Mia Wong

You do have to provide trans health care under whatever circumstances or ideally all of them.

He's chosen not to.

And if you look at his history of transphobia before he became pope, it's not particularly surprising.

Yeah, I think sort of like the very baseline kind of anti-clerical stance here is like, the moment your religion is able to dictate the behavior of people who are outside of it, you have crossed the line into this kind of clerical rule in ways that I think everyone should be...

Like deeply opposed to?

Yes.

Like universally that should be regarded as unacceptable and oppressive.

Yeah, and this is what we're dealing with here, which is that when there isn't this, you know, because like we talk a lot about sort of the separation of church and state, which has always been kind of a joke in the U.S.

to like a broad extent, right?

But like, you know, there are like other spheres that exist in our lives, right?

There's, you know, like there are economic spheres, there are health spheres, there are like social spheres, and...

You know, like the fact that a church can just be like, no, fuck you, and cut off unbelievable numbers of trans people from their health care in a way that even the sort of like right wing theocrats in office wouldn't be able to do.

Yes.

Is something that has to be that has to be opposed because fuck that.

It does.

And I will add while, you know, obviously, and we deal with some in the story of, you know, an example of pro-trans folks at a Catholic hospital, even a Catholic hospital, overwhelmingly the staff were pro-trans.

Yeah.

But I do think and polls to the extent that they matter, you know, do show repeatedly that opinion within Catholics themselves individually is pretty split on this.

There are a substantial number who are pro-trans rights and pro-trans health care.

I also have to say, though, that at this point, I think there is a specific obligation among them to speak up and act against this loudly.