Last year, Pride month was a pivotal turning point for me - as both a queer woman as well as a healthcare professional.
It was the first year that I had been completely out of the closet - both publicly as well as to friends and family. I allowed myself to take up space in queer meetings and collectives, decided that I would embrace Pride month and have a good out of the closet celebration for myself.
But every single idea of a celebration came crashing down on 31st of May, a Sunday. I was travelling to a village with my husband to help out with his practice, when he said, “Someone we know has died of AIDS. He was probably a closeted homosexual.”
Now this man that my husband was talking about was his acquaintance, and someone I had only heard about in passing - a husband and father in a heterosexual marriage.
The whisperings in our circles painted a damning picture: a man who had irresponsibly engaged in same-sex affairs, contracted a sexually transmitted illness, and, in their view, died as a kind of deserved consequence.
I spent an entire day with a deep constricting feeling in my chest, wondering if no one else saw what I did.
But all I could see was a man failed by every system meant to protect him. A man who had been denied the space to live authentically. A man who never got tested, perhaps never even received the information he needed — because his queerness, like mine, was something he had to deny at every step.
It is a health system failure, where a queer individual still dies of a disease that is extremely treatable, only because they didn’t have the awareness to ever get tested.
Pride was never going to be a party for me anymore.
Prejudice And Ignorance Kills
There are books and poems that bring you to tears. But during Pride last year, it was the cold language of clinical studies that broke me open. Numbers, graphs, and odds laid bare the suffering of my community.
Take COVID-19 vaccination for example. Despite having had the largest vaccine drive in the world, only 5% of transgender women in India received the vaccine. The reason? The deep mistrust and mistreatment in the healthcare sector which drove them away.
In fact, some trans women in interviews mentioned how paracetamol tablets for fever after vaccination were thrown at them because health workers did not want to touch them. Dignity for queer individuals, it seems, is conspicuous in its absence within our health system.
Another study published in PLOS Global Public Health captures important first person narratives of transgender women accessing health, and it paints a bleak picture.
Tales of being driven away at the gate by security guards, facing passive aggressive remarks by both health and allied staff and having doctors refuse to examine or treat them, having to pay a premium to access consultations are all stories that come out in this study and ask us to really pause and reflect.
In every study about the LGBTQIA population in India I read, numbers were revealing deep inequalities. These numbers demand us to stop and remember that the prejudices we hold translate into real life outcomes for real people - outcomes that threaten their life at times.
You don’t believe it? Transgender individuals have the highest mortality rates compared to cisgender people, even in developed countries. In India, 31% of transgender individuals die by suicide and 50% of them have tried atleast once. Transgender suicide attempt rates range from 32-50% across countries. I wonder why this statistic never ever comes up in the gender war discourses about suicide.
I urge you to sit with these numbers for a minute.
The Bloody Fight for Health Justice
And then, let's go on to think about the queer community’s battle for their right to health. Most of the current youth were either toddlers or infants at the time and we are not aware of the bloody history that belies this.
In 1981, the US government became aware of an AIDS crisis in the USA, after five gay men died of a rare pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.
As thousands of queer men died, the government remained silent. The media called it the “gay plague.” Families abandoned their sons. Hospitals turned them away. Roommates and landlords chucked these men out on the streets, beating them up when they were most vulnerable.
Many first person narratives from that time later revealed that gay men were dying in droves. “I could not make it to all the funerals of my friends because many were happening at the same time,” wrote someone.
But from within that devastation rose fierce activism. Queer communities cared for one another. Lesbian women donated blood when others refused. They cooked, nursed, and stood vigil. That’s why we say LGBT and not GLBT — to honour those women who showed up when no one else would.
All this to say, while prejudice leaves a bloody, bloody trail, its detractors leave their indelible mark on history too.
Artist John Boskovich encasing the only remnant of his lover Stephen Earabino’s life, a fan in plexiglass to memorise the breath that was stolen from him because of AIDS
Closer home, news outlets report many many stories of misinformation, discrimination and difficulty in access to healthcare that queer individuals have faced across the spectrum of health facilities.
Queer Visibility in Indian Healthcare
Now what did I learn out of all my reading last year?
I learnt that there was a dire need for openly queer healthcare providers.
For Aslam, my husband, the only openly queer people he'd met before me were patients who came in for treatment of sexually transmitted infections — and that shaped his understanding in all the wrong ways.
Did that mean there were no queer individuals at all in his life? Unlikely. It is possible that he was meeting queer individuals every single day as a part of his job, in his friend circles and even his family, but he didn’t know because they were closeted.
But as of today, Aslam has had experiences of holding me on my worst days of having seen queer hate, uncontrollably crying, “Why do I have to be this way? Why can I not just be heterosexual and divest myself of all this pain?” This definitely has led to a lot of character development on his end.
I believe India, and the world at large, is continuing to hold on to its outdated stereotypes about us because it has only been exposed to us in those stereotypical contexts, because most of the queers are closeted.
The heterosexual gaze and hatred I felt when onlookers perceived me in the Guwahati Pride parade was mammoth, but at that moment, I also knew that if the same people were to walk into my OPD for a consultation as a doctor, they would have a lot of respect for me.
Same individual, different contexts and differing levels of (de)humanisation. This is the perception divide in the community that we desperately need to close.
And this is why as a healthcare provider, I choose to be out of the closet.
Not just that, queer healthcare providers have the potential to change the landscape of queer healthcare because we bring sensitivity and knowledge to the conversation.
Take the Mitr clinics for instance, staffed entirely by transgender individuals, these clinics have been instrumental in providing dignified care for queer individuals, something that has been sorely lacking for them across the board.
There are of course a number of factors that might hinder anyone being out. In fact, a study in the BMJ reveals that most doctors prefer to hide their sexual orientation at work for fear of discrimination or retaliation. This is in developed countries. The situation in India is probably more dire.
But queer visibility in healthcare is a radical act — not just for those who need our care, but for those who care beside us. I know that being out comes with risks, and I speak from a place of privilege. But if safety allows, and the moment feels right, I urge more of us to come forward. Because our presence in medicine can transform not just how others see us, but how the system treats those like us.
Pride, for me, is always political, because I know that healthcare is always political. And Pride is also a promise: that we will be seen, heard, and cared for. And that we, too, will care — with the dignity, sensitivity, and humanity our community has always deserved.
Edited by Radhikaa Sharma
Image by Christianez Ratna Kiruba
