“God, when I said I wanted to be a little boy, I didn’t mean it like this.”
That’s how Cy, a 23-year-old trans man, described how he feels living with the severe physical pain and neurological deterioration caused by Long Covid.
“I feel simultaneously like I’ve become both an infant and geriatric,” he said in a phone interview. A 2023 college graduate, he once looked forward to days filled with creating art: Forming sculptures, composing print layouts and using his new graphic design degree in his first “big job” in the industry.
And art wasn’t Cy’s only avenue for self-expression. “I had just gotten top surgery last summer,” he said. “I wanted to get more active because I was just starting my transition.”
But Cy, who spoke on condition that we use only his first name, contracted Covid-19 in August 2023. His initial bout of the virus sent him to the emergency room with severe vertigo and nausea. Even after getting the antiviral Paxlovid and going home, the fatigue he felt never went away — instead, it got worse and developed into frightening new symptoms.
“It started getting really hard to take care of myself on a daily basis. I felt in my muscles like I was being stretched too thin, like taffy or something,” he said. He dragged himself to the emergency room, to doctors, to specialists, with each appointment yielding little in the way of effective treatments. Meanwhile, he developed extreme lightheadedness, tremors and nerve pain, and his heart rate frequently rose to the point where he would pass out.
“I kept pushing it because I had to. I have to eat. I had to do my job,” he said. But in late 2023, the symptoms became too much. Cy is now forced to spend most of his days in bed without the strength to address his basic needs. Exertions like getting up to eat or use the bathroom can leave his entire body sore in the days after. The mental fog feels like his brain is “turning itself inside out,” he said.
Roughly 15% of all adults in the U.S. have or have had Long Covid, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s October 2023 Household Pulse Survey. “Long Covid” encompasses a throng of debilitating symptoms and long term effects brought about by Covid-19. Some of the most common include post-exertion malaise, gastrointestinal problems, heart palpitations and cognitive issues. It can impact every organ system of the body. The physical ramifications can last for years: Some people are now in their fourth year of symptoms.
Cy is not only one of the millions of Americans with Long Covid — as a trans man, he’s part of a population that is overrepresented in these millions. Less than 2% of U.S. adults are trans or nonbinary, yet nearly 24% of all transgender adults report that they have experienced Long Covid. Bisexual adults report Long Covid cases at the same percentage rate (24%). That makes trans adults and bisexual adults, along with disabled adults, the demographic groups that are experiencing Long Covid in the highest percentages in the country.
As the U.S. weathers another surge of Covid-19 and a new variant, trans and bisexual people with Long Covid are facing enormous challenges. Six of them shared their experiences with ClearHealthCosts.
Managing compounding disabilities
“I used to be really, really competent at navigating the healthcare system. And now I’m struggling,” Cy said. “Before, I could ring out 15 phone calls in an afternoon and play phone tag all day. Did I enjoy it? No, not really, who does? But I could do it,” he continued. “And now I just can’t — there’s a lot of things that I just can’t do anymore.” As a result of Long Covid, Cy was also diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), conditions marked by severe fatigue, brain fog and lightheadedness, among other symptoms.
As a trans man, Cy’s experience of living with multiple interconnected disabilities and chronic illnesses is far too common. Long before the onset of the pandemic, LGBTQ+ people have consistently reported higher rates of cognitive and physical disabilities than non-LGBTQ+ people. One analysis from the Human Rights Campaign in 2020 showed that 36% of LGBTQ+ people report having at least one disability, as opposed to 24% of the non-LGBTQ+ population. Within the LGBTQ+ population, 52% of trans people reported at least one disability.
Gabriel San Emeterio, a social worker and cofounder of Strategies for High Impact and its Long Covid Justice project, has lived with ME/CFS, fibromyalgia and HIV.
“It took me years to learn how to sort of manage my ME/CFS,” they said in a Zoom interview. “I had to switch careers. I made it through undergrad and grad school with accommodations and everything.”
“And then I got Covid,” San Emeterio continued. “And my new symptoms appeared. They became more unpredictable. So the severity and the fluctuation of symptoms became greater.”
San Emeterio contracted Covid in June of 2022, despite their best efforts to stay safe. But given their decades of activism for disability justice, they were attuned to the developments of Long Covid well before that.
