Trent’s Talk for a Catholic “Sex and Gender Studies” Class

So, I’m not going to say which one, because I want to continue to be invited back to address these students and to present them a gracious and persuasive case for Catholic sexual ethics. In the past, I focused on different elements. In the past, I did more of a natural law presentation on homosexuality. This time round, I and my colleague were given five questions to divide up. He took three on homosexuality. I took two on gender and gender identity. So, what I want to share with you today is the presentation that I gave these students, tailored with a tone and content for Catholic college students, in sexuality and gender studies classes, who probably have fully bought onto LGBT ideology and everything that goes with it. There may be a few minorities, a small minority, some students in these classes, that hold to Catholic teaching.

Hopefully… I don’t know. But it was great to present to them. I was given 20 minutes, my colleague got 20 minutes. So, I’m going to share with you my 20 minutes on gender, gender identity theory, and the Catholic response to that. And then, we got a really good Q and A session with the students. So, maybe in the future, I’ll be able to share with you some of my answers to the questions that the students gave. There was one that came up, I thought was interesting. It was in light of the CDF document on the church saying no to same-sex blessings. And the question was basically this, “Since we know that teachings like this increase suicide rates among LGBT, do you think the CDF was irresponsible to put forward this document saying that they cannot bless same-sex unions? They cannot bless sin.” And so, what I said was… First, I am skeptical of the claim that teachings on homosexuality when the church merely articulates its teachings, that it drives up suicide rates.

I pointed out to the students that when you look at other countries, you look at countries that are very affirming of homosexuality, like in Scandinavia, for example, there are still higher levels of mental illness and higher levels of suicide in these places. Now, some people will say, “Well, there’s still homophobia there.” Okay. It ends up being, when you say that this “homophobia” is so rampant it drives suicide rates up, you create this unfalsifiable hypothesis. And you’re not even able to investigate a contrary hypothesis, like “Does engaging in this kind of behavior, elevate the risk of mental illness and suicide?” It’s like a third rail that people don’t want to touch, frankly, among researchers. But then, I also said…

Look, even granted… Even if it were the case that the Catholic teaching on sexual ethics, no matter how graciously it’s presented… there is an associated increase in suicide rates among those who identify as LGBT, that wouldn’t mean it’s immoral to articulate God’s revelation about our sexuality. It would just mean that, in doing something good, there is an unintended consequence, a negative unintended consequence, something we foresee, but don’t intend. So, it doesn’t make the original act bad. I’ll give you two examples that I gave the students. One is when a culture… when a country invests more in education, so that education rates go up, suicide rates go up. You look at South Korea, for example. It’s a very wealthy, prosperous well-educated country, has some of the highest suicide rates in the developed world. But that doesn’t mean that prosperity and education are bad things, even though elevated rates of suicide are correlated with this. Or to give another example, if you build roads, car accidents go up, but it doesn’t mean that you are guilty of the deaths of people in cars because you built roads.

Roads are a good thing. We foresee that some people may not drive on them properly, or have an accident and something bad will happen, but it doesn’t take away the goodness of building the road. Much the same way, teaching God’s revelation for our sexuality is a good thing, keeps us from misusing it to our own peril. So, teaching that, in a gracious way, that is good. It’s always tragic if someone responds to God’s offer of salvation and mercy and grace and responds to it with despair. That’s always tragic. But that is not the fault of God, or of Christ, or of his church, if someone does not respond to grace in a way that is good for them. We pray for that person. We always pray for people, but it doesn’t mean we abandoned the truth just because some people choose to not… or just unfortunately unable to receive it.

So, that was one question that came up in the Q and A, I thought was interesting. Maybe I’ll share some more of the Q and A in a later episode. But for now, here is my live 20 minute presentation, Trent, in the sexuality and gender studies class and major Catholic university. And I hope you get a lot from this. By the way, if you’re watching on YouTube, the devil was after this. The devil did not want this to happen. I’m telling you, my webcam was completely shot. I had to use the FaceTime camera on my laptop, which ended up being kind of laggy. But the audio came out really well. So, I’m very happy for that. I’m happy to be able to share it with you. So, here is that presentation and I hope you like it. Okay. I’ll start now then?

