語言

Franciscan at Home

Forming those who form others

Gender Theory: Responding with Love and Logic

While camping at the World Youth Day vigil in Kraków this summer, I spoke with a young woman who was preparing to enter her first year of college at a prestigious university in California. She pulled her iPhone out of her backpack and showed me where her online college application required her to check the appropriate box to indicate her gender. There were 18 boxes to choose from. I read through the litany of genders, and noticed that two were missing: male and female. (Facebook—which invites its users to identify as one of 58 genders—at least offers them the possibility of choosing to be male or female.) The university application, however, did allow the incoming students to choose “cis-male” or “cis-female,” which means that the biological sex one was assigned at birth aligns with the gender one chooses as their identity. What’s going on? Where is this coming from? In a sense, it could be said that Gaudium et Spes prophesied our culture’s sexual identity crisis by stating, “when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible.” In order to offer pastoral care for individuals who struggle with gender dysphoria, it is useful to reflect upon the roots and ultimate goal of gender theory. Throughout its history, the Church has defended the truth of the human person from ideologies that aimed to separate the body and soul, including Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Cartesian Dualism. In varying ways, each of these schools of thought pitted the physical against the spiritual, considering what is material to be inferior to what is immaterial. Similarly, gender theory promotes the notion that one’s gender is a reality that exists independently of one’s body, and it defines one’s true identity. In other words, one’s body is not a reliable guide to discovering one’s identity. Rather, the body is a collection of parts that may be augmented or even surgically removed if they conflict with one’s internal feelings.

The rest of this online article is available for current Guild members.

Join the Guild today!

Jason Evert has traveled to six continents to bring the message of chastity to more than one million people over the past fifteen years. He earned a master’s degree in Theology, and undergraduate degrees in Counseling and Theology, with a minor in Philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Jason runs chastityproject.com and authored more than ten books, including Theology of the Body for Teens, Saint John Paul the Great, and How to Find Your Soulmate without Losing Your Soul. 

This article is from The Catechetical Review (Online Edition ISSN 2379-6324) and may be copied for catechetical purposes only. It may not be reprinted in another published work without the permission of The Catechetical Review by contacting [email protected]

Categorized Under
Categorized Under: 
Issue: 

Current Issue: Volume 10.4

Designed & Developed by On Fire Media, Inc.