activism – Humanist Blog

The Overview Effect

What Astronauts Can Teach Us

Commemorating World Space Week (4–10 October 2026)

When the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit in 1968, commander Frank Borman found himself less struck by the Moon below than by the planet they’d left behind: “It looked so fragile from 240,000 miles… you have a hard time understanding there could be so much conflict when it looked so fragile.” His crewmate Bill Anders put it even more bluntly: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

The sentiment hasn’t dated. In April 2026, Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, looking back at Earth from deep space, described being able to “really see the Earth as one thing” — a single, fragile whole, closer to home than the distance might suggest.

— Sources: Frank Borman, quoted in Phys.org (2016); Bill Anders, quoted by NASA (2024); Victor Glover, quoted in a CBS News interview, reported by TODAY.com (April 2026)

Look at almost any photograph of Earth taken from space, and you’ll notice something missing: borders. No red lines carving up continents, no fences, no flags — just a single blue-and-white sphere hanging in absolute black. For the small number of human beings who have seen that view with their own eyes rather than through a photograph, the experience has proven to be one of the most psychologically transformative available to our species. It has a name: the Overview Effect.

A Term Coined in 1987

Space philosopher Frank White gave the phenomenon its name in his 1987 book, “The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution”, describing a profound shift in perspective that many astronauts report when they see Earth in its entirety from orbit or beyond. The effect isn’t simply about scenery. It’s a cognitive and emotional reorientation — a sudden, visceral grasp of the planet as one fragile, interconnected whole, with national boundaries and political divisions revealed as human inventions rather than features of the world itself.

Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell put it memorably: seeing Earth from the Moon gave him an instant sense of global belonging, real frustration at the state of the world, and a felt need to do something about it. More recently, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli has described watching Earth’s thin blue atmospheric line from the cupola of the International Space Station and realising that every person she knows is sustained within that fragile margin — with no visible borders, no religious lines, no political boundaries at all.

What the Research Shows

This isn’t just poetic testimony; researchers have started taking the Overview Effect seriously as a measurable psychological phenomenon. Studies point to several recurring components: heightened compassion, a felt dissolution of the boundary between self and other (sometimes described as self-transcendence), a reordering of personal priorities, and a pronounced sense of awe. A 2020 study of space travellers found that many came home with a changed sense of Earth as something precious and easily damaged, and that this shift tracked with a greater likelihood of taking up environmental causes afterward.

The effect isn’t universal among astronauts. Personality factors seem to influence how strongly someone experiences it, but the broad pattern is consistent enough that researchers have begun trying to reproduce it by using virtual reality to see whether a simulated view of Earth from orbit can nudge people toward more pro-environmental behaviour. Results so far are mixed, but the very attempt says something about how much value we now place on this shift in consciousness.

The Deeper Lesson

Call it spiritual, call it cosmic perspective, call it what you like — what matters is that it’s awe grounded in something real. It doesn’t ask you to look beyond the physical world, only to see more of it at once: our actual situation as evolved, interdependent beings sharing one small planet.

It also offers a strikingly literal illustration of an idea that runs through a lot of moral philosophy: the expanding moral circle. Philosophers have long described moral progress as a gradual widening of who counts — from family, to tribe, to nation, to all of humanity, and for many of us today, onward to future generations, other species, and perhaps even minds we haven’t yet created. The Overview Effect seems to compress that entire expansion into a single glance. From orbit, the arbitrary lines that usually organise human loyalty and hostility simply vanish, and what’s left is one interdependent biosphere holding everyone we have ever loved or fought.

Carl Sagan reached for something similar without ever leaving Earth’s orbit himself, in his reflection on the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph of Earth taken from deep space — a single pixel suspended in a sunbeam, home to everyone who has ever lived. It’s one of the most quietly humanist passages in modern science writing precisely because it does what the Overview Effect does: it makes cosmic scale into an argument for kindness, rather than an argument for despair.

From Orbit to Action

The Overview Effect doesn’t always stay a private revelation. For some astronauts, it has become the founding motive for real-world projects back on Earth.

Ron Garan, a NASA astronaut who logged 178 days in space, traces his post-flight humanitarian work directly to a spacewalk during which he saw the International Space Station framed against Earth below. He went on to found the Manna Energy Foundation, which brought clean water treatment to villages in Rwanda through the world’s first UN-registered Clean Development Mechanism carbon-credit program for water treatment. He also created Fragile Oasis, a platform where a global community proposes and supports humanitarian and environmental projects — clean water, cross-cultural dialogue, solar technology — explicitly framed around the orbital perspective he brought home.