Well, thank you guys so much for inviting me to speak on these important issues. I’ll echo my colleague in saying that I’m grateful for the open minds, and that our goal is to share these truths of the Catholic faith as graciously as we can, and as persuasively as we can. So, I was asked to comment on these two questions. What is the Roman Catholic position on gender identity and trans non-binary and gender non-conforming persons? And the other one is what is the Roman Catholic position on intersex, pansexual, asexual, and polyamorous persons? I will say though, the term I would prefer would just be Catholic, because this is beyond just the Latin right, the Roman right in the church. I actually attend a Byzantine Catholic church. There’s Catholic church. Catholic means universal. And so, what I’m sharing with you is part of what the universal church teaches and believes.

So, in order to understand that, let me just put out three definitions to understand what we’ll talk about here. That would be sex, gender, and orientation. So, sex… And these are just the definitions I’m using as a shorthand. When I say sex, I’m referring to the biological fact of being a member of the male or female in a species. So, there are many, many non-human organisms that have sex, and engage in sexual reproduction, animals, plants, fungi, protists. I think only most bacteria asexually reproduce. So, sex is a biological fact that you can find even in non-human species. Gender, however, is something that seems to be unique to human beings. Unlike sex, being a biological fact, gender seems… The way I use the term would be it’s a self understanding and manifestation of sexual identity, so an understanding of what someone is, whether they are male or female, and what it means to be a male or female.

So, this is more of a soft science than a hard science like biological sex. And then, orientation would be the affect of desire for sexual relations with another person. Some people distinguish sexual and romantic orientation. For our purposes, I’ll just talk about sexual orientation. So, if we break this down then, the issues I was asked to address can be divided into identity and orientation. So, you have issues of identity. What am I? Transgender, non-binary gender nonconforming, or intersex? And then questions related to orientation. What does the church teach about my sexual desires in terms of being asexual, pansexual, or polyamorous? An important reference document… I’ll be citing a lot of other things as well. But an important document I would encourage you to read, to get the church’s teaching on a lot of these issues, and how to approach it, would be Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education. This is put forward by the Vatican’s congregation for Catholic education.

So, there’s a lot in there. I’m not going to be able to summarize the whole document. I will cite parts of it here and there. But to understand our identity and orientation, I think we have to just go back to the beginning to understand God’s design for our sexuality. All the way at the beginning of the book of Genesis, Genesis chapter one says, “God made man, male and female, in his image.” They are equal, but complimentary and created for one another. And man, the Adom in Hebrew, which can mean human, or just a male, says that the Adom/man/humans are male and female. And that Genesis chapter two tells us that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. And the two become one flesh, that marriage is not merely a legal reality. It is reality where to, as my colleague referenced, people who are incomplete on their own become complete as one flesh, because their bodies are United towards a purpose larger than their own.

In 2012, Pope Benedict the 16th said, “According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. It’s what we are as humans. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about as ordained by God.” Now in 2015, in his encyclical Laudato SI, Pope Francis said, “Valuing one’s own body and its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I’m going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it.” So, I’m continuing on with other… We go forward from Genesis and scripture talking about gender being male and female. I think an important truth of the Christian faith is that we don’t have bodies. We are bodies.

In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, chapter five, he talks about the resurrection of the body. And Paul talks about how a soul without a body is like being naked without a tent. It’s like, it’s a situation you don’t want to be in. Unlike the platonic view of Greek philosophy, which said that we just are souls that try to escape this bodily imprisonment, Christianity teaches that we have a unique identity with our bodies. We’re incomplete without them. We dwell in earthly tents that will become immortal. Philippians 3:21, Paul says that Christ will change our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body. Paul further underscores in first Corinthians six, nine through 19. He talks about the importance of the body. How sins against the body are very grievous. These can include sins like drunkenness, gluttony, revelry, sins of malice, but also sexual sins.

