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.