Gender Jamboree, Part Two

I heard the squeak of the questing beast,

where it scratched itself in the blank between

the queen’s substance and the queen.

—Charles Williams, ‘The Coming of Palomides’

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Go here for Part One.

CW: genital injury, suicide

The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, Domenico Zampieri, 1646 (source).

Gotta love Adam's 'What?' shrug.

So! God made mankind in his image, male and female, and that’s normally pretty straightforward, but in a small minority of cases we find male and female characteristics mixed; we call this physiology intersex. Accurate estimates of how many people are intersex are difficult to find, as the subject isn’t well-studied, but an estimate of about 1% seems to be a safe generalization from studies that have been done to date, making it only a little less common than red hair.1

Ironically, this knowledge was actually a little more common until a hundred or so years ago. The twentieth century saw an extensive use of surgery on intersex newborns, modifying or eliminating their unusual characteristics; when these surgeries had yet to be developed, and most babies were delivered at home and by midwives, it was familiar enough to them to deliver the occasional intersex baby. Legal cases right down to the eighteenth century make occasional mention of intersex people.

Nor has intersexuality been wholly unknown to the Church. Although there are few references to the phenomenon in Catholic history, they are mentioned in passing (under the title androgynes) by St Augustine, and Gratian, the foremost canon lawyer of the Middle Ages, discusses them briefly. Those canonists who addressed the subject stated that if one sex could be determined to be predominant in an intersex person, that person should be treated as being of that sex (up to and including that a principally male intersex person could be validly ordained2), while allowing that there might be cases in which it was impossible to judge for certain which sex predominated in a person’s body. At least one cleric at that time gave the opinion that, in cases where someone’s physiology was evenly mixed, they were to be given the choice, under irrevocable oath (no pressure), of which was their sex.

However, to the best of my knowledge, only canon law has directly addressed intersexuality to date, and it’s done so rarely. Theological reflection on what defines male and female is not the same thing, though the two are related. St John Paul II’s extensive meditation on male and female in Theology of the Body may, after adequate unpacking, speak to the question; but even understanding, let alone unpacking, that tome is going to be the work of generations. And in the meantime, the sciences do have something more to say, which theology needs to operate upon. (Like any science, theology operates upon facts: the differentia of theology is that some, though not all, of those facts are provided by God’s revelation. The rest are derived from observation and inference, the same place we get most facts.)

The surgical ‘correction’ of intersexuality has come under fire. Initially developed in the 1950s, it was thought at the time that it would be easier for the child to develop as whichever gender they were raised, and that a confused identity would be avoided if the confusing body were adjusted. Nor was the practice even limited to intersex children. Anatomically typical male children who exhibited a micropenis,3 or whose genitals were irreparably damaged in infancy, in some cases received vaginoplasty and were raised as girls.

One notorious and particularly tragic case was that of David Reimer, born in 1965. His penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision4 a little before the age of two. His parents took the advice of Dr John Money (I swear I did not make his name up), a pioneer and advocate of performing sex reassignment in infancy, on the grounds that infants healed much more easily and completely and that surgeries of this kind would be less traumatic if they could not be remembered. Their son was surgically reconstructed as a girl, and raised in a thoroughly female environment. The much-crowed-over success of the procedure, accompanied by some very weird follow-up creepiness from Dr Money, lasted until he was 13. Reimer had never felt like a girl, he had become suicidally depressed, and he told his parents he would kill himself if forced to see Money again. The next year his parents told him the truth about his history, on the advice of his psychiatrist. Reimer then shed his feminine identity and began living as a boy again, seeking multiple medical interventions to restore his physical masculinity, including hormone treatment, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty. He went public with his story late in 1997.

That story came to an end just over six years later. His relationship with his parents, naturally enough, remained difficult, and he struggled with unemployment; his twin brother died of an overdose in 2002; and in 2004, his wife of over thirteen years asked for a separation. Two days later Reimer shot himself in the head.

