An identity-based sensibility blinds Fr. James Martin, SJ, to a social contagion harming the vulnerable minds of children and leading to the mutilation of healthy bodies and genitals.
“How far your eyes may pierce I can not tell: Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.” King Lear Act 1:4:368-69 Albany to Goneril
Table of Contents
Part 1: The Most Marginalized Group in the Church Today
Fr. Martin, who normally assigns the superlative designation to LGBTQ Catholics as a whole, has recently raised to premier victim status the T, declaring transgendered persons “surely the most marginalized group in the church today.”
The buzzword marginalized, springing from Critical theories, is one of many that flows trippingly from the tongues of those who – like Fr. Martin – “pierce” the church through a Critical lens and see a heteronormative institution that excludes and oppresses those with differing sexual and gender identities.
Fr. Martin often tells us Jesus “continually reached out to those who felt ignored, excluded or marginalized.” But lepers, the destitute, prostitutes, tax collectors, thieves, Samaritans, and others were social outcasts in fact. The persons “on the margins” whom Jesus encountered enjoyed none of the political and financial support of Judea’s social and cultural institutions.
Of course Jesus welcomed all into His embrace as the church is always called to do; but there is no record that He lied to any in order to make them feel included.
No matter how mercifully stated, truth – in the judgment of Fr. Martin – “marginalizes.”
He finds “the worst kind of marginalization” in Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington, VA, whose Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology states that “no one ‘is’ transgender.” This statement, according to Fr. Martin, represents “the worst kind of discrimination and the worst kind of hatred” because it declares that “someone doesn’t exist.”
Did the bishop lie?
No. His statement is in accord with reality: both in church teaching that “a person is created male or female” and in biological fact that a person’s identity as male or female is “a truth reflected in every cell of the body.”
The bishop failed a test.
The quotation marks around “is,” indicating that a person’s subjective “truth” is not the truth, are “pierced” by Fr. Martin into an insult: in failing to affirm a person’s feelings, Bishop Burbidge has failed to cross the Jesuit’s bridge of respect, compassion, and sensitivity.
Fr. Martin’s identity allies at New Ways Ministry claim the bishop’s document “relies on trans-negative church teachings and right wing sources…(and) wholeheartedly endorses the gender complementarity theology at the core of LGBTQ oppression in the church, going so far as to claim, ‘Sexual difference is at the heart of family life.’”
“Going so far as to claim…”?
Considering “sexual difference (being) at the heart of family life” an extreme idea shows how deeply incorporated Critical queer and gender theories have become in certain segments of the church. While respect, compassion, and sensitivity must be hallmarks of our Christian interaction with others, they become, by avoiding truth, buzzwords that place in peril our children.
The bishop’s catechesis is a true and truly compassionate document – and necessary in a time when children are at grave risk.
What is new in our times…is the growing cultural acceptance of the erroneous claim that some people, including children and adolescents, are ‘in’ the ‘wrong body’ and therefore must undergo ‘gender transition,’ either to relieve distress or as an expression of personal autonomy. … At its core, this belief in a ‘transgender’ identity rejects the significance of the sexed body and seeks cultural, medical, and legal validation of the person’s self-defined identity–an approach called ‘gender affirmation.’
What are we as Catholics to affirm about the body? Is the “body a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God” (1Cor: 6-19-20)? Or have we come to believe that this temple is our own and mutable, a construction of the self?
Part 2: How Far Does a Postmodern Jesuit’s Eyes Pierce?
“What is new in our times” is what Critical theories – assertions, not empirical facts – regarding sex, gender, and sexuality have wrought in our culture.
We are living in a transgender moment, as Ryan Anderson calls it in 2018’s When Harry Became Sally. Queer and gender theorists believe “the real self is fundamentally separate from the material body” while insisting, in a queered cura personalis, that “transforming the body is crucial for personal wholeness.”
The ideology, Anderson explains, promotes a “radical subjectivity in which individuals” are free “to define the truth as they choose,” thus incapacitating reason to affirm a lie: sex is “assigned at birth.”
Those most certainly wounded by the queering of our culture – children, adolescents – do not have the benefit of Fr. Martin’s advocacy. The Critical lens through which he “pierces” the world distorts their plight to preserve the integrity of theory.
