Last Updated on July 5, 2023 by web manager
PART ONE
Many Catholics, other Christians and people of good will instinctively know that there is something fundamentally wrong with the movement designed to blur the lines between men and women. This strange campaign is not only unhealthy for society but also for the individuals involved. That said, it is often hard to know how to respond when people who are in positions of authority (such as President Biden or Governor Walz) or who are highly educated (such as most University and College Presidents) advocate for transgenderism and then go on to accuse those who do not accept their twisted social agendas of being bigoted and hateful. For these and other reasons, many who know these things are wrong have been reduced to silence out of concern for losing their jobs or because they just don’t know what to say. Yet, we must do what we can to oppose these ideas because they are harmful to our young people and to our families. These ideologies create confusion in young people about fundamental questions of life including the most fundamental of all, “Who Am I?” To answer this question and others, we need to begin with the facts about the human person.
PART TWO
In previous generations, Catholic children were required to memorize various teachings about our faith. These teachings were presented in a question & answer form. One question was this: “What is man?” The answer: “Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made in the image and likeness of God.” Looking more carefully at this answer, we see first that man is a creature, that is, man was made. Man is not self-made or self-created. That means man is a dependent being and that there are boundaries or limits to what man can do, boundaries which were set by his Creator. For example, man cannot fly like a bird nor live in the ocean. Man’s body was not designed for these things. Also, man is not the author of his own existence. None of us had a say in when we were created. An additional observation is this. God had a reason or purpose for creating man. Just as we have a reason or purpose for making things, so too with God. We make things for various reasons. Snow shovels to move snow, stoves on which to cook, blankets to keep us warm when we sleep, and so on. Notice here that things made for a certain purpose cannot easily be used for another purpose – if at all. For example, you cannot use a blanket to cook food and you cannot use a snow shovel to keep you warm when you sleep. In a similar way, God had His reasons for creating man. However, when man chooses to live in a way contrary to the reason or purpose for which he was made, things do not go well for man.
PART THREE
As I mentioned part two, in previous generations, Catholic children were required to memorize various teachings about our faith. These teachings were presented in a question & answer form. One question concerned the reason for our creation. It asked: “Why did God make us?” The answer was this: “God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.” Notice here that to understand goodness in general and the goodness of God in particular, man needed to have the ability to reason and for that he needed a power by which he could grasp & understand abstract things. For that reason, God created man with an intellect so that man could reason. Here it should also be noted that God did not give this power to any of the animals. That is why Saint Thomas (and Aristotle before him) defined man as a rational animal as distinct from all other animals which are not rational but irrational. Now abstract things are those things which are real but have no material parts to them. They include things like love, friendship, happiness, beauty, truth, justice, verbs and adjectives, integers and cosines, the periodic table, the government, the arts and so on. With his intellect, man can understand these abstract things and reason about them. In addition to his intellect, God created man free so that he could have the ability to choose or to reject those things which he came to understand as good. At its most fundamental level then, this freedom allows man to choose God who is the source of all good and is goodness itself, or this freedom allows man to reject God. However, to reject God is to reject the very reason for which God made man, namely, to live with God in heaven and there to share in His everlasting happiness.
PART FOUR
As has been seen thus far, God has created us to live with Him in heaven and there to share in His happiness. In order to gain heaven, we must know, love, and serve God in this world. Here again, it is important to note that we are not self-made or self-created. We cannot remake ourselves into something else or change the reason or purpose for our existence. That said, God made us creatures of body and soul for a reason. He had a purpose for making our bodies, and more specifically, for making us male and female. Similarly, as has been pointed out, in the spiritual realm, God also had a reason for making us as He did. While we are free to accept or reject God’s reasons for creating us as He did, we are not free to change the reasons for why He created us as He did. To put it another way, we are not free to change our very nature, and attempting to do so doesn’t work very well and is always harmful in the long run. With all of these things in mind, we can now make some comments about those who claim that we can in fact alter our bodies to such an extent that we can even change our sex from male to female or vice-versa.
