In this issue:

  • Meet Our Shero of the Month: Michelle Troxell
  • Organizing Spotlight: NC Queens for Change Won’t Be Stopped
  • We Are People, Not Clusters

Meet Our Shero of the Month: Michelle Troxell

Our September 2020 Shero of the Month is Michelle Troxell of Barto, Pennsylvania. Michelle is the current co-chair of PWN-USA Pennsylvania, a newlywed, and a woman living with HIV for over 28 years.

Andrea Johnson, who nominated Michelle, said, “With pleasure, I nominate Michelle Troxell for her fearless, tireless, and awesome leadership as she helps to lead PWN-USA PA members through an important time in all of our histories and lives as we continue to forge through the huge injustices that continue to take place and encapsulates us all.”

Michelle said finding balance is not one of her strong traits. She has to constantly practice at finding balance in her life, between her new marriage and all the emerging battles that 2020 has brought. She said she learned that some things are important and some things are urgent.

“Family, health, and self-care are most important, and at times when the urgent things come up, it’s easy to overlook the other important things, like making sure my husband doesn’t forget we are married!” she said.

Advocacy work has kept her grounded and given her the energy to get through some dark times, even prior to the pandemic. In an effort to practice balance, Michelle said, “I have recently started using a tool I learned about a while ago but hadn’t been using on a regular basis, the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s a tool to divide up all the tasks that must be done, personal, work, family, etc., and you put them into categories: important AND urgent, important BUT NOT urgent, NOT important But urgent, and NOT important and NOT urgent.”

Read more about Michelle here!

Organizing Spotlight: NC Queens for Change Won’t Be Stopped

With so much going on in our country today, it can be easy to forget that the most crucial election of our lifetime is only a little over a month away. Civil uprisings are continuing to happen in light of unaccountable police who kill Black women and men with relative impunity. The Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has put far more Americans in danger of contracting the virus and led to over 200,000 American deaths, with Black and Latinx people hit the hardest.

Still, early voting in some states is already beginning. It’s against this backdrop that advocates are registering voters and commencing get-out-the-vote activities.

We interviewed Alicia Diggs of PWN North Carolina Queens for Change about how the team stays focused and motivated in the midst of so many crises.

Q. In the midst of a pandemic and civil uprisings, dedicated PWNers in North Carolina continue to engage the voting community. In what ways have you maintained communication with your voter lists?

A. North Carolina has maintained communication with our voter lists in the midst of a pandemic and civil uprisings by sending emails and text messages to keep them up to date on current events and notices.

Q. How has social distancing impacted your ability to organize during the pandemic? How has it impacted the advocacy work you were already doing?

A. While social distancing has had an impact on our ability to organize face-to-face, It has not stopped us. Queens for Change host online education sessions with a reach of over 400,000. We have presented on webinars about the importance of leadership among women living with HIV.
Read the full interview here

Read and Share:
We Are People, Not Clusters


We Are People, Not Clusters, co-authored by some of our favorite advocates for the American Journal of Bioethics, details the human rights objections to the use of molecular HIV surveillance. It also digs into the current covid19 pandemic and the threat that surveillance in the name of public health poses to people already at heightened risk of criminalization.

Thank you Edwin J. Bernard (HIV Justice Network); Alexander McClelland (Carleton University); Barb Cardell (Colorado Organizations and Individuals Responding to HIV/AIDS and PWN-USA); Cecilia Chung (Transgender Law Center); Marco Castro-Bojorquez (HIV Racial Justice NOW); Martin French (Concordia University); Devin Hursey (Missouri HIV Justice Coalition); Naina Khanna (PWN-USA); Mx Brian Minalga (The Legacy Project); Andrew Spieldenner (HIV Caucus); and Sean Strub (SERO Project) for this enlightening piece!

What MHS demonstrates is that we are still fighting to access self-determination and informed decision-making about our lives. But this is more than an issue of violating consent (however egregious) or the specific practices of MHS. This is about undoing the objectifying, othering logic of public health actors and medical researchers. We must work toward the abolition of such logic which views the bodies and blood of people living with HIV—especially those who are Black, Indigenous and immigrant people and other people of color; people who use drugs, people who sell sex; trans women; and gay men—as objects to be studied without consent under the justification of the “public good.” We must abolish the logic which considers non-consensual violations against our bodies and our communities as collateral damage, and not as harms done to the public.
Read the full editorial here!