Recent retrograde shifts in foreign aid and diminishing civil society space threaten gains made through decades of evidence-based harm reduction programming that has saved countless lives globally. Civil society organisations providing crucial peer support systems are being defunded and their voices repressed. Concurrently, feminism and LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception, gender-based violence services and safe abortion are being assaulted. Now, more than ever, harm reduction and underserved populations are at risk as essential life-saving services are being closed down.
With the expansion of the measurably harmful Global Gag Rule, sexual and gender diversity are being actively attacked, with trans rights violated to the point of erasure of identity, sexual and reproductive health rights invalidated and gender equality goals undermined. Funding strangleholds are constraining lifesaving healthcare for trans people, women living with HIV, people who use drugs and other key populations. This spurious attempt to institutionalise patriarchal heteronormative hierarchy serves to sanction and popularise racism, sexism, userphobia, transphobia and homophobia. Patterns are emerging where under the guise of ‘family values’, ideology trumps science, propelling a climate ripe for societal destabilisation, hate crime and public health dismemberment.
On this International Women’s Day, we (the 104 endorsing organisations listed below) stand in solidarity with our gender expansive and cis-sisters who use drugs to denounce the current undermining of public health, science and bodily autonomy which represent a wider offensive against equality norms, rights protections and common sense.