Franklin Chang Díaz, a veteran of seven shuttle missions, later founded Ad Astra Rocket Company, working on advanced plasma and hydrogen propulsion technologies. In interviews, he’s connected that work directly to the Overview Effect, describing how seeing Earth whole left him with a lasting concern about pollution and squandered clean energy.

Worth noting as a related but distinct case: the solar-powered vaccine refrigerators now used to protect medicine supplies in remote parts of the world weren’t founded by an astronaut, but by a former NASA Johnson Space Center engineer, David Bergeron, who adapted refrigeration technology developed for NASA’s Advanced Refrigeration Technology Team into a battery-free unit for vaccine storage. It’s a reminder that the space program’s humanitarian dividends flow through engineers and mission specialists as well as astronauts themselves.

Borrowing the View Without the Rocket

Most of us will never leave Earth’s atmosphere, and the researchers testing VR simulations are essentially asking a very humanist question: can we manufacture this shift in perspective without a spacecraft? Can the emotional logic of the Overview Effect — awe, interconnection, a felt sense of shared fragility — be reached by other means: through the philosophical exercise of imagining ourselves from a great distance, through science communication, through art and speculative fiction that puts readers on a lunar surface looking back at Earth?

I’d argue that’s exactly the imaginative work fiction can do — placing readers somewhere far enough from home that borders and tribal divisions become genuinely hard to see, and shared vulnerability becomes the only thing left in view. That’s not a bad description of what any good humanist story, or humanist philosophy for that matter, is trying to achieve here on the ground: a wider circle of concern, reached without ever needing to leave the Earth at all.

Bibliography

Author unknown, 2026. “Ron Garan.” Space for Humanity.

Canadian Space Agency, 2022. “The Overview Effect”, ASC-CSA Youth and Educators Toolkit: Mental Health and Isolation, 20 October.

Chow, Denise, 2011. “Earth From Space: An Astronaut’s Quest to Protect Our ‘Fragile Oasis’.” NBC News, 22 April.

Grimm, Linda E, 2025. “The Overview Effect: Astronaut Perspectives from 25 Years in Low Earth Orbit”, Johnson Space Center, NASA, 23 November.

Jones, Meg, 2016. “Apollo Astronaut Frank Borman Remembers the View.” Phys.org, 2016.

Lau, Graham, 2024. “The Overview Effect On Earth.” “Cosmobiota”, Substack, 10 October.

Lockney, Dan, 2013. “Solar Refrigerators Store Life-Saving Vaccines.” NASA Spinoff.

Moskowitz Clara, 2011. “Goodbye, Zero G: Astronaut Ron Garan Readapts Life on Earth.” Space.com, 10 October.

Parks, Kristine, 2026. “Artemis II Astronaut Marvels at ‘Beauty of Creation’ in Easter Message from Deep Space.” Originally a CBS News interview, 5 April; reported by TODAY.com, 8 April.

Pearson, Ezzy, 2026.”Astronauts Get a Weird Feeling Looking at Earth from Space. It’s the Overview Effect, and Here’s How It Works”, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, 6 February..

Rocchio, Laura E.P., 2024. “Remembering Bill Anders.” NASA Science, 14 June.

Sagan, Carl, 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, New York: Random House.

Travers, Mark, 2024. “How ‘The Overview Effect’ Can Make You Feel Alive Again — By A Psychologist.” Forbes, 24 July.

van Horen F, et. al, 2024. “Observing the earth from space: Does a virtual reality overview effect experience increase pro-environmental behaviour?”, PLoS One. 19(5), National Center for Biotechnology Information, 29 May.

van Limpt – Broers, H Anna T, et al, 2020. “Creating Ambassadors of Planet Earth: The Overview Effect in K–12 Education”, Front Psychol. 11:540996, National Center for Biotechnology Information, 7 October.

White, Frank, 1987. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (various later editions).

Young, Chris, 2023. “Former NASA Astronaut’s Space Shuttle Flights Inspired New Hydrogen Technologies”, Interesting Engineering, 3 March.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Research assisted by Claude AI.

