Want to Support Queer and Trans People? Fix Your Churches.

Protecting our rights and dignity at a more fundamental level than “getting out the vote”

Pax Ahimsa Gethen
6 min readOct 23, 2018
Members of the Coalition of Welcoming Congregations of the Bay Area attend the 2011 San Francisco Pride Parade. Photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen.

For World Mental Health Day on October 10, I decided to stop reading any story that had the name of our 45th president in the headline. My outrage at the amount of violence and injustice in the world had reached a level where hearing any more news about the latest hate spewed by the current presidential administration would only cause me unnecessary grief. Reading liberals repeatedly urging people to vote for Democrats as a response —with the inevitable associated shaming of progressive third-party voters and abstainers — did not help either.

I just needed a break from the onslaught, and short of avoiding news coverage and social media altogether, this was my chosen method of self-care. I knew I couldn’t avoid reading about current events for long, though. My self-imposed news break ended when the New York Times reported this week that the current administration was planning to legally deny the existence of sex and gender variance. Members of the trans, non-binary, and intersex communities and our allies immediately condemned this latest attack on our rights and dignity.

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