Pride Month: Asking tough questions of healthcare workers

A recent University of Cape Town (UCT) Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) Pride Month online event titled “Trans and Gender Diversity within Higher Education” posed some tough questions for healthcare workers to consider.

What was your earliest experience of yourself as a gendered being? When did you first realise that you had been assigned as male or female and there was a gender role attached to that and how did you feel about it?

Anil Padavatan, the programmes manager at the human rights organisation Gender Dynamix, said these introspective questions are just some of the talking points put to healthcare workers undergoing sensitisation training during a gender-affirming education programme.

“Many are stumped. For many of the cisgendered people in our training, this is the first time they have had to think about this,” said Padavatan. The training sessions include healthcare workers and trans and gender diverse people.

“Pride is about human rights: the right to equality, dignity, freedom and security of the person, education and healthcare.”

Padavatan was speaking at the FHS event organised in honour of the South African observance of Pride Month, which commemorates the first Pride event held in October 1990. The faculty held a series of events underscored by the hashtag #AllyFHS.

“Pride is about human rights: the right to equality, dignity, freedom and security of the person, education and healthcare.

“It is about communities, like the trans and gender-diverse community and all the other communities who fall under the LGBTQIA+, who have faced violence, exclusion and discrimination,” he said.

Better understanding

The programme aims to provide healthcare workers with an introduction to gender affirming healthcare and to equip trans and gender-diverse people to better understand their own healthcare so they are able to take control of their bodies.

“Healthcare workers who join these trainings are interacting with people who are talking about their lived experiences and how they live their lives as real human beings.

“We give all the participants the opportunity to think about their own identity and gender expression, and often it is the first time that healthcare providers are doing this.”

“We have a responsibility to recognise that human rights do not play second fiddle to academic discourse.”

The need for introspection on gender identity by healthcare workers was echoed by the event’s other speaker, Dr Anastacia Tomson, a medical doctor, author and human rights activist.

She read from an oath taken by doctors: Let me never see in my patient anything but a fellow human being in pain. “The ‘fellow human being’ part gets lost on us,” said Dr Tomson.

“We are as guilty as anyone, as clinicians, as doctors. We have poked and prodded. We have been at the helm of conversion therapy with paddles. We have a responsibility to undo that. We have a responsibility to recognise that human rights do not play second fiddle to academic discourse.”

Include queer voices in academia

Tomson felt that there has to be a concerted effort to start creating opportunities for queer folk within academia and to ensure these opportunities are filled with queer voices.

“Some institutions and individuals have co-opted the academic interrogation of identity and weaponised it against people in the LGBTQIA+ community, especially trans folk, often to great fanfare. They market these harmful ideologies under a blanket of academic feminism.

“When we start talking about ideas like ‘trans women are not women but trans women are trans women’, when we start pushing back on language like ‘pregnant people’ or ‘people who menstruate’, we spread the idea that we are taking away by protecting the human rights of a marginalised group.

“Gone are the days when it is acceptable for a group of cisgender, straight people to lead the discussion on queer identity and to pass it off as upholding human rights.”

“Gone are the days when it is acceptable for a group of cisgender, straight people to lead the discussion on queer identity and to pass it off as upholding human rights.”

Padavatan shared similar sentiments on inclusion.

“The first step towards creating inclusive learning spaces is the inclusion of trans and gender-diverse persons in those spaces, as trainers and participants and not as absent subjects.

“Human interaction in spaces that deliberately challenge power dynamics is the most effective way of breaking down prejudice and stereotypes, and is more likely to lead to meaningful learning than a learning space that simply echoes the pervasive power dynamics.”

A commitment to curriculum transformation

The Trans and Gender Diversity within Higher Education event was co-moderated by the faculty’s dean, Associate Professor Lionel Green-Thompson, and Gender Dynamix health advocacy officer Savuka Matyila.

Associate Professor Green-Thompson listed three principles they are using in the transformation of the faculty’s curriculum:

• Engaging with society.
• Engaging with the curriculum from the point of view of graduate attributes – considering the nature of the professionals emerging from the institution.
• Social accountability – ensuring that graduates leave with a capacity to make a difference in the world.

“When we come into the higher education space, we must acknowledge that it is a place of evolution. It is the place in which the identities we come with, sometimes partially formed, sometimes complete, are always nurtured by the process of higher learning.

“If we are not creating learning processes in which we engage and continue to create cognitive dissonances, we will fail to educate people who will change our world,” said Green-Thompson.

Matyila said they hope UCT would open more platforms such as these and give students an opportunity to share their experiences and what transformation they think would be possible within universities.

Padavatan encouraged people interested in further discourse to attend Gender Dynamix’s National Conference on Trans and Gender Diverse Inclusive Education, which will be held online from 20 to 21 November 2021.