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Forty years ago, women were fighting to stay alive. Forty years ago, women were fighting to be diagnosed. Forty years ago, women were fighting off unusual symptoms. Women even had to fight to wear the clothes they liked.
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Since the beginning of time, women have had to fight for recognition.
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There are narratives around HIV that get reinforced through misinformation being repeated over and over to the point that it is accepted as fact-as well as the complete erasure of people, places, and events that aren’t considered important enough to include in historical documentation. It is a reminder that we live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t value women and demands that we keep pushing for change. The erasure of women with HIV in historical narratives can be tracked over the past 40 years. It was also a message of demand to the government to expedite scientific discovery around HIV and women and revise the AIDS diagnostic criteria to include women-specific HIV-related illnesses. This famous slogan was a rallying cry to raise awareness about the fact that women do in fact get HIV, can progress to AIDS, and too often die without proper diagnosis, treatment, and care. This repeated neglect in narratives is reminiscent of why women with HIV and activist allies were forced to protest the government and yell chants like, “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it,” in the early years of the epidemic. The negligence of this piece has serious consequences as there is a very real possibility that thousands of people came away from the program thinking that there were no women with HIV at the start of the epidemic and that women don’t get HIV in 2021. Others asked why the community couldn’t just be happy that the Today show had reported about HIV, completely missing the point that cisgender and transgender women are consistently erased from HIV narratives.
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While it appeared that many on social media were in support of the concerns being raised, some justified the focus on men by stating that it was an LGBT Pride episode-somehow missing that lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women with HIV exist and should have been included. HIV activist Barb Cardell also tweeted, “Hey thank you for honoring the anniversary of 40 years of HIV but you need to do better! Women, Transgender & gender diverse folks have been here since the beginning and must be included. Positive Women’s Network-USA tweeted, “Why didn’t include #women living with #HIV in their coverage of #HIVat40? Cis & trans women would like to know! We are here & available to answer your questions & connect you with amazing women living with HIV who can tell you how they’ve been impacted by the epidemic.” Women living with HIV and their allies expressed anger over the lack of representation of cisgender and transgender women in the segment and posted about their feelings on social media. While the news report was informative, many people (myself included) wondered how the Today show could release an entire report on HIV and not include cisgender and transgender women. Later in the segment, four men from different generations were interviewed about their lived experience with HIV, the anguish of the early years of the epidemic, scientific advances-including undetectable equals untransmittable (U=U)-and HIV-related stigma. Well-known men with HIV were mentioned, including Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson, and Pedro Zamora. On June 2, the Today show released a six-minute video news report titled, “40 years since first AIDS cases, men living with HIV share their perspectives.” In it were old news clips from the early years of the epidemic showing imagery of hospitals, clinics, and ill-appearing men in beds.