F*cking with the Canadian Guidelines on Sexually Transmitted Infections: A Queer Disruption to Homonormativity

Abstract

Queer people present interesting challenges to sexual health care because they often defy dominant understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. When it comes to sexual health assessments, most practitioners operate according to a set of heteronormative assumptions or misinformation that too often has life and death consequences for people, particularly queer people. To provide much needed guidance and clinical recommendations on how best to prevent and manage sexually transmitted infections (STIs) prevalent in diverse populations, the Public Health Agency of Canada revised the Canadian Guidelines on Sexually Transmitted Infections in 2006. I examine this policy and speculate about its effect on the health of queer people. I argue that its additive approach does not meet the needs of queer people because it is entrenched in both a heteronormative and homonormative agenda in health care policy. Focusing on the latter, I assert that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organizations take on this homonormative agenda, which promotes and defines an acceptable gay and lesbian population and negates questioning the confines of gender, sex, and sexual identity. This omission of other queers (trans, intersex, and those between and outside of existing boundaries of sex, gender, and sexuality) is a specific neoliberal political manoeuvre that results in the dominance of a homonormative agenda in sexual health care to the detriment of queer people's health.