Scattered Thoughts on Trans Issues

The sad suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a seventeen-year-old trans girl,* is one of a number of events that have brought transgender issues more to the fore in recent years. An author writing for the Witherspoon Institute has recently argued that Christians should categorically reject trans identities, and in particular that "Leelah's Law," a proposal to ban Gender Identity Disorder Therapy (at least for minors, though I'm not clear on the details), should not be passed.

Trans issues are a category unto themselves in the broader spectrum of queer issues; most people seem to find a gay identity easier to grapple with than a transgender identity, and homosexuality is also commoner and thus more familiar. Further complicating matters are the facts that some people at first perceive themselves to be gay or lesbian before discovering a trans identity, some people identify with both homosexual and transgender experience, and some people feel ungendered, double-gendered, gender-fluid, et cetera.

I am decidedly out of my depth with these things. Being gay gives me a very limited window into the experiences of a person who identifies with the opposite of their biological sex, or with none; and while I do know a very few trans people, I can't pretend to know them intimately, or to speak on their behalf. Nonetheless, I'd like to put down a few scattered thoughts that appear, to me, to be important to the conversation on gender identity as held by Catholics, and by traditional Christians more generally. (In reading, be aware that sex refers to a person's physical or exterior sex, and gender refers to the psychological or interior reality that corresponds, or fails to correspond, with sex.)

1. To the best of my knowledge, the Church has made no dogmatic pronouncement on what determines a person's gender. I could of course be mistaken about this, and if she has in fact made such a pronouncement, then I accept it; however, the limited research I've done has indicated that she hasn't. This is important, because cries of heresy (and, for that matter, of insanity) are not wanting in the discussion of gender identity, and I don't think they're either justified or productive.

Her reasons for not having done so are not, I suspect, as simple as not having been confronted with trans issues hitherto; trans people are by no means unknown in history, though they are admittedly rare, and people who, if not trans necessarily, have at any rate been genderqueer, have been accepted and indeed celebrated by the Church: St Marina the Monk, St Joan of Arc, and St Theodora of Alexandria all come to mind. But the nineteenth and still more the twentieth centuries seem to have been a time when the Church was increasingly called upon to articulate her theology of the body, expressed pre-eminently in the definitions (after nearly two thousand years) of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin, which -- especially the latter -- highlight the holiness of the body. That the Sexual Revolution, which occasioned the important encyclical Humanae Vitae and the writing of St John Paul II's Theology of the Body, should have occurred in the twentieth century, and so soon after Munificentissimus Deus, is perhaps no coincidence. It may well be that the Church will articulate her teaching about gender with a greater clarity and fullness in the near future; we shall, of course, have to wait and see.

NOTE (6/5/2015): On receiving some feedback and rereading, I realized that what I've written here could be taken as my claiming that the Church has not historically maltreated genderqueer people. That, sadly, she has certainly done. The only point I wished to make was that the Church has not always viewed unusual expressions or experiences of gender as incompatible with the Catholic religion, or indeed with profound holiness, and I think that that suggests that the range of possible approaches to gender -- and, by extension, trans issues -- is wider that the traditionalist Christian of early twenty-first century North America might be inclined to think.

Window depicting Our Lady of Lourdes, who revealed herself under the title the 

Immaculate Conception, in the Cathedral of the Assumption in County Galway, Ireland.

2. When a trans person talks about his or her gender, they aren't suffering from a delusion about the shape of their genitalia. The contention of trans persons is that their body is the wrong shape, i.e. wrong for them: that, internally (that is, psychologically and perhaps spiritually), they are one gender and their body is another. And it must be admitted that, while it may not be susceptible of proof, this contention may not be susceptible of disproof, either. Whether trans people are wrong or right about their gender, the observable facts line up with both possibilities; so that going back and back to the observable facts about their sex organs is irrelevant in itself. The constitution of the sex organs is significant if physical sex is determinative of gender, which is a thesis that needs to be proven, not just assumed -- especially for Christians, who have traditionally believed (it seems) that the soul gives meaning to the body rather than the other way around.

3. Physiologically, sex is not always a clear-cut fact. I'm not simply talking about the bearded lady here. A vast majority of people are one sex or the other, speaking from a purely physical standpoint; but there are individuals, known as intersex people (formerly as hermaphrodites), who exhibit a mixture of both primary and secondary sexual characteristics, up to and including ambiguous genitalia. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is in a similar position, leading in some cases to people whose chromosomes are XY but whose sex is to all appearances female, yet with testes in the position normally occupied by ovaries. The ambiguities here are expressed in physiological form, DNA, or both.

The number who have these conditions is of course small, but statistics aren't really the important thing here in my opinion. What matters is that, if we're going to have a rubric about what determines (or, at the least, invariably reveals) a person's gender, it has to be a rule which can explain intersex or otherwise sex-ambiguous people as well, or it isn't a rubric that actually works on the human race as such -- it is only a rule of thumb, not an apprehension of the essence of being human. And questions of trans identity are precisely questions about the essence of being human. Whatever the answer may be, it must be one that is adequate to that kind of question, not just one that works in practice a majority of the time.

