At their June 2023 gathering, the United States bishops voted to revisit a section of Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, the latest edition of which was published in 2016.
The bishops will review Part III of the document, which offers directives on patients’ rights, the responsibilities of health care professionals and specific areas of potential concern. Not included in the present version are issues related to purported treatments and remedies for gender dysphoria. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, the head of the committee on doctrine, proposed -and the bishops voted to approve—the incorporation of a doctrinal note issued in March of 2023 that addresses these matters:
These interventions differ in the magnitude of the changes brought about in the body. They are alike, however, in that they all have the same basic purpose: that of transforming sex characteristics of the body into those of the opposite sex.
Such interventions, thus, do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated. Bodiliness is a fundamental aspect of human existence, and so is the sexual differentiation of the body. Catholic health care services must not perform interventions, whether surgical or chemical, that aim to transform the sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex or take part in the development of such procedures. They must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who struggle with gender incongruence, but the means used must respect the fundamental order of the human body. Only by using morally appropriate means do healthcare providers show full respect for the dignity of each human person. (Doctrinal Note, 17-18)
A few bishops pushed back during the discussion on the vote, suggesting that this material should not be incorporated into the directives until there was “broad consultation,” not only with Catholic health care institutions, but with members of the “trans community” as the bishops work out the pastoral implications of doctrine.
The apparent movement among the bishops to incorporate the very clear and uncompromising words of the doctrinal note into the directives is heartening. Nonetheless, there remain potential problems. As those who have followed this issue over the past few years can attest, the pressure against reality is intense, both outside the Church and inside—as, for example, we see this week in the Archdiocese of Portland—and is not weakening.
The bishops’ words so far—both as a group and as individuals—have been strong and reality-based. There are, however, two areas of potential weakness.
Language
What, exactly, these procedures are supposed to help or treat might seem clear. But looking closely reveals—not surprisingly—confusion about definitions, a confusion that is partly due to the fact that these definitions are ever-changing.
A diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” may seem like a sensible, if challenging reality. Certainly, there are individuals who suffer from such a disconnect between body and sense of sexual identity.
But it is essential to realize that the energy of gender activism is quickly moving away from centering any sense of “gender dysphoria” as a reason for medical intervention, and in some cases, from giving any legitimacy to gender dysphoria as a diagnosis at all. What is quickly coming to the fore in the demands of these activists is a complete collapse of any essentiality of sex or gender—complete fluidity to be expressed in any way one pleases, no gatekeeping allowed.
This is the stated goal of gender activism at this moment: incorporation of gender self-identification into policy and law. That is—you are what you decide you are (he/she/they) and that identification has no necessary relationship to your body. This self-definition is fluid, can change as often as you feel it should, and you have a right to be treated in accordance with this self-identification.
In short, the landscape that health care institutions are facing—and in many cases fostering—has little to do with treatment of disorders, and much more to do with enabling desires.
Now, to be sure, these desires are coming from a disordered, dysphoric place, but the provision of the interventions is increasingly framed as a right due, simply because an individual is seeking it.
It’s a nightmare, it’s anti-reality, and Catholic healthcare should have no part of it—and be explicit in adding a critique of the entire deceptive framework to its reasoning why.
Further, while the bishops and other pastoral ministers might assume they are simply being compassionate in accepting individuals’ self-descriptions as “trans,” it is worth asking—is this correct? Is there even such a thing as “trans?”
To question “trans” as a category is not, by the way, “genocide.” It’s not an assertion that “trans people don’t exist.” That argument is nothing but emotional manipulation. To say that “trans” is a definition of a group of human beings is to say, even implicitly, that it is possible to be born in the “wrong” body—and that is simply not true. It is not even helpful as a description of people who believe they were born in the wrong body and are seeking modifications to repair that.
As presently used, “trans” is an umbrella term used, for example, to group young women seeking, for one reason or another—personal trauma, mental illness, reaction against expectations—to reject their female identity, along with men who get a sexual charge out of seeing themselves as women, as well as effeminate males—and it doesn’t take much to see how ridiculous it is to group all of those (and more) under a single “identity” with specific rights to be delineated.
To be very blunt about it, a young woman requesting to have her healthy breasts amputated and a middle-aged man asking to have implants inserted in his chest are not suffering from the same problem with the same root causes.
Further, to treat them as if they are works, in the end, to mask other problems that merit distinct, particular treatments.