In May 2022, Fr. Martin published a lengthy essay, “The Church and the Transgender Person: A Pastoral Approach” at Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic resource he established under the auspices of America media. In its 6,000 words, Fr. Martin, upset with church shepherds who have not crossed his bridge, misses the forest.
For the past decade or so, parents have been facing an unprecedented phenomenon, “rapid onset gender dysphoria”: their children are rejecting the sexed bodies God has given them and seeking to replace them with the bodies they feel they ought to have.
Yet Fr. Martin focuses almost exclusively on adults who made decisions as adults to become a trans man or trans woman. He wields their genuine “decades-long feelings of deep dissatisfaction with their gender” as a shield to avoid confronting the mental-emotional contagion affecting children unshielded from postmodern Critical influences.
Part 3: Missing the Forest
Since only 0.6% of people identify as transgender, according to a 2021 Gallup Poll, Fr. Martin wonders why so many bishops are suddenly instituting policies that become “condemnations of ‘gender ideology’” and what he claims are “sweeping restrictions on transgender people.”
Did he examine the poll he cites? The small 0.6% total for the entire adult population 18 and over is in fact a 200% increase in those who usually identify as transgender. Why the increase? The 0.6% includes a highly unusual 1.2% of millennials (those born between 1981 – 1996) and 1.8% of Generation Z (those born between 1997 – 2017) who describe themselves as “assigned” the wrong sex at birth.
Also new – and completely ignored by Fr. Martin – is that, prior to a decade ago, the very few cases of gender dysphoria (historically closer to 0.1% of the populace) occurred almost entirely among boys. The unprecedented rise in dysphoria is now occurring primarily, and for the first time, in girls.
“Before 2012, there was no scientific literature on girls ages 12 – 21 ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” observes Abigail Shrier, whose 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is not cited by Fr. Martin anywhere in his essay. “For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those with dysphoria, they constitute the majority.”
Even the mainstream media is finally catching on, but it took three reporters from Reuters to discover recently what Shrier has been vilified for uncovering almost three years ago: The United States has seen “an explosion in recent years in the number of children who identify as a gender different from what they were designated at birth.”
Jesuit priests Fr. Martin and Fr. Keenan are protecting a theory when it is children who are in danger, boys and girls somehow convinced the very bodies with which God has blessed them are mistakes.
Fr. Martin does link to a commentary (behind a paywall) discussing Dr. Lisa Littman’s research of parents whose teens insist their “gender identity didn’t match their sex, although they’d shown none of the common prepubescent signs of” gender dysphoria. Dr. Littman’s work, covered extensively in Shrier’s book, has survived strenuous efforts to suppress it.
Even as he admits – parenthetically – that “the number of teens who identify as transgender has been on the rise in the past few years,” what he stresses is that “most transgender adults say they were not influenced by external forces, peer pressure, or media encouragement, much less ‘gender ideology.’”
He cites Boston College moral theologian James F. Keenan, SJ, who discusses his “transformative” listening experiences with transgendered adults, none of whom ever mentioned “gender ideology.” Fr. Keenan’s conversations occurred 20 years ago.
Yes, each transgender adult known by Fr. Martin and Fr. Keenan “rejects the idea that ‘gender ideology’ is behind their experiences.” But unlike those adults, trans millennials and Generation Z are students of the postmodern Critical Academy, who have also been deeply involved with social media and their many influencers and gurus, such as Chase Ross and Alex Bertie.
Jesuit fathers are protecting a theory when it is children who are in danger, boys and girls somehow convinced the very bodies with which God has blessed them are mistakes.
Part 4: Gender-Affirming Bridge to the Gold Mine
When Fr. Martin references an NBC report that three major medical organizations have concluded “gender-affirming care is medically necessary for transgender youth and is backed by decades of research,” he does not note the report’s contradiction.
There have been no “decades of research” involving “youth” because both the “explosion” in children identifying as transgender and the gender-affirmation model of treatment are recent.
Critical theories have penetrated the major institutions, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Aaron Sibarium, in observing this ideological takeover of the professions, reveals that four members of a six-person committee created in 2016 by the AAP to support children with gender dysphoria were working in pediatric gender clinics that prescribed puberty blockers to patients as young as 10 and cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 14. Its 2018 policy statement endorsing gender-affirmative care was written by a single doctor, Dr. Jason Rafferty [in video below], and apparently not “reviewed by anyone else at the organization.”
