Mia Wong

It includes an incredibly sprawling network of clinics and specialists and doctors' practices.

Plenty of them are not outwardly Catholic even.

So people may be going to a practice owned around the Catholic Church and not even be aware of it.

It's also expanding.

It's taking over and buying out previously secular practices.

And this is a multifaceted problem.

It goes along with cuts in federal aid.

It goes along with the general capitalist fervor that kind of grips secular health care as well.

So if they cut services, the Catholic Church often buys them up and expands.

So it affects everyone in that, everyone who deals with that.

And the Catholic Church has never been pro-trans remotely.

But previously, prior to this ban, there was kind of a hodgepodge and some local ambiguities.

And there were cases, and we'll get into some of them in a second, where local pro-trans Catholics or folks working at those networks could and did provide pretty substantial trans care through like one ambiguity or loophole or another.

That just ended.

All of it.

Yeah.

So throughout that entire network in some states and ones you wouldn't necessarily think, including ones like Oregon and Washington that are ostensibly supposed to have like pretty strict trans health care protections.

Catholic hospitals comprise like over a third of hospital beds.

And I think Washington is over 40 percent.

So we're talking about, of healthcare beds, we're talking about a substantial part of the American healthcare system.