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In this episode, Trent breaks down the German Synod’s recent document supporting transgender ideology and shares what the Church can really do to help people with sexual identity disorders.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today I’ll be breaking down the awful transgender gender proposal that was recently passed by the German Synod. All right, so here’s what the Catholic News Agency says about it. Here’s what they say.
“The implementation text, “Dealing With Gender Diversity,” that’s the title, “passed with support from 96% of the 197 voting delegates. 38 bishops voted for it while only seven voted against it. 13 abstained from voting. Consistent with a pattern running throughout the assembly, there would’ve been enough votes to block the measure if those abstaining had voted against it. Critics of the Synodal Way say that organizers’ removal of the secret ballot has created a fear-driven atmosphere that has prohibited many bishops from voting freely.
The resolution calls for “concrete improvements for intersex and transgender faithful,” including changing baptism records to match someone’s self-identified gender, banning one’s gender identity from consideration for pastoral ministerial roles, and mandatory education for priests and church employees to “deal with the topic of gender diversity.”
Before I break down what’s wrong with the German Synod’s document on gender, I want to point out that Christ’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church, that doesn’t mean the church will always exist in every part of the world. It expands in some places and contracts in others. For example, the church used to thrive in what is now modern day Turkey. This is the western part is what the Bible calls Asia Minor. This is where Antioch is. It lies on the border with Syria.
Antioch, in what’s now Turkey, that’s where the followers of Jesus, they were first called Christians according to Acts 11:26. Antioch is where St. Ignatius of Antioch called Christians Catholics. This is where the Hagia Sophia cathedral was built in the 6th century. Now there’s only about 30,000 Catholics left in Turkey and over 80 million Muslims there and Hagia Sophia is a mosque.
You also see sometimes in church history entire regions succumbing to heresy, such as when Arianism overtook the eastern empire of the church during the life of St. Athanasius. The church has weathered these doctrinal storms and will continue to weather them as the Holy Spirit guides the universal church, even if some individual parts of the church fall away. So we shouldn’t let individual bishops conferences that lose the plot cause us to lose our faith. It’s happened before, it’ll always happen in church history. All right, let’s dive into the document. Here’s how it starts.
“Every person possesses a gender identity and a sexual orientation. These are part of a complex developmental process and they cannot be arbitrarily shaped or even chosen. Instead, they result from a combination of biological processes and psychosocial factors, which include not least the individual acceptance and shaping by the person himself or herself.”
The first problem right off the bat is we don’t get a definition of things like gender identity. Second, there’s kind of a contradiction here because we’re told in this document that gender identity and sexual orientation can’t be shaped or chosen, but then we’re told they are shaped and accepted by the individual. So which is it?
It goes on to say, “Already for the gender variants, male and female, these developments lead to a variety of physical, psychological, and social characteristics, ways of expression, and self-perceptions. This diversity is already biologically inherent. The biological gender identity of a human being is initially based on the chromosomal code of XX or XY.” Okay, true, though there are other sex chromosomes, XXY, single X. But that’s pretty general. All right.
“However, it can by no means be reduced to this.” Oh, boy! “Instead, the biological gender identity develops some complicated interactions between genetic and epigenetic factors and is above all decisively shaped by the hormonal sex. Sex hormones such as testosterone or oestradistol occur in all sexes, although they appear in typically male or female bodies at different levels of concentration. In contrast to genetic sex, hormonal sex is not typologically binary, i.e. strictly male or female, but is expressed on a sliding scale in which the individual status can also lie between the two polls.”
All right, here in the document, this is where it starts to go off the rails while still containing a nugget of truth. Yes, our maleness and femaleness are not shaped only by our genetic code. A person’s hormones will determine what kind of sex characteristics he or she will develop. So for example, someone who has a condition like androgen insensitivity syndrome, they may appear to be a woman and have breasts and a shallow vagina, but they’re actually a man, a biological man, and they won’t have a uterus even though they have external female sex characteristics.
But we have to remember that these are the tiny minority of cases, maybe one in 2000 births. The exception does not disprove the rule. We need to remember that because of the complexity of hormonal development and transcription errors in DNA, there’s always going to be cases where it’s difficult to determine if someone is male or female. But in almost all of these cases, it’s not impossible. We can make a judgment. Even still, there may be a handful of cases in the medical literature where we’re not sure, like a person with XY genetic chromosomal mosaicism that ends up giving birth.