A superficially similar, if somewhat happier, case is that of Christiane Völling, born in 1959, who in 2011 became the first intersex person to win a suit for damages over non-consensual sex reassignment surgery. Born with XX chromosomes, her phenotype was unclear at birth: she had ambiguous genitals but was assigned and raised male (an unusual decision at the time, since, to use a very crude phrase, it was considered ‘easier to dig a hole than build a pole’), and experienced a relatively early, vigorous, masculine puberty. Völling was found to have an undeveloped but complete set of female reproductive organs during an appendectomy at age 14; she was told only that she was ‘60% female,’ which caused her severe psychological distress. Her female reproductive organs were removed four years later, despite the fact that the full details of her diagnosis had been withheld from her in the name of protecting her mental health. She continued for some time after that to live as a man, but eventually transitioned into life as a woman. She was awarded €100,000, nearly forty years later, for receiving an unnecessary surgery without being able to give informed consent.

Source.

So cases like these are clear-cut evidence of original biology over imposed sociology, right? Proof that no matter what you do to a person’s body through surgery, you can’t make a man into a woman or vice versa, and that trying to only makes them miserable. Right? Well … hang on. Before we can address that, we need to talk about gender dysphoria.5

Gender dysphoria is the distress a person feels due to their physical sex characteristics not matching their inner sense of gender identity. Most people who identify as transgender experience gender dysphoria, and vice versa, but the two aren’t the same thing. Reimer and Völling exemplify both the experience itself, and the therapeutic and medical steps generally taken to address it; the difference is that they were identifying with sexual characteristics that had been excised from them, whereas gender dysphoria is generally used to talk about people whose bodies have developed normally but whose identity or sense of self is in conflict with their bodies. And the thing is, both transgender identity and the dysphoria that typically accompanies it appear to be just as persistent—just as deeply rooted and intractable to all psychotherapy and socialization—as the gender identities that Reimer and Völling display.

This doesn’t mean that trans identities are therefore automatically valid and unquestionable, no. What it does mean is that our analysis isn’t finished yet. I'll discuss dysphoria and identity further in my next.

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1That the intersex minority is a small one is not, philosophically speaking, significant. What makes intersex bodies important to the discussion is that they exist at all, not how common they are.

2The canonists did say that intersex men could not be licitly ordained, due to canonical requirements forbidding the ordination of men with physical deformities. However, requirements of this kind could in principle be changed (as, e.g., the Church can and occasionally does relax the Roman ban on ordaining married men).

3A micropenis is a penis that is at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean. It is not a health risk, although it can be caused by growth hormone deficiency, androgen insensitivity, and certain other conditions, as well as by intersexuality.

4The late circumcision was an attempt to treat phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin is too constricting and impedes penile function. Treating phimosis is not generally considered necessary until after the age of three.

5Though it appears in current DSM manuals, this term is controversial in some circles, as some people consider it pathologizing and stigmatory. I can’t really get into that discussion right now; the thing that the term ‘gender dysphoria’ is talking about does exist, and the term is already in use, so, with apologies to any readers who are bothered by it, it’s the term I’ll use for the present.

Gender Jamboree, Part One

Now I know your heart, I know your mind

You don’t even know you’re being unkind

So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways

Just use me up and then you walk away

Boy you can’t play me that way

Well I guess what you say is true

I could never be the right kind of girl for you

I could never be your woman

—White Town, Your Woman (lyrics by Jyoti Prakash Mishra)

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Edit: Now that Mudblood Catholic is up and running on Patheos, I've re-written this post. You can find the new version here.

