The decidedly un-Catholic National Catholic Reporter recently ran an article by a young woman who has surgically “transitioned” to live as a man, who now goes by the name of Maxwell Kuzma. The enemy has deceived this beautiful young woman. As a mother of children her age, my heart and prayers go out to her and to her parents. But the battle for truth and for souls requires us to challenge grave errors and heresies.
Satan is the father of lies, and lies are the inversion of truth. Because the devil cannot create anything on his own, he must invert and distort the truth in order to destroy God’s created order and thus snare souls. Catholics must look for examples of inversion to help us identify when the deceiver is at work.
Inversion #1: Arguments are “me”-centered, not God-centered
In authentic Catholic doctrine and thought, God is always at the center, and man conforms himself to God. He is the Creator, and we are the creatures. He knows how and for what purpose we are made, and our nature is his domain alone. Man is made in God’s image and not the other way around. When we place ourselves at the center, with God as a prop for our own feelings and experiences, we have inverted reality.
In Kuzma’s short article, I found 53 uses of the words I, me, and myself. By contrast, I found zero uses of the words God, Jesus, Spirit, Father, or Lord. I expected a lopsided ratio, but I did not expect zero.
We should expect an ostensibly Catholic publication, in running a discussion of or dissent from Catholic teaching, would include a reference to God. But God did not figure into this discussion, which makes sense if you understand inversion. The appeal here is not to God Almighty, his laws, and created order, but to self—to personal feelings and experience.
But with self instead of God at the center, why can’t anyone’s emotions or experience dictate morality? Adulterers, fornicators, gluttons, thieves, embezzlers . . . anyone at all should be able to remake the moral law in a way that feels comfortable. It’s true that we live in a culture where “LGBTQ” sins and temptations are somehow more special and protected than other sins and temptations, getting encouragement, even “reverence,” unlike the others. But there is no logical reason why the other sins could not also be considered “true” if man is the center and arbiter. When we invert the way we determine truth, we invert the truth, too.
Inversion #2: Sinners shaming the faithful as if the faithful were sinning
Though innocent, Jesus Christ was mocked, blamed, and falsely accused. Faithful Catholics are similarly scapegoated when they will not cooperate with grave sin. In this instance, Kuzma’s parents are painted as the bad guys, as sinners lacking love. They are, we are told, “cold and distant” because they would not accede to what their daughter wanted (emphasis mine):
I wanted my mom and my dad to be there with me at my doctor’s appointments. I wanted them to be waiting to pick me up after surgery, to take me home and feed me soup and put on my favorite movies. . . . I wanted my parents to use my name and pronouns and to celebrate me as their son.
Kuzma accuses her parents of “preferring dogmatic legalism over willingness to see the real me. ” But in fact, it is right order that Catholic parents would choose God and his Truth (“dogmatic legalism”) over destructive lies. Any right-thinking, godly parent would have no part in a beloved child’s mutilation. Authentic love refuses to go along with a lie.
Referencing “gender theory,” Pope Francis echoes Pope Benedict in saying, “We are living in an epoch of sin against God the Creator.” And the U.S. bishops warn that the “false idea” of transgenderism “compels people either to go against reason . . . or face ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation.”
Kuzma’s parents are victims of such retaliation. Increasingly, if a parent does not cave to a child’s emotional manipulation regarding irrational appeals—essentially putting creature over Creator—the parent will be cast as the sinner. We see this inversion everywhere now: parents are expected to “accompany” their child’s homosexual relationships, cohabitation, invalid marriages, abandonment of spouse, and “transitioning.” The sinners are seen as righteous, and the righteous are treated as sinners.
Inversion #3: Physical reality versus imagination
The lies of gender theory have no momentum unless we elevate imagination and emotion over what is tangible, scientific, and real. Kuzma is explicit in her admission that feelings determine reality: her physical body “did not ring true to me” (emphasis mine).
It should go without saying that no one is permitted a private “truth” about objective things. Truth is what corresponds to reality. The physical world that God created, that can be known by the senses, is reality. In an inverted reality, created things are suspect, and imagination holds the truth.
