about being positive in the community,” Davis said. “We are here to talk about issues like HIV, like domestic violence because people often think that it won’t affect them. If we can save one person’s life through a workshop like this, then we’ve done our job.”
It was a mission with which Sanford E. Gaylord wholeheartedly agreed. The celebrated Gay and Lesbian Hall of Famer, creative activist, actor and writer was speaking in both an official capacity as the HIV/AIDS Regional Resource Coordinator with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and as someone sharing his own impassioned story as a man living with HIV. “What sustains me and why I have been in this field for twenty years is because everyone needs options,” Gaylord said. “Here I am trying to provide the tools so that people can dance on earth and stop having to visit those who lay up under it.”
Sista Yaa Simpson was at the event as a representative of The Association of Clinical Trial Services (TACTS), an organization dedicated to bringing science to the people. Like Gaylord, she has been working for over 20 years as an advocate. She serves as an epidemiologist and statistician who has specialized in national and local clinical research around HIV such as the benefits of PrEP. “I am here as a resource for people,” she said. “I want to engage them, answer their questions and give them the facts. Knowledge is better than riches.”
Some of those facts in Simpson’s presentation included the 21,555 people living with HIV in Chicago alone with blacks averaging 618 infections per year for the past five years. Similarly shocking were the numbers of Chicagoans suffering from STIs: 28,006 chlamydia and 9,715 gonorrhea cases were reported in 2012—the highest percentage of which fell into the 13-29 year-old age bracket.
The event’s host was nationally acclaimed performance poet and activist C.C. Carter. “If we had just one person here, that is one person who can go back and tell two more people,” she said. “As more women become head of households, we must have these conversations with our youth and with our own peers particularly within same-sex relationships.”
“If you want to live, you’ve got to do what you need to do to survive,” Gaylord said on the war on HIV. “There are still struggles and there are still challenges.”
Other speakers included Renee Perry Portee, LCPC of the Inner Reflections Counseling Center, who discussed intimate partner violence and Frances Hawkins, who helped cut through the confusing array of medical and insurance terminology as well as how insurance plans work particularly in terms of deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.