Che Gossett and Ben Singer speak at Yale

Access Without Oppression: HIV in Transgender Communities

BY Emily Villano
November 19, 2012

On Friday, November 9, thirty or so Yale students and community members crowded together in a classroom in William Harkness Hall for what was billed as an “interdisciplinary panel” on “HIV in Transgender Communities.” This event was held as part of Trans Week at Yale, an annual event series on issues and experiences facing trans communities, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic could not be a more pressing topic. Although numbers are difficult to aggregate, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that in 2009, newly identified HIV infection was 2.6% among transgender persons, as compared with 0.9% for males and 0.3% for females. Rates of infection are higher among trans people of color. In addition, HIV-infected trans people experience significant obstacles to accessing care because of discrimination in a variety of forms, such as lack of health insurance due to discrimination on the job market and harassment or refusal of care from medical providers.

Chamonix Adams Porter, one of the co-coordinators of Trans Week (and an associate editor here at Broad Recognition) introduced the three panel members, each roughly representing different perspectives from policy, activist, and research arenas. Lending a local touch, the first speaker, Shawn Lang, discussed her work as Director of Public Policy for the Connecticut AIDS Resource Coalition. Next, Che Gossett, a member of ACT UP Philadelphia and the Sex Worker Outreach Project, focused on the history and their own activist work surrounding the criminalization and policing of transgender communities, particularly in the realm of sex work. Finally, Ben Singer, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who has also worked in collaboration with the CDC on HIV in transgender communities, talked about his own experience straddling policy and activism as he worked with the government to provide access and care to HIV-infected transgender people.

Lang and Singer both described the limitations of government programs in confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Lang stressed the link between HIV and homelessness in Connecticut, and stated frankly that the government was doing a “piss-poor job” on the issue. The main problem she identified was the lack of a “deeper literacy” on what healthcare means for transgender communities and the obstacles they face to that care.

Singer talked about a vital care center, the Trans Neighborhood and Resource space, where transgender sex workers could stop to change before going out to work, that closed down once research money dried up. “Sustainability should have been built into that,” Singer said. Nevertheless, both Lang and Singer see the government as a potential platform for expanding access and care. Singer stated, “We need to piggy-back on existing resources and we need to leave them behind… Even if we are mandated to do XYZ, we are also going to do ABCDEFG—we’re going to do all those other things, and we’ll do it undercover.”

A salient theme throughout the event was that of building safe spaces for transgender communities. Gossett emphasized the influence of Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman of color who, in their words, was one of the first to “articulate a revolutionary trans politics.” This entailed “creating a space for homeless youth, for sex workers,” a “space for people to live and thrive.”

Singer talked about his own initial isolation within gay and lesbian circles, and the importance of finding a trans community. He cited an interview he conducted as part of his ethnographic research with the director of the Tom Waddell Health Center in San Francisco. Tuesdays were “Transgender Tuesdays,” when the transgender community received care; the director recalled one Tuesday at 9:00pm finding nearly fifty people still seated in the waiting room. When asked who still needed to see the doctor, only two people raised their hands. “Everybody else was there to stay with each other,” Singer said. That was when he realized how necessary these spaces are for building solidarity and combating this crisis.

One audience member pushed back on this space-building emphasis, asking to what extent activism entailed creating spaces for people to live and discussions to happen, and how much wider change is required to make those spaces possible. Gossett admitted to a tension in activists’ focus between fighting for systemic change and carving out safe spaces, one they felt unsure how to resolve, but they suggested that the latter was itself an act that challenged existing systems.

Later, Singer asserted that “movements begin with bringing people together… Ben Singer walking around Philly is not a movement, it’s just Ben Singer.” Indeed, he claimed that only through “non-governmental” and “non-regulatory” spaces can “[trans people] create our politic and our own ways of being.”

Another tension the panel explored surrounded the category of “transgender” itself. Singer talked about how “transgender” confounds data collection because it acts not as a normative identity category but as an “umbrella category” with a “proliferative aspect,” meaning that the term “transgender” can include gender non-conforming, genderqueer, gender variant people, and more. Thus, while a delimited category allows one to “register [one]self on the radar screen of the government” to prove one exists and, importantly, to accrue resources, it is also reductive and can be at odds with self-determination. He cited a study by David Valentine demonstrating how service providers impose the term “transgender” on racial and lower socioeconomic status people in NYC in order for them to access care. “On the one hand we want this category, but it becomes a gate that opens for some people but not for others,” Singer said. 

When a student asked about work being done about HIV in transgender communities around the world, Singer expressed concern about the term “transgender” circulating globally through NGOs, and the “tension between local politics and forms of identification and this global imaginary of ‘transgender.’”

“What kind of politics in a colonialist way is it exporting?” Singer asked, noting examples in which Western activists organizing around the term “transgender” consistently misgender the people they seek to help. 

This led into the final, central topic of discussion—in Gossett’s words, “How do we create more HIV/AIDS resources in less oppressive ways?” Singer asserted that interventions need to be thought about from a “self-determination perspective,” from the perspective of those who would actually access the services. “What do we want?” he asked. The safe spaces for trans communities, cited above, play a crucial role in enabling people to answer that question. Lang implied that the government simply needs a higher level of literacy on these issues and more information about the challenges HIV-infected transgender people face. Gossett suggested that an eye to history, looking to the erased experience of transgender people’s resistance and resilience during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, as well as to innovative techniques—campiness, taking over churches—and reimagining the meaning of activism, might be the place to start.