Due to Reasons™, the new hot-button issue of the kulturkampf seems to have moved to trans issues rather than gay issues. Due to most Catholics understanding trans issues even more poorly than they understand gay issues—an unenviable accomplishment—I feel it’s worthwhile to do some mansplaining here at Mudblood Catholic. However, before I begin, I wish to make two disclaimers. One, which technically is a disclaimer appended to this entire blog (see the ‘About the Mudblood’ box at the bottom of the page), is that I submit everything I say to the final judgment of the Catholic Church. I contend pretty strongly that the Church has not in fact defined her final judgment in these matters, but if and when she does so, by ecumenical council or pontifical definition, I will accept that.

The other is that I write this primarily because I know a lot of Catholics will listen to a cis1 person more willingly than they’ll listen to a trans person. I am not writing this because I’m any kind of expert on trans issues. I’m very much an amateur, and I urge anyone who’s willing to do so to go to trans sources rather than me. Natalie Wynn of the Contrapoints channel on YouTube, though she wouldn’t suit everyone’s taste stylistically, is an intelligent and engaging exponent of trans theory whom I recommend; Daniel Ortberg, a columnist for Slate, is another prominent source on trans issues2; and though I haven’t read their work, I understand that Thomas Page McBee, Imogen Binnie, Raquel Willis, and Akwaeke Emezi are generally well-regarded by the trans community.

Right, now that those are out of the way, what’s up with this left-wing genderist stuff anyway?

A review complete revision of high school biology is in order to start with.3 The format we were taught was that, at conception, XX chromosomes make a girl and XY chromosomes make a boy. This is roughly true, but it is an oversimplification because it was high school biology. Without touching the other aspects of gender (social, psychological, and spiritual), we may consider at least three on a strictly biological basis: chromosomes, gonads, and phenotype. This is going to get kind of technical, so bear with me.

There are two basic sex chromosomes in Homo sapiens, codified as X and Y. Most humans have two sex chromosomes in their cells, of which one is always X: thus, a vast majority of people have either XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. XX people are female, XY people are male. Clear, but not quite accurate to all human biology.

The other two biological components of sex are gonads, or reproductive organs (either ovaries or testes), and phenotype, or the shape and appearance of the body (including the external genitals, the breasts, and secondary sex characteristics such as body hair and voice). Most of the time, these three things develop straightforwardly and together, but occasionally they do not.

There are several ways and reasons that chromosomes, gonads, and phenotype can diverge from each other. Sometimes the divergence comes in the reproductive cells themselves. For instance, there are a tiny number of XX males: the sex-determining SRY protein, which is normally attached to the Y chromosome, in rare instances gets exchanged to an X chromosome during the production of sperm, thus producing persons who are genetically female (XX chromosomes) but who frequently appear entirely male (male phenotype) and have testes rather than ovaries (male gonads). This is one of many intersex conditions,4 biological states in which male and female characteristics are mixed. Sometimes intersex conditions produce visible ambiguities, sometimes not.

Another example of intersex biology is CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. People who have CAIS have XY chromosomes and testes, but their cells do not respond to androgens at all (androgens are the hormones responsible for masculine sexual development and characteristics; testosterone is the best-known androgen). Hence, their phenotype is wholly female: the testes don’t descend, but remain where the ovaries would be in the abdomen; a vagina rather than a penis forms—often the passage is shallower than in cissex1 women, but it’s there; the breasts develop in feminine form; body hair and voice are typically female. CAIS typically isn’t discovered until puberty, at which point the absence of menstruation generally prompts a visit to the doctor.5

There are other intersex or otherwise unusual biologies in human beings, and I won’t linger over them, interesting though the subject is. The point I’m making here is not that gender is a social construct because biology is a confusing science—we’ll get to that discussion—but simply to point out that, even though it covers a majority of people, the black-and-white idea that male and female are totally obvious in every case just isn’t true. That doesn’t mean that male and female don’t exist, any more than the phenomena of dawn and dusk mean that day and night don’t exist. But it is a very good reason to be patient and cautious and ready to learn, before we make snap judgments about other people. It certainly calls for theological examination and reflection, as distinct from simply quoting Genesis 2 and calling trans people Satan.

