Link Love: Trans* Health Care, Bisexuality, and Forced Sterilization

Spread the love, ya’ll.

New Report Shows Trans* People Experience Huge Gaps in Health Care Access (emphasis below is mine):

…the final bullet bears special mention, in light of the recent media attention on the high suicide rate for gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth that has almost entirely ignored the suicide epidemic among trans* youth. An attempted suicide rate over 25 times higher than the general population is profoundly distressing, and points rather strongly to systemic discrimination harassment, and huge gaps in health care, including mental health care.

Bisexuality, Binarism, And Why Everyone Has It Wrong:

What happens is, instead of recognizing that biphobia is actually a form of monosexism and bisexuality one simple form of polysexuality, bisexuality replaces polysexuality as the label for non monosexual orientations and biphobia is equated to polysexuality. This erasure is destructive to these other sexualities and centers bisexuality as the only polysexual option beyond pansexuality (which many bisexuals even approach in a bigoted fashion) which creates binarism within bisexuality.

So people on both of the major sides of this debate on bisexuality and binarism are both engaging in binarism, cissexism, erasure and are just flat out wrong. Bisexuality doesn’t enforce the binary and cissexism, the erasing way it is used to mean polysexual, the way essentialism is spilled into it and the way it is policed to only be about men and women does.

Report Shows HIV-positive Women in Chile Forcibly Sterilized, Denied Medical Treatment:

During the first trimester of her pregnancy, Julia began experiencing an orange-colored vaginal discharge. Concerned, she went to the hospital to have it checked out. Instead of treating her, however, hospital workers turned her away and told her to return for her regularly scheduled check-up. She was admitted to the hospital three days later, hemorrhaging and with severe abdominal pain, but she still sat untreated while the hospital staff attended all the HIV-negative patients first, including those who arrived after Julia. Her pregnancy ended in a miscarriage shortly thereafter, and a paramedic told her, “‘It is because God knows, because you were going to have a sick child.’”

Help Nikki Araguz

A woman whose husband has died is being sued by her in-laws, who assert that because the widow is trans, the entire marriage was a farce and she has no right to his death benefits. On top of the fact that the in-laws are grabbing for money only a few weeks after her husband’s death, they have also publicly outed her as a trans woman and have endangered her life by doing so.

For more details, check out Cara’s post on The Curvature.

Mrs. Araguz is currently living off of donations since her assets have been frozen. Please help. If you can’t afford to donate, then at least spread the word! I doubt very seriously that the big GLB orgs and celebrities are going to come running to her assistance; trans issues just don’t rate very highly on the list of Things That Matter in any cis-dominated sphere. Every little bit helps.