Procedures
The bishops’ statements so far have indicated, as I said, that they will hold the line. I’m afraid, however, that even more forthrightness on the specifics of these procedures will be required in order to help the general public—and perhaps even large swathes of the Catholic public—to understand why they are problematic, to say the least.
As the discussions about these interventions over the past years have shown, proponents will do their best to hide the grotesque and anti-human aspects of these procedures, and to hide them with a cloak of purported compassion.
Sound familiar? It should, because we’ve been here before. We’ve been trained to think, not of unborn children or tiny, defenseless, voiceless human beings, but of fetuses (accurate, but dehumanizing in intent), products of conception and simply “pregnancies.” The issue has been aggressively and successfully framed as one essentially about women and “health care”—not curettes scraping out small humans from their mother’s wombs.
None of that is pleasant to think or talk about, much less picture. This isn’t either. But as we’ve seen, the obfuscation and compassion-cloaking works. The only way to fight it is to be brutally honest.
(Fair warning: this is rough and explicit. More detailed explanations are widely available, but this article at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind is an excellent—and of course, disturbing—summary.)
So, should Catholic hospitals perform procedures in which:
- Young women’s—even teens’—healthy breasts are amputated?
- Women have the interior walls of their vaginas excised and allowed to scar shut?
- Females are put on a course of testosterone (which must be taken the rest of their lives) and as a (desired) result experience enlargement of the clitoris (to mimic a penis) and often (not desired), uterine problems which will require hysterectomy and might result in a greater risk of cancer?
- Females have skin and tissue from forearm, thigh or abdomen excised and grafted onto their bodies to mimic a penis? And then their urethras lengthened and stretched to extend through that tube of skin?
- Males get breast implants?
- Males have healthy testicles removed (orchiectomy)?
- Males have wounds created in their bodies then lined with skin from their inverted penises—or digestive tracts—in an attempt to mimic a vagina? A wound that then must be dilated with an instrument several times a day for months, and less often but still regularly for the rest of their lives?
- Children are given medications that were developed to treat prostate cancer in order to halt puberty?
- Children who have been given puberty blockers are given cross-sex hormones?
In the end, this is about some very basic questions:
- Is it possible to change sex? If not, is it ethical to perform procedures on people that “affirm” their desire to do so?
- The question of the “sickness” or “condition” these procedures are said to treat. Is this a single, actual condition or a label for a number of very different issues that call for recognition and discrete treatment?
- Should Catholic hospitals be amputating healthy breasts, sewing up healthy vaginas, attaching tubes fashioned from forearm or thigh skin and tissue to women’s abdomens, running urethras through those tubes or clitorises, amputating healthy male genitalia, and inverting penises to line cavities in men’s pelvic areas?
- Should Catholic health care providers be providing off-label medications to physically healthy children and adolescents in an attempt to halt puberty—a multifaceted stage that involves all systems of the body as well as brain development?
Laying all of this out in such a frank manner is not “scare-mongering.” It’s not “alarmist.” It’s simply about the actual procedures, plainly seen, and no guilt-inducing deflections allowed.
It might even be—wait for it—compassionate.
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It should not be a surprise it has come to this. Contraception, most especially the hormonal and implant/IUD type, has as its purpose the making a functioning reproductive system into a non-functioning system. Same with “sterilization procedures” such as vasectomies and tubal ligations.
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Doctors have been “breaking” the body for awhile now with very little pushback.
The term “Gender Identity” was invented by “Dr” John Money, a deranged pedophile who experimented on children (what he did to the Raimier brothers is truly sickening). Gender Ideology was invented by perverts, for perverts, has no moral legitimacy, and should be eradicated from society, as Michael Knowles put it.
While there are genuine hermaphrodites, an infinitesimally tiny fraction of humanity, the issue here is the chemical or surgical mutilation of the bodies of healthy males and females who imagine they are the opposite gender – in some cases this is done to children without parental consent.
If the bishops condemn this practice like they condemed aborting one’s minor daughter without parental consent, that will be utterly insufficient.
God help us.
Our beloved Lamb of God said that in the end, “White will become black and black will become white”. Suffice it to say, things are no longer as they use to be, and things now are not what they seem to be. Satan has launched an all out assault on God’s Creation. But this meek and humble Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, is also the great Lion Aslan of Narnia, and this great Lion King of all Kings, is keenly watching over His Church on earth. Take heed Church Leaders of all stripes, because to those whom much more has been given much, much more is expected. Come Lord Jesus! Ahooooooo!
Thank you!
YES!!!
