Vatican document casts gender change and fluidity as threat to human dignity
ROME
The Vatican on Monday issued a new document approved by Pope Francis stating that the church believes that gender-fluidity and transition surgery, as well as surrogacy, amount to affronts to human dignity.
The sex a person is assigned at birth, the document argued, was an “irrevocable gift” from God, and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” People who desire “a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes,” risk succumbing “to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”
Regarding surrogacy, the document unequivocally stated the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition, whether the woman carrying a baby “is coerced into it or chooses to subject herself to it freely.”
Surrogacy makes the child “a mere means subservient to the arbitrary gain or desire of others,” the Vatican said in the document, which also opposed in vitro fertilization.
The document was intended as a broad statement of the church’s view on human dignity, including the exploitation of the poor, migrants, women and vulnerable people.
The Vatican acknowledged that it was touching on difficult issues but said that in a time of great tumult it was essential, and it hoped beneficial, for the church to restate its teachings on the centrality of human dignity.
Even if the church’s teachings on culture war issues Francis has largely avoided are not necessarily new, their consolidation now is likely to be embraced by conservatives for their hard line against liberal ideas on gender and surrogacy.
The document, five years in the making, immediately generated deep consternation among advocates for LGBTQ+ rights in the church, who fear it will be used against transgender people. That was so, they said, even as the document warned of “unjust discrimination” in countries where transgender people are imprisoned or face aggression, violence and sometimes death.
“The Vatican is again supporting and propagating ideas that lead to real physical harm to transgender, nonbinary and other LGBTQ+ people,” said Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that advocates for gay Catholics, adding that the Vatican’s defense of human dignity excluded “the segment of the human population who are transgender, nonbinary or gender nonconforming.”
He said it presented an outdated theology based on physical appearance alone and was blind to
“the growing reality that a person’s gender includes the psychological, social and spiritual aspects naturally present in their lives.”
The document, he said, showed a “stunning lack of awareness of the actual lives of transgender and nonbinary people.” Its authors ignored the transgender people who shared their experiences with the church, DeBernardo said, “cavalierly,” and incorrectly, dismissing them as a purely Western phenomenon.