Cameron Patel

Cameron Avisa Patel (NYU College of Arts and Sciences) | Sylvia Rivera Law Project | New York, USA

My time at SRLP is coming to a close, though because it is in New York City, I intend to volunteer there in the future. This summer has been such an incredible experience: from meeting people who were at Stonewall in 1969 to working one-on-one with SRLP members. This experience broadened my understanding of what issues are affecting transgender and gender expansive people in NYC. While I initially went into this fellowship with a sole focus on involuntary hospitalization, it became clear that housing status has a major impact on people’s experiences. I had heard anecdotally about police officers targeting folks living on the street, but this summer, I found out that many people had been threatened with hospitalization by shelter workers. This opened a new avenue for my research, and it raises critical questions about the overlap between police violence, housing status, and medical autonomy.

I am incredibly grateful for the Gallatin Human Rights Fellowship, which is a global fellowship that nonetheless allowed me to stay in New York City. This allowed me to apply the international human rights framework that the fellowship taught me to local issues. It also allows me to maintain continuity in my relationship and work with SRLP in the future.

This past month, most of my work has involved the Know Your Rights guide on involuntary psychiatric admission. We have been working with the Peer Defense Project, an organization that does incredible work connecting young people with legal resources. As a result of my fellowship work, I will likely be partnering with them this spring to run a workshop about involuntary hospitalization. 

I have also been helping to set up a food pantry at SRLP, which will include shelf-stable food and basic hygiene items. This is another way that SRLP is trying to support people who are housing insecure, which has increasingly become a core part of the organization’s mission. The long-term goal is to have a food pantry which also includes meat and fresh produce for people who have access to kitchens and refrigerators. That expansion would help people who are in stable housing situations but cannot afford certain food items.

This fellowship has been incredibly fulfilling and has expanded my understanding of human rights issues here in New York City. I cannot wait to apply everything I’ve learned to my future work.

Cameron Avisa Patel (NYU College of Arts and Sciences) | Sylvia Rivera Law Project | New York, USA

This last month at SRLP has been fulfilling and busy. At the end of June, we participated in the Queer Liberation March. That same week, our working committee on housing also launched a new initiative to distribute food and basic supplies to homeless people in Lower Manhattan. Also included in the care kits was a list of housing resources that SRLP offers in collaboration with another nonprofit. SRLP members plan to make the supply distribution a monthly event to support everyone in the community.

On July 8, we celebrated Sylvia and Marsha Day, and I had the great privilege of meeting people who were at Stonewall in 1969. I spent the previous week tracking down flower donations for the annual tradition of throwing them into the water where Marsha P. Johnson’s body was found. I also learned that Sylvia Rivera spent several months living in the event’s location, the Christopher Street Pier. That reiterated the importance of SRLP’s current housing work, demonstrating how intertwined trans liberation is with housing justice.

Moving forward, I will be finalizing the Know Your Rights pamphlet on involuntary psychiatric admission. Much of my daily work moving forward will be helping people schedule medical appointments, navigate insurance coverage, and find discounted pharmacy prices for their medication. I will also be starting my interviews on trans people’s experiences with involuntary admission and the NYPD, though that will be separate from my work at SRLP.

Cameron Avisa Patel (NYU College of Arts and Sciences) | Sylvia Rivera Law Project | New York, USA

This past month, I attended a community meeting at SRLP and got to know some of the members. A lot of my day-to-day role involves helping people fill out forms, sign up for events, and navigate questions about health insurance. I also get to learn from members who witnessed and/or participated in the early Gay Liberation Movement. If I have time, I want to collect the oral histories of interested members.

June is a very busy time because of Pride, and SRLP has been hard at work organizing for upcoming events. We will be participating in the Queer Liberation March, which is a protest against corporate and state co-opting of Pride. Next month, SRLP is honoring key leaders in the Gay Liberation Movement by celebrating Sylvia and Marsha Day.

Alongside supporting SRLP’s existing event planning, I am also working on a Know Your Rights guide on involuntary inpatient psychiatric admission. Once I am done with the content, SRLP will run it by an attorney, and then I will help format it into a pamphlet. That has been most of my work this month since I had some time off for surgery. 

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.