Katie Willingham, diagnosed in June of 2000, is a two spirit woman of transgender experience and Cherokee heritage from rural North Alabama. Katie is an activist and advocate for thewellproject.org, co-chair of the Positive Women’s Network USA pwn-usa.org Alabama chapter, board member of the Shoals Diversity Center, member of the HIV Prevention and Care Planning Committee of the Alabama Department of Public Health, and Community Impact Coordinator for The 6:52 Project Foundation.
I’m back from Washington DC, where I attended the USCHA. This conference is the largest of its kind in America. Advocates, healthcare professionals, and pharmaceutical industry professionals converged to network and learn from each other.
Have you ever heard of USCHA? It’s an acronym that stands for the United States Conference on HIV and AIDS. It’s the largest conference of its kind in the country.
As an HIV advocate I talk about stigma quite a bit. I fault it entirely for the perpetuation of HIV around the world.
I’ve lived with HIV for 25 years, and I’ve learned a lot during that time. There are things I wish I’d known. But when I was diagnosed, no one was there to tell me how to live with it. I was given a death sentence of 1-5 years. The only advice I was given was to get my affairs in order.
It’s been over 40 years since the emergence of HIV. It’s killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions of people globally. Those numbers would be even higher without medical breakthroughs. Let’s talk about some of them.
The topic of sex is pretty taboo. Just the word can make people uncomfortable and cause them to blush and sweat. That makes it really difficult to talk about it, even though sex is a basic human necessity.