Kanchan Aher, a trans and rights activist based in Pune expressed her concerns about her community and the discrimination that their gender attracts and the problems that they might have to face, especially during the COVID pandemic. She says, “Genuinely speaking we are invisible for everyone in this society. Most of my kind are forced to stay in jhuggis and slums as we don’t get residential spaces easily and we literally exist on the margins of society.
Most of us eke out a living by begging, or being paid at ritual functions, activisim and community members or sex work - all of these based on social contact.
Now that everyone is following social distancing most of us are suffering not just physically and mentally but financially as well. There is an aid for labourers, the poor, and the homeless even but no one is talking about us. In such conditions, if I am to contract the virus, would I get the same treatment that other patients receive? To start off with, we usually get denied the basic healthcare that the urban elite and middle classes receive; and in such scarcity of hospitals or doctors, I wonder of we will even get basic care? Hence, COVID-19 is forcing us to face the possibility of dying out of hunger and lack of care before our time.
Even if I do get admitted, none of the quarantine centres across India have separate isolation wards for transgenders. So I will be forced to stay either in the male or female ward. There may be doubts and biases towards my gender in the back of the doctor’s head; after all doctors are human beings with human prejudices with a high possibility of discriminatory attitudes in their treatment towards me.
These thoughts and circumstances are making me fear the possibility of treatment by a doctor who wouldn’t value my life since I am a transgender person. I do not trust all health care providers to treat me equally, since I’ve been seeing news about how they differentiate on the mere basis of religion or sect, something that is at least recognized and fought against by many. I am invisible for most and with an unwanted or a burdensome theory in mind; they might treat me with discrimination based on my gender and I fear that more than death caused due to a pandemic.”