As President Donald Trump’s executive orders threaten to strip away protections for transgender and gender-nonconforming people, a new report by the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown Law urges health care providers and health departments to expand HIV care and improve the health and safety of these populations and offers recommendations on how to do so.
Report authors Jeffrey Crowley, MPH, director of the Center for HIV and Infectious Disease Policy at the O’Neill Institute, and Kirk Grisham, MPH, the center’s program manager, call for broader societal support for transgender and gender expansive people, an umbrella term for nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people.
Trump’s exercise of presidential power “seeks to negate the existence of transgender and gender expansive people,” the authors write, adding that Trump’s executive orders also “seek to remove the promise of fair and equal treatment in federal programs and other areas of civic life for not only members of the LGBTQ community, but also people of color and others.”
The eight-page report is titled “Improving the Health and Safety of Transgender and Gender Expansive People” (you can read a two-page brief here). It includes easy-to-digest “getting to know you” graphs and data about trans and gender expansive people as well as tips on simple actions Americans can take to help improve the lives and health of trans folks.
In the United States, about 1.6 million people identify as transgender, 300,000 of whom are between 13 and 17 years old, according to the report, which uses data from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, known for its research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. This means that 0 1.4% of youth and 0.5% of U.S. adults 18 and over identify as transgender.
Transgender and gender expansive people have a higher rate of HIV compared with the rest of the population. In 2021, transgender folks accounted for 2% of new HIV diagnoses. Including all populations, genders and sexualities, about 36,100 people tested HIV positive in 2021. Trans women accounted for 89% of new diagnoses among all trans people, and 78% of those women were Black and Latina.
For further details about the report, click here.
Source : POZ
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