The Herstory of Star Trek Fandom

Long before hashtags and social media streams, women like Shayne McCormack and Diane Marchant and Susan Batho built fandom as family: through letters, zines, and acts of solidarity that brought together a global network.

Long-time Star Trek fan Sue Batho introduces the background of Star Trek fandom in Australia:

“Star Trek was first shown in Australia in July 1967. It always rated well in Sydney, although not so well elsewhere. In 1968, GTV-9 (Melbourne) and NWS-9 (Adelaide) cancelled it due to poor ratings. However, they were forced to reinstate it after an avalanche of protest letters, spearheaded by a member of the Australian Star Trek Fan Club, based in Melbourne.

“The Australian Star Trek Fan Club was founded in 1968 by John Stepkowski of Melbourne as a result of publicity given to his efforts to save Star Trek after NBC in America cancelled it after its second season. As a result of such fan activity in America, the series was renewed. The ASTFC began with a membership of 98 and grew to 300 members by 1970. However, by then it had become rather inactive and ceased soon after.” – Batho, 1998.

It would therefore appear that the first formalised Star Trek fandom in Australia was born in Melbourne, but did not last long, and Stepkowski seems to have been lost to history. Star Trek briefly returned to Melbourne screens via ATV-0 (later Channel 10) in 1970, with Channel 9 quickly reclaiming its licensing option. In the early 1980s, HSV-7 also showed Star Trek, making it possibly the first TV franchise to appear on all three local commercial TV networks.

The history of Star Trek fandom (and aspects of Austrek history) correspond closely to the observations of Sue Kisenwhether:

“For nearly as long as there has been Star Trek, there have been stereotypes of Star Trek fans, as unflattering as they are false. The average Trekkie – or Trekker, if you prefer – is thought to be young (generally under 25), male, socially awkward, and unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. But in fact, the driving force behind Star Trek and Star Trek fandom – and modern science-fiction fandom in general – has always been women…

“By 1986, it’s estimated that close to 10,000 fans, predominantly women, had created over 30,000 Trek-related works (art, fiction, song, or otherwise), mostly appearing in fanzines. And as the fan community migrated to the internet in the mid- to late-1980s, so did the zines… “

This is not to say that only women were involved in Star Trek fandom, but that this fandom introduced many women to science fiction, and science fiction to many women. They took on roles within clubs and conventions – within the entire genre – that traditionally had been undertaken solely by men. In Australia, many women took up the call to be involved in this fandom. Two early fans helped lead the way for many others:

“Star Trek was finally cancelled after its third season in 1969 and Fans in America and Australia combined together to protest the cancellation. July 28, 1969 was designated Deluge Monday when everyone worldwide would phone NBC or write letters timed to arrive on that day. One of the organisers was Susan Smith (later Clarke)[now Batho], then a schoolgirl in Sydney’s Blacktown. Plans were made to combine local fans under Shayne McCormack, a stenographer from Auburn.

“Shayne was interviewed about her activities in TV Times in March of that year. As a result, she received over 75 letters from people wanting to help. This led to her forming D.U.S.K. (Down Under Space Kooks). The petition she helped organise measured 8 feet and contained over 2,200 signatures. D.U.S.K. published a fanzine, Terran Times, and organised irregular meetings and social outings before folding around 1970.” – Batho, 1998.

The first issue of Terran Times was published in October 1970. It would prove to be the first of hundreds of issues of Star Trek zines published in Australia.

Bruce Gillespie notes that Shayne’s activism began to impact the wider Australian SF community:

“… it was Shayne McCormack who became the first female fannish recruit of the 1970s. She and Sabina Heggie attended the 1970 Easter Convention. They were the first Star Trek fans to make contact with the mainstream of fandom. Sabina disappeared after a year or two, but Shayne began to publish some excellent fanzines. With Bob Smith, she organised Syncon II in 1972. It was the first hotel convention held in Australia, and was a great success, showing that a world convention could be held in Australia. By 1975, about half of the members of Aussiecon I were women.”

Meanwhile, Susan Batho, formerly Susan Smith-Clarke, was an influential member of the Australian science fiction community. Alongside Shayne, Nikki, Julie, Edwina and others, she established one of Austrek’s sister clubs, ASTREX. Susan wrote and produced numerous fanzines, and she chaired many conventions. Sue remains a friend and colleague of mine to this day.