He mentions pornea, adultery, and he also mentions homosexual behavior in first Corinthians chapter six. Then, 6:19, he talks about how we are temples of the holy spirit. Our bodies are important. They’re not inconsequential to who we are, and that to join them… For example, to join one’s body with a prostitute is to become one flesh with a prostitute. You can’t just casually use your body to engage in sexual relations because your body is an essential extension of who you are as a person. And then ultimately, our bodies, as male and female, are ordered towards a one flesh union. So, what that means, not to be crude, is that what sex is for… Sex is for the expression of marital love. The sexual act, properly speaking, can only be vaginal intercourse that takes place between a man and a woman. There are other acts that can involve stimulation of genitals. But even in our own language, we distinguish that. We distinguish masturbation and mutual masturbation from sexual acts.

But these sexual acts… One body part inside another body part is not sex or the marital act. When a surgeon puts his hand inside my abdomen, we don’t become one flesh just because we’re one body part in another. Rather it’s that incomplete… that giving of two incomplete people fully of themselves in the marital act that forms that one flesh union. That’s why it’s important to Jesus’s teaching on divorce. Why divorce is wrong? Jesus took a harder view against divorce than even the most conservative rabbis of his time who allowed divorce in cases like adultery. Jesus was very clear that whoever divorces his spouse and re marries another commits adultery because… And he roots his teaching back in Genesis chapter two on that indissoluble one flesh union. And the same thing occurs in Paul’s teaching on sexual immorality that I referenced earlier.

So, then we go to the 2019 Vatican document on gender theory. What it says in section 20 is the underlying presuppositions of these theories or gender theories can be traced back to a dualistic anthropology, separating body reduced to the status of inert matter, from human will, which itself becomes an absolute that can manipulate the body as it pleases. So, the church would reject an idea of the body as being completely distinct from our identity that we can shape as we will, and that only our will or our personal mental self decides our identity, and that the body is inconsequential to our identity, that the church teaches that’s a dualistic anthropology. We form a single union, a composite of body and soul. So then, how would that relate to the issues that were brought up with identity? When we talk about transgender identity… Now, this would be a condition where one’s gender, sense of being male or female, does not align with one’s biological sex. More modern definitions will use the term sex assigned at birth rather than biological sex.

I am extremely skeptical of this term because while there are cases where we aren’t sure what someone’s sex is, like an intersex, I’ll talk about here a little later, I think the term sex assigned at birth risks relativizing the biological factor that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we can determine genetically, phenotypically, whether someone is a man or a woman. And so transgender identity would be… I would say the sense of male or female contradicting the biological fact of being a male or female member of a species. So, what should we do and reply to those who identify in this way? We should empathize with them. And we should support people who have gender dysphoria. We should walk a mile in someone’s shoes to understand it would be very distressing to feel like you’re trapped in the wrong body.

And there are many other bodily dysphorias where people feel a similar feeling that their body is not their own or something is wrong. And that would be greatly upsetting. And we should have empathy for that. However, that empathy should not encourage us to do things that are actually harmful for the person. So, in the catechism of the Catholic church, in paragraph 2297, it says, “We must reject non-therapeutic surgery that mutilates the body.” Now sometimes, if somebody has gangrene and they’re going to die, you cut off their limb. That’s for the good of the body as a whole. There’s a therapeutic reason here. But just as we wouldn’t give laxatives to someone who is an anorexic, because they have a mistaken sense of their bodily weight, we should not engage in surgeries that can cause… surgeries or hormonal treatments that can cause irreversible damage to someone because they have a mistaken view of whether they are male or female.