4. Theology of the Body treats our own incarnate natures as primarily a way of being a body. Now, St John Paul II wasn't necessarily right, and naturally his teaching will be proportionately less important to non-Catholic Christians; but as a Catholic I don't think it wise to begin by assuming that a Pope, and a saint what is more, was wrong; and in any case, one can hardly study gender as a Catholic and not at least deal with his thoughts on the subject.

His teaching, which is deeply Scriptural and Semitic in its derivation, is difficult to follow, but what I have gleaned from it (guided in part by my spiritual director and by Christopher West) is chiefly that we do not have bodies, but are bodies, in the sense that a horse is a four-legged creature: you could cut the legs off and it would still be a horse, if a rather unhappy and confused horse, but it is by nature a four-legged thing. This dovetails very naturally with the Christian doctrine of final resurrection, discussed at length by St Paul in I Corinthians 15. Gender and sex, then, would seem probably to be not independent realities, but aspects of what it means to be a body, a rational animal as Aristotle has it.

This seems to me to be disconsonant with the idea of transgender identities. The feel of it suggests that the body determines, or (when it is unambiguously sexed) infallibly reveals, the gender of the soul, because it would seem to suggest that gender is simply a word for how the soul animates the body with respect to its sex. However, this is at most a feeling on my part, and I'm not at all sure that it's accurate. There may well be room within Theology of the Body for trans identities; my thoughts on both TOB and trans issues are in their infancy.

Also, this exists. This doesn't have anything to do with Catholic theology

or trans issues, I just couldn't stand being the only person who knew is all.

5. For a Catholic, these matters come to a point primarily in the sacraments of Marriage and Holy Orders. These are the only sacraments in which the sex/gender of the participant(s) is relevant to their operation; in most of the rest of life, including sacramental life, it doesn't have a determinant role to play. As is well known, Catholic theology recognizes marriage only between one man and one woman, and only men as possible candidates for the priesthood.

Now, if one or both parties are physically unable to consummate the marriage, it cannot in our view take place,** but if transgender identities are valid, then presumably so is SRS, and if a trans person got it then I assume on the same premises that they would be eligible to contract a sacramental marriage. As for Holy Orders, given that a vast majority of Catholic priests are celibates, I imagine the lack of, uh, equipment wouldn't really be relevant; so that, if trans identities are valid, a trans man seeking ordination would presumably be eligible in principle. But if trans identities aren't valid, then we get invalid marriages, invalid ordinations, and (via the latter) invalid sacraments out of the deal, which is a huge no-no for the Catholic Church.

6. None of this decides what it is and isn't okay to call people. For the record, yes, tranny is rude, but that's not what I'm thinking of. What I have in mind is, for example, the point that Mr Flores makes in the article linked at the top, where he specifically refuses to speak of Leelah Alcorn as Leelah or she, instead using Joshua and he throughout, and explaining that his reason for doing so is a refusal to concede that transgender identification is right. He has the privilege of doing so, and, as I have stressed, my own mind is not made up on the subject; I don't feel I have anything like the expertise required to have a right to an opinion. (Incidentally, is there any maxim sillier than "Everyone has a right to an opinion"?)

But I do have an opinion of how to speak to and about people, and that opinion is that disregarding their stated preferences is rude. There is a time for rudeness, when it is the only way to get a truth across, though even then it is permissible only when leavened by love; but when it doesn't stand much chance of getting a truth across, I think being disrespectful is unchristlike.

Even if traditionalists are correct in thinking that transgender identities are simply a disorder, challenging them on their pronouns is not in my opinion a useful response. "Whom you would change you must first love, and they must know that you love them," said Martin Luther King, and ironically, things that have to be explained with "I'm doing this because I love you" generally don't communicate love well. Even if you want to challenge a person, you have to earn the right to do so by showing them love first, and it has to be comprehensible love -- love that puts them first, not your own need to be right. And it's hard to set that need to be right aside, never more so than when you are right, but there are times when it must be done. In any event, as my mother told me once, "You are not the Holy Spirit." He can look after His own.

As I've tried to emphasize throughout, none of these points are decisive, or show anybody whose "side" to take in the dialogue about transgender issues. They are simply, I believe, important points to bear in mind, regardless of our convictions or lack thereof, in having that dialogue.

*For simplicity's sake, I am using trans girl and trans woman to mean someone biologically male at birth who comes to identify as female, and trans boy or man to mean someone biologically female who identifies as male. I'm aware that the vocabulary of trans persons gets a lot more complicated than this, and that preferences vary from one person to another, but I am largely ignorant of the niceties of this conversation, so I've been bold to aim for simple clarity over rigorous exactitude. I sincerely apologize if I therefore step on anyone's toes.

**The word cannot must be given its full strength here. It isn't that it can't be allowed; it is that, according to Catholic theology, you could perform the whole ritual and mean it, but nothing happens. This is in contrast to a valid sacramental marriage, of which our belief is that an invisible event does really happen, and is no less objective for being invisible -- rather in the way that a person's father is always their father even though that fact is invisible.