We know indisputably that, despite injected hormones and deforming surgeries, there is not one physical part of Kuzma’s being that is not intrinsically female, including the brain she believes is telling her she is a man. Every single one of the approximately 100 billion cells in her brain is stamped, indelibly, female. Any and all DNA before and after death will be female, and her resurrected body at the Final Judgment will, along with her united soul, be female.
I often ask LGBTQ advocates to show me where “gender” is found outside the imagination. No one has answered. “Gender” is not found in any measurable scientific, objective, or sensible thing. Imagination is subjective and forever “fluid,” often contradicting reality.
Feeling something, even deeply, does not make it so, just as believing something with conviction does not make it true. Truth is outside ourselves. It does not change with our desires, and we are not its arbiters.
If we reject God’s created order for imaginary “truths,” we are attempting to undo what God created in the Garden. In fact, that inversion is what I found when I clicked a link on Kuzma’s piece that led me to a “related article” by Jessica Gerhardt.
Inversion #4. Rejection of natural law for an “experiential” approach to morality
Gerhardt tells us, based on not a hint of Catholic teaching or understanding, that “trans-inclusive feminism is compatible with Catholicism.” She has made this up, by inversion.
Her bizarre claim requires that we reject natural law, which is foundational to Catholic thought. What is natural law? Natural law is the universal moral law of God, which is ascertainable by all men through the light of human reason alone. It asks the question, “What is this created thing, and what is its nature, its purpose (telos)?” This includes man and woman, and that began in the Garden. As the Catechism puts it, “the natural law expresses the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie” (1954).
Gerhart discourages “clinging to Aristotelian natural law or gender essentialism” and encourages people to “expand their imagination, to allow for new categories” instead. After admitting that the pope calls transgenderism a sin against the Creator, she inverts it to a virtue, to “perhaps a way of becoming a more integrated, whole person.”
After all, she claims, Jesus taught more through “experiential knowledge” than he taught objective truth. Jesus, who is Unchanging Truth, and the history of his vicars beg to differ: Back in 1939, Pope Pius XII lamented the world’s “drift toward chaos” and blamed that chaos on “disregard . . . and forgetfulness of the natural law itself.” The chaos surrounding us today is exponentially worse (no one could have dreamed of the folly of “gender ideology”), as now natural law teaching is essentially non-existent. The abandonment of natural law truth for “experiential truth” is a dangerous inversion, because it’s become how we teach children—in the broader culture and, unfortunately, in large swaths of the Church.
Inversion #5: Twisting Scripture to mean its opposite
The devil has inverted Scripture to use against God for millennia, but in her article, Gerhardt twists Scripture in grotesque new ways.
In a huge translation overreach with no grounding in, or even appeal to, Catholicism, Gerhardt proposes that Adam can be “seen as nonbinary or intersex.” She quotes another author’s “alternative Catholic framework” (read: anti-Catholic idea) to pervert Matthew 5:27-30 beyond all recognition. Where Jesus says, hyperbolically, to cut off the body parts that cause us to sin lest we go to hell, the inverters have twisted this into Jesus’ approval of surgical genital mutilation and double mastectomies to escape the sex that God created us to be.
But the inversions get worse. Gerhardt uses the glorified, resurrected body of Christ as a confirmation of or affirming parallel to the scarred and mutilated bodies of the “transgendered,” arguing that the “holes” and “brokenness” of Christ’s resurrected body “challenge” and even overrule the “perfection” of God’s creation of Adam and Eve.
The idea that Christ’s selfless love through the wounds of his crucifixion gives permission to mutilate our bodies in defiance of our creation is a blasphemy. Christ gave not an ounce of his flesh or a drop of his blood for his own will or desire. There was no “me” in his sacrifice, which was undertaken for the redemption of our sins, not for their affirmation.
Ultimately, Kuzma and Gerhardt have conflated their own subjective feelings and desires with the truth. It is a shame and a scandal that a dissident “Catholic” publication has given their heresies a platform.
For us, the most important takeaway is the need for discernment among the faithful. We must look for inversions as red flags. If an attempt at persuasion is littered with inversions of our Faith, reject it, and turn away as if you are being seduced by the devil himself. Because you are.