QueerCare Principles

This page describes principles, base assumptions upon which QueerCare operates. See structure of queercare documentation if you're new to QueerCare.

This resource contains information which may be useful for performing care or advocacy work, or describes overall policy and principles.

This document outlines the principles upon which QueerCare operates.

Principles of QueerCare as an organisation

1. QueerCare is a transfeminist organisation
   • It prioritises the needs of trans women first, trans women who experience intersecting oppressions within that, and other people who experience similar oppression. It is not a general purpose feminist, liberationary or queer organisation.
2. QueerCare as a central organisation looks after people doing care and helps them do their job
   • QueerCare does not in itself prioritise those receiving care; that's for the individual carers within the network to do.
3. QueerCare's purpose is to help people do care for people who experience transmisogyny
   • Along the way we end up doing care for a lot of other people, but this is the overriding goal.
4. QueerCare as a system does not decide which people are worthy of care
   • Some people our skills may not be appropriate for, but no-one has done too much harm to our community, or is not respectable enough, to receive care from people supported by QueerCare.
5. QueerCare as an organisation does not decide which people are worthy of doing care
   • Some people would do bad care, or would do bad care in certain situations, and QueerCare should do its best to place other more appropriate people in these situations.
   • Where a person would only do bad care, they should not be placed in a situation where they are doing care, but instead given opportunity to support others in doing care.
6. QueerCare does not strive towards professionalism, but instead strives towards competency
   • There are times when the organisation can learn from professionals currently doing care, and there are times when QueerCare can learn from people who base their work on lived experience, and times when QueerCare learns from experimentation and innovation.
7. QueerCare helps people do Good Care
   • Good Care does not cause harm to the person doing the care, and from there works to give the person receiving the care the outcomes they wish for. Good care is not medicine, a discipline with a record of doing Bad Care through history to the current day.
   • See below for principles of good care.
8. QueerCare is not coercive of carers or people who receive care, except where there are immediate threats to life or limb
9. QueerCare is a permissive organisation
   • Where things are not directly specified as out of scope of QueerCare, or are not specified as Bad Care, they are within the scope of QueerCare
   • Approval is not needed to do the work which you think fits these principles, so long as it is not directly contradicted by protocol. You are free to call such work QueerCare, and use QueerCare resources for it.
10. QueerCare is deliberately not concerned with the public perception of its work
    • Focus on appearing respectable and moral often leads to organisations disposing of people who tarnish their reputation. QueerCare’s focus is on supporting people to do Good Care regardless of how this may be perceived.

Principles of good care

1. Good care does not cause harm to the person being cared for, nor the person doing care.
   • Sometimes harm occurs while doing care as a result of the surrounding circumstances, but care should always lessen that harm, never amplify it.
2. Good care focuses on providing outcomes that are desirable to the person receiving care in day to day life, not which are desirable to society in general or other people in their lives.
3. Bad care does the opposite of these things.