Goal for vaccination clinics is to reduce risk of transmission of the Monkeypox virus during the Lazy Bear week among participants and the host community.
WHEN: West County Health Centers will be holding two Monkey Pox vaccine clinics on Friday, August 5th
ELIGIBILITY: Due to a very limited supply of 500 vaccines available from the California Department of Public Health for this event, the following criteria must be met to receive a vaccine:
Registered for Lazy Bear Week – OR –
Current resident or works in the lower Russian River Area – OR –
Active patient at West County Health Centers
REGISTRATION: No appointment required. Please bring reasonable documentation of eligibility.
n response to a mean-spirited tweet sent by Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida about her appearance, a queer activist from Texas has gotten the last laugh. In addition to clapping back hard, she has raised more than $1.5 million to support abortion care as of Friday.
Olivia Julianna, a political strategist for Gen-Z for Change, a social justice advocacy group led by young people, revealed to The Advocate that she wasn’t prepared for her overnight success but appreciated it. She uses her first and middle names publicly for privacy concerns.
“I’m in shock at the amount of support that we’ve gotten from people across the country,” she says.
Julianna says she could never have imagined the level of impact she will have had with her deft navigation of the situation that Gaetz inadvertently made possible.
As of midday Thursday, donations to a fundraiser she established were $3,000 short of $700,000, she told The Advocate. On Friday that number reached $1.5 million, she tweeted.
“We’ve now hit $1.5 million raised!! That’s 500K+ just in the last day,” she wrote. “Any celebrities or philanthropists want to close that gap to 2 million[?]”
“I would like to say thank you to him for giving me such a big platform to share my message and share my work with,” she says.
The activist launched the fundraiser for the nonprofit organization’s abortion fund after being body-shamed by Gaetz on Twitter. Julianna had responded to remarks Gaetz made last weekend. The congressman mocked abortion rights activists, calling them “disgusting” and overweight. Julianna criticized the congressman’s comments online.
“It’s come to my attention that Matt Gaetz — alleged pedophile — has said that it’s always the ‘odious…5’2 350 pound’ women that ‘nobody wants to impregnate’ who rally for abortion,” she began in her tweet.
“I’m actually 5’11. 6’4 in heels. I wear them so the small men like you are reminded of your place,” she continued.
Gaetz responded by tweeting an image of her next to a news article mentioning his comments.
Julianna raised the clap-back level several notches and replied, referencing Gaetz’s ongoing potential legal troubles for alleged sexual encounters with underage women.
Then she announced a fundraising campaign on behalf of Gen-Z for Change, a 500-strong youth-led group that supports abortion rights and says it seeks to create tangible change on “issues adversely affecting young people.”
A reporter asked Gaetz whether he believed women who attended abortion rights rallies were “ugly and overweight” after his comments at the weekend rally at the conservative Turning Point USA Student Action Summit drew condemnation, and Gaetz doubled down on his remarks, according to The Washington Post.
He replied to those offended by the comments: “Be offended.”
It’s taken just a little more than 48 hours for Julianna to raise three-quarters of a million dollars.
Among other reproductive health care services, Julianna says donations will be split among 50 abortion funds.
As for Gaetz’s political acumen, Julianna says he lacks any.
“I think it’s hilarious that Matt Gaetz underestimated me and didn’t think that I would clap back in such a strong way,” she says.
The incident has taught Julianna one thing that she hopes will benefit other young people.
“It goes to show no matter how young you are, no matter what position of power you’re in, you can make a difference,” she says. “I hope that this absolute insane event that’s taken place will motivate young people across the country to make their voices heard and fight for the things that they believe them.”
And Julianna has one final assessment of Gaetz: “He’s a joke,” she says.
Will they or won’t they support marriage equality? That is the question facing Senate Republicans. Backers of the Senate version of the House’s Respect For Marriage Act think they are close to finding 10 Republican votes to make up the 60 votes needed to pass the measure and overcome a filibuster. But many Republicans have been very quiet about whether or not they support the bill. A common response is that they haven’t looked at the bill — a four-page document — yet.
The time it’s taken just to confirm that eight more members of the GOP will vote yes on the measure is very much at odds with the lightning speed at which the House introduced and passed the bill. It aims to codify marriage equality for LGBTQ and interracial couples into law and would effectively cut off expected attempts to throw the U.S. back into darker times by outlawing marriages for some based on sexual orientation or race.
The time it’s taken just to confirm that eight more members of the GOP will vote yes on the measure is very much at odds with the lightning speed at which the House introduced and passed the bill.
