Dr. Ronx: On Finding Comfort in the Collective, from TV to A&E to the Queer Community

Over the phone, Dr Ronx speaks in a way not unlike their television persona: breezy yet firm. Their answers bubble over with detail, underscored by a friendly cadence. Their attentive, authoritative style suits the distinct spaces they inhabit — Dr Ronx is an emergency medicine doctor in Hackney, East London, a CBBC presenter on Operation Ouch!, a mentor to young people in Hackney and the author of two children's non-fiction medical books — Amazing Bodies and How to Save a Life. The latter, their latest book, aims to help 6-9-year-olds know what to do in medical emergencies.

Familiar to us for having hosted television programmes such as Unshockable Dr Ronx and Is COVID Racist? aimed at making health personable and palpable — less mystifying —  Dr Ronx is also active in charity work, previously raising £1000 for Syrian refugees and over £2000 for Sistah Space, a charity supporting African and Caribbean heritage women affected by domestic and sexual abuse.

Photographer: Kareem Abdul @kareemabvisuals

Stylist: Jaka Koroma @ja.stylesss

Set Design: Shania Wright @shaniam00

Creative Director: Rhona Ezuma @roena

Production Assistant: Sol Rei @nowosnika

Model: Ronx @dr_ronx

Adding to Dr Ronx' busy schedule and kaleidoscopic curriculum-vitae is their social media presence, which veers on hectic — two Instagram accounts that together have accumulated a 25,000+ following. One highlights their work with young people, while their main account is a scrapbook of fundraisers, LGBT+ and community activism, funny videos, and screenshots from their notes app, a digital collage that reflects intersectional identity and passion. As a teenager, Dr Ronx left home and went on to self-fund their medical degree. They are not religious, but something like an inner calling drives their work; queerness, with its tendency to challenge and renew the status quo, is interlaced in everything they do. When they speak of their inspirations, they list figures who forged societal or cultural change and community in part by being themselves unreservedly. Women carved into queer black feminist mythology.

During our conversation, Dr Ronx paused now and again to check they were making sense. Each time, they had been. This perceptible quality, a keen desire to leave their audience with something intelligible and impactful, is no doubt a virtue in A&E wards, public life, protests and social media. 

Ijeoma Okoye: Where does your inspiration for your work come from?

Dr. Ronx: The programme ER — that was what inspired me to become a doctor. I've wanted to be a doctor since the age of 12. Now, I would say that my inspirations are more female activists. I really love Angela Davis, Diane Abbott— female icons who are trailblazers and have done things in the past that I don't even know if any of us would have had the guts to have done. Like Angela Davis, for example, just everything she did for black liberation and being honest about queerness and the place of black people. bell hooks, All About Love; a seminal text in terms of making AFAB people and females reclaim our sexuality, reclaim our existence. Say no to the patriarchy. Grace Jones, another hero. I mean, now everybody loves Grace Jones, but when I was younger, her aesthetic, her personality, who she was, was not something that was necessarily celebrated much amongst black people because she was othered.

IO: How do Operation Ouch!, your books, Amazing Bodies and How to Save A Life and activism fit into your work as a medical doctor? Did doing Operation Ouch! feel like a step away from being a doctor?

DR: When I was younger, everything was quite compartmentalised. I wasn't aware that I lived with different intersections, but I knew that I had different parts of my life which weren't all merging or weren't connecting seamlessly. For example, when I was at university, I was like, ‘Oh, I think I'm queer, so I'm going to explore this by joining the LGBTQI society’ and then I noticed that when I went to that society, there weren't that many black people. So then I joined the African Caribbean society, and then I noticed that there were loads of black people, and it was very religion based, but there was nobody who was queer per se. I think I was an accidental activist in the beginning, because for me, it made no sense that I existed as a queer person, as a Nigerian person, as a junior doctor, as somebody that didn't practice religion, but was spiritual and also really enjoyed African culture… it didn't make sense to me that these, all these parts of me just didn't merge together. I didn't have many role models that I could physically, actually access in regards to knitting all of this together. It's society that says that they can't knit together, but they can and I would say that it wasn't until I became a doctor [that I realised that]. For me, perhaps I needed the security of a title, which is, again, a construct of society that you think a title gives you some gravitas. But it was only once I'd worked to become a doctor and worked as a doctor that I felt confident enough to be like ‘I'm a black doctor, I'm a queer doctor, I'm also a trans, non-binary doctor’.

Doctors like me exist. And while I haven't actually met many doctors that have the same kind of intersections as myself, luckily for me, in the queer scene, I’ve met loads and loads of black and brown queer people who are living in all types of echelons of society, doing all sorts of things. So I would say that my activism and my desire to show the world that people like me exist actually comes from my queerness, because when you're queer, it's like you've already decided. You've already opted out of the constructs of society. Alongside that, you meet people who share that same ideas, but also test your ideas.

I never hid myself at work. But I was also worried that if I said I was queer at work, then people would judge me. At the time [when I was starting out], I felt that medicine was a very patriarchal institution. 

When I met all of these queer people, they were just like, ‘No, these are all constructs. You can construct your own constructs. You don’t have to be bound by this.’ And so I would say being queer has been the best thing that I've ever evolved into, because my mind is open to all the possibilities of existence. I don't feel bound by anything…

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