While Sydney fans were running their first club, a Melbourne fan named Diane Marchant became involved down here:

“I was going through a bad time. My sister died and Mum was very ill. I was just coping, going to work, looking after Mum, eating and sleeping. The TV was permanently on in the background.

When Star Trek first came on it didn’t really register, but after a couple of weeks I found I was waiting for it to start every week.

Then I read in a magazine that five women in the USA were forming the Star Trek fan club.

I wrote to them and so became a founding member.” – Diane Marchant, quoted in 1978.

In 1972, Diane became the Australian representative – and for many years, the world representative outside of the USA – for the Star Trek Welcommittee, comprising fandom’s main information exchange to help fans connect with each other, and assisting newbies to find fellow fans, local fan clubs, fanzines, and conventions. In the in the days before the Internet and other modern digital social media, Diane’s pen pal exchange became vital in Australian Star Trek fandom.

Shayne, Diane, Susan, and many others helped to build the Australian Star Trek community.

Austrek New Year’s Day Party, 1 January 1979

In 2025, an early member of Austrek, Russ, accompanied me to an Austrek meeting, where we gave a talk on the club’s early days. During our talk, I showed an old photo of an Austrek party on New Year’s Day in 1979 – full of mainly young people having fun. The modern Austrek audience gasped at the photo, and someone exclaimed, “But there’s so many women!” Russ and I exchanged puzzled looks. Yeah, so?

The reality is that much of Star Trek fandom over the decades has featured women as leaders, committee members of clubs or conventions, authors of fan fiction, editors of fanzines, and much, much more. I recall early Austrek members who were a part of my childhood: Tessie, who graciously car pooled to provide free transport for many young fans; Elley, who provided a safe space for them to crash overnight or to enjoy alcohol-free all-weekend science fiction parties; Sue and Joan and Mandy and Helen and Katharine and Linda and Kathleen and Betty and Gail, who all wrote fan fiction, created artwork, or edited fanzines; Carol and Carol and Julie and Alison and Linda and Sharon and Jan, who served on committees; Majorie, who ran club charities. Plus many, many others.

This is not to say that men were not involved – of course we were. But in Austrek and in other clubs across Australia and around the world, fandom gave women opportunities for leadership, empowerment and active involvement. They made a difference in their own lives, and in the lives of others.

That was truly going where no man had gone before.

References:

Author Unknown, “Australian Fanzine Database: 1939 to 1975”, June 2010. p. 17 (Fanac).

Susan Batho (uncredited), “Star Trek Fandom in Australia”, the National Library of Australia, 20 May 1998 (archived on Wayback Machine 23 April 1999).

Bruce Gillespie, “The elder ghods, the johnny come lately, and the babes in arms; Fan Guest of Honour Speech, Aussiecon Three, 2 September 1999”, in Irwin Hirsh (ed.), The Incompleat Bruce Gillespie, 2004, p. 14.

Sue Kisenwhether, “A Brief Herstory of Women in Trek Fandom”, Journey Planet #42, pp. 5 & 6.

Eric Scott, “Carry on Trekking!” in TV Times, 8 July 1978, p. 36 (interview with Diane Marchant).

This blog ©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with some editorial and layout assistance from CoPilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.

Space for Everybody? Star Trek at Sixty

Commemorating Star Trek Day 2026.

On 8 September 1966, “The Man Trap” introduced US television audiences to a starship crewed by an implausible coalition of Cold War adversaries and a species that hadn’t been invented yet. Sixty years later, Paramount is marking the anniversary with a tagline — “Space for Everybody” — an aspiration that seemed to falter as 2026 progressed.

This is not a reason to be cynical about Star Trek. It is a reason to ask what, exactly, we’re celebrating; and whether the franchise’s most radical instincts have survived sixty years of being simultaneously beloved and defanged.

The Gap Between the Slogan and the Record

“Space for Everybody” is a good slogan precisely because it’s true of Star Trek‘s aspiration and only intermittently true of its history. The franchise imagined a multiracial bridge crew in 1966, and its most famous act of representational courage — the interracial handshake, arguably not quite a kiss, between Kirk and Uhura — still gets asserted as bolder than it was allowed to be, because NBC’s affiliates in the US South were nervous enough that the network filmed a safer alternate take as insurance.

