Description
I explore the cruel agencies inflicted upon the trans/queer accessing healthcare in the UK, including both transition healthcare, and non-transition healthcare. Access to transition healthcare through public and private pathways is typically predicated on a number of diagnoses and criteria that understands transness/queerness through a psychiatric model. This creates requirements, behaviours and patterns to be performed, or at least performed to be performed, before healthcare is met.
Accessing non-transition related healthcare is complicated by medical transphobia, and causes disabling, death and ailment. This can be jeopardised by transition-related healthcare, and deliberately cause disengagement and and avoidance of healthcare systems.This is particularly exacerbated for global majority individuals, and asylum seekers, who already experience medical racism, and who often do not have the financial resources to access private care and with the case of asylum seekers, the knowledge base required to navigate deeply hostile systems.
As trans/queer communities already experience greater employment and housing precarity than the non-trans/queer population, these factors and absence of adequate support systems inflict an increasing attrition rate and toll on trans/queer populations, and liveability. I argue this is an example of a cruel agency, where a 'slow death' is inflicted on trans/queer communities by severing access to support systems other communities would be able to participate in through the carceralism innate in psychiatry.
