New York/IBNS: “The struggle to beat AIDS is inseparable from the struggle for women’s rights and from the struggle against all forms of discrimination”. This is the message from Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, on Zero Discrimination Day, which falls on Sunday March 1. The theme of this year’s Day is the fight against discrimination faced by women and girls, and the organization aims to raise awareness, mobilize action, and promote equality.

Time for change

Discrimination against women and girls occurs in many different forms, across the world. These include laws that limit women’s sexual and reproductive rights, criminalize people for their gender identity or sexual orientation, or for transmitting HIV.

UNAIDS has outlined several societal changes that need to take place, to end discrimination and help in the fight against AIDS.

These include ensuring equal participation of women in political life, uphold human rights for women, and guaranteeing them economic justice, which includes ending the ongoing gender pay gap.

Violence against women must end, and laws that protect women form violence must be put in place and respected, with policies to support and protect survivors of violence.

Health care must be available, without any stigma, discrimination or barriers, and care for women must respect their autonomy, with guaranteed sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Any age of consent for health services should be lifted, and married women should not need the permission of their spouse to access care.

UNAIDS also calls for free education for all, and an end to the large gender gap which still exists in access to education, and a response to climate change that takes into account the fact that women are disproportionately affected, and are particularly vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence during climate-related emergencies.

This is personal

Byanyima, who has lost family members to AIDS, said that it can only be beaten if the international community takes on social and economic injustices faced by women and girls, and spurs scientific innovation to help those living with the disease.

“Both my own family experience, and our collective experience at the United Nations, have highlighted the same key lesson: the struggle to beat AIDS is inseparable from the struggle for women’s rights and from the struggle against all forms of discrimination”.

AIDS is the biggest killer of women aged 15-49. For UNAIDS, gender-based violence, inequality and insecurity must end, and women and girls must have equal access to education, health and employment, if AIDS is to be beaten by 2030.

In addition, society must be transformed so that there are no second-class citizens, and everyone’s human rights are respected, said the UNAIDS chief.

“AIDS cannot be beaten while marginalized communities (such as the LGBTQI community, people who inject drugs and sex workers) live in fear of the state or of socially sanctioned violence and abuse”, said Byanyima.

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For more than a decade, Northwestern professor Celeste Watkins-Hayes documented the lives of more than 100 women living with HIV/AIDS in Chicago and beyond.

Now, the stories of the obstacles they faced, and the ways in which their diagnoses transformed their lives, are featured in a new book.

It’s called “Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality.”

The book opens with a statement Watkins-Hayes describes as powerful – and complicated: “If it weren’t for HIV, I’d probably be dead.”

Watkins-Hayes told “Chicago Tonight” she was initially confused by the logic of that statement, told to her by one of the women featured in the book. “How can an illness responsible for the deaths of millions around the world help to save a life?” she asked.  

“And what I came to learn … is what she was explaining was that the support system that was necessary for her to move from what I call ‘dying from,’ to ‘living with,’ to ‘thriving despite’ HIV/AIDS was found within the HIV support community,” Watkins-Hayes said. “She was telling me about the significance of the social support network that constitutes our HIV/AIDS safety net and pointing to it as a lifesaving resource that helped save her life.”

Those safety nets and the HIV community were crucial to the personal and political transformations of the women profiled in the book.

Worldwide, 36 million people live with HIV/AIDS. In the United States, 1.1 million are living with it, and there are about 40,000 new infections each year.

But in the early days of the epidemic, white gay men were the face of the disease, making it difficult for cisgender and transgender women to be addressed in the HIV/AIDS response, Watkins-Hayes said.

As more women tested positive, Watkins Hayes says “it became clear that the infrastructure that was being built and the mobilization that was being mounted didn’t necessarily include the experiences of HIV positive women.”

The focus on women living with HIV/AID didn’t happen until much later, she said. Part of their struggle was “finding their voice within that existing community, thinking about HIV in the context of motherhood and not just the potential risk of HIV transmission to their children.”

Watkins-Hayes said there was a reluctance among women to be out in front of the movement because some had children. Women were worried about the stigma of the disease and whether or not the foster care system would take their children away or if they’d be able to stay in school.

Racial disparities among HIV/AIDS diagnoses have also been persistent.

Though African Americans make up about 12% of the U.S. population, the disease still disproportionately impacts them. According to “Remaking a Life,” among all women with HIV diagnoses in 2015, 61% were African American, 19% were white and 15% were Latino. In 2015, HIV/AIDS was the fourth leading cause of death among black women aged 35 to 44.