“ME/CFS is a post-viral disease. So when Covid happened and people started reporting that they were not getting well and they were having these long-term symptoms, it made sense to us in the ME/CFS community, because we have experienced that,” San Emeterio said.
Struggle to find diagnoses
Because Long Covid can not only trigger new symptoms, but also exacerbate existing ones, some disabled queer people have found it more difficult to even attain a proper diagnosis.
“I did experience chronic fatigue and pain before my infections, but they were nowhere near the level of severity they are now,” Lala Novali wrote in an email interview from their home in Boston.
Novali, 23, said they previously lived with ME/CFS symptoms before contracting Covid in December 2021. “It was much more manageable, enough that I could sometimes go out even on a flare day. Now, even at my baseline it is difficult to even make it to the restroom.”
Novali began to recognize new symptoms two months after their initial infection with Covid, including “chest pains that would happen either randomly or from eating or from heart palpitations, and the heart palpitations would be from any minimal physical activity or even just from sitting upright,” Novali wrote. “I had respiratory issues where lying down flat would make it hard for me to breathe.”
Long Covid and ME/CFS share many similar symptoms, but the prevalence of ME/CFS in transgender and gender-diverse communities hasn’t been thoroughly studied yet. Some studies have shown that Black and Indigenous people, and people of color in general, are less likely to be diagnosed with ME/CFS, with researchers suggesting that these groups’ historically uneven access to quality healthcare plays a role.
Medical gaslighting and neglect
Novali, who is Black and gender-expansive, has experienced such marginalization firsthand while seeking care for their symptoms.
“My whole journey from 2021, up until now, has consisted of pathologization due to my extensive psychiatric history and many medical ‘professionals’ attributing my complaints of fatigue and pain to my mental health,” they wrote. “Despite attempts to explain that my mental health is worsened by my physical state and the way this cycles, doctors proceed to suggest my mental health is the root and all of my symptoms are psychosomatic.”
One survey published in 2023 found that 47% of LGBTQ+ people interviewed have experienced medical gaslighting in the past two years. Medical gaslighting can be subtle, with providers attributing patients’ health concerns to factors like weight, mental health or stress, or dismissing them outright. At its worst, it can lead to many patients getting inappropriate, ineffective or no medical care at all.
Maya Garcia, who is two-spirit and nonbinary, said: “To be honest with you, I was gaslit quite a bit.”
Garcia is Indigenous, of Nahua and Otomi heritage. The 49-year-old lives in Chicago and contracted Covid in March of 2020, becoming seriously ill with fevers and breathing problems. “I basically never completely recovered,” they said. In the years since, Garcia has been in and out of the emergency room and visited specialist after specialist — but said multiple doctors attributed their Long Covid symptoms to mental health issues, like anxiety, or blamed their weight.
This kind of treatment is all the more alarming given that Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people have consistently weathered some of the highest rates of Covid infections and deaths in the country. These biases translate directly into the quality of care people receive. One study found that doctors are 2.54 more likely to use negative descriptors in Black patients’ notes than white patients, classifying them as “aggressive,” “combative,” or as exaggerating their own conditions.
Lala Novali said they were repeatedly made to feel unsafe in medical settings, specifically in ways related to their race. “I have been laughed at and disparaged for my appearance, especially my body hair and the hair on my scalp,” they wrote. “Told to shave my armpits. That I’m not allowed to wear a bonnet in the hospital and that I won’t be taken seriously.”
‘Definitely not Covid’
Multiple people also recounted being frequently misgendered by healthcare providers.
Chiron Barron, 39, began to seek treatment for Long Covid symptoms in June of 2020. They went into their medical appointment armed with a list of recurring symptoms they’d been tracking.
“The doctor said I very likely had blood cancer because I gave her a list of almost 50 symptoms. And she was like, ‘it’s definitely not Covid, because you haven’t been out, you’ve been too careful,’” Barron said in a Zoom interview. Barron said the doctor dismissed their questions about Long Covid.
“I got my [medical] notes and I can’t read through them, because she misgendered me in every single instance. None of the rest of the staff does, but she does. It’s definitely a choice,” Barron said.
What concerned Barron even more was the fact that this doctor was working at a clinic whose priority populations include LGBTQ+ people. The possibility for this kind of treatment is common for trans people. The National Center for Transgender Equality conducted a nationwide survey of trans people in 2015 and found that 33% of respondents who had seen a health care provider in the past year “reported having at least one negative experience related to being transgender, such as verbal harassment, refusal of treatment, or having to teach the health care provider about transgender people to receive appropriate care.”
