HIV Scare & Transsexuals
Unfortunately, I am old enough to remember when the public hysteria over the AIDS/HIV epidemic in America and how it was used as the supreme gay bashing weapon in the 1970s. This was a time of great struggle for the "homosexual community." Much of the progress that the gay community had made, in the sexual revolution movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was threatened and lost. Panic, fear, and ignorance swept the mainstream heterosexual community in America about HIV/AIDS, to the point many thought by simply touching a person (homosexual) with AIDS, you were risking contracting the disease yourself. Popular opinion ignored the well established fact that it truly was not predominately a gay issue but, a heterosexual illness that some gay individuals contacted as well. The AIDS/HIV issue and its misuse had more of a damaging effect on the gay community than Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his propaganda had on all of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. AIDS/HIV devastated the gay movement in the United States to the point that, even today, the homosexual community has not fully recovered, and this was deliberate.
Today things have change, although the fight by the gay community to recover lost ground of public opinion and acceptance has been painfully slow, there has been progress. But, I see things in the transgender and transsexual community that are reminiscent of the good old witch burning days of the AIDS/HIV propaganda campaigns, of mass public ignorance, and hysteria of the 1970s that alarm me. As fare as what little is know about the transgender community by the larger society in the United States, most believe there is a direct connection between transsexuals and AIDS/HIV. For that matter, it is also believed that there is a direct connection between transsexuals and drug abuse, between transsexuals and prostitution, transsexuals and alcoholism, transsexuals and metal illness, transsexuals and crime, and welfare abuse. But recently, the granddaddy of all of this public misinformation is that transsexuals are AIDS/HIV infected prostitutes. This is true, to the extent that if you seek medical care from public or even private medical centers design to cater to the transgender community, you will be overwhelmed by the presumption and suspicion that you are among this affected group of individuals within our community. So, even well intended medical care givers and social service providers that seek to help our community are frequently operating under these assumptions. Ladies, my dear sisters, this is real bad news, it can't get any worse than this, if our community desires to gain full, or even partial societal enfranchisement.
Godiva