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The evangelical-led Trump administration has been waging a war against transgender people since 2016, but the way they responded to a Supreme Court case involving anti-trans discrimination may be the most horrifying defense of bigotry yet.

The case in question involves Aimee Australia Stephens, a transgender woman, who spent six years working as a funeral director and embalmer in Detroit. In 2013, she told her colleagues and employers at RG & GR Harris Funeral Home that she would go through sex-reassignment surgery so that her outward appearance matched her true gender.

The proper response would have been, “We wish you the best.” Or maybe “We can’t wait to have you back at work!” Or maybe “This is none of my goddamn business, but more power to you.”

Instead, owner Thomas F. Rost fired her.

Stephens later filed a lawsuit against her employer with two specific allegations: that the company violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by firing her for being transgender, and that they violated sex discrimination laws by saying she was fired for refusing to wear a suit (which was required of all maleemployees). The first allegation was rejected altogether because a court said discrimination on the basis of gender identity was not banned by Title VII, so you couldn’t argue otherwise. The second one has been the basis of a lengthy legal battle.

In 2016, a federal judge said the funeral home didn’t violate the law by firing an employee who wanted to dress as a woman. While discrimination could be argued, the judge said, the employer’s religious rights allowed for it under the law. To put it another way, the employers’ faith, which compelled them to make men wear suits at work, was deemed more important than the right of a female employee to not wear a suit.

An appeals court later (thankfully) overturned that ruling. They said Stephens was a victim of discrimination and that her wanting to wear a dress didn’t burden her employers enough that the religious trump card kicked in.

Now the Supreme Court’s going to weigh in, and the Trump administration issued a brief calling for SCOTUS to overturn the ruling. They want religious business owners to have the right to fire transgender employees. Just because. But they’re going even further by calling for the Supreme Court to make sex discrimination legal regardless of what Title VII says.

In short, the government is saying that when Title VII prohibits sex discrimination, it really means “biological sex.” So firing trans people at will ought to be totally fine.

Dominic Holden at BuzzFeed explains that this is all coming from the Christian Right’s playbook:

The administration’s argument against LGBTQ rights matches the advocacy of conservative Christian groups, which claim Congress only intended to ban discrimination because someone is male or female — saying the sexes cannot be treated differently. Their argument says interpreting the term “sex” more broadly effectively rewrites the law, and only Congress, not courts, has that license.

The counterargument from LGBTQ advocates and several lower courts, however, is that the intent of lawmakers does not limit a law’s reach, but rather its meaning is defined by the statute’s plain text. They say anti-transgender discrimination can result from a person defying traditional sex stereotypes or because the person transitioned from one sex to another — and thus, it is inherently a type of sex discrimination.

That latter argument makes sense. Stephens was fired for, say, wanting to wear a dress, but a cis woman who wanted to wear a dress would still have a job. Stephens was fired, then, for not fitting a gender-based stereotype. That’s sex discrimination. It’s like firing a woman for having short hair.

If the government gets its wish — which is to say, if white evangelical Christians get their wish — then it could become open season for Christian business owners to fire transgender people for the crime of merely existing. (In which case the rest of us should openly refuse to do business with bigoted owners — and to make sure the world knows which businesses are run by those people.)

If all that wasn’t enough, a separate brief filed by the Christian hate group Alliance Defending Freedom took a “sky is falling” approach to what the country would look like if you couldn’t fire trans people.

“It will deny women and girls fair opportunities to compete in sports, to ascend to the winner’s podium, and to receive critical scholarships,” the ADF brief states. “It will also require domestic-abuse shelters to allow men to sleep in the same room as female survivors of rape and violence. And it may dictate that doctors and hospitals provide transition services even in violation of their religious beliefs.”

The people who have earned a reputation for not giving a damn about anyone who doesn’t think just like they do want you to believe they now care about the whole world. (Also, I assure you no trans person has ever forced a doctor to perform a transition service against his or her will. That sounds… like a horrible idea.)

The oral arguments for this case and two others that involve similar issues will occur in early October. Given the Court’s makeup, there’s no reason to be optimistic about what the justices will do.

Never vote for a Republican. The GOP’s only policy goal is to inflict pain on people who disagree with them. LGBTQ people will suffer more than most, and this is just the latest example of it.

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