That doesn’t mean these unusual cases there isn’t a binary distinction between men and women. There are cases of brain injury where we’re not sure if the person is alive or dead, we’re really not sure, and these odd cases, but that doesn’t disprove the general binary reality between life and death, in that you’re either alive or you’re either dead. That’s just the general truth of human nature. It’s the same for you’re either male or you’re either female. That just is the general truth of human nature.
The German Synod’s document on gender is disingenuous because it conflates these really rare intersex conditions with transgender identity and makes it seem like, well, we have no idea who’s a man and who’s a woman. But in almost all cases of transgender identity, a person’s genetic code, their skeletal structure, and their hormones all correspond to the same sex. In the case of transgender identity, the person just has an incorrect sense of identity. But the Synod’s document refuses to accept that a person could be mistaken about their sexual identity.
In fact, for all its talk of inclusion, nowhere is it mentioned in the document how the church should help those who detransition or go back to accepting their true sex even after engaging in so-called gender reassignment treatments and surgery. These are people who need the church the most because they’re often shunned by the transgender community as traitors or transtrenders, and then they feel out of place among people of their biological sex because of the effects of their surgery or cross-sex hormones.
The church should be a place where everyone feels welcome and encouraged to seek holiness no matter the misguided choices they may have made in the past. All right, let’s look at an important definition that the document offers. It says the following: “Transgender people are people whose biopsychosocial development leads to a gender perception that does not, or at least not predominantly, correspond to the gender assigned at birth, usually on the basis of the external sexual organs.”
All right. Notice that the document fails to define what a man or a woman even is. It just relies on the pseudo definition of gender assigned at birth. That’s why I think that if we talk about this issue, it may be helpful to just not mention the word gender. Instead, we should talk about sex and sexual identity. Sex is the fact that you are a man or woman, and sexual identity is your belief about whether you are a man or a woman.
When a person’s self-identity contradicts reality, such as when an anorexic person says she is obese or a man says he is a woman, then that’s an identity disorder. But in order to say someone has an identity disorder, you have to be able to objectively define the reality of that person’s existence, whether they’re obese or not, or a man or not. If we can do that for racial identity errors and other personality identity errors like multiple personality syndrome, well, why can’t we do it for sexual identity errors?
This is absolutely critical for Catholic theology because of the terms man and woman only mean a person who claims to be a man or a woman. Then this completely evacuates scripture of its meaning when it describes God making humans male and female. The church’s teaching that only men can be priests or that a relationship of two women is not marriage depends on an objective definition of man and woman. Though I’m sure for many of these Synod members that confusion is part of their entire plan honestly.
So the document goes on to say that there has been progress in recognizing people who are intersex and transgender in society and then says the following: “In the Vatican paper, “As Male and Female He created Them: towards a Path of Dialogue on the question of Gender Theory in Education” of the Congregation for Catholic Education of 2019,” this is a Vatican document, “trans and intersexuality are mentioned for the first time.
However, this is characterized by an understanding of these terms that corresponds neither to the self-understanding of the people concerned nor to the state of the human sciences. Inter- and transgender people, it is assumed, are part of an ideology whose goal is, among other things, the disillusion or obscuring of the supposedly clear and exclusive distinction between man and woman that is considered God-given.”
So already, I mean, they’re saying, “Oh, they’re just part of this ideology who wants to obscure male and female.” Well, members of the German Synod, isn’t that what you’re doing? Notice the fallacy, that people with gender identity issues, according to them, they all have a unified perspective that’s being ignored, that everyone who identifies as transgender thinks the same way and they feel the same way about this and they’re being ignored. But ironically, the Synod members in this document ignore people who identify as transgender who realize that they made an error.
It ignores the 80% of young people who identify as transgender who don’t identify that way later in life. So in actuality, it’s the German Synod that treats people who identify as transgender as some kind of a monolith and ignores the experiences of those who’ve been harmed by gender reassignment surgery. It just ignores them. They don’t actually count when it comes to talking about this issue. Of course, notice when they say that human science has a kind of universal perspective on this.
