NOWT SO QUEER AS FOLK

Ángela Ponce
Click on any image for a larger version

I have just read the Vatican's latest tract on transgender and intersex.

Well, I read most of it. I began to run out of steam around the middle and just skimmed the rest of it.

I haven't read anything so stunningly ignorant and incendiary from the Vatican since Benedict XVI's letter on clerical sex abuse to the Irish people.

It is based on the idea that transgender/intersex is a life style choice consciously and freely opted for by the individual. This is a stunning misrepresentation of what is involved for most affected people.

Not only that but it pursues this paper tiger reductio all the way to its absurdum. Consider this extract:

challenges emerging from varying forms of an ideology that is given the general name ‘gender theory’, which “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences

Let's face it. Either we're all God's creation, and theory and doctrine needs to be developed to encompass this, or these people are effecttively criticising God for being asleep on the job.

I am reminded of my mother's Novena to St. Joseph, where some element of the mystical body had clearly been dozing during working hours.

A society without sexual differences. What in Jaysus name is that, and who's advocating it. Now, if they were discussing the Holy Trinity I could sort of understand what they thought they were at.

In fact I considered an alternative title for this post:THE GENDER OF THE SOUL but it sounded too much like the language of this rubbish Vatican document and I dumped it in favour of a more colloquial title.

Let's look at a few more bits of this execrable text.

Over the course of time, gender theory has expanded its field of application. At the beginning of the 1990’s, its focus was upon the possibility of the individual determining his or her own sexual tendencies without having to take account of the reciprocity and complementarity of male-female relationships, nor of the procreative end of sexuality. Furthermore, it was suggested that one could uphold the theory of a radical separation between gender and sex, with the former having priority over the latter. Such a goal was seen as an important stage in the evolution of humanity, in which “a society without sexual differences” could be envisaged.

I am, unfortunately, not an expert in these matters but this sounds to me like a self-serving exaggeration. Again it relies on the free choice thesis. What if I were to describe it as "discernement"? Would that make any difference?

Consider the story of Kailyn Damm. This is not a case of a lightly taken decision, but rather of heroic but misguided resistance at great personal cost. Fortunately after almost a lifetime, the penny dropped and some degree of serenity followed. And this is from a CATHOLIC website.

Are the cretins in the Curia plugged into any of this or do they just babble on, serving up the same old mixture time and again.

the separation of sex from gender. This separation is at the root of the distinctions proposed between various “sexual orienta-tions” which are no longer defined by the sexual difference between male and female, and can then assume other forms, determined solely by the individual, who is seen as radically autonomous. Further, the concept of gender is seen as dependent upon the subjective mindset of each person, who can choose a gender not corresponding to his or her biological sex, and therefore with the way others see that person (transgenderism).

And don't miss the implicit condemnation of LGBTQ+ contained in the above paragraph.

The separation of sex from gender indeed. "radically autonomous", "subjective mindset", "choose a gender etc." - what world are these people living in? You have a God-given mickey, use it. Make more babies - souls to be harvested by the Lord in due course. I grew up with this stuff. I thought they'd have grown out of it since.

What counts is the absolutely free self-determination of each individual and the choices he or she makes according to the circumstances of each relationship of affectivity.

This is the swinging gender, changes with the wind. Nothing stable here.

It strikes me as I read through it that this is an attempted defence of the Creator which just flies in the face of his creation. It is vital for this gang to show that God has nothing to do with this sex/gender dissonance. It is purely the subjective (and erroneous) creation of the individual.

Who actually wrote this stuff? I was inclined to wonder about Benedict, but it is sufficiently illiterate to rule him out. Then there is the Cardinal and the Archbishop who signed it. Useful idiots?

It reads like the shit we would have regurgitated in the diocesan exam had we the vocabulary in those conforming and repressive days of yore. It might have got you a pass in that exam but certainly in no other.

Mind you, it has also taken refuge in throwing in areas of pastoral agreement (non-discrimination, dignity of human person, etc) to give it some pretence of reasonableness.

And then it goes overboard in its listing and praise of female attributes. That might be all very well for the purpose of this particular document. But just read the two paragraphs below in the light of the church's assertion that it is not appropriate to ordain women.

A further positive development in anthropological understanding also present in writing on gender has centred on the values of femininity. For ex-ample, women’s ‘capacity for the other’ favours a more realistic and mature reading of evolving situations, so that “a sense and a respect for what is concrete develop in her, opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society”. This is a contribution that enriches human relationships and spiritual values “beginning with daily relationships between people”. Because of this, society owes a significant debt to the many women “who are involved in the various areas of education extending well beyond the family: nurseries, schools, universities, social service agencies, parishes, associations and movements”.

Women have a unique understanding of reality. They possess a capacity to endure adversity and “to keep life going even in extreme situations” and hold on “tenaciously to the future”. This helps explain why “wherever the work of education is called for, we can note that women are ever ready and willing to give themselves generously to others, especially in serving the weakest and most defenceless. In this work they exhibit a kind of affective, cultural and spiritual motherhood which has inestimable value for the development of individuals and the future of society. At this point, how can I fail to mention the witness of so many Catholic women and Religious Congregations of women from every continent who have made education, particularly the education of boys and girls, their principal apostolate?”

These sound to me like an excellent recommendation for the ordination of any woman who wishes to put them forward.

I'm sort of running out of steam here and the document tends to be very repetitive when it's not introducing new outrageous material or papering over the cracks with pastoral truisms.

So I'll just leave you with a few more paragraphs, with minimum comment, to keep your blood pressure at its present level for a few moments longer.

In this understanding of things, the view of both sexuality identity and the family become subject to the same ‘liquidity’ and ‘fluidity’ that characterize other aspects of post-modern culture, often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants, or momentary desires provoked by emotional impulses and the will of the individual, as opposed to anything based on the truths of existence.

These ideas are the expression of a widespread way of thinking and acting in today’s culture that confuses “genuine freedom with the idea that each individual can act arbitrarily as if there were no truths, values and principles to provide guidance, and everything were possible and permissible”

in cases where a person’s sex is not clearly defined, 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.

Clearly the term "therapeutic" here is intended to be a divinely loaded one.

The process of identifying sexual identity is made more difficult by the fictitious constract (sic) known as “gender neuter” or “third gender”, which has the effect of obscuring the fact that a person’s sex is a structural determinant of male or female identity. Efforts to go beyond the constitutive male-female sexual difference, such as the ideas of “intersex” or “transgender”, lead to a masculinity or feminity (sic) that is ambiguous, even though (in a self-contradictory way), these concepts themselves actually presuppose the very sexual difference that they propose to negate or supersede. This oscillation between male and female becomes, at the end of the day, only a ‘provocative’ display against so-called ‘traditional frameworks’, and one which, in fact, ignores the suffering of those who have to live situations of sexual indeterminacy. Similar theories aim to annihilate the concept of ‘nature’, (that is, everything we have been given as a pre-existing foundation of our being and action in the world), while at the same time implicitly reaffirming its existence.

Wow, "constract" and "feminity", they haven't even proof read the damn thing.

The dialogue between Faith and Reason, “if it does not want to be reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise, it must begin from the present concrete situation of humanity and upon this develop a reflection that draws from the ontological-metaphysical truth”.

They should have listened to themselves on this one.

Further reading:

Tina Beattie's instant response.

A potentially damaging document.

Ángela Ponce