About this episode

Róisín Michaux returns to discuss her investigation into the World Health Organization's guidelines for transgender healthcare and the implications for HIV funding.

Today I welcome back Róisín Michaux — the Irish writer based in Brussels who covers women’s rights and free speech in the context of the transgender movement — for her second appearance on the show. When I booked this interview I had no idea what we’d cover; I simply trusted her to bring something worth digging into. What she brought is her ongoing investigation into the new World Health Organization guidelines for global transgender healthcare, and I’m hearing most of it for the first time right alongside the listener. Róisín walks me through how a 2019 reclassification in the International Classification of Diseases — moving gender identity out of mental health and into sexual health in order to “depathologize” it — created a conundrum: how do you get hormones and surgeries reimbursed for a condition that’s no longer a condition? That question, she argues, is the thread that connects the WHO’s guideline development group to a much larger story about HIV funding, the Global Fund, Open Society Foundations money, and decades of AIDS-elimination targets. We get into the “third gender” populations of India, Thailand, and Latin America; why so many of these vulnerable young men end…

People in this episode

Host: Stephanie Winn

Guest: Róisín Michaux

Topics covered

• transgender health policy
• HIV funding
• women's rights
• free speech
• global healthcare guidelines
• mental health
• sexual health

Keywords

• transgender healthcare
• HIV
• World Health Organization
• gender identity
• AIDS-elimination
• insurance coding
• prostitution
• antiretrovirals

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: World Health Organization, Global Fund, Open Society Foundations

Places: India, Thailand, Latin America

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