Catholic Church Calls Transgender People Annihilators
Ignoring science, the Church promotes suffering
By the time you finish reading this article, a transgender person somewhere in the world will have been beaten or murdered. According to Trans Murder Monitoring project, more than one transgender person was reported murdered every day last year.
The number of reported murders is believed to be much lower than the actual numbers. In the United States, one in three transgender women report having been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. One in six transgender men report sexual assault.
Rates of ordinary physical assault are so high that researchers hesitate to quantify them. In the United States, transgender women of color are assaulted at the highest levels, some studies showing rates that approach 100%.
On Monday, the Catholic Church released a document on education that denies the transgender experience, condemning transgender people and those who validate and affirm them as annihilating the “concept of nature.”
Put more simply, affirming and making space for transgender youth reduces suffering and saves lives.
As Christian pastor and author Ken Wilson notes, writing on Medium, the document is a ‘sugar-coated call to action’ against vulnerable transgender kids. The Vatican authors, while throwing in a few platitudes about respect and dialogue, issued a hard-core denial of the lived truths of transgender people, whose personal views are entirely absent from the document.
The Vatican also ignores vast bodies of medical and biological science that demonstrate that transgender people do not choose to be who they are. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society are just two professional associations that curate and organize such research and who find that transgender people are who they are because of innate biology.
The Catholic document breaks no new ground —
It casts doubt on academic gender theory while ignoring medical science entirely. Without any basis in medical fact, it promotes traditional Catholic teachings that biological differences between men and women are defined solely by external genitalia.
For Catholic advocates hoping for an inclusive approach to LGBTQ people, the document is a blow. Rather than moving the Church forward, the authors harden old positions and ratchet back recent signs of progress.
Fr. Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ equality within the Church, issued a statement pointing out the harm the document will surely cause to vulnerable people.
The document, from the Congregation for Catholic Education, will confuse those who sincerely struggle with questions of gender identity and sexual orientation. Such confusion leads to self-harm, addiction, and even suicide. The misinformation the document contains will cause families to reject their children, and it will increase alienation of LGBT people from the Church.
DeBernardo’s priorities seem in the right place. He’s positioning compassion and care ahead of ideology. We know empirically that transgender people suffer when forced to live in ways that are not true to who they are. We know that levels of self harm are high and made higher by family rejection. We know for certain, as reported by the US NIH, that social transitioning reduces rates of self harm and suicide dramatically.
Put more simply, affirming and making space for transgender youth reduces suffering and saves lives.
DeBernardo identifies the document’s most crucial flaw as the authors’ inability or unwillingness to critically examine nature, ironic given their conclusions. They mine philosophy and theology for their positions on gender, while ignoring actual evidence about the world around them — from nature.
Much as the Church once invested itself in denying compelling evidence of a heliocentric solar system, they now seem to be closing their eyes to compelling evidence about gender diversity. According to DeBernardo,
The Vatican maintains the idea that gender is determined solely by visible genitalia, which contemporary science has shown is an incorrect and harmful way to categorize people. Gender is also biologically determined by genetics, hormones, and brain chemistry–things not visible at birth. People do not choose their gender, as the Vatican claims: they discover it through their lived experiences. The Church should respect and encourage this process of discovery, because it is a process by which individuals discover the wonderful way that God has created them.
The authors are echoing Pope Francis
In speaking of transgender people “annihilating nature,” the document’s authors appear to be nodding to Pope Francis, who used similar language on a trip to Poland in 2016.
In a private meeting with Polish bishops, Francis complained that children learn at school that they can choose their gender. He claimed that, “We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God. Today, in schools they are teaching this to children — to children! — that everyone can choose their gender.”
Francis makes the same two fundamental errors that appear in Monday’s Vatican education document.
- Gender is not a choice. No one claims it is. The Catholic hierarchy errs when they ignore the lived experiences of transgender people and the empirical observations of medical science.
- Whether God or nature is responsible for the creation of human beings, transgender people are who they are. They are natural, i.e. part of nature. Their brains, hormones, and bodies were created as they exist. The Catholic hierarchy errs by denying nature and the actual reality of creation.
Worse than erring philosophically or religiously, the Church is hurting people.
By invalidating the lives and lived experiences of transgender people, the Church is encouraging rejection and bullying. The Church is buttressing a system of belief that denies biological and psychological truth.
Transgender and gender variant people have been rejected, bullied, ostracized, and assaulted for millennia. They have suffered because we didn’t understand that transgender people are ordinary but minority variants of human beings.
By perpetuating systems of belief that further this misunderstanding, the Church perpetuates suffering. They cement suffering.
Even if every biologist and medical researcher in the world were wrong about trans people being natural, about gender identity being biological and innate, then perpetuating systems of belief that lead to human suffering would surely still be immoral.
Why cause suffering? What’s the point?Religions and systems of faith are supposed to exist to increase human happiness and decrease human suffering. Christianity in particular centers itself around encouraging people to love one another and to be kind.
Imposing gender on unwilling people is neither loving nor kind. It leads to terrible and predictable consequences. Remember, please —