Today, on the National Day of Action to End Violence Against Women Living with HIV, Positive Women’s Network - USA affirms:
HIV is a gender justice issue, and violence against our bodies is at the center of the HIV epidemic. Violence from partners, from the state, from healthcare systems, and from laws designed to punish rather than protect.
On October 23, 2014, PWN-USA spearheaded the first-ever National Day of Action to draw attention to the high rates of interpersonal violence, abuse, and systemic brutality faced by women living with HIV – including the brutal murders of
Cicely Bolden and
Elisha Henson following disclosure of their HIV status. For over a decade, PWN has spoken truth to power: All women (cis and trans), gender diverse, and transgender folks living with HIV are survivors and leaders resisting overlapping systems of harm.
Today we lift that call louder, because this violence is intensifying.
We cannot separate the HIV epidemic from the political climate we are living in. State sanctioned violence is on the rise, attacks on our reproductive freedom, abortion bans that strip us of the right to decide what happens to our own bodies, the mass firing of Black and trans women in workplaces, and the vilification of transgender people–some even labeled as “extremists” simply for existing.
The Trump regime (including complicit members of Congress) has waged a coordinated campaign to dismantle the systems that keep us healthy while supercharging institutions that surveil, police, and criminalize us. They have used immigrant communities, people of color, trans and gender diverse people, and those who need abortion access as scapegoats to roll back our human rights and increase state-sponsored violence. Even today, we are experiencing a government shutdown because the Congressional Republicans refuse to secure healthcare access for millions or hold the Trump regime accountable for stealing funding from our communities.
These realities are not isolated incidents; they are part of the same system of violence that fuels the HIV epidemic.
On this day,
We
REMEMBER those we have lost,
We
RESIST oppression and violence in any form,
and we
RECOMMIT to advocacy and action.
We call on policymakers, healthcare providers, and communities to dismantle these systems of harm and to invest in the leadership, safety, and dignity of all cis and trans women and trans and gender diverse people living with HIV. Ending violence against us is not optional, it is essential to ending the epidemic.
In solidarity,
Marnina Miller & Evany Turk
Co-Executive Directors, Positive Women’s Network - USA
