Round Table – “Health and Precariousness: Inequalities in access to healthcare and health services in Europe: Proposals for anti-sexist, trans-inclusive and anti-racist healthcare”

Context:

In both Europe and France, power dynamics based on gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and migration status shape access to healthcare, as well as its quality and acceptability. These dynamics manifest as exclusion, neglect, and violence—whether medical, institutional, or symbolic—which disproportionately affect women, trans people, racialized individuals, migrants, sex workers, people living in poverty, people with disabilities, and those at the geographic or social margins.

While these inequalities are not new, they are now worsened by an increasingly hostile political climate: the rise of the far right, anti-gender movements, security-driven policies, austerity measures, the rollback of reproductive rights, and attacks on trans communities. Crises—whether health-related, economic, climatic, or geopolitical—act as catalysts, deepening precarity and making access to healthcare even more fragile for the most marginalized.

In response, many feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist initiatives have developed tools to highlight the precariousness of healthcare access and to cultivate collective, autonomous, and critical care practices, conceived as acts of political resistance.

This roundtable, held as part of the intersectional feminist festival Les Marges en Feu! – Margins: On Fire!, aims to frame health not only as a right but as a crucial terrain of struggle, at the intersection of the political, the social, and the intimate.

It will present and foster concrete proposals for European policies that tackle precarity in healthcare access.

Session Objectives:

Analyze the links between the anti-gender backlash, anti-gender policies, and the intensification of systemic medical violence and inequalities in access to healthcare and rights.
Expose the many forms of exclusion and mistreatment experienced by trans, racialized, precarious, queer, migrant individuals and sex workers in their healthcare journeys.
Critically question the increasing delegation of public health responsibilities to the non-profit sector in a context of neoliberal withdrawal from public services.
Highlight community-based, autonomous, and collective care practices as forms of resistance.
Connect struggles for reproductive justice, menstrual health, trans self-determination, and the decolonization of care—as shared fronts for building a truly universal and political right to health.

Location: Les Arches Citoyennes, 3 Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, 75004 Paris

Date & Time: Saturday, June 7 | 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM

Language(s): English & French (simultaneous interpretation)

Participants: Justine Okolodkoff, Johanna-Soraya Benamrouche, Emmanuelle Handschuh, Helen Belcher, Salomé Cheysson, moderated by Ségolène Pruvot