As a matter of fact, Genesis 2, and the rare passing reflections on it made by St Paul, seem to hint at the coïnherence as well as the distinction of the sexes. Adam is caused by God essentially to give birth to Eve6; he is male, and yet he is maternal, as is artistically proper to a person formed out of the earth (which is always Mother Earth in myth). And the Apostle says frankly, in the very act of confirming the distinction between women and men in the symbolism of liturgical dress, that nevertheless woman and man depend upon each other and each comes from the other, and both from God—harking back, maybe, to his earlier7 letter to the churches in Galatia, in which he said rapturously that there is no male or female in Christ. Indeed, the Virgin Birth itself, re-rooting the human race and the Second Adam in a sinless woman, reverses the pattern of the creation narrative: again birth takes place by the direct intervention of God, but this time it is a woman who is given the role then appointed for the male, and the flesh of her flesh, whom she also names, is the male—the same Man who, once again in sleep, gives birth from his side to the Church.

Again, none of this is to say that sex or gender don’t really exist. It is to say that we may not always understand them perfectly, and that God is apparently prepared to do surprising things with them sometimes. There’s a great deal more to be said—we haven’t even gotten to trans identities as such yet. But I think this forms a good period for the moment.

Go here for Part Two.

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1For those not familiar, the prefix cis- is simply the opposite of the prefix trans-; both are derived from Latin: the former means approximately ‘on this side of,’ while the latter means ‘on the far side of, beyond.’ (For example, when a part of the Gaulish people settled in northern Italy, the Romans referred to that region as Cisalpine Gaul, i.e. ‘Gaul on this side of the Alps,’ and to the area of modern France as Transalpine Gaul.) Cisgender, or cis for short, is thus simply the contrary of transgender.

2Because qualifiers are necessary for friggin everything: I’m not saying I agree with everything these people have written (e.g., both are firmly pro-choice, and Wynn at least is an atheist). But it’s always better to learn about a human experience from the horse’s mouth.

3In starting here I am not saying that biology is the only thing to consider, nor the most important thing. But I do think biology is moderately accessible to people of all political and religious views, and it is something that (to be blunt) some churchmen do not seem adequately acquainted with, so it seems like a decent starting point.

4Intersex people used to be called hermaphrodites; the word comes from a myth about Hermes and Aphrodite having a child together, who had male genitalia, feminine breasts, and long hair, whom they uncreatively named Hermaphroditus. However, the word never really signified all intersex conditions in the first place, and is found insulting by some intersex people.

5There’s an incredibly problematic House episode about CAIS, if incredibly problematic House episodes are your thing.

6Perhaps we see here the faintest of hints from the Holy Ghost of our own future scientific discoveries, a sort of Easter egg. Adam has XY chromosomes, and Eve is made from Adam but is not simply a copy of Adam; she is made from his X side alone, which is then doubled, forming a person who is reflective and yet different. Thus man, in meeting his fellow, meets himself and becomes fully human by relationship. (Whether and to what extent Genesis 2 represents historical as well as mythical realities is for our purposes immaterial.)

7Fight me

Brebeuf Jesuit vs Indianapolis Archdiocese: Electric Boogaloo

All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at the present period. Some ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop towards the outer world a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the ‘Cause’ is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. Even when the little group exists originally for the Enemy’s own purposes, this remains true. We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique. 

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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You’ve likely heard of the clash between the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and the Jesuit-run Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School over the latter’s refusal to fire a gay teacher for entering a same-sex marriage. Cathedral High School, run by the Holy Cross brothers, did fire a gay teacher for similar reasons at the request of Archbishop Thompson, shortly after the Archbishop declared that Brebeuf would no longer be permitted to describe itself as Catholic. Given the ticklish situation, a.k.a. utter shitshow, that is Catholic-LGBTQ relations, evaluating this stuff is a delicate business, and this piece turns on a dime more than once in trying to sort out the details. I hope you’ll bear with me.