With 47 House Republicansvoting in favor of the bill, it seems like conservative lawmakers have figured out something very important: They can’t be the party of family values and be in favor of taking away the right to be a family for many of their constituents at the same time.
Now, we wait to see how many Senate Republicans have realized it too.
As a journalist who has covered many similar pieces of legislation, this issue is also particularly personal. For many queer people, marriage isn’t even a goal. In many communities, it’s still something seen as what boring heteronormative suburban gays do. I say this as someone who doeswant to get married someday and carries an aching heart over the fact that marriage was legalized for me just as my last serious live-in relationship ended — and might be taken away again just as I’ve moved in with a new partner and am exploring domestic bliss once again.
But regardless of whether it’s a knot you’d like to tie (or not), everyone from staunch Republican voters to anti-assimilationist queer activists agrees that it’s a right people should have. Marriage equality was never about assimilation — it was about putting an end to a separate-but-equal society in which only some people have fundamental rights, including financial security and protection and stability for children, while others are seen as lesser and undeserving of those same rights and relationship recognition.
A majority of American voters across all political parties have supported equal marriage rights for same-sex couples since 2021, when the annual Gallup Values and Beliefs poll found 55% of Republicans, 73% of independents and 83% of Democrats saying same-sex marriages should be recognized under law. This year, Gallup reported that 71% — up from last year’s 70% — of Americans support marriage rights for LGBTQ people. It’s a number that has risen every year since the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized it. It could explain why 47 Republican House representatives voted in favor of the Respect For Marriage Act in this era of hyper-partisanship and divisiveness over everything politics.
Decades of advocacy and activism led to this moment: LGBTQ people are more visible and accepted across mainstream society than ever before, and marriage is a fundamental part of that. We are out and proud, able to live authentically at work, school and in communities without having to hide our partners and identities out of fear of repercussion. Another Gallup poll this year found that 7.1% of the U.S. population identify themselves as LGBTQ, with numbers increasing with each younger generation to the point where 1 in 5 members of Gen Z is out as LGBTQ.
This visibility has led to increased discrimination. A 2022 report from GLAAD found that 70% of LGBTQ people reported that personal discrimination has risen over the past two years. Not to mention the dozens of discriminatory state laws proposed to shove LGBTQ youth into a closet they’ve never had to be in. But change is inevitably coming; when it comes to LGBTQ equality, the train has already left the station.
The GOP claims to be for family values. LGBTQ people have families now. Families with kids.
LGBTQ people serve at every level of government from the federal Cabinet down. Transportation Secretary and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, campaigned openly and affectionately to help millions of people see how mainstream and likable gay couples can be. Buttigieg’s unspoken campaign slogan might as well have been, “We’re boring and suburban, just like you.” We’ve come far from the 2004 resignation of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who stepped down in brewing scandal and outing threats with a new phrase that quickly entered the discourse: “I am a gay American.”
But the current conservative makeup of the Supreme Court threatens to stop the progress LGBTQ communities have fought hard for. When Justice Clarence Thomas said that the court should “reconsider” its ruling in cases like Obergefell, which guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry, and Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized LGBTQ intimacy, it sent such a panic throughout LGBTQ communites across the country. How could it not? After all, the nation had just watched the court decide to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion — despite a majority of Americans disagreeing with the move.
To even “consider” overturning constitutional protections for the LGBTQ community would be out of step with not just what the majority of the American people want, including the majority of Republicans. But anything seems possible right now.
Now is the time for Republican lawmakers to act. The GOP claims to be for family values. LGBTQ people have families now. Families with kids. How would a Wanda Sykes or a Neil Patrick Harris, much less the countless other LGBTQ parents across America, explain to their kids why the Supreme Court took their parents’ marriage away and why the government didn’t do anything to stop it? When did breaking up families become a mandate for the party of family values? These questions should haunt the 157 Republicans in the House who voted against the Respect For Marriage Act, and it should give pause to the senators poised to cast their own votes. Republican voters made it clear that they support marriage equality. Now it’s up to Republican senators to listen.
Oklahoma public schools have started requiring students from kindergarten to college to complete “biological sex affidavits” if they want to compete in school sports, in accordance with a state law that took effect earlier this year.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill in March that bans transgender student athletes in public elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges from competing on the sports teams of their gender identity as opposed to their sex assigned at birth.
A photo of an affidavit required by Woodall Public Schools went viral Wednesday after Erin Matson, executive director of abortion rights group Reproaction, shared it on Twitter.
“This has nothing to do with encouraging girls to be athletes,” Matson wrote. “This is totalitarianism. It is the white nationalist agenda. The anti-LGBTQ agenda. The anti-abortion agenda. It is all the same agenda.”
