Today, Dec. 1, is World AIDS Day. It is well known that transgender people are disproportionately impacted by the epidemic, but their voices and leadership too often are silenced or marginalized. For this World AIDS Day, the Positively Trans program has released three new videos by and about trans people of color living with HIV.
Watch the videos by Positively Trans National Advisory Member Arianna Lint, Marcus Ecks, and Aryah Lester below!
“In 2017, we live in a world where contracting HIV is completely preventable,” Arianna Lint, a Positively Trans National Advisory Board member from Florida, says in her video. “We are living in a world where if you contract HIV, it’s a chronic and critical disease, not a death sentence – unless you are poor, unless you are a person of color, and especially unless you’re a poor, transgender person of color. If you are holding any of those identities, especially if you’re holding all of them, you don’t live in 2017. For us, it’s 1980.”
Transgender Law Center launched Positively Trans in 2015 with the support of the Elton John AIDS Foundation as a response to the structural inequalities that drive the high rate of HIV/AIDS and poor health outcomes. By partnering with a National Advisory Board of community leaders, Positively Trans seeks to mobilize and promote resilience of transgender people most impacted by or living with HIV/AIDS, particularly transgender women of color, through research, policy advocacy, legal advocacy, and leadership strengthening.
The full Positively Trans video library and research reports are available here: https://transgenderlawcenter.org/programs/positively-trans.