Other things that have come from the church on this issue recently, in 2015, the congregation for the doctrine of the faith prohibited, in an individual case, a individual, I believe it was a female identifying as a male, I might be confusing it here in my head, to be a godparent, a transgender individual identifying to be a godparent. The church said… As long as this person lives as the sex. They identify this way and live as the opposite sex that they are not biologically. It said that this does not accord with the truth of their sexuality, and they don’t possess the requirements to lead a life according to the faith. So, the church would not affirm this kind of a false portrayal of the human person. In 2017, the US conference of bishops signed a statement with other religious leaders saying the movement today to enforce the false idea that a man can be or become a woman or vice versa is deeply troubling.

It compels people to either go against reason or to face ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation. The document goes on to say, “We desire the health and happiness of all men, women, and children. Therefore, we call for policies that uphold the truth of a person’s sexual identity as male or female, and the privacy and safety of all.” So certainly, unjust discrimination would occur. Let’s say if a transgender individual goes to an emergency room with a gunshot wound, doctor doesn’t want to treat this person because they’re transgender. That would be unjust discrimination. But let’s say you have a doctor who does mastectomy for people who have breast cancer, but you have someone who has healthy mammary glands, and they want to remove them because they identify as a male, here, a doctor would not be unjust discrimination to say, “In my practice, I don’t amputate healthy breasts or mammary tissue. I only do unhealthy ones.”

And we risk, as my colleague said, them not having the freedom to be able to do that. Also, we can also know things from reason alone to make us skeptical of transgender ideology. I think one of the biggest ones here is, what do the terms man and woman mean? I mean, if you say a transgender man is a woman, this person is very offended. Many people are offended. But that implies the terms man and woman don’t mean the same thing. So, if they don’t mean the same thing, what’s the difference between the two? If the only difference is a man is someone who says, they’re a man, a woman is someone who says, they’re a woman. Then the terms don’t actually have any meaning at all. So, the entire thing becomes incoherent. Also, how could someone know? Maybe they’re mistaken about their sex?

What does it mean to say, “I am a man” or “I am a woman”? What actually does that… How could you know that you’re right. Because as my colleague noted, a majority of transgender children, you can look at the studies on his website, they cease to identify that way when they enter into adulthood, which is another reason to question so-called sex reassignment surgery at a young age. And finally, why don’t we accept other similar claims, someone who says they’re trans racial, or someone who says they have body identity integrity disorder. These are people who identify as amputees, but their arms and legs function properly. So, they want doctors to amputate healthy limbs. This is an article by Mueller and the 2009 American journal of bioethics. Is it justified? And Mueller says, “Well no, it’s not. Because we could see here this person has a kind of mental disorder that’s an incorrect perception of their body. And so, we can’t facilitate that.”

But really, how is that different from someone who identifies as the opposite sex and wants a body part amputated? I’ve never had anyone tell me what is the strict difference between the two. Moving on here… I’ve got about five minutes left, but that should be enough time to cover some of these. We talk about being non-binary or having an intersex identity. When it comes to the idea that there could be a mainstream identity of someone being neither male or female, according to a gender identity, this will be something that church rejects, at least on the non binary realm. In section 34 of the Vatican document, it says there is a need to reaffirm the metaphysical roots of sexual difference as an anthropological refutation of attempts to negate the male/female duality of human nature from which the family is generated. It says that we cannot see human beings as merely a sort of abstraction that we choose our own nature.

In section 25, it’s even clearer, saying the process of identifying sexual identity is made difficult by the fictitious construct known as gender neuter or third gender. This idea neither being male nor female. And I’ll say, when I look at it, the alternative genders… Usually what’s interesting, when people try to get rid of the binary, they still end up defining these alternatives in virtue of the binary. It’s either partially male and female, both, or neither, which I think speaks to the gender binary being rooted in the biological or an objective binary. So, the idea of gender, erasing male/female, I would say the church does not affirm that. Intersex would be different. This would be a biological condition. In that same Vatican document, it says the church recognizes the suffering of those who have to live with situations of sexual indeterminacy.