The address on the affidavit matches Woodall Elementary School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, about an hour southeast of Tulsa.
Ginger Knight, superintendent at Woodall Public Schools, confirmed via email that the district is required by state law to have students complete the form if they want to participate in athletics, but Knight had no additional comment.
After the governor signed the bill in March, Oklahoma was the 13th state nationwide to enact such a bill. Now, 18 states have enacted similar measures.
Nearly all of those states designate sports teams by sex assigned at birth as determined by the student’s birth certificate issued at or near the time of their birth.
Oklahoma is the only state so far to require an affidavit to prove a student’s assigned sex. If a student is under 18, the affidavit can be completed by a legal guardian or parent. Once a student reaches 18, they have to sign the affidavit themselves. The law requires that a new affidavit be completed ahead of every school year.
Two other states can require an affidavit or sworn statements in some cases.
In Kentucky, for example, a student’s assigned sex can be determined by their “original, unedited birth certificate” or via an affidavit “signed and sworn to by the physician, physician assistant, advanced practice registered nurse, or chiropractor under penalty of perjury.”
Under Idaho‘s law, which a judge blocked in August 2020, a student’s sex can be disputed. If that happens, the school can request that the student provide a form from their health care provider to “verify the student’s biological sex… as part of a routine sports physical examination relying only on one (1) or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”
Proponents of trans athlete bans argue that they help ensure fairness for cisgender female athletes, while LGBTQ rights advocates say the measures violate the civil rights of trans people.
Some LGBTQ people on Twitter condemned Woodall Public Schools’ affidavits.
“With a notary requirement — this is not ONLY incredibly transphobic, but is going to have the impact of preventing lower socioeconomic status kids from participating,” one person wrote.
Another person wrote that requiring “notarized affidavits attesting to the genital composition of individual elementary schoolers is a disgusting invasion of privacy and is predatory and discriminatory.”
The Education Department issued guidance last year that said it will interpret Title IX, a federal law that protects students from sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools, to protect LGBTQ students from discrimination.
At the time, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told ESPN that he understands concerns about fairness in sports, “but we do have a responsibility to protect the civil rights of students, and if we feel the civil rights are being violated, we will act.”
The Biden administration’s Title IX directive is on hold after a federal judge in Tennessee blocked it earlier this month, ruling that it would make it impossible for some states to enforce their own laws on transgender athlete participation and use of restrooms.
While CDC works to contain the current monkeypox outbreak and learn more about the virus, this information can help you make informed choices when you are in situations or places where monkeypox could be spread.
How can a person lower their risk during sex?
Talk to your partner about any recent illness and be aware of new or unexplained rashes on your body or your partner’s body, including the genitals and anus. If you or your partner have recently been sick, currently feel sick, or have a new or an unexplained rash, do not have sex and see a healthcare provider.
If you or a partner has monkeypox, the best way to protect yourself and others is to avoid sex of any kind (oral, anal, vaginal) and do not kiss or touch each other’s bodies while you are sick, especially any rash. Do not share things like towels, fetish gear, sex toys, and toothbrushes.
If you or your partner have (or think you might have) monkeypox and you decide to have sex, consider the following to reduce the chance of spreading the virus:
Have virtual sex with no in-person contact.
Masturbate together at a distance of at least 6 feet, without touching each other and without touching any rash.
Consider having sex with your clothes on or covering areas where rash is present, reducing as much skin-to-skin contact as possible. If the rash is confined to the genitals or anus, condoms may help; however, condoms alone are likely not enough to prevent monkeypox.
Avoid kissing.
Remember to wash your hands, fetish gear, sex toys and any fabrics (bedding, towels, clothing) after having sex. Learn more about infection control.
Having multiple or anonymous sex partners may increase your chances of exposure to monkeypox. Limiting your number of sex partners may reduce the possibility of exposure.
Avoid touching the rash. Touching the rash can spread it to other parts of the body and may delay healing.
What should a person do if they have a new or unexplained rash or other symptoms?
Avoid sex or being intimate with anyone until you have been checked out by a healthcare provider.
If you don’t have a provider or health insurance, visit a public health clinic near you.
When you see a healthcare provider, wear a mask, and remind them that this virus is circulating in the area.
Avoid gatherings, especially if they involve close, personal, skin-to-skin contact.
Think about the people you have had close, personal, or sexual contact during the last 21 days, including people you met through dating apps. To help stop the spread, you might be asked to share this information if you have received a monkeypox diagnosis.
How can a person lower the chance of getting monkeypox at places like raves, parties, clubs, and festivals?
