The Fenway Institute of Fenway Health today released its annual policy brief laying out the Trump administration’s expansion of anti-LGBT policies over the past year.
“During Donald Trump’s third year as president, we moved from worrying that anti-LGBT policies would harm people to seeing the damage of these policies in action,” said the report’s coauthor Sean Cahill, PhD, Director of Health Policy Research at The Fenway Institute in a Fenway Press release issued today.
Cahill authored the report, titled “In its third year in office, the Trump Administration dramatically expanded discriminatory anti-LGBT policies,” along with Fenway Institute Senior Policy Analyst Tim Wang and Social Work Intern Connor Simonoff.
“The most dramatic examples have been the deaths of two transgender women seeking asylum in the United States who were detained in facilities currently being sued for their alleged abuse of LGBT migrants,” said Cahill. “Other moves have made LGBT people and people living with HIV much more vulnerable to discrimination in health care, social services, employment, education, and access to basic government services.”
According to the release:
Much of the harm LGBT people are now experiencing is the result of discriminatory actions that target them, such as rolling back sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination provisions in health care, employment, and housing while expanding discriminatory religious refusal policies. But other policies that are not specifically aimed at LGBT people, such as restricting asylum hearings in the United States only to people who have been denied asylum in another country, and the maltreatment of people in border detention facilities, have disproportionately affected LGBT people from Central America seeking asylum to escape anti-LGBT violence.
In June, a transgender woman from El Salvador, who spent six weeks in a detention center in New Mexico that has been sued by the ACLU for creating “unconscionable conditions” for LGBT immigrants, died after being hospitalized for chest pain. The woman, a nurse, had repeatedly asked for an IV solution or, barring that, water, salt, and sugar so she could make and administer her own solution, but was denied medical care.
The complete policy brief can be downloaded here. (For other examples of actions taken by the Trump Administration in 2019 that undermine the health and well-being of LGBT people and people living with HIV, check out the press release here.)
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