So, there are cases with biology where we have chromo… So, we have cases called intersex. They’re either chromosomal, hormonal, or anatomical anomalies that prevent healthy sexual development. I will say though, in the vast majority of intersex cases, we can identify that this is a male member of the species or a female member who has suffered from a kind of developmental anomaly. Two examples might be related to intersex. Turner syndrome. That’d be a woman who has a single X chromosome that affects and hinders female sexual development. Kleinfelter syndrome would be when a male has an extra X, so they’re XXY. That would hinder male sexual development. But here we can still determine there is a female and a male. Intersex, the rates of it are somewhere between 0.02% and 2% of births, depending on how broadly you define it. But only an extremely tiny minority of cases are there where we’re not sure if this person is male or female. There are only a handful I’ve ever counted in the literature. But these hard cases don’t disprove the general male/female essence of the human being.

Much the same way, there are very difficult brain death cases where we’re not sure if somebody is alive or dead. We’re not entirely sure, but that doesn’t disprove the life/death binary, would be an example I would give in contradiction to that. And I didn’t get a chance to put here about gender non-conformity. That’s a very broad topic maybe I could address in Q and A. But, I mean, at the basic level, a man who wants to be a kindergarten teacher, a woman who wants to be a Marine, churches and have a teaching on that. We can disagree. A man who repudiates being male at all? That’s where the church would say that would be problematic. Finally, our last three orientations. Asexual, lack of sexual attraction… I got about two minutes here. It’s not the same thing as celibacy. Celibacy is when you choose to not marry, regardless of your sexual attractions. Church doesn’t have an explicit teaching on that. But it could be an impediment to marriage because marriage is for the sexual act.

Just as the church does not marry people who are forever incapable of having sex, the church may not be able to marry someone who has no desire to have sex whatsoever. Marriage is different from every relationship because of its sexual element. Pansexual is not that you are attracted to every other person in the world. That would be exhausting. Pansexual individuals are those who are attracted to people regardless of their sexual or gender identity. They are attracted, I guess, to the idea of the person as a mental state, rather than their body per se. I would say the church, from everything I’ve gathered so far, would not affirm pansexual orientations as something to act upon, especially with someone outside of the male/female ethic, because it reduces human beings. Once again, it reduces humans to just being a mind, or a soul, rather than that soul body composite. And it rejects the importance of our bodily identities. Finally, we have polyamory, the desire to have sexual relations with more than one person at a time.

The Vatican document does reference polyamory by name. And it says that this would reduce family ties to individual preferences, and condemns that. It violates the moral law, as the catechism says in paragraph 2387, which would be the catechism paragraph on polygamy, different than polyamory, but related. And to be clear… It’s interesting. Divorce is kind of a serial polyamory or polygamy. You engage in the one flesh union with more than one person in a series, if you engage in divorce and remarriage. But polyamory would be all at once. So, even though polygamy and divorce were both tolerated in the Old Testament, they were not the ideal for God’s people. Instead, we’ve been given the sacrament of marriage in the new covenant, and God gives us the grace to live that out in a fruitful and loving way. And so, we are called to do that, and to help others, and to empathize with them as they learn to come to peace with the bodies and lives God has given them to help them carry their crosses.

As Galatians 6:2 says, let us ,carry one another’s burdens. We can do that without sacrificing truth. We can speak truth and charity without sacrificing either. So I hope that’s helpful. And I look forward to questions. So, I’ll turn it now. Let me… Hey guys, thank you so much for watching. I hope you really benefited from this presentation. I cover a lot of these topics as well with my coauthor Layla Miller in our book Made This Way.

It’s a book for Catholic parents, to teach them how to explain to their children these tough moral issues. You might want to check that out. Also, another good book, if you can find it online, Amazon isn’t publishing it, When Harry became Sally is a great book on transgender identity. Hopefully, I’ll do a future episode with more resources to help you out with this. It’s a tough subject, but one we have to face as it’s becoming more and more prevalent. So, thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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