September 3, 2025
To the organizers of the United States Conference of HIV/AIDS (USCHA), on behalf of the Sex Workers Rights Coalition,
USCHA is the largest annual HIV/AIDS conference in the United States. It positions itself as “a platform for frontline workers to enhance your capacity building, skill development, and idea exchange” and a “growing table for our movement that convenes the HIV community, workforce, government, policymakers, and industry to end the HIV epidemic.” Unfortunately, its current practices directly undercut that mission.
We write with deep concern regarding ongoing patterns of exclusion, inadequate safety planning, and failure to meaningfully support impacted marginalized communities at USCHA. As participants, advocates, and community members directly impacted by the HIV/AIDS crisis, we urge USCHA and NMAC to take accountability for harmful practices and to commit to substantive change.
Honoring the Legacy, Not Erasing It
The HIV/AIDS movement was built by the very communities that USCHA’s practices now exclude – BIPOC, sex workers, trans people, migrants, people who use drugs, and people facing economic injustice. From the 1980s to today’s harm reduction networks, our communities created the strategies that forced institutions to act. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a grassroots coalition of people living with HIV/AIDS and their allies – many of them queer, trans, economically disprivileged, migrants, sex workers, and people who use drugs – confronted pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, the Catholic Church, and police violence. They demanded not only access to treatment but recognition of the rights and humanity of our communities. This movement, including USCHA’s platform, was built on the backs of those whose survival was won by refusing to wait for institutions to care or catch up.
To exclude these same communities now through financial and structural barriers is not just oversight – it is a betrayal that erases the legacy USCHA claims to honor, and reduces a radical movement of resistance into something sanitized and institutionally palatable.
Complicity in Policing Dangerously Framed as “Know Your Rights” Guidance
The recently published Know Your Rights 2025 document produced by USCHA for conference attendees at increased risk of state and police violence demonstrates the dangerous consequences of excluding our communities from meaningful participation and leadership.
By convening in Washington D.C. – a city that is actively undergoing forced militarized occupation under openly fascist leadership – USCHA invited migrants, non-citizens, and other criminalized people into an actively repressive environment without providing meaningful safety planning. The Know Your Rights 2025 (KYR) document directly discourages and contradicts well-known and practiced abolitionist survival strategies and falsely equates compliance with safety, leaving those most vulnerable exposed to the very systems of violence the conference claims to resist. This so-called guidance places the burden of safety and protection entirely on those most at risk by encouraging alignment with state-violence:
- Advising attendees not to “resist” disregards the realities of state violence, reinforces compliance with police, and dismisses the powerful legacy of resistance strategies that have kept criminalized communities alive.
- Suggesting people carry ID at all times, collect badge numbers, and file complaints later assumes privilege and safety many do not have – and directly disregards the life threatening impact that any encounter with police have on criminalized individuals and communities.
- Insisting that “you cannot fight police misconduct on the street” is a violent erasure of the necessity of street-based response to state oppression: from ACT UP chaining themselves to FDA doors and storming St Patrick’s Cathedral during the AIDS crisis, to trans, unhoused, and sex worker communities resisting raids, to present-day protest and de-arrest tactics that protect people from state-sponsored genocide across the globe. Resistance to state violence has never been optional – it is a necessity for the survival of our communities.
To tell attendees that quiet compliance is the best and safest strategy is not only dishonest and dangerous – it is complicity in state violence. This so-called “guidance” betrays the radical abolitionist survival strategies that have historically kept our people alive: street protest, mutual defense, de-arrest, and collective resistance.
Without these tactics, there would be no USCHA, no HIV/AIDS movement, and no space for our voices at all. Erasing this legacy while promoting advice framed as “safety / rights” is not only misguided, it is antithetical to the very work USCHA claims to advance.
Structural Barriers and Rejection of Community-Led Panels
In 2023, sex worker-led groups successfully presented well-attended and highly valued panels at USCHA, including one titled “Blocked and Criminalized: HIV/AIDS, Anti-Trans Laws, and Sex Worker Rights”, that provided stakeholders with concrete tools to reduce stigma and improve health outcomes, and even motivated conference organizers to state their intention to create a dedicated sex work track for future conferences.
Yet instead of building on that commitment, USCHA moved to exclude us.
In 2024, four grassroots organizations submitted panels that were accepted, but were not given the necessary tangible support to enable these groups to attend and present. Each panel, comprised of multiple speakers, was offered only one free speaker registration. Without equitable support, those speakers could not attend, and those sessions ultimately did not take place. Attempts by these organizers to request accommodation from conference coordinators went unanswered.
In 2025, all panels submitted by those same groups were rejected outright.
This pattern highlights broader systemic barriers:
- Economic Disenfranchisement: By requiring presenters – especially those lacking institutional funding or affiliation – to self-fund registrations, travel, and accommodations, USCHA effectively bars low-income and criminalized communities from meaningfully participating in the conference.
