Vatican casts gender fluidity as threat to human dignity
New document was approved by Pope Francis
ROME — The Vatican on Monday issued a 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 was 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He said it presented an outdated theology based on physical appearance alone and was blind to “the growing reality that a person’s gender includes the psychological, social, and spiritual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.”
Though the document is a clear setback for LGBTQ+ people and their supporters, the Vatican took pains in it to strike a balance between protecting personal human dignity and clearly stating church teaching, reflecting the tightrope Francis has tried to walk in his more than 11 years as pope.
Francis has made it a hallmark of his papacy to meet with gay and transgender Catholics and has made it his mission to broadcast a message for a more open and less judgmental church. But he has refused to budge on the church rules and doctrine that many gay and transgender Catholics feel have alienated them, revealing the limits of his push for inclusivity. The church teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”
The Vatican acknowledged that it was touching on hot-button issues but said the Vatican argued that in a time of great tumult around these issues, it was essential, and it hoped beneficial, for the church to restate its teachings on the centrality of human dignity.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who leads the Vatican’s office on doctrine, described in the foreword of the document the long process of its drafting, which began in March 2019, and how it took into account the “latest developments on the subject in academia and the ambivalent ways in which the concept is understood today.”