PART FIVE
While our bodies come already assembled and pre-designed, it is also true that many people can and do make changes (mainly external) to their bodies. For example, you can change your hairstyle, or you can work on your tan, or you can work out to increase your muscle mass, or you can diet to lose weight or you can have various treatments to reduce wrinkles. However, none of these changes alter who we are on a fundamental
level. We still remain human beings and not animals. We still remain the age we actually are, and we still remain either male or female. Going beyond these minimal (and for the most part superficial) changes is almost always harmful to our bodies and therefore to us. This is most clearly evident when we consider people have been severely injured. Someone who has lost a limb in an accident or who has been badly burned in a fire can no longer do everything they once could. That said, there are also people who have willingly altered their bodies in significant ways. In past times, the Chinese bound the feet of girls so their feet would not grow. As adults, because their feet were deformed, these girls had difficulty walking. Today, people who abuse drugs do harm to their bodies. Alcohol abuse causes cirrhosis of the liver and fetal alcohol syndrome. Women who take hormonal contraceptives harm their reproductive systems, and these drugs can also cause early abortions. The point here is that God had a reason for the way He designed us. Our bodies are part of us, and when altered or damaged, they do not work well, and that, in turn, makes life more difficult for us. We are and always will be creatures composed of body and soul, and consequently, we should care for our bodies because when we do not, we do harm to ourselves.
PART SIX
As I mentioned in Part Five, we can make superficial changes to our bodies, but making significant changes to our bodies is almost always harmful. This fact brings us finally to the notion of changing one’s sex. This topic is presently being debated in legislatures across the country & has been embraced by nearly all significant institutions in our nation. These include colleges and universities, the entertainment industry, the health care industry, the federal government & many state governments (including MN) and many major corporations such as Budweiser. According to those who advocate for transgender individuals, to not affirm them is to be hateful and cruel and to be personally responsible for any harm that may come to them. That said, many people remain confused about this issue for various reasons. Many don’t understand the terminology being used, nor how someone could change from a man to a woman or vice-versa. To begin sorting all this out, we need to begin with some biology. In human beings, from the very beginning of our existence, a moment after conception, males can be distinguished from females because males (even though the body consist of just one cell at this point) have XY chromosomes & females have XX chromosomes. That fact never changes throughout our lives. As our bodies grow & add more cells, every single one of those cells has that same characteristic. Males have XY chromosomes in every cell of their bodies, & females have XX chromosomes in every cell of their bodies.
PART SEVEN (added 5/13/2023)
One confusing thing about the transgender movement is the fact that many people have no idea what is being discussed. This is due in part to our language being manipulated by advocates of transgenderism. So let’s continue our discussion with a few words on how language is being misused to further the agenda of transgenderists. Two words are important here: sex & gender. Sex has always had a reference to biology. It refers to the quality of being male or female. On the other hand, gender (which traditionally had to do with language, whether a noun was male or female or neuter) is now being used by people who maintain that their sexual identity has nothing to do with their bodies. Instead, their sexual identity is self-defined and has to do with how they feel. They say that sexual identity is not based on objective criteria such as XY chromosomes or reproductive organs, but is rather purely subjective. Thus, the word sex which is based upon objective criteria and has only two categories, male or female, is rejected in favor of gender which is subjective & can have as many categories as one can imagine. Transgendeerist use the phrase “sex assigned at birth” to refer to what the doctor put on the birth certificate: male or female. They maintain that what you were called at birth (a boy or a girl) is not necessarily who or what you really are. You may identify as something else. For example, a boy might identify as a girl or a girl might identify as a boy or one might even be “gender fluid” meaning that he could be a boy one day and a girl the next depending upon how he felt that day. One might also be both or neither. Because transgenderists make no reference to the body, they can create multiple gender identities simply based upon how they feel. Some of the names they give to these identities include transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, and third gender to name only some. In reality, once you detach who you are from the body you have, you can imagine being just about anything. Of course, there is only one problem with doing so, and that is we all have bodies and our bodies are either male or female which makes us – each and every one of us – either a man or a woman (to be continued).
