What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honored and valued queer and trans people’s lives, bodies and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure and liberation? LGBTQ+ health care doesn’t look like this today, but it could. This is the care we dream of. Through a series of essays (by the author and others) and interviews, this book by the editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Remedy offers possibilities—grounded in historical examples, present-day experiments, and dreams of the future – for more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. It challenges readers to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and asks what it would look if our health care was rooted in a commitment to the flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. This book is a calling out, a calling in and a call to action. It is a spell of healing and transformation, rooted in love.

To remedy means to heal, to cure, to set right, to make reparations. The Remedy invites writers and readers to imagine what we need to create healthy, resilient, and thriving LGBTQ communities. This anthology is a diverse collection of real-life stories from queer and trans people on their own health-care experiences and challenges, from gay men living with HIV who remember the systemic resistance to their health-care needs, to a lesbian couple dealing with the experience of cancer, to young trans people who struggle to find health-care providers who treat them with dignity and respect. The book also includes essays by health-care providers, activists and leaders with something to say about the challenges, politics, and opportunities surrounding LGBTQ health issues. Both exceptionally moving and an incendiary call-to-arms, The Remedy is a must-read for anyone—gay, straight, trans, and otherwise—passionately concerned about the right to proper health care for all. Contributors include Amber Dawn, Sinclair Sexsmith, Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco, Cooper Lee Bombardier, Kara Sievewright, and Kelli Dunham. Zena Sharman is a passionate advocate for queer and trans health. She has over a decade's experience in health research; currently she is Director of Strategy at the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Zena is also co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

An inclusive, populist anthology on queer and trans health issues by members of the LGBTQ community and health care providers.