I waited a bit to weigh in on this because I wanted to have more facts at my disposal. Stories are easy to twist; I’m not an expert in canon law; I haven’t met any of these people; and certain relevant details to making a judgment have been, quite reasonably, kept private—even the names of the teachers in question, I believe, have gone unreleased, probably to protect them from harassment. The hate mail or even the loathsome ‘charity’ doled out by some Catholics even to avowed celibates who come out as gay is revolting enough.

For instance, one very pertinent detail that has gone unexamined (as far as I know) in the assorted hot takes on the dispute is: how do the two men in the civil same-sex marriage understand their union? I know more than one Side B couple, committed to chastely celibate lives, who are married in order to be able to extend legal benefits to their partner (insurance, hospital visiting rights, etc.) and who don’t consider this arrangement equivalent to the sacrament of matrimony. If the teachers at Brebeuf and Cathedral were in partnerships of that kind, surely there can be no objection to that? except, possibly, that it risks scandal, but that is easily addressed by just explaining the situation to the people whose business it is. I don’t consider this a likely description of the teachers in question—not because it’s intrinsically implausible, but because the Side B community is in fact fairly small; small enough that I might have heard about this through the grapevine instead of the news, if the teacher in question were connected with one of our groups—but it isn’t something that either the Jesuits or the Archdiocese seem to have considered.

The takes I’ve seen from Fr James Martin and co. have mostly focused on primacy of conscience, which, yes, is a vitally important Catholic moral doctrine. But conscience does not entitle people to their jobs, and disagreeing with Catholic moral teaching (as we may probably, though not certainly, suppose the teachers do) seems like a good enough reason to resign from teaching at a Catholic school. On the other hand, that is a reason to resign, which is not the same thing as cause to be fired. [1]

On the third hand, well, it isn’t intrinsically unreasonable for a Catholic school to ask its teachers to exemplify Catholic beliefs and values, about marriage as much as anything else. This last has, in substance, been the line of argument taken by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. And canon law itself states that ‘teachers must be outstanding in … uprightness of life’—so the argument goes that since homosexuality is held by the Church to be contrary to natural law, i.e. that sphere of conscience which can be discerned by human reason without the special assistance of revelation [2], entering a gay marriage is ipso facto disqualifying to the ‘uprightness of life’ clause, even for a non-Catholic or non-Christian.

Here’s why I don’t buy that. For background, the text of the canons about Catholic schools, in a little more context, reads thus:

Canon 803 §2. Formation and education in a Catholic school must be based on the principles of Catholic doctrine, and the teachers must be outstanding in true doctrine and uprightness of life.
Canon 804 §2. The local Ordinary [normally a bishop] is to be careful that those who are appointed teachers of religion in schools, even non-Catholic ones, are outstanding in true doctrine, in the witness of their Christian life, and in their teaching ability.
Canon 806 §1. The diocesan Bishop has the right to watch over and inspect the Catholic schools situated in his territory, even those established or directed by religious institutes. He also has the right to issue directives concerning the general regulation of Catholic schools: these directives apply also to schools conducted by members of a religious institute, although they retain their autonomy in the internal management of their schools.

The thing is, Catholic schools habitually hire non-Catholic and even non-Christian employees, up to and including teachers, and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis hasn’t make a peep about that, to my knowledge. I’d be surprised if they had, given that it’s a longstanding practice of Catholic schools, hospitals, charities, and even parish offices. Yet if beliefs that are, you know, Catholic are key to being ‘outstanding in true doctrine’—and I’d hope most Catholic bishops would feel that they are—then how in the name of Elvis is it okay to violate one aspect of Canon 802, but then trot it out as a reason to fire someone for transgressing a different aspect of the exact same canon? How come having a teacher who denies Catholic doctrine as a Protestant or an observant Jew or even an atheist is fine, but having a teacher who denies Catholic doctrine [4] as a gay man is not?