When thinking about what to do, seek out information from trusted sources like the local health department. Second, consider how much close, personal, skin-to-skin contact is likely to occur at the event you plan to attend. If you feel sick or have a rash, do not attend any gathering, and see a healthcare provider.
Festivals, events, and concerts where attendees are fully clothed and unlikely to share skin-to-skin contact are safer. However, attendees should be mindful of activities (like kissing) that might spread monkeypox.
A rave, party, or club where there is minimal clothing and where there is direct, personal, often skin-to-skin contact has some risk. Avoid any rash you see on others and consider minimizing skin-to-skin contact.
Enclosed spaces, such as back rooms, saunas, sex clubs, or private and public sex parties where intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners occurs, may have a higher likelihood of spreading monkeypox.
In a memo sent to school administrators on Thursday, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said the new federal protections under Title IX “are not binding law, do not create any new legal obligations, and should not be treated as governing law.”
“The Department will not stand idly by as federal agencies attempt to impose a sexual ideology on Florida schools that risk the health, safety, and welfare of Florida students,” the memo continues.
“As we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of this landmark law, our proposed changes will allow us to continue that progress and ensure all our nation’s students — no matter where they live, who they are, or whom they love — can learn, grow, and thrive in school,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in June.
Diaz claims that allowing transgender girls to use the restrooms and locker rooms of their gender and to participate in school sports as their gender would jeopardize “the safety and wellbeing of Florida students” and risk violating Florida law. In 2021, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill to ban transgender girls from playing school sports.
“While Governor DeSantis and Commissioner Diaz are intent on weaponizing state agencies in their war on transgender youth, the fact remains: the U.S. Department of Education has said unequivocally that students are to be protected from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” Equality Florida press secretary Brandon Wolf said in a statement.
“The DeSantis Administration repeatedly puts the political ambitions of the Governor over the wellbeing of Florida’s students and the result is a state that is increasingly more hostile toward and unsafe for young people. LGBTQ students exist. The federal government has recognized that they are protected from discrimination. Even as the Governor attempts to bolster his right-wing bona fides by hurtling our state toward full-tilt authoritarianism, school districts across Florida should remain committed to protecting all students.”
DeSantis has declared an all-out war on Florida’s LGBTQ community. In March, he signed the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law, prohibiting any mention of LGBTQ topics in schools.
Last month, he signaled that he is open to using Florida’s child protective service laws to terminate the parental rights of adults who take their kids to see drag shows, and his administration is trying to get a drag bar’s liquor license revoked for allowing children to attend a drag show.
As cases of monkeypox surge around the globe, four pioneers of the AIDS activist movement watch in awe and with a sense of nostalgia.
Some of the similarities between the two viruses speak for themselves. Like the HIV strain that started the AIDS pandemic in the late 1970s, the current monkeypox outbreak has emerged from sub-Saharan Africa and has been found overwhelmingly in men who have sex with men who live in the world’s metropolises. And while epidemiologists have not reached a complete understanding of how the current outbreak of monkeypox spreads, recent research points to sexual transmission.
Four pioneering AIDS activists of the 1980s and ‘90s contend that there are other, consequential yet less obvious parallels playing out in real-time.
People hold up signs representing the number of AIDS victims in a demonstration in Central Park in New York City on Aug. 8, 1983. Allan Tannenbaum / Getty Images file
As in the early days of the AIDS crisis, they argue, government messaging around the outbreak has been flawed, gay men have been blindsided and public health officials have failed to defeat a severe disease plaguing the LGBTQ community.
“It feels like déjà vu,” said gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who was a leading member of the Gay Liberation Front in the United Kingdom. “The lessons from the AIDS crisis and Covid have clearly not been learned.”
Public health officials around the world were slow to combat AIDS when it first began to emerge in men who have sex with men during the late 1970s. It wasn’t until June 5, 1981, that the United States released the world’s first government report on the infectious disease in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a government bulletin on perplexing disease cases.
“In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California,” the report read. “Two of the patients died.”
Three years later, the U.S. government announced the development of an AIDS test, in addition to a vaccine, which never came to fruition. By 1985, an estimated 12,000 Americans had died of the disease.
Similarly, activists argue that the global response to tame monkeypox has been too slow to curb ballooning case numbers — more than 20,500 cases of the current monkeypox outbreak have been reported globally across 77 countries and territories since the start of May, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
No one has died from monkeypox outside the 11 African nations where the infectious disease has become endemic since it was discovered in 1970. However, a substantial proportion of patients infected with monkeypox have been hospitalized for severe pain caused by pimple-like sores that commonly develop.
