Why does the Catholic Church oppose gender transitions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Talk about timeliness for a church pronouncement. On April 8, the Vatican’s doctrine office issued a broad-gauged “declaration,” approved by Pope Francis after five years of work, that contained new moral denunciations of what it called “gender theory” and resulting “sex change” treatments.

The very next day, science weighed in, as British medical journals reported such devastating research findings that the National Health Service has halted gender transition treatments for children and teen-agers.

There’ve been other such medical rollbacks in Western Europe, but American medicine and media remain more sympathetic toward these treatments, which have become common this past decade, largely among girls.

Rome’s declaration Dignitas Infinita or “Infinite Dignity” (text at www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20240402_dignitas-infinita_en.html/), addresses numerous moral problems in nearly 12,000 words, but reactions focus on the six paragraphs about gender identity. Understandably so, since bishops and parishioners worldwide, and the general public, seek understanding of emotionally fraught transgender, non-binary and gender-fluid issues.

“Dysphoria” and “incongruence”

This vigorous discussion involves patients troubled because the gender identity they currently experience conflicts with the identity defined at birth, a condition known as “gender dysphoria” or “incongruence.” Transgender proponents say gender was “assigned” at birth, but genetics and physiology set designations, not doctors or families. Britons instead speak of “registered” birth identity.

Catholicism’s decree concerns a range of assaults upon “human dignity,” which is cherished because God the Creator “has imprinted the indelible features of his image on every person” (citing biblical Genesis 1:26), as seen in the laws of created nature. The gender section draws upon Francis’s 2016 “apostolic exhortation” Amoris Laetitia.

Importantly,  Dignitas first denounces the assaults on human dignity in discrimination, aggression or violence against individuals on the basis of their “sexual orientation.”

That said, it addresses the “considerable debate among experts” on modern gender theory, which  embraces “personal self-determination” and   amounts to “the age-old temptation to make oneself God.” The new thinking is said to deny humanity’s “foundational difference” between the sexes and its role in the “miracle” of producing children. Only by acknowledging and accepting this can “can each person fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.” Thus, the decree concludes, “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between men and women are to be rejected.”

Sex-change “interventions”

On transition treatments, the text insists that protecting humanity means “respecting it as it was created.” So “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” The church dos not oppose medical resolution in cases of  “genital abnormalities” at birth.

The new decree does not specify how the church handles transgender Catholics who want church marriages or clergy ordination. However, a ruling from the same doctrinal office last November states that in general, parishioners who have undergone “gender reassignment” by hormones or surgery may be baptized themselves, serve as godparents at baptisms, and be recognized witnesses at church weddings. The Vatican’s education office also addressed gender policy  in the 2019 statement “Male and Female He Created Them.”  It opposes efforts in education or legislation that promote “a radical break with the actual biological difference between male and female” and make identity “the individual’s choice, which can also change in time.” This paper states that from the moment of conception, each person has “a structural determinant of male or female identity.”

Though the Catholic stance bars transitions at any age, most secular controversy  involves patients under age 18. A related dispute in court cases is whether youths are capable of the ethically required “informed consent” to medical treatments with such life-altering and often permanent impact.

Among U.S. Protestants, the Catholic viewpoint receives elaborate backup from healthcare professionals in the Christian Medical and Dental Association, with 19,000 members, mostly conservative Protestants; see https://resources.cmda.org/article/transgender-identification/. Yet evangelical clinicians’ approach is more complex than some might suppose, as reported here: www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2022/10/10/under-covered-story-in-tense-times-counseling-with-transgender-christian-believers/ Meanwhile,  several “mainline” or liberal Protestant denominations support transgender causes, as here: www.ucc.org/home/trans-nonbinary_pastoral_letter_june2022/.

Drama in Britain

Britain’s dramatic policy change is based on nine surveys of research reports to date on treatments, many in the U.S., posted by Archives of Disease in Childhood, with simultaneous coverage in the British Medical Journal; see  www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/evidence-for-puberty-blockers-and-hormone-treatment-for-gender-transition-wholly-inadequate/. The investigation was chaired by Hilary Cass, past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Heath.  National Health commissioned a team to assess 50 studies on “puberty blockers” prescribed to retard youths’ sexual development, and 53 studies on the customary follow-up applying hormones for feminizing or masculinizing effects. The team contends only two of these 103 academic studies met needed scientific rigor.

The Journal reported  no “statistically significant changes in gender dysphoria or mental health outcomes” have resulted, while hormones “could have a range of unintended and as yet unidentified consequences.” Evidence is “unproven and benefits / harms are unknown.” Cass protests that  in no other situation do doctors “give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.” And there’s much more.

Returning  to the Vatican declaration, it also repeats the Francis’s newsworthy January reaffirmation of Catholic opposition to human births via surrogate motherhood using in vitro fertilization, and a papal plea for legal prohibition. The Guy provided background on this belief here:  www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/2024/02/why-does-the-catholic-church-condemn-surrogate-motherhood/.

The Vatican’s decree otherwise addresses  “serious and urgent” contemporary issues in terms of human dignity including abortion; animal rights and endangered species; “arbitrary imprisonment;” “climate crisis”; death penalty; “degrading working conditions”; digital technology that fosters “exploitation, exclusion and violence”; economics and poverty; education; euthanasia and assisted suicide; gambling; genocide; healthcare access; human trafficking; immigration and deportation; mutilation and torture; polygamy; pornography; prostitution; racism; religious freedom; rights of women, children, and the disabled; sexual abuse; “subhuman living conditions”; slander; slavery; and war.