Mia Wong

And they were like, you know, like there was a point like a couple of years ago where they were genuinely seriously weakened by their series of like of internal abuse scandals.

Yes.

And like even though like these are like the church groups that are also backing the health care bans on the legislative level, there's no sort of political will to actually go to war with the right wing churches that are doing this stuff.

Well, so this is an interesting difference and it relates to what we were just talking about.

The sentiments I hear among trans folks on the ground, you know, working class trans folks, it's pretty anti-clerical, like to put it mildly.

It tends to be more gentry types, especially ones more in Scots and institutions or like, you know, official political culture, the gang stuff we've been mentioning that have more of this aversion.

And I will have to say it wasn't always this way.

I am old enough to remember when queer organizing, taking aim at, mocking, even directly going the attack against, suing definitely, religious institutions was a pretty common fixture.

A prominent example, and I deal with this in the earlier piece as well as touching on the more recent one, was ACT UP's 1989 Stop the Church action campaign.

Which you'll imagine a queer org doing an action with that title today, in which case they militantly disrupted services of St.

Patrick's Cathedral in New York because of the ridiculous homophobia of the Catholic Church and its role in the Asianicides.

Yeah.

And there's some video of this that we linked in that first story from ACT UP's archives.

And I find the signs hilarious, but there's stuff that you would immediately see tone policing about, even from some queer and trans media today.

Yeah.

You know, oh, we shouldn't alienate normies, all this, all that.

And no, hey, there was a big backlash at the time, a huge one.

The president condemned it.

You know, the federal officials condemned it.

Congress critters condemned it.