PART EIGHT (added 6/25/2023)
As was said previously, every single cell of our body, every single one, contains either the XY chromosome pair in men or the XX chromosome pair in women. Thus even those who have modified their external features still remain the sex they were at their conception, they remain either male or female. The fact that a man may “feel” he is a woman or a woman may “feel” she is a man does not and cannot change how that individual was created and the sex they actually are. By way of analogy, we have all heard the phrase “You are only as old as you feel.” However, even though one may be lively and youthful in spirit, that person is still chronologically the age he or she is. You cannot change your age by feeling younger or older than you actually are. Similarly, you cannot change your sex by feeling you are what you are not. That said, those who are obsessed with these feelings actually have a mental illness which is called “gender dysphoria.” This illness can be defined as a sense of unease that one’s biological sex and one’s gender identity are mismatched. This sense of unease can become so intense that it leads to depression, anxiety and self-harm. Proper treatment of this mental illness should involve treating what is wrong, namely the mind. We all understand that some people are delusional. There are some people who believe they are Napoleon or Big Bird or even God. Sometimes people believe they are too fat and so starve themselves. Doctors call that illness Anorexia. In all these cases, we never affirm people who suffer from these forms of mental illness. We don’t say to a young girl who is starving herself that she is too fat. Rather, we hospitalize her and feed her to save her life and then provide her with counseling to help her get well. Yet, the odd thing is when mental illness involves sex, many in our society will affirm those who suffer from it (to be continued).
PART NINE (added 7/02/2023)
As was mentioned previously, when someone is ill or injured, proper medical intervention should be to treat what is wrong. On the other hand, to affirm or humor people who suffer from some infirmity is not going to heal them or help them. We don’t tell someone who is nearsighted they shouldn’t wear glasses because they look much better without them. We don’t tell people who suffer from depression cheer up because things could be worse. We don’t tell couples who struggle with infertility that if things don’t work out they can always adopt. No, good doctors first seek to find out what is wrong and then provide a remedy. However, in the case of gender dysphoria, that is not what is being done. Instead of treating it as a mental illness and a psycho-sexual disorder, doctors have been treating it as a physical ailment. So, instead of trying to help people harmonize and connect the mental image they have of themselves with their bodies, doctors have been using drugs and surgeries to modify peoples bodies. This is wrong and does not heal but rather harms the person even more. Frankensteinian doctors are now altering the external appearances of men and women to make them appear like the opposite sex. What is worse, when surgeries are performed to remove a woman’s breasts or the genitalia of either men or women, the harm done is irreversible and those people will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. This is not medicine but medical experimentation. What is even worse is that these operations are being done to children and teens who are in no way mature enough to make these kinds of life-altering decisions. It needs to be said that doing these things to children is just plain evil. Here it’s interesting to note that recently, the publicly funded health service of England has decided not to routinely offer puberty-blocking drugs to children. The health service said that more evidence is needed about the potential benefits and harms. In other words, they have no idea if what they were doing was helping or harming the children (to be continued).
PART TEN/CONCLUSION (added 7/09/2023)
So, what is behind the promotion of transgenderism? How is it that important and influential people from all walks of life can embrace and support something so clearly disordered? Furthermore, how can they turn a blind eye to the permanent and irreversible harm this does, harm not just to adults, but even worse to children? There are several reasons. One is peer pressure. No matter who you are or what position you hold, you still want the acceptance of your peers. To be an outlier or to be contrary is always uncomfortable. Another reason is cowardice. If more people had stood up to the transgender movement, things would not have gone this far. Sadly, in our times, courage has become a rare virtue. Finally, it’s also clear there is a sinister and evil agenda at work here. This attack, especially on our young people, is clearly demonic. There is no other word for it. To sexualize children and to destroy their childhood innocence is simply immoral. So what can we do? First, make sure you keep a good grip on the truth. We are creatures composed of body and soul, and that means our bodies inform our sexual identity. Furthermore, because we cannot change our bodies in any essential way, that also means we cannot change our sex. We are and will always be either male or female. Here one might also keep in mind that clinical psychologists have called this confusion concerning one’s gender a psychological epidemic, similar to cutting or bulimia or anorexia. That said, those who “feel” they have the wrong body are suffering from a psycho-sexual disorder called gender dysphoria, and the proper treatment for this is to focus on helping the individual understand their self-view is incorrect and does not correspond to the truth. To affirm their desire to make changes to their bodies is to lie to them and to prevent them from getting the genuine help and guidance they need to work through their condition. The second thing we can do is this. Speak the truth and push back against those who are promoting transgenderism. Oppose those who are seeking to influence and sexualize our children. When you hear about organizations sponsoring “drag queen” events, oppose them. Speak to your school board members and tell them to keep transgenderism out of our schools. Also, don’t be intimidated by those who will call you a hater or a bigot. They are simply trying to silence you so that they can go about their evil business unopposed. Finally, be kind and compassionate towards those who suffer from gender dysphoria and keep them in your prayers.