Well, when it comes to science, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, it should be clear by now that there is no such thing as the science. There are scientists who have conflicting opinions about contentious issues. Now, there are well-established laws of nature that scientists agree about, no doubt. But when it comes to a lot of the social sciences and psychology, a lot of what these scientists say about human nature is really pseudoscience or it’s bad philosophy that’s dressed up as science.
So these descriptions also ignore the many scientists who completely reject transgender ideology, or the very least, it ignores those scientists who accept it but don’t believe that transgender surgeries and things like that should be given to minors. I cover a lot of this in my response to John Oliver on transgender ideology. I’ll link to that below. Be sure to check out that previous episode of the podcast.
Right. Another thing we need to know when speaking out on this issue or euthanasia or abortion or anything that relates to modern bioethics, we need to assertively challenge the idea that there is such a thing as “science” because in many cases that’s not true. We should say some scientists. We don’t want to let people get away with saying science is completely on their side unless they have the data, they really have the data to back it up.
That’s why, in general, I don’t say that science says life begins a conception. Now, I do cite studies, for example, which say that 96% of biologists say a new human being comes into existence at fertilization, or I point out how this is uniform in embryology textbooks. In those cases, when you have the data, it’s fair to cite it. But we need to point out when scientists are divided on these factual issues and when the disagreement that they have is overvalued judgements, not empirical facts.
All right. So the document goes on to say that the “supposedly clear and exclusive distinction between man and woman that is considered God-given,” this idea we’ve had for 2000 years in church history, “it causes harm to transgender people and leads to abuse and suicide.” Though they say this without any evidence to back this up. Many people have pointed out that even in extremely affirming countries and environments, LGBT mental health disorders are higher than average.
I also found this part of the document to be very inconsistent. They say this. “The church must speak out unequivocally against so-called conversion therapies performed on transgender people, as well as on homosexuals and bisexuals, as these efforts massively endanger the physical and mental integrity and health of the respective persons as well as their faith and trust in God.”
Okay, so they’re saying we should oppose people who go to a doctor, they say, “You know what? I have a same sex sexual orientation,” or, “I think that I’m a woman, but I’d rather have an opposite sex sexual orientation,” or, “I think I’m a woman, but I know I’m a man and I’d like to think that I’m a man. I would like to change my mistaken sexual identity and my mistaken gender identity.” That the Synod says it’s wrong for people to try help people who want to do that, who want to change their sexual orientation to conform to a natural sexual orientation or change their identity to conform to a natural identity.
They say that that’s wrong and yet they say, “Oh, well, it’s perfectly…” They’re completely oblivious to the harms that transgender ideology causes to children as young as three years old who are put through things like social transitioning. Now, I’m not endorsing conversion therapy or every single kind of conversion therapy to change a person’s sexual orientation or sexual identity. I’m not going to get into that here in this episode.
But I will say this is a massive double standard that they will come out and say it’s wrong to try to use medical science and technology to change your sexual orientation or your sexual identity to be more natural in conformity with what God wants if you recognize there’s a disorder, desire, or identity, but they’re perfectly fine with it if you want to facilitate a kind of change that is not in accord with our human nature.
Once again, see my John Oliver rebuttal where I talk about how harmful these kinds of treatments are for minors. In fact, it’s so harmful the only clinic that does youth gender transitions in the United Kingdom is shutting down, Sweden is backing off on gender transitioning for youths. In any case, the document… the declaration goes on to say this.
“Pope Francis describes the core message of our faith in his Encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti with the guiding principles of universal fraternity and social friendship. This message of love that transcends all boundaries is also a utopia or a dream in the church that can and should guide actions. He, the Pope, challenges us to acknowledge our respective neighbors in their respective own way of being – beyond all boundaries and differences.”
This might well have been written by a local Unitarian minister. It reminds you of that joke on The Simpsons. “Do you kids want some Unitarian ice cream?” “Well, it’s just an empty bowl.” “Exactly.” Besides, if you’re going to cite Pope Francis, by the way, then why not cite what he said about gender ideology? He said this in 2016.
“Today, children,” children, “are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the people and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries, and this is terrible.”
And just last week, a few weeks ago, he said, “Gender ideology today is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations.” Boom! But the German Synod says, “Well, we just need to re-understand genesis on male and female identity.” “The insinuation of a gender ideology must be stopped,” it says. It also says this, which is interesting.
