A failure to recognize the biological basis of gender is an offense to both reason and science, two California bishops assert in a new pastoral letter.
Since gender ideology denies “the reciprocal complementarity of man and woman,” it is “radically opposed to a sound understanding of human nature,” San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and Oakland Bishop Michael Barber write in their September 29 letter “The Body-Soul Unity of the Human Person.”
Gender ideology attempts to “promote a notion of personal identity which is left to the choice of the individual” and denies “the anthropological basis of the family as founded on the biological difference between male and female,” they write.
It is therefore “opposed to reason, to science, and to a Christian view of the human person,” they state.
Following ideology rather than sound science leads to offenses against human dignity and social injustice, they insist.
“From the beginning of his or her existence, the human person has a body that is sexually differentiated as male or female” and being man or being woman “is a reality which is good and willed by God,” they note.
For this reason, “one can never be said to be in the ‘wrong’ body,” they add.
Moreover, male-female sexual difference and complementarity are essential to a Christian understanding of marriage, “which is itself an image of Trinitarian communion,” they declare.
Addressing those who experience gender dysphoria, the bishops observe that “Jesus not only reveals God to us, but reveals us to us.”
“Our identity is not something we invent or create for ourselves,” they write. “Your most fundamental identity is that of a beloved child of God.”
The bishops also take issue with the euphemistically titled “gender-affirming care,” which causes immeasurable damage to young people.
“Great harm can be done in situations where medical procedures and treatments fail to respect the fundamental created order of the human person,” they warn, while encouraging physicians, healthcare workers, and anyone caring for people suffering from gender dysphoria to carefully consider the long-term consequences of their actions.
The bishops finish their letter citing the late Pope Benedict XVI, who said, “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary.”
Pope Benedict XVI reads papers in his summer residence on July 26, 2010, in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, Italy. (L’Osservatore Romano – Vatican Pool via Getty Images)