Someone could argue that, e.g., Jews and Protestants are of different faith traditions, and faith is a supernatural gift rather than a matter of natural law, so it isn’t fair to hold them to the same standard. Fine. But why do the beliefs of a gay man (perhaps devoutly religious; look at Pete Buttigieg) count for nothing in this equation? If his religious tradition and convictions inform him that gay sex is intrinsically innocent, then of course we as Catholics disagree, but are we also saying that his religion has somehow ceased to be a religion for that reason? Are we saying that it’s okay to hire Jews and Protestants as long as they’re Catholics? And what about the agnostic or the atheist employee, whose absence of belief or positive disbelief are also described by the Church as being contrary to natural reason? If there are any (and it’s not unlikely), has Archbishop Thompson come down on them?

Maybe canons can be applied with prudent, pastoral consideration by bishops; maybe they can even bent as long as they’re not broken; I don’t know, I’m not a canonist. If they can, I think the Archbishop has in fact acted with great imprudence and in a profoundly unpastoral manner. Applying canons strictly only when it targets LGBTQ people is homophobic, even in the very restrictive definition I gave to it in this post from a few years ago (dating to before I’d lost all moral confidence in the hierarchy). The Catholic tendency to scapegoat gay men is unjust and unreasonable, contrary to the explicit teaching of the Church, and damaging to LGBTQ people in general, especially young people.

Moreover, it causes the exact thing it’s typically framed to avoid: scandal. The world at large already knows the Catholic Church thinks gay sex is wrong. It’s often one of the few Catholic doctrines they do know, in contrast to little things like the Real Presence. Accenting the teaching on homosexuality is not nearly such an urgent necessity as people who are extremely comfortable with that teaching tend to insist. But what a great mass of those outside the Catholic Church do think, is that the Church hates gay people, and that that’s where the teaching comes from. The latter is, I believe, false. Is the former false too?

Think about it. When an archbishop singles out gay people who live out of line with Catholic beliefs and ignores straight people who do the same thing, what message does that send? Not just to gay people and to the world at large, but to the very students they are trying to form as Catholics? Doesn’t it matter that they’re being presented with a decision that, at the absolute best, is going to look like a homophobic double standard? and in the exact, perfect situation where they could have been given a beautiful example of how to respect and embrace people whom we deeply disagree with?

It’s been said that when the Vandals invaded Africa, St Augustine remarked, ‘God has called us to evangelize the nations, and he has just brought the nations to our door.’ How much more is that true of people who aren’t marauding through the countryside in full Conan-mode?

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[1] Kindly don’t come to me with any ‘He wasn’t going to be fired, they just wouldn’t have renewed his contract!’ nonsense. When you’re relying on a job, losing it is losing it, and the pedantic reasons offered by your ex-boss for why it isn’t his fault do not matter.

[2] For instance, the obligation not to murder people is an obligation we know by natural law [3], an extension of the morally intuitive Silver Rule (do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you); it comes from God like all right and wrong does, but it didn’t need to be specifically revealed to us by supernatural means: the natural witness of conscience and intellect are enough. By contrast, the obligation to get baptized is something we could never get to just by thinking it out. It was revealed by the personal command of Christ, and has since been passed on from one person to another. The Church claims not only that having gay sex is wrong, but that we can know it’s wrong apart from revelation, by natural conscience and reasoning.

[3] I don’t actually subscribe to natural law theory myself, but I’m trying to articulate the argument as well and fairly as I can.

[4] Always supposing the teachers in question do deny Catholic doctrine. Again, that’s plausible and statistically likely, not certain.

The Stonewall Inn and the Sacred Heart

I had been in enough riots to know the fun was over. … The cops were totally humiliated. This never, ever happened. They were angrier than I guess they had ever been, because everybody else had rioted … but the fairies were not supposed to riot … no group had ever forced cops to retreat before. 