During a 90-minute Psychiatry Grand Rounds in November 2022, “Caring for Gender-Diverse Youth,” which was presented by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Dr. Rafferty discussed child-friendly graphics used as teaching tools: the Genderbread Person, the Gender Unicorn, and the Gender Book, which he uses with children and whose authors are self-identified as “queer and trans folks.”
Though many factors are always in play, the rise of rapid onset gender dysphoria is a Western phenomenon that coincides with the dissemination into the cultural bloodstream of the Academy’s Critical queer and gender theories. A 2022 Gallup poll shows almost 21% of Generation Z now identify as LGBT, with 2.1 % (instead of 1.8%) now saying they are transgender.
In 2007 there was one pediatric gender clinic in the United States, says Shrier; today, we have hundreds. Planned Parenthood itself now offers transgender services in over 200 of their offices. Children’s hospitals are actively involved in gender transition surgeries. The lack of curiosity from the Society of Jesus about a growth industry pertaining to children suggests the order’s apostolic preference to promote a “healthy and safe environment for children” is less virtue than signal.
Affirming a 15-year-old’s feelings that she is born in the wrong body is a lucrative endeavor. Critical theories are gold.
Part 5: Is Gender-Affirming Care Cura Personalis?
Gender-affirming care is attractive to those who believe feelings must be affirmed in order to be respectful, compassionate, and sensitive.
Shrier explains that “mental health specialists must affirm not only the patient’s self-diagnosis of dysphoria but also the accuracy of the patient’s perceptions.” The therapists must agree that a male patient with gender dysphoria who identifies as a girl really is a girl. They use the child’s new name and new pronouns; the gender journey has begun.
Once affirmed, puberty blockers are the next step, Lupron being the most common drug provided. Lupron’s original purpose, says Shrier, was for the chemical castration of sex offenders. The FDA has never approved it for halting healthy puberty.
Has Fr. Martin, who insists the church must “listen” to the transgendered, listened to Chloe Cole, who detransitioned after undergoing years of puberty blockers and an irreversible double mastectomy when she was 15? She recalls being 11 years old when body image issues and exposure to gender content online pushed her dysphoria toward affirmative care.
As Abigail Favale points out in her book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, the gender-affirmation model is a “mass-scaled, unassessed experiment” on children’s healthy bodies and healthy genitals. Children given blockers almost always move on to taking cross-sex hormones and thus “never go through puberty.” This leads to permanent sterility while it “arrests critical brain and bone development.”
Top surgeries (double mastectomies) and bottom surgeries (vaginoplasty, phalloplasty and metoidioplasty) become a next step for those who feel they were born in the wrong body and whose feelings are affirmed by adults.
Has Fr. Martin, who insists the church must “listen” to the transgendered, listened to Helen Kerschner, who has detransitioned? Advocates of compassionate care should be, she says, “noticing the sweeping demographic change and exponential increase” in those transitioning and “inquire openly into what is causing it.”
Has Fr. Martin listened to Chloe Cole, who detransitioned after undergoing years of puberty blockers and an irreversible double mastectomy when she was 15? She recalls being 11 when body image issues and exposure to gender content online pushed her dysphoria toward affirmative care.
Version 8 of the Standards of Care by WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) recommends that “in almost all situations, parental/caregiver consent should be obtained” before affirmative treatments are initiated except “when caregiver or parental involvement is determined to be harmful to the adolescent.” Who makes the determination as to how and when “parental involvement” becomes “harmful” is not stated, but many school administrators have decided they can and should.
The draft of these new guidelines, issued in September, had included minimum age recommendations: age 14 for receiving estrogen or testosterone, age 15 for allowing minors to have mastectomies, and vaginoplasty and hysterectomy at age 17. But negative reaction led to some last-minute excisions of specific ages, leaving those decisions up to the professional judgment of the clinicians. WPATH President Marci Bowers, a transgender surgeon, told the New York Times that “reinstituting the young age recommendations will require ‘a better political climate.’”
Fortunately, some health care officials – in Europe – are greeting these updated standards of care skeptically. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare – questioning the reliability of WPATH’s scientific evidence and noting the increasing number of detransitioners – has put an end to treatments that affirm a child’s self-diagnosed gender identity.