Since the first cases were discovered in May, the United States has distributed nearly 200,000 Jynneos vaccines — a two-dose vaccine to prevent smallpox and monkeypox — to the most at-risk population, which falls far short of its roughly 3.8 million gay men. In France, only an estimated 6,000 people have been vaccinated across more than 100 vaccine centers in recent weeks, French Minister of Social Affairs and Health François Braun said on Monday. And in the United Kingdom, health officials ordered an additional 100,000 vaccine doses last week to keep up with burgeoning demand.
Last Saturday, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern, a designation reserved for the most threatening global disease outbreaks, after initially forgoing to do so last month. More than two months after the first U.S. case of monkeypox was detected in mid-May, on Thursday public health officials in New York City issued a declaration that the infectious disease posed an imminent threat to public health, and officials in San Francisco declared a state of emergency.
“What’s interesting is that many of the scientists and clinicians who were trained during the AIDS epidemic or were there at the beginning, people like Tony Fauci, know this history, but the response to monkeypox has been alarmingly slow and chaotic,” said Gregg Gonsalves, who joined Act Up — the leading group that fought for action to combat AIDS — in 1990 and is now a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. “As an individual, it’s like, ‘Three strikes you’re out, man.’ HIV, Covid and now monkeypox? How many times can you make the same mistakes over and over again?”
Representatives from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Anthony Fauci has directed since 1984, and officials from the White House, where Fauci serves as the chief medical adviser to the president, did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.
Images of men waiting in long lines outside clinics around the world to get vaccinated, technical issues with online vaccine portals and reports that accused the U.S. government of developing a “wait-and-see” response to the outbreak — reportedly calling for shipments of vaccines only as cases surged in the last handful of weeks — have piled on to activists’ fears that the public health response to monkeypox is shaping up to be a repeat of its flawed strategy to combat AIDS.
People lined up outside a Department of Health and Mental Hygiene clinic on June 23, in New York.Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Although the virus started spreading in May, the U.S. didn’t order more doses of the monkeypox vaccine to add to its stockpile until June. Regulators also had not finished inspecting a key Denmark facility manufacturing monkeypox vaccines until July, leaving 1.1 million ready-to-distribute doses stuck in Europe.
“Just like during the AIDS pandemic, it seems that some governments care very little so long as monkeypox is just affecting men who have sex with men,” said Tatchell, who was turned away from a hospital in London that had run out of monkeypox vaccine last Sunday. “What other explanation can there be? Governments should have been rolling out emergency vaccination programs for gay and bisexual men two or three weeks ago.”
Some veteran AIDS activists also argue that as during the AIDS crisis, the messaging to combat monkeypox has not been tailored enough to reach the LGBTQ community.
Ron Goldberg, an early AIDS activist who joined Act Up in 1987, points to the “America Responds to AIDS” public service announcement campaign, which the government launched at the height of the crisis in the late 1980s. Many of the commercials featured heterosexual couples and displayed messages including “AIDS Is Everyone’s Problem.”
“At that time, they were so afraid of talking about gay sex, or anything like that, they had to bland out the message when they were trying to give some information,” Goldberg said. “If it’s happening within a certain population, you have to direct your messaging to that certain population.”
Activists have largely applauded public health officials’ efforts to not link monkeypox directly to the LGBTQ community — as many believe they did with AIDS — and thereby create stigma. However, some argue that repeated statements from public health officials that “anyone can get monkeypox” mirrors AIDS messaging that “anyone can get the AIDS virus” and also circumvents efforts to alert the demographic most at risk.
Research overwhelmingly suggests that the current outbreak of monkeypox is being driven overwhelmingly by men who have sex with men. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine published last week found that of the 528 cases of monkeypox researchers analyzed, 98% were found in men who identified as gay or bisexual. Another recent report by the the British Health Security Agency finding that of the 699 monkeypox cases for which there was available information, 97% were in gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men.
“The numbers are there,” said Didier Lastrade, who founded the first French chapter of Act Up in 1989. “We shouldn’t shy away from this. … We’re big people, we’re grown-ups, we can take it. The stigmatization is happening either way.”
On Thursday, the WHO recommended that gay and bisexual men limit their number of sexual partners to protect themselves from monkeypox and contain its spread.
But compiled with two years of pandemic isolation and big summer events, such as last weekend’s annual Pines Party on Fire Island, some activists fear it will be difficult to get gay and bisexual men to curtail their sexual behaviors.
“You want to be able to reach people in their 20s and 30s and say, ‘Look, this is no joke. You’ve all seen the pictures. You’ve all had friends who have had monkeypox. You don’t want it,’” Gonsalves said.
