3 Things About Climate Change and LGBTQ+ Health

In the summer of 2004, I found myself a sweltering, windowless room in a building just off a busy street in downtown Paris. Equipped with only mediocre French skills, I struggled to follow all of what was being said around me, but I could clearly understand the messages on the t-shirts that others were wearing: Silence = Mort. Action = Vie. Silence equals death; action equals life.

I was surrounded by Parisian AIDS activists who had gathered for a meeting of ACT UP, or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. It was my first exposure to on-the-ground activism (and a chance to learn some colorful new French words). Many of those present at the meeting were members of the LGBTQ+ community, which played a critical role in highlighting the egregious health disparities that have played out throughout the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Two decades later, as the US faces an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, activists around the world are still shining light on how health disparities affect the LGBTQ+ community. An emerging area of focus is climate change. Social stigma and systemic discrimination often make LGBTQ+ individuals more vulnerable to environmental risks than the general population is.

Here are three things you should know about climate change and LGBTQ+ health:

1. Higher rates of homelessness: Homeless individuals are especially vulnerable to the weather extremes that climate change is making more frequent and more intense, such as heat waves and strong storms. And LGBTQ+ individuals are more likely to be homeless than the general population. LBGTQ+ youth are especially at risk for homelessness, often facing discrimination from their own families and communities; they are more than twice as likely to be homeless than their non-LGBTQ+ peers. LGBTQ+ individuals of color are particularly at risk for homelessness.
2. Access to health care limited by financial inequities—and discrimination: LGBTQ+ individuals are more likely than the general population to be unemployed and to live in poverty than the general cisgender, heterosexual population. Black transgender people are especially at risk of unemployment. Climate change affects many dimensions of human health, and financial inequities may limit access to critical medical care for the LGBTQ+ community. And when LGBTQ+ individuals do access health care, they often face discrimination from within the health care system, receiving poor-quality treatment.
3. Vulnerability to violence: One of the most concerning impacts of climate change is the increased likelihood of sexual and gender-based violence, which can arise from a number of factors (for example, extreme heat is linked to exacerbations of aggression and gender-based violence). LGBTQ+ individuals are already at higher risk for gender-based violence than the general population—for example, research suggests that fully half of transgender individuals and bisexual women will experience sexual violence at some point in their lives.

As a bisexual woman myself, these statistics hit painfully close to home. In spite of the efforts of dedicated activists who have been working on LGBTQ+ health disparities for decades, the concerns of LGBTQ+ individuals are still frequently left out of important conversations about climate justice. This needs to change. The activists I met in Paris years ago would undoubtedly say that what was true about AIDS is true about climate change: silence equals death; action equals life.

Let’s choose life.

Tell the Senate: Support Commonsense Climate Investments