The first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are now being handed out across the country, but for LGBTQ people, it’s going to take more than just medication to recover from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report.
An analysis from the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), a think tank, released on Wednesday, found that since the pandemic began, LGBTQ people have been hit hard in just about every imaginable way. Compared to non-LGBTQ people, they’re more likely to have lost their jobs. They’re more likely to say that they couldn’t access health care. And they’re more likely to say that they haven’t had enough to eat over the last few months.
All of these differences have their roots in discrimination, and are particularly stark for LGBTQ people of color, according to the organization.
“The pandemic has disrupted life for all of us. Yet, some communities have borne the brunt: Black and Latinx people, low-income people, and, as this new data show, LGBTQ people,” Ineke Mushovic, MAP’s executive director, said in a statement alongside the release of the report, which uses data from polls conducted by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health over the summer.
The MAP analysis draws a line between the dire circumstances facing LGBTQ people in 2020, and the historical disparities that have kept them from succeeding at the same rates as their straight, cisgender peers. A 2018 survey from the Center for American Progress found that 8 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer adults said they’d been turned away from a health care provider due to their sexual orientation. Nearly 30 percent of transgender adults said they’d been turned away due to their gender identity.
“Decades of discrimination on the job, in health care, and beyond, combined with uneven legal protections around the country make LGBTQ people more vulnerable to pandemic-related instability and insecurity, with an even more devastating impact on LGBTQ people of color,” Mushovic wrote.
Read the rest of the article on Vice here.
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