“The physical safety and integrity of intersex people is to be respected by the church. The Vatican Congregation for Education must therefore retract its view that a gender clarification in the direction of male or female is to be produced in children by medicine, if necessary even without the consent of the parents.
The withdrawal of this Vatican demand is also imperative because it suggests actions that are rightly punishable almost everywhere. Medical intervention against the will of inter-persons,” intersex persons, “or their custodial parents is, as a fundamental and human rights violation, a punishable offense both nationally and internationally.”
Ooh! Bringing out the big guns here. Well, the Synod is referring to the following paragraph from the 2019 Congregation for Catholic Education, their document on gender. Here’s what it says. “In cases where a person’s sex is not clearly defined,” like an intersex case, “it is medical professionals who can make a therapeutic intervention.
In such situations, parents cannot make an arbitrary choice on the issue, let alone society. Instead, medical science should act with purely therapeutic ends and intervene in the least invasive fashion on the basis of objective parameters and with a view to establishing the person’s constitutive identity.”
All right, so this document is not saying doctors should act without the consent of the parents. It’s saying parents don’t get to decide of their own whim if they want their child to be a boy or a girl. Science tells us that. We have cases of people who are trying to transition toddlers through social means who don’t even know what the concepts of boy or girl, what that even means. It’s child abuse and it’s evil and we shouldn’t be afraid to call it as such. We have to say that.
All right. So what do I recommend when you hear more of this stuff, including from fellow Catholics. First, ask them if the church should help people with identity disorders. Should we be compassionate towards people with dementia or anorexia? Of course. Well, does that compassion mean we should constantly lie to them? Does it mean we should use surgery to mutilate them? Don’t hold back to referring to gender reassignment surgery as genital mutilation or hormonal poisoning, what it does to people.
Second, ask these people, how are we going to help those who want to detransition? Ask them, could a person ever be mistaken about his or her sexual identity? If so, how could they know? They can only know if there is an objective way of answering the question, am I a man or am I a woman? And yes, always go back to that question that Matt Walsh raises so well. What is a woman? What is a man? Be sure to show that the philosophy supporting transgender ideology in the church is absolutely incoherent.
Then we should raise legitimate ways, we should promote legitimate ways that the church can pastorally accompany those who struggle with their sexual identity. And we do so in a way without compromising God’s revelation about the nature of our sexual identity. I would compare this to how the church’s understanding of suicide and mental illness has developed over time. The church has always recognized that suicide is a sin, and it is an evil to be avoided, and it is to never be encouraged.
But we also recognize now a development in that there’s often a lack of culpability on the part of those who die by suicide due to things like mental illness. Likewise, we can recognize the lack of culpability in some cases of those who suffer from a sexual identity disorder without compromising the church’s teaching about the objective facts related to someone being a man or being a woman.
The church can also offer accommodations for those who struggle with sexual identity disorders or developmental disorders related to things like intersex conditions. For example, these can include having single-use bathrooms or the ability to leave the sex blank on a baptismal certificate if an infant has an intersex condition that has not been resolved yet. Though I would subject that to a dispensation process. I don’t want people purposely raising theybies. Babies that are neither he nor she, they’re theybies.
Finally, we should open up the church to broader understandings of masculinity and femininity. We don’t want someone to think, “Oh, I don’t like this traditionally feminine thing, so I must be a man.” Now, you could just be kind of like Joan of Arc maybe, you just don’t like traditionally feminine things. Now it’s a hard line to walk, but I really do believe we can find a balance between overly rigid gender roles and having views on gender that make no difference whatsoever between male and female. We can find a balance there.
Finally, the church can offer training to priests and other lay leaders so they better understand sexual identity disorders and things like intersex conditions so that they’re not blindsided when they meet someone who has one of these conditions. But it should not be done with the Gestapo suggestion of the German Synod, which says, “LGBT commissioners should be established in every diocese to ensure everyone is always accepting of other people’s lifestyles.”
All right. So I hope that was helpful for you. If you want to go deeper on this subject, I would recommend Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally, and Jason Evert’s new book, Male, Female, Other? I have an interview with Jason on the channel. You can go and check that out as well. But thank you, guys, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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