Two small observations from a non-authority…
FIRST, Welborn addresses “gender dysphoria”, but this is not the term used in the bishops’ language. Instead, “gender incongruence.” The latter term better maintains a needed theological and philosophical grounding, versus the more detached, specialized, and even deterministic technical term offered by secularist professionals.
SECOND, the bishops acknowledge that, for some reason, there are those who struggle with real gender incongruence (not more the result of, say, early and indifferent sexual experimentation and cultural brainwashing).
As with Galileo’s telescope, science might well isolate a small number of cases where, while still in the womb, chemical intrusion disrupts the metaphysical and the natural fit between the person’s cognitive/emotional identity and physical development. If so, then as the bishops wisely provide, the corrective means still must be “morally appropriate,” showing “full respect for the dignity of each [read binary] human person.”
While, as Welborn reaffirms, we are born either male or female, in some cases is there a medical disability—which, however, is not to be “solved” by physical mutilation? The topic likely is partly endocrine disruptive chemicals (EDCs):
https://www.endocrine.org/patient-engagement/endocrine-library/edcs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073082/
To be better understood, and resolved morally, is the effect/prevention of high doses of EDCs on fetal development:
“In many well-documented cases of high-level fetal exposures to known EDCs such as DES, certain PCBs, and DDT, the answer to the question of whether exposure is associated with gender-related effects is clearly yes. But high-level exposures such as these are relatively rare and isolated. The debate today centers on low-dose exposures—generally defined as doses that approximate environmentally relevant levels—and the idea that low-dose intrauterine exposure to some EDCs during certain critical windows of development can have profound, permanent impacts on subsequent fetal development and adult outcomes” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281309/
As for the few bishops who object to even addressing the issue clearly and non-politically, leave them to reading their modernday tea leaves, goat entrails and other mobilized fictions. May their numbers diminish.
Peter: “FIRST, Welborn addresses “gender dysphoria”, but this is not the term used in the bishops’ language. Instead, “gender incongruence.” The latter term better maintains a needed theological and philosophical grounding, versus the more detached, specialized, and even deterministic technical term offered by secularist professionals.”
Actually, Peter, the term “gender incongruence” is troubling because it is the one that is more deterministic and detached than “gender dysphoria,” and it can be more easily and wrongly understood and abused as describing an actual state wherein there exists an actual incongruence between a person’s biological sex and what he or she claims to be the case. In short, it’s too matter of fact in its wording and amounts to this: Someone says that Hilda has been diagnosed with “gender incongruence,” and upon being asked to explain what it means, the response that follows sets forth that Hilda experiences a real physical and emotional incongruence between her biological sex and her thoughts of being a man. She is now considering surgery to eliminate the incongruence.
Except, of course, that there is no real incongruence as described, but that is what the pro-“transgender” yahoos want others to believe.
So once again the bishops may have screwed up another thing in the midst of doing something good, and the term “gender incongruence” is one of the latest terms that comes from the secular world involving gender concerns. It did not originate with the Bishops attempting to be more theologically precise. Indeed, what we actually got lacks necessary precision.
On the other hand, “gender dysphoria” describes somewhat more accurately that the problem is with a person’s state of mind in wrongly believing/feeling that he or she is “in the wrong body,” and that his or her actual biological sex does not match up with what he or she wrongly feels is a separate and opposite gender. There is no real “gender incongruence.”
Better still is the former term (still used by those who choose to be more accurate, etc.) that preceded “gender dysphoria” because it sets forth what is actually involved with much better precision and clarity. The term is “gender identity disorder,” and the reason why secular psychologists and others first changed it to “gender dysphoria” is because they wanted to move away from the more objective understanding that what’s involved is an objectively mental disorder involving the inability to recognize the reality of biological sex and gender being one.
The Church would do the world a better favor by re-adopting and insisting on “gender identity disorder,” but even the Church has mistakenly accepted (and which I continue to write against) the notion of a distinction between biological sex and gender, which, as I have pointed out, opens up the many Pandora’s boxes we continue to see.
How about “gender alienation”?
“Gender alienation” suffers from the same problem that “gender incongruence” does: too easily manipulated and abused because it lacks the all-important aspect in and of itself of describing a mental disorder.
“Gender identity disorder” accurately describes what is going on, and the word “disorder” is most powerful in making it crystal clear that what the unfortunate person so afflicted is indeed experiencing is a disorder of the mind that prevents him or her from properly recognizing his or her unchanging and unchangeable gender that is synonymous with his or her unchanging and unchangeable biological sex.