More broadly speaking, Lastrade argued, the advent of pre-exposure prophylaxis, the HIV prevention pill (also known as PrEP), along with scientific proof over the past decade that treating HIV can prevent transmission, have caused gay and bisexual men to fall asleep at the wheel when it comes to their sexual health.
“The new generation totally forgot about the story of AIDS. I keep on writing books about AIDS but nobody reads them,” said Lastrade. “When s— happens, they forget their reflexes that we used to have because it was a question of life or death.”
Regardless of the messaging, with a lackluster global vaccine rollout, the activists fear the virus will become an infectious disease the LGBTQ community has to permanently live with, as it did with AIDS decades ago.
“Many people are saying we’re past the point of containment, that we already missed our chance,” Gonsalves said. “If that’s true, that is incredibly serious because this disease doesn’t necessarily kill, but the enormous suffering and expense of all of this is going to put a burden on many, many people, many, many health systems and many, many communities who have been already plagued.”
South Carolina became the seventh state last month to permit health care providers to decline to serve people if they feel doing so would violate their religious beliefs.
As a result, more than 1 in 8 LGBTQ people now live in states where doctors, nurses and other health care professionals can legally refuse to treat them, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. In addition to South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Ohio and Illinois have similar measures in effect.
“The conflict between patient needs and religious directives has been a serious problem in the past, and I don’t see any sign of that issue being resolved quickly and easily.”
JENNY PIZER, LAMBDA LEGAL
Advocates and legal experts say the laws will further raise the barriers to health care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer patients.
“We often are worried that the expansion of religious rights in these contexts will be taken as a license to discriminate,” said Jenny Pizer, the law and policy director for the LGBTQ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal.
Proponents of such legislation, however, say the measures don’t allow providers to discriminate against or target LGBTQ people.
South Carolina state Sen. Larry Grooms, who supported his state’s law, the Medical Ethics and Diversity Act, told NPR in June that “it’s based on procedure, not on patients.”
“This is America, where you should have the freedom to say no to something you don’t believe in,” he told NPR.
Although “religious freedom” or “conscience” measures, as they’re often called, don’t explicitly list LGBTQ people among those who may be refused treatment, advocates say that in practice they are affected disproportionately.
Ivy Hill, the community health program director for the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South, said transgender people are among those who will be the most negatively affected.
“When we have laws in place that make it easier for providers to discriminate, of course it’s not going to do anything but make it worse,” said Hill, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. “The people who are already on the margins of the margins are going to be the ones who are most deeply impacted by stuff like this.”
Even before the new law went into effect,they said, many trans people they work with in South Carolina struggled to find gender-affirming health care providers in the state willing to help them gain access to hormone therapy, leading some of them to travel to North Carolina to get care.
Hill said doctors usually don’t tell trans people that they won’t treat them for religious reasons, which makes it hard to know how often it happens. Research has found that LGBTQ people, particularly transgender people, are more likely to face medical discrimination.
A study published in 2019 found that 16 percent of LGBTQ adults, or about 1 in 6, reported experiencing discrimination in health care settings. A 2020 survey from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that 16 percent of LGBTQ people, including 40 percent of transgender respondents, reported postponing or avoiding preventive screenings because of discrimination.
Maggie Trisler, who works in tech, said she had a great relationship with her primary care provider in Memphis, Tennessee, for about a year and a half in 2016 and 2017. He asked her in-depth questions about her health and the band she plays in, and he said he was going to take his wife to see her play.
Then, in March 2017, Trisler came out to him as transgender, and she said he suddenly became very cold and told her he doesn’t “know anything about the standards of care” for transgender people. He began to blame pain she was having on her weight, she said.
“It suddenly went from the best doctor-patient relationship I’ve ever had to just the absolute least helpful, most frustrating that I’ve had,” she said.
Three months later, Trisler said, the doctor effectively — although not explicitly — told her he couldn’t see her anymore.
“He did say that he was deeply uncomfortable treating me with [hormone replacement therapy], he wasn’t comfortable providing HRT, and if I was seeking that elsewhere, then maybe I should seek medical care elsewhere,” she said.
Trisler added that she was lucky to have good insurance and that it was easy for her to change doctors, although she acknowledged that she is “coming from a rather privileged position” and that what was just a nuisance for her could have been a “critical roadblock” for others.
While LGBTQ people have long faced barriers to health care because of religious refusals, Pizer said, such religious objections can violate both state and federal law in some cases.
