Shreya Reddy is with ACCELERATE and works as a clinical manager in Mitr Clinic, India's first transgender clinic. Shreya has been working on LGBTQI+ health rights and aspires to institutionalize efforts for greater inclusion and overall well being of trans people.

Shreya Reddy on ‘Community-level barriers in accessing healthcare’ (edited, in the speaker’s words):

The world believes that we transgender people are born with stigma and discrimination. Our existence is supposed to be stigmatized individually and discriminated against individually. This is what the world believes.

I am a trans person and for the last 20 years, I belong to the Hijra community. I will say that society has made me believe that if I ‘want to become’ a girl, or get gender-affirming surgeries, I have to face all stigma and discrimination that the society has given me.

Society discriminates against us every time in many places in many boxes, like everywhere we go. In every place, we face discrimination and are stigmatized every time, every time, every time.

We are also human beings and have suffered a lot in healthcare. So why I'm saying ‘human beings’, is because we are often considered to be out of the society, they pretend that we are like aliens.

Every time I tried to access healthcare, I faced stigma and discrimination like many of my co-panelists have mentioned — sexual abuse, judgement, ‘what is between your two legs’, and so on.

There’s been a lack of knowledge about gender-affirming surgeries within the community and with the doctors. In the year of 2005, when I went for a gender-affirming surgery, the doctor gave me wrong information about the possibility of getting surgery.

Even now, we are confused about which doctors to go to, which doctors have an understanding of gender-affirming care.

Continued: https://www.pixstory.com/story/challenges-in-healthcare-ive-felt-alone-for-20-years-but-tables-have-turned-shreya1652173568/99466