—Bob Kohler, eyewitness of the Stonewall Riots 

I therefore take You, O Sacred Heart, to be the only object of my love, the guardian of my life, my assurance of salvation, the remedy of my weakness and inconstancy, the atonement for all the faults of my life, and my sure refuge at the hour of death. 

—St Margaret Mary Alacoque, from the Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

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In the wee hours of the morning on 28th June, 1969—eight days after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was observed that year—New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. All gay bars were technically underground establishments at the time; laws instituted after Prohibition ended forbade liquor licenses to ‘disorderly houses,’ which was interpreted by the government to include any establishment frequented by gays or prostitutes, among others. The mafia was therefore largely in control of the city’s gay bars [1], and bribed the cops to be able to carry on with business. That night, the NYPD hadn’t gotten their bribe, so they raided the Stonewall and started arresting people. But that night was different. [2] Many of the patrons were drag queens, hustlers, trans women, or homeless young people (the categories overlapped), who weren’t allowed in other covertly gay-friendly establishments or couldn’t afford them; the Stonewall Inn was for many purposes their home. And that night, they fought for it.

Three names stand out from that first night: Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson; Rivera and Johnson were trans women [3], DeLarverie a lesbian. As DeLarverie was being loaded into a police van, she cried out to the watching crowd, ‘Why don’t you guys do something?’ and was thrust forcibly into the van. 

It was then the spark caught. As the rumor spread that the raid was in response to a missed bribe, the crowd began throwing pennies at the police. Rivera said, ‘You been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn!’ and Johnson (though accounts vary) is reported to have thrown a shot glass and shouted, ‘I got my civil rights!’ The police tried to continue with the arrests, tried to make the crowd disperse, but the riot had taken hold. The police were driven back, and the demonstrations went on for days. The gay rights movement as we know it today had begun.

I grew up in an America after Stonewall, after the AIDS crisis of the eighties, after the early phase and early failures of the ex-gay movement. The queens of Stonewall are the reason I could and can be openly gay at my college, at my jobs, at my parish, with little fear of harassment or expulsion or violence or getting fired. Little rather than none, but little. I owe them for that.

But what has any of this got to do with the Sacred Heart of Jesus?

Well, strictly speaking, every human person has to do with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, because it is the center of all humanity and indeed of all creation. Charles Williams put it thus:

Compassion is the union of man with his fellows, as is the blood. The permitted devotion to the Sacred Heart is the source of both. The physical heart is, in this sense, an ‘index’ to both. The visionary forms of the occult schools are but dreams of the Divine Body. … The temples of the Holy Ghost are constructed all on one plan: and our duties to our material fellows are duties to structures of beatitude. … The Sacred Body is the plan upon which physical human creation was built, for it is the center of physical human creation. The great dreams of the human form containing the whole universe are in this less than the truth. As His, so ours; the body, in this sense of an index, is also a pattern. We carry about with us an operative synthesis of the Virtues … [4]

But although that truth sets the brain aflame with its implications, it doesn’t pertain to homosexuality more than to anything else, still less to gay rights more than to anything else. (At least, not as far as I’ve discerned to date.)

For me personally, I feel like the Sacred Heart and gayness cross paths in two ways. One pertains to the Pulse shooting three years ago. That was the event that, for lack of a better word, radicalized me. It was the first thing that had ever happened that made me fear for my safety as an out gay man—even the brutalization of Matthew Shephard hadn’t done that; and also the first clear realization I had that, while individual Catholics might, the Catholic Church in general did not care about LGBTQ people. Or maybe they did, but their care wasn’t worth having. I had believed sincerely that if, God forbid, something like Pulse happened, they would show that they really did believe in avoiding every sign of unjust discrimination. But the bishops were silent: fifty-odd words of colorless sympathy on Twitter was the best they could do. [5] After that, incidentally, I was kind of forearmed for the McCarrick scandal and everything that’s come after it; my illusions about the bona fides of the clergy were gone. My faith had never depended on those illusions, thank God. But all the same, I had genuinely believed they meant it when they said they loved us. When it turned out they were lying about that, I wasn’t as shocked by their lies about so much else.

