Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
I recently had an accident. I spilled boiling water on the front of my body—and suddenly remembered I wasn’t living in the Bay Area anymore, where I knew where to get urgent care and not have to worry about reactions by healthcare providers to my trans body.
It’s possible that I could have gone to the nearby urgent care facility in North Carolina and received trans sensitive health care—but it’s also quite possible that I would not. It was Christmas Eve, not a great time for me to ask around.
So, like many trans people, I avoided the healthcare system and took care of myself.
I now live in Asheville, and have been really fortunate to have a terrific trans friendly doctor at a local clinic, but it was closed on Christmas Eve.
Asheville is widely known as one of the more trans friendly cities in the South, which is one of the reasons I moved here. But after being here for a couple of years, I would say with much affection and love that it still has a ways to go.
I worry that I will lose my trans health care—the clinic I go to is federally funded, and Trump has campaigned on bans on gender affirming care for adults. Trump would like to take away the federal funding of clinics unless they stop providing gender affirming care. That’s straight from the right’s abortion playbook and it’s how the right wing plans on taking away trans health care just as they did abortion. The Democrats have already shown that they won’t stand up for us; many of them voted just last month to take away trans health care for kids in military families.
But we aren’t going anywhere, we will not be erased, and we have been fighting for trans healthcare for decades.
When I was a student at Hastings Law School (now UC Law San Francisco) in 1994, I interned at the SF Human Rights Commission. It was a very important year for the trans community in San Francisco. For the first time, the Human Rights Commission held hearings to document and discuss transgender discrimination in San Francisco. I sat there mesmerized, listening to Kiki Whitlock, Max Wolf Valeria, Susan Stryker, Yosenio Lewis, Matt Rice, Dominique Leslie, Shadow Morton, Stephan Thorne, James Green, Camille, Loren Cameron, and many others discuss their experiences of discrimination as transgender people, an identity I had begun to embrace.
Shortly after the hearing, a group of transgender activists began to meet through the Human Rights Commission to discuss next steps to address denials of care, discrimination, and how to get the city to provide trans health benefits to the city workforce.
I had become more motivated at this time than just being an intern because I had an experience where I was denied care by a doctor once they learned I was transgender. They literally walked out of the examination room! I had also begun to feel the sting of discrimination more generally by my health care providers, and even had a healthcare provider make decisions for me without my consent. Our bodies, their choice.
There is nothing like experiencing first-hand discrimination by health care providers to motivate you to want to change the system.
Initially, we tried to move the benefit for city workers through the city’s Health Services Board with the help of lesbian ally and then Supervisor Leslie Katz, who sat as a representative on the board. Our efforts picked up more momentum when gay Supervisor Mark Leno took up the cause, worked collaboratively with the trans community, and moved the issue as legislation through the Board of Supervisors.
I would say the board hearing on that legislation was a defining moment for the trans community in San Francisco. We needed nine supervisors to vote with us, and it was a very close call. There were 11 Supervisors, two were against us, and one was hidden in his office to avoid voting on the bill.
Fortunately, trans ally and gay Supervisor Tom Ammiano was board president, and in a hilarious moment, Tom demanded that the sheriffs go to the supervisor’s office and escort him back to the Board Chambers to vote. Who knew that the board president could do that?
And yes, he really was hiding in his office with his lights off… LOL. We were a small crew of people in the board chambers, but Mark and Tom stood by us (as they both would once they reached Sacramento as state legislators) and the legislation passed with eight votes, including votes from then Supervisor Gavin Newsom and the supervisor who had been hiding in his office.
But this was a critical moment in the history of transgender healthcare, not just in San Francisco, but in our nation. For the first time a large governmental body was providing their employees with trans healthcare—and if Kaiser wanted to keep its lucrative city contract, they had to step up and include that care. Other insurance companies that had been systematically denying coverage took notice of this massive change, and slow incremental progress began, first in California, and then nationally.
As someone said to me recently, don’t obey but do plan. Plan and strategize we must. Some organizations, like the Campaign for Southern Equality, are creating pipelines to support families with transgender children to move out of the South to states where gender affirming care is available. Tens of thousands of transgender people have already left the South for blue states or other countries in the face of the rising tide of MAGA hatred of trans people in the South, which was happening even before Trump was elected.
For sure, there will be setbacks. We have already faced significant setbacks and I’m sure we will face more. But the horse is out of the barn on transgender rights. Too much has been created for Trump to effectively erase us. Our community has come so far, and we will prevail even in the face of his campaign to eradicate us.
Looking back over the last 22 years since the ordinance passed, it amazes me what has been accomplished, how quickly it spread, and how far we have come. Some unions have even started bargaining for it at the table for their transgender union members. And for those of you who know me as an activist, I believe quite strongly in what Rebecca Solnit says about hope: “It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
We have come too far for Trump to stop us now.
We will find workarounds. We will not obey in advance. We will not obey. #Resist.
Gabriel Haaland, who is trans, is the former president of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and a union activist. He now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is a member of Queers 4 Voting Rights, a grassroots antiracist group.
