CAMPAIGNERS gathered in Leeds on Friday 30 October for a vigil demanding justice for Joelle Plow, a 27-year-old trans woman who died in 2023 after waiting 16 days for urgent cancer treatment at Wolverhampton NHS Trust.
The vigil was organised by Trans Inclusive Gender Revolt and supported by other trans rights organisations.
Joelle, a gifted musician and self-taught coder, had an aggressive lymphoma that is almost always curable when treated as an emergency. After staff saw she was a trans woman she was moved to a side room on the other side of the hospital to await a single-person room per hospital policy, despite her parents asking for her to be put on any cancer ward – female or male – in order to start treatment. Instead, she spent 16 days there in unmanaged pain before she died.
Her mother, Jane, is working with the Trans Legal Clinic to secure an inquest and pursue a clinical negligence claim.
Joelle died before the Supreme Court judgment rolled back trans people’s rights, and before the EHRC code of practice made it even harder for trans people to access healthcare. If Joelle could be failed so badly then, the dangers facing trans patients today are even worse and we must fight to both resist the EHRC code and demand the government legislate for self-ID and equal rights and access to healthcare.