As for Maya Garcia, they were finally able to find a primary care provider who treated them with empathy — and that made all the difference. “She really listened to me, when I was telling her about all the health issues that I was having, how it was impacting my quality of life,” Garcia said. That doctor referred Garcia to specialists and neurologists who were finally able to officially diagnose them with Long Covid in 2021.
Heightened financial precarity
Chiron Barron believes they first contracted Covid-19 in December 2019, before testing was even available. They initially didn’t make the connection between their lingering symptoms and the emergent pandemic in early 2020.
“I was doing a lot of dog-walking. And I remember having really severe lower back pain,” they said in a Zoom interview. “I just remember thinking, ‘wow, I’m out of shape, like what’s wrong with me?’ It was brutal. But I couldn’t stop; I had to keep going, because of the kind of work I was doing.”
At the time, Barron found employment through various gig jobs: house-sitting, dog-walking, standup comedy. But as Barron’s symptoms — including fevers, pinkeye and back pain — progressed into 2020 and the pandemic lockdowns began, they were no longer able to work.
Between half to two-thirds of Long Covid patients cannot work full-time, according to research conducted by the Patient Led Research Collaborative in 2021. When it comes to trans and bisexual Long Covid patients, there are even more factors that make financial stability hard to come by.
LGBTQ+ people are also more likely to be in the gig or part-time economy than others, like Barron. According to a study published by the Center for American Progress in 2023, LGBTQ+ people were more likely than non-LGBTQ+ people to be working part time, be self-employed as a freelancer, or be employed in the gig economy (for example as a ride-share driver or delivery person). Furthermore, trans people surveyed were twice as likely as cisgender people to be working part time.
Gig work is inherently precarious: independent contractors don’t have the same rights that employees do to working conditions like a minimum wage, workers’ compensation, paid sick leave or protections and recourse on discrimination or harassment. These inherent risks are significantly heightened for people who are disabled and openly transgender or queer. Yet even those trans and bisexual people who were more traditionally employed before the pandemic have experienced some of the biggest workplace losses.
Maya Garcia had recently started a new job when lockdowns began in 2020.
“I had just started working for a company that basically produces travel visas. And unfortunately, I got sick at work and the office shut down at the same time due to the travel bans that were put into place,” they said.
But even when travel restrictions began to ease, Garcia couldn’t return to work — because there wasn’t a job to return to. They had been laid off.
“I haven’t worked since the pandemic started. I took about two solid years of being very sick,” Garcia said. “Basically my life revolved around doctor’s appointments, multiple specialists I was seeing, just trying to get answers and also trying to maintain what little quality of life I could have.”
Fewer hours, lost jobs
A report by the Human Rights Campaign found that in the early phases of states reopening in 2020, “the LGBTQ population was 20% more likely than the general population to have experienced a reduction in work hours,” and “LGBTQ people of color are 44% more likely and transgender people are 125% more likely than the general population to have had a reduction in work hours.” Additionally, bisexual people were 80% more likely to have lost their jobs in the lockdown months.
Many of the people CHC spoke with for this article reported that Long Covid made finding consistent employment extremely difficult — not simply because of their physical symptoms, but because of employers’ and workplaces’ resistance to accommodating them. Workplaces in general have not maintained lockdown-era accommodations like fully-remote work (though even that isn’t a panacea for all Long Covid patients, given the fact that a fairly common symptom is hypersensitivity to light and screens).
As with many chronic illnesses, patients have “good” days where their symptoms may ease, and “bad” days where their symptoms may leave them completely incapacitated. Long Covid can be characterized by a cycle of remitting and relapsing for many, like other chronic conditions. A patient may begin to feel better, even recovered, but then a relapse is triggered for whatever reason: Maybe an unrelated infection, a particularly busy day, or simply a change in the weather. This can also make consistent employment for Long Covid patients a constant struggle.
Profound social isolation
As vaccine and mask mandates have become largely a thing of the past, not just in workplaces but most other spaces as well, Long Covid patients face prolonged social isolation.
Prior to the pandemic, Chiron Barron found friendship and fun in their local standup comedy community. Even after getting sick, they were still able to participate in virtual comedy shows online.
