Cameron Avisa Patel (NYU College of Arts and Sciences)| Sylvia Rivera Law Project | New York, USA
This summer, I will be working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Most of my work will involve helping transgender people access medical care, legal services, and information about their rights. This work is part of SRLP’s broader human rights mission to ensure that all people receive medical care and are safe from state violence. Much of the latter is rooted in a human rights critique of the prison system—as a result, SRLP does a lot of work with currently and formerly incarcerated people. At SRLP, this discourse tends to be focused on the United States (or even New York state), but it comes from a human rights framework that is necessarily limited by the scope of the organization.
Additionally, I will be researching transgender people’s experiences with involuntary admission to inpatient facilities. This is an issue that arose after the Adams administration created a policy allowing NYPD to admit patients without the input of a medical or social worker. Human rights become an immediate concern in the context of individual autonomy and the potential for police violence. Involuntary admission already connects to debates in human rights on balancing concern for an individual’s well-being and respect for their autonomy. This research thus connects to a broader question in human rights and medical ethics: at what point is it acceptable to override a person’s autonomy for their good? This raises inevitable questions about whether inpatient admission will do the patient well, especially in the context of the American medical system and structural barriers to basic non-medical needs like housing and food.
In the case of the current Adams policy, it is unclear if the people who are being admitted need psychological intervention, given that their sole assessor may be an untrained police officer. With that in mind, there is already potential for human rights violations under current policies. Within months of its implementation, I had heard of multiple acquaintances in the transgender community being detained under this policy while walking home or at the park. After hearing multiple accounts of peers facing transphobia by police officers and medical workers during involuntary detention, I decided to focus my summer research on transgender people’s specific experiences of this phenomenon. In doing so, I am also looking at the broader issue of queer rights as human rights. Why might transgender people be viewed as mentally ill or deviant? What drives those perceptions? These questions informed my independent study, which explored the connections between queerness, pathologization, and state violence.