Thread by @CaseyExplosion

Hey folks, let's talk about Catholic nuns, Reagan and the stripping of healthcare from trans people during the 80's, and how TERFs were always aligned to the right, arming them with arguments and rhetoric to better discriminate against trans people.

Now, it shouldn't be any news to people that the Reagan administration did an incredible amount of harm to LGBT folks, but it wasn't just the AIDS crisis. Up until the 80's, trans people could access health insurance.

Then Reagan happened.

Federal health insurance was stripped away and private healthcare companies took this as precedent to strip coverage of trans people themselves, it had a tremendously damaging knock-on effect.

This meant that if you accessed any trans-related healthcare, you couldn't be insured.

The precursor to this was a report that was written for the Reagan administration called "Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery" which outright called for the elimination of transsexualism. This was the basis for what Reagan did to trans people.

The person who wrote that report was not a medical doctor with any experience in treating trans people, but rather a former Catholic nun and author of "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" Janice Raymond.

Read more about this here:

transadvocate.com/fact-checking-…

Raymond's Transsexual Empire is perhaps the most foundational work in establishing trans exclusionary radical feminism as a distinct ideology, and along with Catholic theologian Mary Daly, she helped to foment this particular strain of 'lockstep with conservatism' feminism.

Now I keep mentioning religion, because this is the key to understanding TERF ideology. Raymond being a former Catholic nun belonging to the Sisters of Mercy sect, and Daly's education being from Catholic church run university CUA, University of Fribourg, and St. Mary's.

It is through a Catholic lens you need to view TERF ideology. Both Janice Raymond and Mary Daly were lesbian feminists, but their brand of feminism was just accepting enough that they didn't hate themselves for their attraction to women, while retaining a Catholic outlook.

This is why we see TERFs who are all but conservative Christians in that they are anti-sex work, anti-pornography, and prize chasteness and celibacy, except for being accepting of lesbianism. It is an ideology informed by its Catholic roots.