Context: Yesterday we learned that transgender people are the embodiment of evil and that as long as we are allowed to exist in this world, incidents like murdering nine people at a prayer meeting because of their race is bound to happen.
That seems to me to be a call for violence against us. But I suppose that could just be my interpretation.
If we indeed are responsible for all the evil in the world, I apologize. We certainly didn't mean for that to happen. We are peaceful, loving people just trying to find a place of comfort in this world.
Francis, I sit here appalled at you. From many of your statements about issues ranging from the evils of capitalism, to the mistreatment of the poor and the need to improve as custodians of the environment, we are pretty much on the same page.
But then I stumbled across what you said about us transgender people in your latest encyclical. You know what they say, Francis. "If you can't speak well of someone, then keep your peace."
To put it in a context that might mean more to you,
When you hold your tongue, you demonstrate that you have maturity and knowledge.
--Proverbs 17:27
But no...you didn't do that.
The acceptance of our bodies as God's gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home.
Whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.
Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology.
Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different.
--Pope Francis, Laudato Si
Yet, Francis, here you are, putting on your glasses.
Why are you using glasses, rather than just accepting your body as God gave it to you?
In your statement, you state that you have found a failing in yourself (the inability to know yourself when confronted by a trans person) and assigned the blame in that to us.
Transgender people do not assert that we have power over creation. We just wish to be comfortable in our own skin.
Is it really your place to pass judgment on this segment of God's creation? He created us just as surely as he created you.
And ours is not to reason why he did so.
I surmise that you might be hung up on the phrase those who hate us toss out at almost every occasion:
God does not make mistakes.
If so, then we are here for a purpose. Wouldn't it be more useful for us to jointly try to divine what that purpose is than to condemn us for existing?
A general, natural law-based statement in favor of gender essentialism is unsurprising. Nevertheless, interpretation must attend to specific silences, or in this instance, relative quiet on sexuality against the resounding demand for economic and ecological justice, cultivated at both personal and political levels.
[L]et’s take the pope’s keen insistence on the interconnections not only within ecosystems, but also among scientific, economic, political and cultural approaches to their functioning. Then there is Francis’ beautifully mystical spirituality of nature. He reminds us that humans, like all creatures, are of dust, “our very bodies made up of [earth’s] elements” (LS 2; Gen 2:17). These are precisely the bodies in which “each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure” (No. 239) and in which a human person “enters into relationships, going out from themselves to live in communion with God, with others and with all creatures” (No. 240). Yet this complex interpretive dynamic falls by the wayside around certain aspects of embodied life; what might result from a more consistent interdisciplinary treatment of gender and sexuality as elements of the manifold diversity of creaturely life?”
--Elizabeth Pine, New Ways Ministry
. . . .the argument is that a person’s chromosomal/physical gender represents an expression of divine will and that living contrary to that chromosomal/physical inheritance is contrary to God’s will.
There are many aspects of our lives as human beings that are expressions of our genetic inheritance. Not all of these are positive and some (e.g. a genetic predisposition to juvenile diabetes) are potentially lethal. I’m not aware of the Church ever holding that it would be illegitimate to treat such a condition simply because we were born with it.
Ultimately, the concern of religious conservatives with transgender individuals who choose to transition seems to be a fear that this is merely another triumph for expressive individualism and a rejection of the idea that gender, per Genesis 5:2, is actually encoded in the fabric of creation.
. . . [T]he actual experience of the small number of transgender people I have known appears to cut against the idea that gender is primarily a social construct. They spent most of their early years working extraordinarily hard to conform to their genetic/physical gender identity without success. Once they made the decision to transition, they worked equally hard to conform to their new gender identity and incurred large expenses to obtain reassignment surgery. It was not a decision motivated by ideology.
--J. Peter Nixon, dotCommonweal
Earlier this year
you compared us to nuclear weapons.
Let's think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings.
Let's think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.
--Pope Francis, This Economy Kills
Perhaps it would be helpful, Francis, if you or one of your aides might elucidate your understanding of gender theory. Because it is not something with which we are familiar.