Pizer pointed to a 2005 case in which the North Coast Women’s Medical Care Group in Southern California denied infertility treatments to her client Guadalupe “Lupita” Benitez because she is a lesbian. The providers argued that it was within their religious rights to refuse to offer treatment to Benitez, but the California Supreme Court decided that religious rights protected under California law don’t excuse violations of the state’s nondiscrimination law.
The court found that when doctors are “practicing in a particular field and offering services generally, according to patient needs in their field, they can’t pick and choose among patients in ways that violate the nondiscrimination law,” Pizer said.
Pizer said the problem with laws like South Carolina’s Medical Ethics and Diversity Act is that they use broad language that doesn’t give examples of situations in which a religious objection in medicine would violate medical standards or federal law. Many hospitals, including some that are religiously affiliated, receive federal funding. As a result, if they were to provide fertility treatments to heterosexual people and not to LGBTQ people, they would violate Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which the Biden administration hopes to strengthen to better protect access to abortion and gender-affirming services.
Pizer said the issue is becoming more prominent and contentious as Catholic-affiliated institutions control an increasing proportion of the U.S. hospital system. As NBC News reported recently, more than 1 in 7 U.S. hospital patients are cared for in Catholic facilities.
“The conflict between patient needs and religious directives has been a serious problem in the past, and I don’t see any sign of that issue being resolved quickly and easily,” Pizer said. “A hospital that’s operating in a community to serve the community more broadly should not be imposing their religious beliefs on people that are not part of that faith or that are at the hospital for medical services, not religious services.”
In March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the world, a poster appeared in several places in Hyderabad, India. The poster warned, “Do not allow Kojjas, Hijras [an Indian transfeminine community] near the shops. If you talk to them or have sex with them, you will be infected with CoronaVirus. Beat & drive them away or call 100 [the emergency police contact in India] immediately. Save people from CoronaVirus Hijras. [sic]”
Several transgender-rights activists took note, and eventually, the police responded by removing the posters and launching a probe to identify the miscreants. But, this was not the first time that marginalized communities – especially queer and trans communities – were wrongly held responsible for the spread of a global pandemic and had violence instigated against them.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time either. With the monkeypox virus (MPXV) having recently been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization (WHO), queer people are once again being discriminated against and stigmatized. Experts believe this will prevent successful public health interventions from controlling the spread of the disease.
Monkeypox Is Not A “Gay Disease”
MPXV is a viral disease that spreads through close contact. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the infection spreads through:
Direct contact with MPXV rash, scabs, or body fluids from a person with MPXV,
Indirect contact, i.e., by touching objects or surfaces that have been used previously by somebody with MPXV,
Through respiratory droplets and secretions.
Although MPXV is not as infectious as COVID-19, more than 16,000 cases have been recorded worldwide, and the number continues to grow.
A July 21 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which analyzed demographics of MPXV infections from April to June 2022, reported that “98% of the persons with infection were gay or bisexual men.”
Similarly, in a tweet dated July 23, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus mentioned that “this…outbreak is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.” Ghebreyesus added, “That means that this outbreak can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups.”
Does this mean queer men are at a higher risk of MPXV infections? Gagandeep Kang, an acclaimed virologist at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, India, told LGBTQ Nationthat ‘men who have sex with men’ are not the only group affected by the disease. “If MPXV was a ‘gay’ disease,” she added, “children would not be infected – which they have been in previous outbreaks of MPXV and this one.”
Kang pointed out that while the MPXV virus has been detected in the semen of affected individuals, it is “not strictly speaking a sexually transmitted disease. It is more of the respiratory and skin-to-skin contact routes that lead to transmission.”
A report by The Mint suggests that most MPXV cases are reported in queer men because of the “demographic’s positive health-seeking behavior.”
Adding to Kang’s comments, Aqsa Shaikh, an associate professor of community medicine at the Hamdard Institute of Medical Science and Research (HIMSR), New Delhi, India, and a public health researcher, told LGBTQ Nation that the data on which current conclusions about MPXV transmission are based is a “very weak level of evidence in epidemiological studies.”
Further, Shaikh cautioned that it is essential to distinguish between “association and causation.”
“Just because two things occur together does not mean one causes the other,” she said. So, according to Shaikh, even if we were to go by the reports that say queer men are disproportionately affected by MPXV, it does not mean “having gay sex or being a man who has sex with a man increases your risk of transmission of the disease.”
However, none of this has stopped people from wrongly touting MPXV as a disease that disproportionately affects queer men. For instance, Muqtada al-Sadr, an influential Shia cleric in Iraq, took to Twitter on May 23 to suggest that MPXV resulted from same-sex behavior.