- Selective Representation: Institutions with resources are privileged, while those with lived experience are excluded and silenced. This distorts who shapes policy and practice, and undermines the depth and relevance of the movement. Marginalized communities enrich movement spaces through our perspectives, solidarity, and everyday participation – not only when we formally present. Yet USCHA’s lack of financial or institutional support, whether for speakers or general attendees, means those most impacted are often unable to participate at all.
- Erasure of Resistance Histories: Sanitizing HIV/AIDS activism by sidelining criminalized communities severs USCHA from the legacy of ACT UP and other movements that centered radical care, mutual aid, and resistance to policing and state violence. The very people who built the foundations of HIV/AIDS activism are being pushed out of spaces that now falsely claim to carry our legacy.
These harms are compounded by USCHA’s pattern of limiting support to sex worker-led and community-driven participation, even when we have meaningfully demonstrated the value of our contributions.
Exclusion of Sex Workers and Trans Communities is a Human Rights Violation
The ongoing exclusion of sex workers and criminalized communities and diminished trans, BIPOC, and migrant representation within so-called movement spaces is not simply an omission or accident – it is a violation of human rights. Though our communities remain disproportionately impacted by the HIV/AIDS crisis, USCHA’s practices disregard the profound harm caused by our exclusion in a space that profoundly influences national policy and healthcare practices.
The absence of criminalized, gender-diverse, migrant, and marginalized voices reflects ongoing stigma that ultimately weakens the national response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. This exclusion shifts the burden onto our most disenfranchised communities to constantly prove our relevance to movements we created, not only to secure participation, but to ensure survival.
The principle of “Rights, Not Rescue” must guide HIV/AIDS activism. This phrase, coined within sex worker-led movements, is a powerful call-to-action that pushes back against paternalistic “rescue” frameworks that treat survivors of violence as victims to be saved rather than leaders with agency, expertise, and inherent human rights. Rescue models have historically justified criminalization and exclusion in the name of protection, deepening and compounding the harms our communities face.
A truly human rights-based approach, by contrast, demands that our communities and lived experiences be resourced, centered, and heard on our own terms. The only effective way to uplift people who have historically been disenfranchised is to work with us directly and invest in our leadership – not to speak for us.
Our Demands
To restore integrity and align with the communities most impacted by HIV/AIDS, we call on USCHA to:
- Guarantee equitable tangible support for community-led panels: this includes providing full registration waivers and meaningful travel and accommodation for all presenters who cannot otherwise attend.
- Institutionalize sex worker, trans, and BIPOC leadership: commit to dedicated presentation tracks, decision-making roles, and advisory structures that are appropriately compensated to ensure our communities are not only included, but truly centered.
- Retract and revise the current Know Your Rights document: Redraft this document in consultation with impacted criminalized communities and legal advocacy groups, ensuring guidance is trauma-informed, realistic, centered in harm reduction, and in anti-criminalization and abolitionist principles that honor the legacy of resistance to fascism and policing.
- Develop a safety plan for conference participants that acknowledges active risks and engages a shared sense of community responsibility: mobilize privileged attendees not just as bystanders but as accountable protectors by providing training in intervention tactics, legal and financial resource-sharing, and collective abolitionist strategies like protest defense, de-arrest, and jail support skills. Safety at USCHA cannot be left to individual survival; it must be built through a shared sense of accountability to actively protect those most vulnerable to policing and state-sponsored violence.
- Implement true accountability and transparency: publish clear data on accepted / rejected sessions, scholarship decisions, and community representation at each conference, and honor commitments made by conference organizers to center sex-worker led tracks at future conferences.
It’s not too late for USCHA to prioritize solidarity.
As the Sex Workers Rights Coalition, we invite conference organizers to honor their stated commitments by ensuring sex workers, trans people, migrants, and other criminalized communities are not just invited, but centered, in movement spaces.
To host a national conference that systematically excludes the very communities who built this movement represents a stark break from the legacy of resistance that USCHA claims to honor. Without addressing these concerns, USCHA is presenting a polished and institutionally palatable version of the HIV/AIDS crisis while sidelining the criminalized communities whose organizing historically shaped the earliest and most effective responses to the epidemic. This is not only revisionist – it is a betrayal of our history and our communities.
We believe USCHA can and should serve as a space of solidarity, safety, and genuine community leadership. To do so, it must take accountability for the harm caused and implement changes that reflect the realities of those most impacted by HIV/AIDS who are central to the resistance and advocacy that made this movement possible.
We look forward to your concrete commitments to change, and invite other coalitions, organizations, and individuals – whether you are attending USCHA this year or not – to join us in calling on USCHA to be in true solidarity with all communities impacted by HIV/AIDS.
In solidarity,
Penelope Saunders & Erika Smith | Executive Directors | Best Practices Policy Project
Cristine Sardina | Director | Desiree Alliance
N’jaila Rhee | Executive Director | New Jersey Red Umbrella Alliance
Noor Z.K. | Director | Sex Workers Educating & Empowering Texans (SWEET)
And the Sex Workers Rights Coalition
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