ROME, Italy — The United States Embassy to the Holy See celebrated “Transgender Day of Remembrance” Sunday, offering tribute “to those of the transgender community who have been murdered because of hate.”
According to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an annual observance on November 20 that honors the memory of transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.
Transgender activist Gwendolyn Ann Smith established TDOR in 1999 as a vigil to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a black transgender person who was killed in Allston Massachusetts in 1998.
In his 2016 letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Francis said that young people should be taught “respect and appreciation” for sexual differences, as a way of overcoming self-absorption.
Especially when experiencing difficulties with gender identity, “the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created,” he insisted.
Thinking that we enjoy “absolute power over our own bodies,” Francis warned, leads to the delusion that “we enjoy absolute power over creation.”
“An appreciation of our body as male or female,” he added, is “necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves.”
Efforts to cancel out biological differences between male and female are symptomatic of a society that “no longer knows how to deal with it,” he wrote.
Gender ideology “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family,” he warned.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of the LGBT Catholic organization DignityUSA, has said that the pope exhibits a “dangerous ignorance of gender identities.”
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