This Monday, the Vatican released an attack on the LGBTQ+ community after they issued an official document from the Congregation for Catholic Education that rejected the idea of gender fluidity and gender identity, furthering the harmful and scientifically inaccurate understandings of gender. The document is intended to be used as guide for sex education for those who work with children
The document most notably stands against modern understanding of gender being more than a binary and argues for medically incorrect sexual education. The document incorrectly states that fluid sexual identities are “often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants.”
According to the organization GenderSpectrum, “A person’s gender is the complex interrelationship between three dimensions: body, identity, and expression.” The organization argues that to deny people the space and acceptance to have fluidity in these dimensions is to make them targets of disapproval, discrimination and violence.
The document also states that a person’s sex has been chosen by God and no one else: “The Holy Scripture reveals the wisdom of the Creator’s design, which “has assigned as a task to man his body, his masculinity and femininity; and that in masculinity and femininity he, in a way, assigned to him as a task his humanity.”
“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades,” says Dr. Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist at the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System in New York.
The Vatican is not alone in attempting to defy science to attack the trans community. This past October, the Trump administration announced a plan to rigidly redefine gender based on genitalia at the time of birth. Not only is the Trump administration actively hurting transgender Americans by legitimizing erasure, but they are furthering a scientifically incorrect perception of gender.
Media Resources: Washington Times 6/10/19; BBC News 6/10/19; Congregation for Catholic Education 6/10/19; GenderSpectrum 6/12/19; Feminist Newswire 1/28/19
