About Queermed Germany
Why it needs such a project
Why is Queermed Germany needed?
For many people from the queer community, but also from other groups, it is still not a matter of course to seek medical help.
As in many other social structures and systems, there are also prejudices in the health sector. At the same time, there is also a lack of professional competence in certain areas.
The forms of discrimination can be different. From queer hostility, to racism, to rejectionism, to fatophobia. These can appear either subtly in the form of microaggressive comments or overt statements. Elsewhere, however, services that are necessary for health can be withheld.
This can lead to people who have already experienced discrimination in this context no longer seeking medical help.
How Queermed helps
Especially this power imbalance between the treating person and the patient; the fact that we are dependent on the professional expertise and goodwill of the other person in the practice, shows the necessity of being able to find such places.
With a lot of luck, we get recommendations from the community itself, but especially when we move or are completely independent of the environment, we cannot get valuable recommendations from friends or acquaintances.
This is exactly where Queermed Germany is meant to support people.
Founder and Managing Director: Sara Grzybek (they / them)
Current tasks:
- Managing activities
- Maintenance of the website
- Supervision of the social media channels
- Contact person for all enquiries
- Contact person for press or podcasts
- Speaker for lectures or panels
- Author for blog, social media and newsletter
- Coordination of fundraising campaigns
"Ideally, we wouldn't need this project, but we need these safe spaces so that we can also safely seek medical help. At the same time, the project openly shows the problem that there are very many people in Germany who cannot access medical help without discrimination."
From the directory to the non-profit status
At first, the project was set up privately and went live in May 2021. A year later, it was clear that a separate structure was needed behind Queermed. At the end of 2022, Queermed was founded as a non-profit UG. This allows Queermed to stand on its own two feet and at the same time receive the necessary support in the form of donations or other funding.
Queermed Germany would not have come into being through the important groundwork that others have already done. Thanks to Queermed Austria and Gynformation, who supported me at the start of the project with a lot of advice and knowledge.
A lot has happened in these almost two years since the website was created. Besides several hundred recommendations on the website, I was allowed to participate in events for Queermed, online and offline, to talk about the existing discrimination in health care and at the same time to give Queermed to people and other organisations.
Currently, Queermed continues to be run completely independently by founder and CEO Sara Grzybek. The search for interested volunteers is still ongoing.
Support from outside
At this point, I would also like to thank a number of individual people who have accompanied and supported this project & me to some extent at various points: Clara Wördenweber (logo), Alexander Borunski (search function).