This is why the “transgender” movement and its allies in the medical/psychological world eventually dropped the most accurate and descriptive term/diagnosis, because they cannot abide by the truth that a disorder is involved, which undermines their bogus claim to normalcy.
Like George Orwell said, changing language prepares the path for changing society. Or words to that effect.
I thank you, Amy, for this well written and much needed piece. Much to think about and act on. It seems that the end of the sexual revolution will be the end of sex as we know it. Sex will be replaced by sterile pleasure void of any emotional attachment or commitment. What a bleak future. Even so, come Lord Jesus! May God come to our aid and help us. I pray for our leaders in the Church that they have humility ,wisdom, and fortitude and become true shepherds taking the lead.
Really well done, especially, the indepth exposure showing hospital/doctor surgical procedures for TG patients.
You state: “To say that “trans” is a definition of a group of human beings is to say, even implicitly, that it is possible to be born in the “wrong” body—and that is simply not true. It is not even helpful as a description of people who believe they were born in the wrong body and are seeking modifications to repair that.”
I still cannot wrap my head around WHY a “Trans” person would subject themselves to major surgery if they not born that way.
Excellent Amy!
Might I suggest a word that seems to be totally absent from discussions, even a top notch one like this – “evil”.
We cannot know the heart of anyone, but we can speculate based on phenomena what is going on broadly behind the scenes in the spiritual realm. Perhaps many of the physicians who are doing these surgeries are genuinely confused, though that pushes the limit of plausiblity for such a highly intellligent subset of human beings. And then we have the bishops and priests, thankfully few in number, who seem to want to aid and abet what is going on, to delay, to find rationalizations and excuses for it. Could these highly intelligent, superbly educated gentleman, who eat the Body and Drink the Blood of Jesus every day, all be genuinely confused? Or maybe, just maybe, in some of them, which ones we might never know, we are seeing the external manifestations of those who have interiorly, consciously, given themselves over to the dark principalities and powers. Pope Francis has stated more than once that transgender ideology is diabolical. Is anyone listening?
Peter: “FIRST, Welborn addresses “gender dysphoria”, but this is not the term used in the bishops’ language. Instead, “gender incongruence.” The latter term better maintains a needed theological and philosophical grounding, versus the more detached, specialized, and even deterministic technical term offered by secularist professionals.”
Actually, Peter, the term “gender incongruence” is troubling because it is the one that is more deterministic and detached than “gender dysphoria,” and it can be more easily and wrongly understood and abused as describing an actual state wherein there exists an actual incongruence between a person’s biological sex and what he or she claims to be the case. In short, it’s too matter of fact in its wording and amounts to this: Someone says that Hilda has been diagnosed with “gender incongruence,” and upon being asked to explain what it means, the response that follows sets forth that Hilda experiences a real physical and emotional incongruence between her biological sex and her thoughts of being a man. She is now considering surgery to eliminate the incongruence.
Except, of course, that there is no real incongruence as described, but that is what the pro-“transgender” yahoos want others to believe.
So once again the bishops may have screwed up another thing in the midst of doing something good, and the term “gender incongruence” is one of the latest terms that comes from the secular world involving gender concerns. It did not originate with the Bishops attempting to be more theologically precise. Indeed, what we actually got lacks necessary precision.
On the other hand, “gender dysphoria” describes somewhat more accurately that the problem is with a person’s state of mind in wrongly believing/feeling that he or she is “in the wrong body,” and that his or her actual biological sex does not match up with what he or she wrongly feels is a separate and opposite gender. There is no real “gender incongruence.”
Better still is the former term (still used by those who choose to be more accurate, etc.) that preceded “gender dysphoria” because it sets forth what is actually involved with much better precision and clarity. The term is “gender identity disorder,” and the reason why secular psychologists and others first changed it to “gender dysphoria” is because they wanted to move away from the more objective understanding that what’s involved is an objectively mental disorder involving the inability to recognize the reality of biological sex and gender being one.
The Church would do the world a better favor by re-adopting and insisting on “gender identity disorder,” but even the Church has mistakenly accepted (and which I continue to write against) the notion of a distinction between biological sex and gender, which, as I have pointed out, opens up the many Pandora’s boxes we continue to see.
Powerful. Courageous. “[Gender-dysphoria is] a nightmare, it’s anti-reality, and Catholic healthcare should have no part of it—and be explicit in adding a critique of the entire deceptive framework to its reasoning why.”
This article is pretty straight-forward – and true. Graphic, yes. Time to fight fire with fire – pure, unadulterated truth. Thank you.