With polarizing debates about transgender policies and conversion therapy at the forefront of media and popular culture, a presentation on gender identity and sexual orientation from a Catholic perspective couldn’t have come at a better time.
Over the past year, Canadians gained the right to identify themselves as Gender X on their passports. Transgender rights issues have dominated news headlines. Legislation to ban conversion therapy for anyone under 19 has been tabled in B.C., while cities across Canada ban it completely. Meanwhile the federal government is working on its own legislation to address the controversial practice.
In a talk explaining the Church’s position on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, Peter Nation of Catholic Voices Canada took on those controversial topics and more as part of the Friday night Into the Deep series at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre.
Catholic Voices was founded to help Catholics respond to questions about hot button issues of concern to the Church and Canadian society, and to do so in a way that will “shed light rather than generate heat” in conversations with family members and friends.
Using the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nation said man is made in God’s image and likeness, but our human nature is “fallen,” particularly in the area of sexuality. Due to this disorder inherent in human nature, individuals’ sexual orientation, gender identity, or biology sometimes don’t develop according to design.
Nation pointed out that God permits, but does not cause these flaws, and makes it possible for great good to come out of the way we deal with them. At the same time he reminded the audience that, in the words of the catechism, “every sign of unjust discrimination” toward same-sex attracted individuals must be avoided.
Asked about ways to be welcoming to those who identify as gay or lesbian, he responded, “They have to know that you love and care for them, more than you may disagree with their beliefs – that they have to understand.”
He reminded audience members that they are having discussions with individuals, not with an ideology, recalling a breakthrough moment he once had with a woman as they discussed a difficult topic.
“I realized that I wasn’t talking to her as a person, but rather talking to the ideology she was talking about. It is so important to talk to the person, not the ideology.”
For the same reason, Nation tends not to dwell on the place our society has come to, but rather how it got here.
He described the modern sexual revolution and how it began in the 19th century with the rise of communism, Marxism, and philosophies aimed at breaking down the family by abolishing Judeo-Christian culture.
As a combination of Marxist and Freudian theories led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the cultural revolution of the 20th century helped bring about the varied expressions of gender identity and theory seen today, said Nation.
“Gender theory” developed as an academic discipline in the 1980s, portraying gender as a historical, cultural, and social construct, independent of biological sex and proposing multiple non-binary definitions of sex and gender. Transgender identity, as a branch of gender theory, became used to describe a person whose gender identity or expression differs from their biological sex.
Nation, who was a member of the committee that developed a gender dysphoria policy for the Catholic Independent Schools of the Vancouver Archdiocese in 2014, summarized three distinct treatment approaches used by medical practitioners working with someone identifying as transgender or exploring a transgender identity. All have problematic aspects.
The first approach is “watchful waiting,” neither affirming nor criticizing the individual in their identity. The problem with this approach, said Nation, is it implies a false neutrality that the individual may interpret as approval.
The second response is “gender affirmation,” which includes social and legal transitioning, puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgical transitioning. The main difficulty with this method is there is no way to know if a child or a young adult will persist in their gender identity, since some studies show as high as 80 per cent of transgender individuals eventually return to their birth gender.
The third course of action is psychotherapy, which addresses the developmental, social, family, and psychiatric issues involved but may support transitioning in cases that don’t respond to therapy. Another problem with this approach is there is little research examining psychological therapies for “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and no consensus on whether treatments deemed applicable for childhood gender dysphoria are appropriate for adolescents.
The next presentation in the Into the Deep series is March 27 and features Sister Nancy Brown speaking about prostitution and current Canadian legislation.
