#carers

there's a huuuge gap where i live for queer-safe workers, the vast majority of whom do care work casually and don't provide personal care.

my care agency is a big queer org, involved in lots of different things, and my care coordinator and i have been trying to hire people to support me with personal care tasks for the better part of two years.

there just. isn't anyone around who can be counted on to be safe around trans bodies and willing to perform more intensive care work

apparently my case got elevated all the way up to the ceo, and my care coordinator was explaining to him how we'd contacted every other queer care org in the city and been denied due to a lack of workers with appropriate skills like a dozen times. and the same in reverse for mainstream orgs, skilled workers but dangerous lack of queer awareness.

It seems not accidental that "daughter" rhymes with "oughta": "daughter" at this point is both a gendered descriptor and a concept that umbrellas over people of all genders who get cornered by society in a very particular way: we're vessels of obligation and guilt, and the entirety of society is organised around the assumption that we can care for everybody, all of the time, and have no needs ourselves. This problem is not much mediated even when the people to whom we have caring responsibilities themselves are concerned about our carer burnout, because this is a systemic problem as well as an interpersonal one, and they do not have the ability to unilaterally re-order society to our mutual benefit.

And it's not about our not wanting to care for a parent, or not caring what happens to them: it's about being unable to think about anything else for very long because you're at the demographic sharp end of broken health and social care systems that don't see you as a person who may break in your turn.

If we could transmute the sleep we lose to worrying about our parents into fuel for the engine of broken social care systems, maybe we would all be better off. But the only way to get society to acknowledge the broken backs and hearts and minds of family carers is to do what none of us wants to do: to stop. Altogether. En masse. We can't and we won't because we love them, and because we rightly do not trust society to build a system that acknowledges that we or the people we care for matter.

So yeah, I've been thinking and discussing so much today about how society demands that women and AFAB people subsume themselves in family care, no matter the cost to our wellbeing, our health, our ability to be there for other people, or our ability to be there for ourselves.

It's not only us, and it's not bound to a particular life-stage. An 81-year-old friend spends much of her time on the road, caring for a 100-year-old relative of hers who does not live nearby, but who has a middle-aged nephew living much closer: the nephew does next to nothing for his aunt.

I've known childless gay men who, despite having siblings, get shunted into the role of The One Child Who Does Everything For The Ageing Parent. I think misogyny is also present in this, as one of the building blocks of homophobia, and that they're also being subtly punished for not having reproduced heterosexually (or indeed at all). There's a still-potent social stereotype of gay men as irresponsible hedonists, so it's seen as balance to have them shoulder all the care work; their cis het siblings who have had children are seen as inherently virtuous and responsible for having done so, for the usually unstated reason that having kids is seen as replacing yourself with someone who will care for you until you die.

There's a very real sense of, "Ah, so this is what you are for," in families treating their queer sons as the inevitable and only person who will take care of older relatives. This relegates them to a subaltern gender category, per the Sizhen System's essay on the real three genders, which comes from a trans perspective and has enormous insight into how gender functions in society for everyone.

So my point is that gay men in the position I've described are disempowered and subject to expectations, in a way that is very recognisable both to women and to anyone the world wrongly perceives as a woman. Note that punishing the gender subaltern group does not negate that the system requires their existence to propagate itself. Meanwhile, few cis het people lie awake at night wondering what will happen to (particularly, childless) LGBTQIA+ people when we get old. (PS, next week is World Childless Week, and it's for people who are childless for any reason.)

Our local public health org did an engagement event with the over-50s in my queer group. I offered research, as I have some relevant work experience, as did another younger member. What happened? Well, the public health org was very happy to receive all of our contributions. But despite all that enthusiam, nothing's being done because someone further up the chain of local government has not cared to progress it, or not funded them to progress it, or most likely both.

At some point when we are older, there may or may not be public hand-wringing about the plight of old queer and trans people in care homes: our lesser likelihood of having children to come in and see to us, our needs not being understood or recognised within care homes... well, they can't say we didn't warn them.

Meanwhile, we struggle on as carers in families that often don't understand that - contrary to the free-wheeling, wealth-and-party-lifestyle stereotype the world jealously maintains re: queer people to justify all sorts of dismissal and abuse of us - we're more likely to be poor, homeless, disabled and to experience abuse. And if we're trans our government is at all times and by all means trying to make us disappear from existence/public life.