#Political messages don't belong in healthcare settings

[coochiequeens]

A patient said something she thought was in confidence and he (the doctor) shared it with staff? And now TRAs are harassing a woman fighting breast cancer? That doctor needs to lose his license for violating patient confidentiality

A woman in Oregon receiving treatment for breast cancer has been dropped by her health clinic of 12 years because she expressed views critical of gender ideology.

Marlene Barbera, who is scheduled for a mastectomy later this month, told Reduxx that she had commented on the presence of a transgender pride flag that was hanging in the waiting room of the Richmond Family Medical Clinic in Portland last year.

Barbera explained that she had written a message to her doctor on MyChart, a website where patients can access their personal health information, describing that she found the inclusion of “political messaging in a healthcare setting” as “offensive.”

She, like a growing number of women, has “gender critical” views, rejecting modern ideologies that conflate biological sex and “gender identity.” Barbera mentioned she had faced rape and death threats from trans activists on X (formerly Twitter), many of whom would have identified with that same flag.

Initially, the Doctor, who she revealed had been her primary care provider for over ten years, said that he would not take the flag down. But while Barbera had initially believed their correspondence to be private, she later discovered that the note to her physician had been viewed and shared by other staff at the clinic.

This June, while attempting to leave a message for her doctor regarding blood test results, the issue continued to escalate. A receptionist at the clinic, who Barbera speculated was transgender, did not permit her to be patched through to her doctor.

“The person insisted I make an appointment. I have breast cancer and consequently an abundance of medical appointments so I did not want to do that. They got frustrated with my ‘non-compliance’ and hung up on me,” Barbera told Reduxx.

“Thinking it might have been in error, I called back. I was told I was ‘not allowed’ and that I must speak to the previous person who had hung up on me. I declined as things hadn’t gone well the first time.”

She then questioned whether the refusal from the first receptionist was due to her previous complaint about the trans pride flag in the lobby.

“I asked, guessing ‘did I hurt the trans person’s feelings?’ And the receptionist took offense to the question, asking ‘what did you say‘ slowly and with great emphasis.”

Weeks later, Barbera received an email from Oregon Health Science University’s (OHSU) Stein Berger, informing her that she had been “discharged from receiving medical care at the Richmond Family Medicine Clinic,” effective immediately, with services to be cut off from all OHSU Family Medicine Clinics, including immediate care clinics, from July 29th. The email did in fact specify that she was being removed “because of ongoing disrespectful and hurtful remarks about our LGBTQ community and staff.”

Barbera told Reduxx that the incident had sent her “anxiety through the roof” and that she was struggling with her mental health as a result of the stress.

“I have severe chronic agitated depression since teen years,” Barbera explains. “Now I have no primary care doctor and nowhere else to go. I have been made to feel like a worthless nothing.”

This is not the first time a woman has lost access to critical medical services due to her “gender critical” views.

In October of last year, a woman identified as Emma by the UK’s Daily Mail was banned from having an operation in London’s Princess Grace Hospital because she requested single sex accommodation. The woman, who had been scheduled for a complex colorectal operation, also expressed that she did not want to “use pronouns or engage with such manifestations of gender ideology.”

Despite having experience being the victim of sexual assault, Emma was banned from having her procedure at the facility for requesting single-sex care.

[stargazing-enby]

I saw your post about gatekeeping. What does that mean? (Genuine question, im just a baby queer sorry if i offended)

Hi! Not offended at all, it's okay to not know 💜

Several people have asked the same question in the notes of that post through the years, so if you scroll through the notes you'll find some interesting discussions about it. People have also shared their stories and how gatekeeping has affected them, if you want to check those out.

The Urban Dictionary defines gatekeeping as follows:

When someone takes it upon themselves to decide who does or does not have access or rights to a community or identity.

Gatekeeping is a very broad term. There are people who gatekeep fandoms, minorities, communities, interests... Someone who tells you you're not a “true fan” of a music band unless you can name all their albums is a gatekeeper, for example.

