Trans Legal Clinic are calling for justice for a trans cancer patient
BY ELLA GAUCI, IMAGE VIA TRANS LEGAL CLINIC
Trans Legal Clinic is calling for justice for Joelle, a 27-year-old trans woman who died after a delay in finding her a bed for urgent cancer treatment in 2023. Trans Legal Clinic is the first grassroots, trans-led specialist human rights and legal practice in the UK.
On its website, Joelle’s mother has published a powerful statement about the treatment of her daughter at Wolverhampton NHS Trust. Joelle had an aggressive form of lymphoma, which is “almost entirely curable when treated immediately, but it is rapidly and certainly fatal when treatment is delayed”.
Joelle’s mother states that there was an available bed on the cancer ward, but Joelle was instead placed in a single room on an inappropriate ward. “Joelle was placed there because she was trans,” her mother continued. “She was refused the available bed on the cancer ward because it was in a multi-bed women’s ward.”
“Joelle needed treatment immediately. A delay of 16 days was impossible to survive and cost her her life.”
Due to the nature of Joelle’s lymphoma, Trans Legal Clinic writes that “she explicitly pleaded for a bed on either the male or female ward”. However, Trans Legal Clinic states that “because she was trans they made her wait for a rare single room”. Joelle was told that emergency chemotherapy could not start until she was in the right ward.
This event did not occur in a vacuum. Joelle’s mother writes that just the day before Joelle was refused a bed, Conservative health minister Steve Barclay had announced plans to ban trans women from women’s wards in hospitals.
Joelle is remembered as “precious, beloved and magical”. She was a musician who achieved a first-class degree from a conservatoire. She taught herself to code and made a career in technology.
Her mother continued: “In the care of the NHS, Joelle suffered intense physical pain, akin to torture, and the mental agony of knowing that she needed emergency treatment while we tried desperately to secure it. Daily transphobia became our lived reality. Neither Joelle’s suffering nor her death was unavoidable. We cannot shrug this off as a mishap.”
With the Trans Legal Clinic, Joelle’s family are looking for accountability for the decision to deny Joelle a bed in the cancer ward and the 16-day delay in her treatment. Her mother also hopes that an inquest into the systemic failures that led to Joelle’s death will mean that no trans person will have to face the same harm.
Caroline Litman, the mother of a trans woman named Alice who died by suicide, commented on Trans Legal Clinic’s Instagram post about Joelle. “As a doctor I can confirm that Joelle’s death is an entirely avoidable tragedy. The barriers that her mum faced to getting her treatment for her non-trans related medical illness are disgraceful and the barriers put in her path as she both grieves and tries to pursue justice for Joelle and ongoing safety in healthcare and society for all trans people, is a classic example of how little those in power care. In their desperate attempt to maintain supremacy they are prepared to retraumatise anyone who has lived experience of the harms their anti-trans policies inflict.”
You can donate to Justice For Joelle here: translegalclinic.com/justice-for-joelle
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