EDITORIAL

Clear Teaching from United States Bishops on Gender Transitioning

Posted

On March 20th the U.S. Catholic bishops released a statement offering moral guidance for Catholic health-care institutions concerning gender transition interventions. The document stated that “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.” The bishops appealed to universal philosophical, theological and biological principles. While we distinguish body and soul in a person, both come into existence at the same time united in a single nature. Hence, a soul could never come into existence in the wrong body. This teaching corrects the perennial error of dualism that treats either body or soul as mere instruments or secondary to a primary inner authentic self.
This document is certainly timely. On January 6, a U.S. district court judge ruled against a Catholic-founded hospital in Maryland determining that it had discriminated in refusing to perform a hysterectomy on a woman pursuing gender transitioning. The judge also criticized Catholic ethics formulated by the National Catholic Bioethics Center as discriminatory. Meanwhile, the influence of social media on people (particularly youth) to adopt gender ideology is enormous. Catholics in the United States will need statements like the one issued by the bishops to evangelize with love and truth those who think that gender transitioning procedures leads to happiness. We know that true human flourishing comes when acknowledging the truth of human existence and using the appropriate means to accomplish an end.