“For a while I was doing quite a bit of material about Long Covid,” Barron said. “I’d compare the experience of taking my rabbits to the vet versus me going to the doctors… I’d do impressions of how doctors have talked to me versus how my vet talks to my bunny. He’s all like ‘hey, little guy; thank you little buddy. Have a treat!’ and my doctors just yell at me.”
But those opportunities quickly dwindled when venues began to re-open in person. “It was honestly very frustrating when everyone decided that Covid was over, the pandemic was over and went back to doing live shows,” Barron said. “I lost friends over this, friends of mine who were producing [comedy shows] and putting ‘hashtag accessible comedy.’ And not actually booking anyone who’s disabled.”
Right: Poster inspired by the CDC campaign, designed by Anna (@copy_of_a_copy on X, last name withheld for privacy). “I saw an opportunity to re-purpose these bold graphics to share information about the ongoing Covid pandemic, with the hopes that people might reflect on (a) the reality and enormity of the failed government response to Covid and the extent to which mass death has been normalized, and (b) their own behavior and possible complicity,” Anna wrote. Image courtesy of the artist
This social isolation forced upon Long Covid patients by an ableist world is felt on another level by those who are trans and bisexual. LBGTQ+ people often must push through social stigma and navigate unsafe circumstances before they find people who accept and protect them. Trans people in particular frequently experience rejection by their biological families. Bisexual people can be stigmatized even within queer communities themselves, facing accusations that they aren’t “gay enough” or are simply “experimenting” with queerness. Given all these stigmas and more, LGBTQ+ people consistently reported high levels of loneliness even before pandemic lockdowns.
Social isolation isn’t just a mental state: the CDC has noted that social isolation and loneliness are linked to increased risks for health conditions including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and earlier death. All this makes spending time in community with other trans and bisexual folks incredibly precious. Yet even for those who have found queer acceptance, that hasn’t automatically translated to acceptance of the disabled.
Cy, the 23-year-old trans man, lives in rural California and had already found queer community harder to come by. Now with Long Covid, he can rarely leave home. Most of his communication with friends and other queer people is online. Though he feels extremely fortunate to have a supportive family, it stings when he sees queer people that don’t appear to be taking Covid seriously.
“There’s so much of the queer community that’s like, ‘we’re not taking precautions. We’re gonna throw our masks out and go have like unmasked Pride and make out with strangers,’” he said. “I’m like, you can’t make out with strangers when you get Long Covid!”
Losing one’s sense of self
Long Covid’s threats aren’t just physical and mental — they’re existential. Nearly all the people who spoke with CHC for this article brought up feelings of depression, hopelessness, invisibility, questioning their self-worth and losing their very identities.
“I can’t do a lot of the things that I defined myself by anymore,” said Cy in his phone interview. Cy had recently graduated college when he contracted Covid in 2023 — he had to put his pursuit of a graphic design career on hold.
But beyond that: he had also just recently begun his physical transition, having undergone top surgery in early 2023. “I had all these ideas about all the things I was going to do when I got on testosterone. I was going to start lifting weights, so I needed more protein so I could build up some more muscle mass and help change my physique a little,” he said. “I was gonna get facial masculinization surgery, and now it’s way too dangerous,” given his health condition.
While surgeries and hormone treatments aren’t necessary for a trans person to be trans, they can greatly impact one’s mental health and quality of life. Many trans people who want medical care haven’t been able to get it due to insurance denials or bigoted legislation. Numerous studies show that being denied gender-affirming care leads to higher odds of depression, self-harm and suicidality, particularly for young people.
Cy has still been able to get testosterone, but dreads the day he will need to visit a doctor to get the prescription re-upped and if he will even be able to stand on his own two feet. He knows that not being able to pursue all these treatments doesn’t make him any less of a man — but being unable to mold his outer self to better reflect his inner self is a profound blow.
Beyond his reduced physical capacities, he’s also fearful of losing important mental capacity. “I forget things all the time,” he said. Even things that are “fundamentally important to my sense of self and my personhood.”
“My mom gave me a birthday card the other day and it had this drawing of a little guy with a funky face and some balloons, and I asked who drew it and my sister gave me this look,” Cy said.
His mom had drawn it. Apparently she’d been doodling things like that for years. Cy didn’t remember.
