Why does the Catholic Church have to stand against the transgender movement? Why can’t Catholics just stay in their lane and let grown people do what they want to do?
The first thing that must be said is that the Catholic Church never went looking for a fight with men who wear dresses. That is not the issue at all. Rather, the Church is obliged to speak up on behalf of victims of injustice, and the transgender movement—though it covers itself in the language of compassion—is a movement steeped in injustice.
Consider an example: a friend of mine who is a child advocacy lawyer tells me of two boys in his state who were repeatedly raped by their own father. Then, when they were in the custody of the state, they began to claim they were not boys, but girls. Social workers began to “help” the boys present themselves as female—what’s now commonly known as “transitioning.”
Any person not caught up in the transgender delusion can easily see that this is madness. In fact, this kind of “care” perpetuates the cruelty done to the boys by their father—especially if it gets to the point of physical and chemical mutilation.
In a recent letter to the faithful under his charge, titled “A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology,” Bishop Michael F. Burbidge, of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, pointed out a particularly inconvenient truth:
Studies show that children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have high rates of comorbid mental health disorders, such as depression or anxiety, are three to four times more likely to be on the autism spectrum, and are more likely to have suffered from adverse childhood events, including unresolved loss or trauma or abuse.
Advocates for the transgender movement will object to Burbidge’s words here, insisting that the mental health problems of children who claim to be “mis-gendered” are caused by society’s rejection of their real identities. But there is no evidence for such an assertion. No, notwithstanding transgender activists’ objections, Burbidge’s language—pastoral language, along with some clinical reinforcement—describes the reality, which should alarm anyone who cares about the least among us: those who are vulnerable because they need intensive psychiatric help.
As story after story emerges from parents with such children—notably children with autism, though that’s not the only affliction we could mention—a picture is becoming clear of people, because they are vulnerable, being mistreated and manipulated by the health care professionals whose help they most need.
Recently, a mother called to ask for help during our broadcast of Catholic Answers Live. She started her call by saying, “I was screaming out to God last night.”
The night before, she had been arguing with her daughter, seventeen years old, whose mental health issues include autism, PTSD, severe depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. The argument was about the girl’s insistence that she is a boy.
As a normal and loving mother of a child with overwhelming mental health issues, all our caller wanted was for her daughter to continue treatment for the underlying conditions and wait on making any decisions regarding her sex. But she was terrified, because the same psychiatric doctors and hospitals the family had relied upon to care for their beloved child were now helping that same child to “transition.” When this mother visited her daughter in the hospital, she found that the staff had changed the hospital system’s entries for her name and sex. What’s more, they would not allow the mother to use the child’s given name or refer to her as a girl.
“I gave her a beautiful name,” this mother sobbed into the phone. “Do I not have any rights as the parent?”
Is there another power move quite as thorough as a mental hospital declaring that a child’s name and sex are now different, and insisting that if her mother wants to be included in the care of the child, she must go along or be labeled a problem? This mother now lives in constant fear of the medical professionals that her family depends on. She fears that they will harm the child physically—maybe even mutilate her as soon as she turns eighteen.
There is nothing else to call this except abuse rooted in an utterly deluded sense of false compassion.
We are all familiar with the bullying self-righteousness that now insists that the whole of society change the meanings of words such as mother and father, woman and man, but this is only the beginning of the bullying associated with the transgender movement.
Nowhere is this bullying more evident than in the mental health profession, especially when the institutions of that profession come into contact with the families of children with autism, trauma, and suicidal depression. In many cases today, families seeking help for their children have nowhere to turn except to institutions and doctors who have caved to the distorted illogic of the transgender movement. For the parents of vulnerable children, navigating a system that has surrendered to transgender ideology means risking their children in order to get them the help they need.
Bishop Burbidge gives a sense of what is at stake for these parents:
“Gender-affirming” medical or surgical interventions cause significant, even irreparable, bodily harm to children and adolescents. These include the use of puberty blockers (in effect, chemical castration) to arrest the natural psychological and physical development of a healthy child, cross-sex hormones to induce the development of opposite-sex, secondary sex characteristics, and surgery to remove an adolescent’s healthy breasts, organs, and/or genitals.
Imagine having lived night and day for years to keep your suicidal child alive, to help your autistic child to be part of a community, or to root your psychotic child in reality—only to face that those charged with helping your child might—with full legal authority—do such things to them as what Burbidge has laid out in his letter.
Parents of children with autism, major depression, schizophrenia, and similar disorders are entirely dependent on doctors to prescribe the medicines and on hospitals to provide the emergency care that their children depend on. That these parents have to acquiesce to a lie is in itself grossly unjust. That they have to live in terror that their children will be mutilated, or removed from their parental custody, or both, is simply monstrous.
It is not prudish for the Catholic Church to stand against an ideology so shot through with injustice. It is obligatory.