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Locating healthcare in daily trans lives | Speaker: Rachana Mudraboyina, State Technical Trans Expert, ACCELERATE, Telangana (edited, in the speaker's own words) at the TransCare MedEd National Conference:
It's always been problematic for me to narrate my own experience, so I'm going to tell a story, which is important for this conference today. It's a story about two trans sisters, whose names are Prema and Hema.
They both come from a remote area of Telangana district, and they travel across to Maharashtra. We know that trans people – not only for their livelihood, but also for the freedom of gender expression – travel and migrate to a lot of places.
So they migrated to Mumbai and started their transition. Somewhere down the line, Hema got a surgery through a quack, not a proper medical or plastic surgeon.
Ten to fifteen days later, Prema comes home to find Hema in a really problematic condition, and has to rush Hema to the doctor, who is not aware of trans people.
The doctor took four to five hours just to understand that Hema was trans. A few years later we got the news that Hema died of a brain hemorrhage. Prema was not with her at the time, as she was living with HIV and at a critical stage, and migrated back to Telangana to her house.
We went to Mumbai to get Hema’s body back, and found that Hema had been married to a cisgender woman and had a child.
This story of Prema and Hema, narrates a lot of things to us: there is migration, there is no environment for your gender expression, there is poverty, there is no healthcare, there is no care for value of lives. If we make any sort of risk to transition, what happens to mental health?
Continued..