He also called MPXV “homosexual-pox” and asked that queer people “repent”, Middle East Eye reported.
Al-Sadr is not the only one guilty. Stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle has also been accused of calling MPXV a “gay disease”.
Interestingly, the CDC page on “Monkeypox Facts for People who are Sexually Active” mentions that “[the disease] can spread to anyone through close, personal, often skin-to-skin contact” [emphasis added]. However, the representative picture on the page shows two presumably male bodies in a sexualized position.
A screen grab of the CDC page as of July 25 2022
Remember COVID, AIDS, and SARS
Shaikh alluded that MPXV being portrayed as a ‘gay disease’ is one example of several instances where entire communities have been wrongly shown as carriers of disease and death. As an example, she pointed out how the SARS-COV-2 virus – the causative agent of the COVID-19 pandemic – was colloquially referred to as the ‘Wuhan virus’ in the initial days of the pandemic. This subjected Chinese people to discrimination and xenophobia.
Similarly, Muslims in India were subjected to severe discrimination and islamophobia when a large international gathering of Islamic preachers – the Tablighi Jamaat – in the country’s capital was blamed for a sudden rise in COVID-19 cases across the country. The Printreported, “For days, ‘Tablighi virus’ and ‘Corona Jihad’ trended on Twitter.” A politician from India’s right-wing Hindu-fundamentalist ruling party warned people not to buy vegetables from Muslims.
Perhaps one of the worst instances where queer and transgender persons were stigmatized and discriminated against while losing their lives to deliberate queer- and transphobia was when the HIV/AIDS infection was first identified worldwide.
It has been well-documented how queer and transgender people – along with other marginalized groups like people of color, sex workers, and migrant workers – were portrayed as the key carriers of the virus.
Further, as The New Statesmanhas reported recently, “there was little public will to tackle the virus until people realized that HIV infected everyone, including heterosexuals [sic], equally.”
Shaikh told LGBTQ Nation that this ostracization of marginalized groups negatively affected public-health interventions to control the spread of HIV.
“It doesn’t help because queer and trans people are already stigmatized, and they eventually go further into hiding,” she said, talking about how such stigma discouraged people from getting tested.
Discrimination against queer and trans people resulting from their stigmatization during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic has left marks that are difficult to erase even today.
Science Over Stigma
Shaikh and Kang agree that touting MPXV as a ‘gay disease’ endangers both queer and non-queer people. In the case of queer people, Kang told LGBTQ Nation, “stigmatization leads to lack of or delayed access to care.” On the other hand, she added, “If MPXV is labeled as a ‘gay disease’, then straight people will consider themselves not at risk and be at a higher risk.”
According to Shaikh, tagging MPXV as a ‘gay disease’ is a “distraction.”
“Rather than researching MPXV, we appear to be keener to prove whether it is a ‘gay disease’ or not. A lot of crucial time and resources that could have been utilized in other aspects of epidemiology are getting wasted in this debate,” she said.
A bakery in a Chicago-area suburb that has been the target of vandalism and harassmentdue to a planned family-friendly drag event has now been ordered to stop hosting public events.
“I feel like this is discrimination and a conspiracy to interfere with my business,” Sac said. “Unfortunately, when the attention waned from all the hate this week, they shifted gears and started victim blaming me after we were attacked by a known domestic terrorist who committed hate crimes against us just one week ago.”
Sac says she was first informed that her business was not zoned for entertainment purposes at a Thursday meeting, which she described as “very threatening.” She says city officials also expressed concerns over public resources being used to protect UpRising Bakery after it was the target of a hate crime late last month.
“This issue is about a business conducting activities it was never permitted to conduct,” Village of Lake in the Hills officials said in a statement. “This zoning designation prohibits entertainment in large part due to the close proximity to residential neighborhoods and shared tenant parking.”
“We dispute the letter’s characterization of UpRising programs as ‘entertainment events’ that are prohibited in a B-2 zoning district,” writes senior staff attorney Rebecca K. Glenberg. “Even if that characterization is correct, however, the Village’s sudden determination to enforce the code against UpRising or Ms. Sac based on their exercise of First Amendment rights constitutes unconstitutional retaliation.”
UpRising Bakery became the target of repeated harassment last month after announcing a planned “child-friendly” drag event. “One morning I came in and there was a bag of feces outside,” Sac told Chicago’s ABC7 News. “There was a letter taped to the door that said pedophiles work here.”
The event had to be cancelled after the bakery was vandalized. On July 23, Lake in the Hills Police arrested 24-year-old Joseph I. Collins after he allegedly shattered windows and spray-painted hateful messages on the bakery.