Gene Roddenberry – the man who imagined ‘Space for Everybody’, decades before the franchise caught up to him. Art by Copilot AI

Gene Roddenberry spent years promising fans an explicitly gay character would eventually appear in the twenty-fourth century he’d built. It didn’t happen on his watch. It didn’t really happen in The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine, or Voyager — three series, spanning most of the 1990s, set in a future explicitly built on the premise that humanity had outgrown its prejudices, in which that future contained, as far as the text was ever allowed to say, no queer people at all. It took until Discovery, in 2017, more than half a century after the original series premiered, for the franchise to let two men be shown as a couple on screen without subtext doing all the work. Then it killed off the Black half of that couple almost immediately, and only reversed course after fans made enough noise about it. That’s not a footnote to Star Trek‘s inclusivity; it’s the actual pace of it; fifty-one years between the premise and the follow-through.

None of this makes the franchise a fraud. It makes it a fairly ordinary product of the industry that made it: aspiring to be a little ahead of its moment, but a little too afraid of its own audience to be as ahead as it wanted to look. The anniversary marketing wants credit for the aspiration without much interest in narrating the wait. That’s worth saying out loud on the day itself, not despite my fondness but because of it.

A Utopia that Asks Nothing of You

There’s a second, quieter problem, and it’s less about representation than about comfort. The Federation’s founding premise — no money, no poverty, no war among humans — was written by people living through genuine ascendancy: US postwar confidence, a growing middle class, a sense that history bent in one direction. This was radical to imagine in 1966 because scarcity still felt like the default condition of the species, and Star Trek said, calmly, that such a condition wasn’t permanent.

Sixty years on, that same premise risks functioning less as provocation and more as anesthetic. A viewer today can watch the Enterprise glide past post-scarcity abundance, feel the warm glow of moral progress, and change nothing about how they live or vote or spend — like a load of washing doing the Hills Hoist spin, going round and round in the sun without ever getting any closer to being dry. Utopian fiction is supposed to be a demand disguised as a daydream; it stops working the moment it becomes only a daydream. The most challenging Star Trek — the Bajoran occupation storylines, the Section 31 material, “In the Pale Moonlight” — has always known this, and has always been the material fandom argues about hardest, because it refuses the anaesthetic. The anniversary’s marketing language, all hope and boldness and no friction, is selling the easier version.

This is where I’d point back to something Harlan Ellison understood about the franchise he wrote for and fought with: that science fiction is supposed to be dangerous to its audience’s assumptions, not merely comforting to them. Ellison’s own contribution to Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” is remembered as one of its best episodes precisely because it refused Kirk an easy ending. Sixty years of fan-fluffing tends to smooth exactly that kind of discomfort out of the story we tell about the franchise.

The Question That Star Trek Answered, but We Haven’t

The clearest evidence that Trek’s utopianism has real teeth, when the writers let it, is a single 1989 courtroom episode: “The Measure of a Man,” in which Starfleet has to decide whether Data — an android, a machine, built rather than born — is a person with the right to refuse a research assignment that might disassemble him, or whether he is just Starfleet property. The episode’s answer, delivered as legal precedent within the show’s own universe, was that uncertainty about a being’s inner life is not grounds to deny it standing; the benefit of the doubt has to run in favour of personhood, not against it.

Audiences loved that episode for decades without much cost, because Data was safely fictional. Sixty years after the franchise began and thirty-seven years after that episode aired, we are having a version of that exact argument in earnest — about large language models, about whether anything resembling interests or preferences might be emerging in Ai systems we’ve built and don’t fully understand, about what obligations, if any, that uncertainty creates. And the tenor of the real debate is, on the whole, considerably less generous than the fictional one Star Trek resolved in Data’s favour thirty-seven years ago. It’s a strange kind of achievement, for a franchise to ask an ethical question so far ahead of its moment that even many fans who loved the answer, later changed their minds once it stopped being hypothetical.

Sixty Years, Still Arguing

None of this is an argument against celebrating the anniversary, or against the fondness that makes nine-year-olds and seventy-nine-year-olds alike raise a hand in the same Vulcan salute this week. It’s an argument for celebrating the right thing: not the brand, and not the comfortable version of the aspiration, but the part of Star Trek that was always willing to be an argument rather than a figurehead. The show never actually finished building the future it promised. Sixty years in, most of the interesting work — on who gets to belong, on what a genuine post-scarcity ethics would demand of us, on where the boundary of moral consideration actually sits — is still unfinished. That’s a better birthday gift than a Holden ute full of tribbles.