“I was like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t remember this.’ And she’s like, ‘I’ve been doing this since before you were born.’”
“Brain fog” is a common Long Covid symptom, though the name doesn’t come close to illustrating how debilitating it can be for many. It refers to a range of symptoms, including feeling mentally slow, having difficulty thinking or concentrating, confusion and forgetfulness. According to one study published in 2022, nearly half of Long Covid patients report one of these issues.
As a young man who was only recently able to begin living more openly as his authentic self, Cy worries that that very self is slipping away each day.
“There are so many things that I just can’t do anymore,” he said. “So many things where all I have of them is a memory, and when you start losing those too, at what point is my world just going to become these four walls?”
Political action or political ‘posturing’?
Throughout the pandemic, Long Covid patients and advocates have fought hard for more robust research and political action. On January 18, 2024, they had some payoff: the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee convened a hearing on Long Covid. It was the first ever since the emergence of the pandemic. The hearing room was so packed that the Senate had to use an overflow room to accommodate all those who attended — a result of countless hours of organizing and even crowdfunding by patients and advocates to ensure they were strongly represented. Two patient advocates, one parent of a patient, and four doctors testified to the debilitating effects of the syndrome on every aspect of life.
Yet save for a short mention in one of those testimonies, there was no discussion of the fact that trans and bisexual people are so overrepresented in the patient pool.
“We are in a time when even basic access to health care for trans people is seen as a matter of political posturing, not a human right,” JD Davids wrote in an email. Davids is a queer trans man with Long Covid. He runs the Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness newsletter, pulling from his decades of experience in HIV/AIDS advocacy.
“We have not seen a single initiative, commitment or engagement from the federal government that addresses the needs of trans people in this health crisis, even though their own statistics reveal a huge impact of Long Covid on trans people,” Davids continued.
Patients lead advocacy efforts
Davids is also a co-founder, along with Gabriel San Emeterio, of Strategies for High Impact’s Long Covid Justice project, which organizes research and amplifies political advocacy on Long Covid as a public health issue. This is one of a number of patient-led collaborations that have helped keep Long Covid in the spotlight for the past four years.
Many such groups evolved out of informal networks of patients who turned to each other for support where others failed. The nonprofit Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project was incorporated by patients in June of 2020 and has since helped draft proposed legislation on the issue. Survivor Corps was founded by an early Covid patient and showcased Long Covid research, compiled locations of newly opening “post-Covid care clinics” and detailed best practices and standards of care. The queer feminist group Body Politic launched a Covid support group on Slack in March of 2020 that eventually grew to 14,000 members strong, from over 30 countries.
Some of those members were researchers in neuroscience, public policy, biomedical sciences and other areas. In April 2020, they began to research Long Covid symptoms. The Patient-Led Research Collaborative, as it came to be called, published the first research paper on “prolonged Covid symptoms” in May of 2020 and hasn’t stopped working since. Their peer-reviewed research has been cited in national and international policy documents and numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals.
In addition to these formalized efforts, Long Covid patients are still finding advice and community through Facebook groups, X (formerly Twitter) Spaces, Discord servers and other social media. Maya Garcia, Lala Novali, and Cy all noted that Long Covid-related social media spaces have become a primary source of social interaction and information. It’s thanks, in part, to these spaces that the January Senate hearing garnered such a large turnout, as patients used these networks to mobilize.
The spirit of mutual aid has animated so much of this work, and the horizontal organization of these networks has made it even more possible for queer patients to be seen and heard. But sustainability isn’t simply easy to achieve, particularly for activists who must actively manage their health. (The Body Politic Slack group shut down in 2023 due to a lack of funding. The Survivor Corps website is no longer being updated as of March 2023.)
“There’s sort of a mythology going on now. Yes, there’s real heroic and vital efforts; there’s never not a need for community-led, patient-led, peer-led networks and information,” Davids said in a Zoom interview. “But that’s not a health ecosystem.”
As vital as this work is, Davids said, it should be only a tiny bit of the Long Covid response. “That needs to be the goal along with access to community-based medical care, specialty care, peer education, policy and advocacy institutes, networks of public officials at all levels, figuring out solutions, development of healthcare financing models. There’s just so much that we should just be a little part of, but all the rest isn’t there. So I think we’re sort of lying to ourselves that we’re able to shoulder all of this.”