I'd say there are many ways to define the gatekeeping of the queer community in particular. Here are some definitions I can come up with:

The act of trying to decide or sentence who has a right to identify as queer or as any particular label under the queer umbrella.

The act of accusing an individual of not being queer (or any other label) enough, or of faking their identity.

The act of claiming a person does not deserve access to queer spaces, accommodations or healthcare (eg. gay bars, pride parades, hormone replacement therapy, certain sets of pronouns, terms such as butch and femme, etc).

The act of sentencing which labels belong to the queer community and which don't. Typically, people will say “only LGBT”, “only LGB” or even “only LG” people are part of the community, and they'll reject other groups of people (trans, nonbinary, pansexual, asexual, aromantic...) from the community. Sometimes, people will go as far as to state some or all of these identities aren't real, or are just an attempt by straight people to invade a community that isn't theirs. These are usually the same people who reject the very word queer, and who feel entitled to knowing which other labels a queer person fits into so they can judge whether that person belongs in the community.

At its core, gatekeeping in the queer community is a form of discrimination. And it's discrimination that typically comes from within the community. It can be motivated by different things. For example, some people desire to earn the acceptance and respect of people outside the community, and they believe they can earn that privilege by siding with them against the “weirder” or “less acceptable” queer people. They essentially punch down to try to move up the social ladder. This kind of attitude and behaviour is usually referred to as respectability politics. Other people gatekeep because of the way they understand their identity (often deeply rooted in internalised queerphobia). For example, some trans people believe their transness is a diagnosable physical illness, and only trans people who experience dysphoria are actually trans. These people usually feel threatened by others using the same label as them when their experiences don't match. They feel like others are doing queerness “wrong”. 

There are many different forms of gatekeeping, and yes, they are alive and well today, especially on social media. There are forms of gatekeeping specific to virtually every single label within the queer umbrella. From “real gay men don't need to wear rainbows for people to know they're gay” to “the only real lesbians are the ones who've never liked men or been with men” to “asexual people are just traumatised or immature, everyone grows out of that” to “real trans people feel dysphoria, everyone else is just a trender” to “bisexual/m-spec people in straight relationships are basically just straight”. That's just scratching the surface. But the core message is always the same: that there are “real” queer people, and then there are people who are falsely claiming to be queer and, in doing so, harming the community.

This kind of mentality has caused a great amount of pain to many people. People spend years in the closet or in denial, too scared to even question their gender or sexuality in fear of invading a community they don't belong to, because what if they turn out not to be queer? People feel too terrified to try out labels and pronouns for fear they don't deserve to use those words for themselves. People genuinely believe they aren't suffering enough to deserve to transition or to end a relationship or to try dating a different gender. People silence their own voices, make themselves small and quiet, and apologise for their own identities because they genuinely believe they aren't queer enough to deserve to take up space in the community, or they aren’t queer in the correct way. 

I used to feel this way myself. I used to feel like, even though I was nonbinary, I didn't deserve the trans label or to speak up about my experiences because I'd be talking over “real” trans people who deserved to be heard more than me. The vast majority of the queer people I’ve talked to have had to overcome (or are still struggling with) feelings of shame, guilt, doubt, fear, denial or self-hatred because of the messages they’ve received about the “right” way to be a certain identity. There have been many cases of online harassment and abuse toward people who weren’t deemed queer enough by gatekeepers, or who were accused of doing queerness wrong. 

That's why it's so important to question gatekeeping when you come across it. If you see someone trying to claim a label is harmful to the community, or a person is faking being queer, or there are certain queer people who are just “too gross” or “too weird” or “too cringy” to deserve respect; if you see someone trying to instil fear about people “invading” the community, ask yourself why those people are making these claims. What's their goal? What do they gain by making these statements? Who and what are they trying to protect?

I hope this helps. If anyone else wants to add any information or share their personal experiences on this post, please feel free to do so. I hear you.