Serious problems have recently been revealed concerning the two Dutch studies of 2011 and 2014 that were primarily responsible for launching the gender-affirming model of treatment for young people. Those studies reported “only the best-case scenario outcomes” and failed “to properly examine” the risk of “the radical, irreversible nature of ‘gender-affirming’ medical and surgical interventions.”
However, research into both the rise in gender dysphoria among adolescents and the gender-affirmative model of care is not always appreciated. The moral theologian Fr. Keenan cites – approvingly – physician-scientist Jack Turban, who is skeptical of any studies “asking what determines someone’s gender identity,” suspecting anti-LGBTQ purposes. He believes transgender children must be affirmed. “It’s time we celebrate that and move on.”
Curiosity was once an essential attribute for all doctors and scientists, but the quasi-religious nature of Critical theories compel the curious to pass a politically correct test before being taken seriously.
Is there any limiting principle to cura personalis, the care for the whole person? Or does cura personalis necessitate affirming adolescent feelings at all costs?
Part 6: The Bridge from Judith Butler to Queer Theology
Educational institutions combining cura personalis with a commitment to gender diversity, equity, and inclusion – which Jesuit colleges and universities do – follow a gender-affirming model.
Fr. Martin may not trust the institutional church on questions regarding gender, but a theologian he does trust is Fr. Daniel Horan, OFM, who, like Fr. Keenan, denounces the term “gender ideology” as used by Catholic prelates. Fr. Horan says the term is a political “rallying cry” for “discrimination and (a) defense of (an) inexcusably outdated” Christian view of the genesis and nature of man, a “static, universal Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology.” Its usage “is deployed in Catholic circles to cause grave harm to people already made vulnerable in an unjust society.”
Because “those who invoke ‘gender ideology’ generally don’t know what they are talking about” and are “right-wing,” Fr. Horan suggests the church listen to leading scholars on the subject of sex and gender, scholars like Judith Butler, to whom he links.
Butler, who goes by the pronouns they/she, is a self-identified non-binary lesbian and the most influential queer theorist in the Academy. Among her publications are Undoing Gender and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Her assertions regarding sex and gender are at home in any school’s office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Butler insists gender theory “is neither destructive nor indoctrinating.” It simply “calls into question the repressive dogma that has cast so many gender and sexual lives into the shadows.”
She invokes feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, whose assertion “one is not born a woman but becomes one” has inspired subsequent academicians. Although Beauvoir never denied the biological reality of sex, Butler manipulates her idea to do so.
“Nothing about being assigned female at birth determines what kind of life a woman will lead and what the meaning of being a woman might be. Indeed, many trans people are assigned one sex at birth, only to claim another one in the course of their lives. And if we build on the logic of Beauvoir’s ‘existentialist’ account of social construction, then one may be born a female, but become a man.”
What is female and male, says Butler, ought never be considered fixed identities. Even the “biological complementarity of the two sexes” is a social fiction maintained through discourse.
The Butlerian assertion that sex is assigned at birth comes from queer theory’s devious manipulation of the medical term known as intersex – a range of congenital conditions, as Favale explains, that “disrupt the development of sexual characteristics,” some of which (but not all) may create an outward ambiguity about the sex of the person, which doctors strive to resolve.
That intersex people exist has no bearing on the binary, says Favale, because biological sex is “constitutive of the whole person.” The human body is structured to produce either large sex cells (ova), making the body female, or small sex cells (sperm), making the body male. This two-fold distinction between large and small gametes is universal and stable. There is no third gamete nor a spectrum of possible gametes.
The sex binary is, says Favale, the “necessary foundation for the continued transmission of human existence,” to whose defense the Church is called.
Citing both Butler and Susannah Cornwall, professor of constructive theologies at the University of Exeter, Craig A. Ford, Jr., at St. Norbert’s College, calls it a “fiction” that “human sex manifests as a simple binary of male and female.”
Concerned that the church’s teaching about human nature “excludes sexually queer identities as more or less pathological,” Ford seeks to construct a theology “queer enough to be able to challenge both gender essentialism and gender complementarity.”
Dr. Ford writes on topics at the intersection of “queer theory, critical race theory, and the Catholic moral tradition.” His Ph.D. dissertation at Boston College, Foundations of a Queer Natural Law, was directed by Fr. James F. Keenan, S.J..
First published February 2, 2023, at Jesuit School @ Substack and slightly modified here.