Disability justice, not ‘recovery’
Looking at Long Covid through a lens of disability justice — emphasizing the inherent worth of all disabled people and their right to self-determination and participation in society as their full selves, not merely their legal rights — reveals severe inadequacies in every sector of society’s responses.
“Trans people are often very brilliant at survival,” Davids said, “because no one wants to take care of us all the way.”
Even mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations have failed to take leadership on Long Covid, Davids believes. He pointed out that a number of them have even held in-person conferences recently with no mask mandates.
And while levels of recovery from Long Covid are possible for some, San Emeterio says focusing on mere “recovery” is missing the point.
“There’s so many things that had to be eliminated from my life in order for me to work again, in order for me to have a life again,” they said. “So that on paper may seem like I got better. I did, but I radically had to alter my life.”
San Emeterio spent years learning how to manage their conditions of ME/CFS, fibromyalgia and HIV prior to contracting Covid — how to track symptoms, evaluate the effects of different supplements and medications, “shop” for specialists, review on-the-cusp medical literature, and tap into online communities for possible solutions. They re-oriented much of their life around minimizing physical symptoms: avoiding physical exertion, screens and bright lights, even changing careers after finding themself no longer able to meet the physical demands of their role as a hairstylist.
“To just look at electronic health records that don’t really reflect people’s lived experience, you might be able to draw the conclusion that people get better. But what did these people give up in order to get better?” they asked. “Are they able to still have friendships? Do they have leisure time?”
Davids believes that the Senate hearing in January showed that there is an appetite for genuine political will on Long Covid. And he sees a potential roadmap: what grassroots, queer advocates won for HIV/AIDS treatment.
“With HIV in the U.S., we demanded and won a comprehensive, interlocking set of services, research, treatment and care that took an almost universally fatal condition into a manageable condition that people can live with and also not transmit to others,” he said.
Left: Poster distributed by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, a grassroots movement formed in 1987 by LGBTQ+ people to push for political action on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Source: International Center of Photography
Right: Poster inspired by the ACT UP original, designed by Anna (@copy_of_a_copy on X). “I think that the AIDS epidemic showed just how willing the US government is to discard entire groups of people, and also that there is immense power in collective resistance, that we can help save each other’s lives. The same goes for Covid. When we as queer folks know our history, we realize that queer liberation is tied up directly with disabled and racial liberation,” Anna wrote. Image courtesy of the artist
The federal government began funding agencies to address HIV/AIDS in 1983, spending billions of dollars in the decades since. Numerous programs now fund grants for low-income patients to get primary medical care, treatment for under- and uninsured patients, stable housing and more. While it still has shortcomings, it shows an understanding that an epidemic can’t be mitigated by focusing on the illness in isolation.
“When we look at the national HIV/AIDS strategy,” Davids said, “there’s a planning element that requires the inclusion of people living with HIV. It’s not just about people having a low viral load, it’s about their quality of life.”
Gabriel San Emeterio agreed. “What kept me from going into abject poverty and homelessness, kept me with health insurance — was the safety net that exists for people with HIV. When ME/CFS was keeping me from working, the services, the health insurance, the housing assistance, the food assistance, all came from the HIV center.”
It’s perhaps telling that the federal government’s stated goal behind these programs for HIV/AIDS patients is in fact ending the epidemic, whereas the only end political leadership seems to envision with Covid is ending the national public health emergency. The language is just about “being prepared”… for more Covid. When it comes to Long Covid, the federal Health and Human Services agency has struggled to win funding for research and treatment — with Congress granting a mere $10 million of its request for $750 million in 2023.
But consider that bisexual adults have a higher likelihood of health issues like high cholesterol, asthma and breast cancer. Or that trans adults are more likely than cis adults to be on Medicaid, or not have health insurance altogether. A hypothetical Long Covid response that focuses merely on physical symptoms could clearly ignore the myriad of factors that make trans and bisexual people particularly vulnerable. But a response fueled by an understanding of disability justice stands a chance — not just at treating symptoms, but ensuring that Long Covid does not render people invisible.
Remember Cy, a young trans man who should have a lifetime of queer joy to look forward to: “I know there’s lots of different kinds of Long Covid, but I think the worst of us don’t deserve to be left behind because we’re more complicated,” he said.