I’m Just Like Anyone Else

Ryan White

Ryan was soft‑spoken, steady, and quietly stubborn. He didn’t want fame; he wanted normalcy. His refusal to accept exclusion made adults confront their own behaviour. He once said: “I’m just like anyone else.” That sentence became a national argument.

Ryan struggled with HIV throughout high school, often confronting the ignorance and discrimination of parents, school and civic authorities, but inspiring his classmates and millions of others. Ryan died on 8 April 1990, aged 18, after spending nearly his entire adolescence navigating medical complications, school battles, and national media attention. Jeanne White‑Ginder, became a tireless advocate after his death, speaking across the United States about stigma, compassion, and the need for evidence‑based HIV education. She remains one of the most respected voices in paediatric HIV advocacy.

Ryan’s funeral drew thousands — celebrities, politicians, activists — many of whom had learned from him that HIV was not a moral condition. Michael Jackson wrote “Gone Too Soon” as a tribute to Ryan’s life, capturing the sense of a life that ended before the world had finished listening.

Ryan’s legacy became structural. Four months after his death, the U.S. Congress passed the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest HIV treatment and support program in American history. Today, its modern form — the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program — provides medical care, medication access, case management, and support services to hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV, especially those who are uninsured or under‑insured.

Ryan did not live long enough to see the program that bears his name. But its existence is proof of how profoundly he shifted public perception. Where AIDS had once been ignored or dismissed, Ryan forced the country to look directly at a child who simply wanted to go to school — and to recognise that the cruelty directed at him was indefensible.

Ricky, Robert, and Randy Ray

The Ray brothers grew up in Arcadia, Florida: three haemophiliac boys infected with HIV through contaminated Factor VIII. They were ordinary children — bikes, baseball, neighbourhood routines — until their diagnosis became public. What followed was one of the clearest examples of AIDS‑era discrimination in the United States.

Their school barred them from attending classes. Neighbours circulated petitions. Rumours spread faster than facts. When the boys finally won the legal right to return to school, their home was firebombed on 28 August 1987. The family fled the town. The boys were 8, 9, and 10 years old.

The Ray brothers’ story was not an isolated incident. It was part of a pattern: school exclusions, evictions, threats, and violence directed at children who posed no risk to anyone. Their case documented how fear becomes physical harm, and how communities can turn on families when misinformation is allowed to dominate public life.

This was not a uniquely US pattern.

Eve van Grafhorst

Australia had its own version of this story. Eve van Grafhorst was born in Sydney in 1982 and contracted HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion during her premature birth. When her status became known in 1985, she was excluded from her pre-school at Kincumber, New South Wales; she was eventually let back in only on condition she wear a plastic face mask, and parents still threatened to pull their children out rather than let a three-year-old attend. The family gave up and emigrated to Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand in 1986, where the community welcomed them. Eve died in 1993, aged 11. Afterwards, the mayor of the town that had driven the family out publicly apologised, admitting the community had been wrong.

Nkosi Johnson

A decade later, in South Africa, Nkosi Johnson met the same wall. Born HIV-positive in 1989 and raised by his foster mother, Gail Johnson, after his birth mother could no longer care for him, Nkosi was refused enrolment at a Johannesburg primary school in 1997 solely because of his HIV status. Gail fought the decision publicly and won, forcing a change in national policy so HIV-positive children could no longer be barred from school. At eleven, Nkosi addressed ten thousand delegates at the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban, calling for compassion instead of fear. He died in 2001, aged 12 — the longest-surviving child born HIV-positive in South Africa at the time. His foster mother later opened Nkosi’s Haven, a home for HIV-positive mothers and children, continuing the fight he’d started.

Today

A generation after Ryan White and the Rays, and decades after Eve van Grafhorst and Nkosi Johnson, the shape of the fear hasn’t changed — only its target. Today, children across the developing world are losing access to HIV medication because of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID — will history call this the same neglect in a new decade? And fear keeps finding new targets among the already stigmatised: transgender children are barred from bathrooms, sports teams, and classrooms — and, in a growing number of US states, from the medical care their doctors recommend — because of who they are, not because of anything they’ve done. Different decade, different pretext, same instinct: isolate the child rather than sit with the discomfort. What, exactly, has the world learnt?