But here’s the thing. That is not how Jesus feels about gay people. The night those forty-nine people were shot in Orlando, he was shot forty-nine times. The blood of their deaths and the blood of his sacrifice are both the life of the image of God: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof. No matter how faithless his Church is, he is not faithless to her nor to humanity. He held those forty-nine people in his arms as they died, and unless they finally refused him, he holds them still. Their wounds are in his Heart as I write these words.

Which brings us to the other intersection between that Heart and homosexuality. Nothing is wasted. No injury, no indignity that was inflicted on Jesus was wasted; every moment of pain was used to restore creation. There’s so much meaningless suffering in the world—the promise of the Sacred Heart is that, in reality, all that suffering appears meaningless but it isn’t. Any belief in a just deity includes the belief that, from the cruelest to the pettiest, every evil will be acknowledged and recompensed in the Last Judgment; devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is an adamant assertion that all those evils will not only be stopped, they will be transformed into greater goods—not only made powerless, but humiliated in their turn—evil does not, ever, get the last word in any way at all. No concession is made to it when its very existence is made the felix culpa that summons a glorious Savior.

It’s easy to distort this truth into the petty, saccharine maxim that Everything happens for a reason. No. Not everything happens for a reason. At any rate, not in the sense the people saying that think. Not only the pain of suffering, but also the horror of meaninglessness, will be honored by the final consummation; otherwise it couldn’t really be final. But for that exact reason, there must be no rushing to the end, no pretending that we have the final meaning now. That is why, in its ikons, the Sacred Heart still bleeds as well as burning. The grief of the world will end, but it has not yet ended.

Which has what to do with being gay? My traditionalist readers will probably think I’m talking about what a wound being gay is, while some of my progressivist readers may think I’m unconsciously reflecting the unnecessary burden laid on me by the Catholic Church. I take neither of these views, actually; though I’d point out to both that Jesus did not carry his cross in secret, and asking me to conceal either my sexuality or my beliefs is, accordingly, not going to land. In any case, I believe in a standard of chastity that I cannot manage to live up to; and that's uncomfortable to a lot of people. They want something neat, something that makes sense, something that fits their categories, and I don't offer that.

But the mystery of the Sacred Heart leaves me with some (some) assurance that the messy and uncertain life I lead is not a waste. Being gay in a world that’s mostly straight is hard; being gay in the Catholic Church is hard; being Catholic in the queer community is hard. But not fruitless. As bitterly as loneliness and guilt and anger and worry still, often, bite into me, I’m not afraid like I once was that they’re symptoms of a pointless life. Whether suffering comes from the inner struggle for self-discipline, or from homophobic (or, occasionally, Romaphobic) sources without—I might be scared of the pain, because who isn’t, but I’m not scared that it’s all for nothing, because I see that picture of a bleeding Heart above me, and that’s the center of everything. And that blood runs through every heart, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

Happy fiftieth anniversary.

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[1] Were you honestly thinking that the law was going to stop any queen from getting her vodka soda on and dancing to ‘Sugar, Sugar’? 

[2] For one thing, it was the night following Judy Garland’s funeral, so raiding a gay bar was not perhaps the most cunning thing the NYPD has ever done.

[3] At the time, the commonest term was transvestite; the term transgender had not yet been coined. Nonetheless, they would most probably fall under the transgender umbrella today, especially as both used female pronouns.

[4] From the Dublin Review of July 1942, republished in the posthumous collection The Image of the City.

[5] My parish did better than average. Our pastor added a petition for the victims to the Bidding Prayers (it was actually the first thing I heard about Pulse), and I had an opportunity to give a couple of lectures on homosexuality and Christianity a few months later. But the Church in general proved too apathetic, or too cowardly, or too hateful, to even say (let alone do) anything of substance.