“Repeating a Silly Idea Doesn’t Make It True”: Where Some Bishops Err on Trans Identities

Today’s post is from Bondings 2.0 contributor Lisa Fullam, D.V.M., Th.D., professor emerita, Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. Lisa’s previous posts on the blog are available here.

One of the more curious accusations leveled at transgender people in Catholic magisterial documents is that of dualism, that somehow trans people are adopting the stance that body and soul/mind/spirit are considered separable in the human person, and that bodily sex is a matter of personal choice. 

Pope Benedict XVI raised this concern in his 2012 letter to the Curia: “People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”

Pope Francis picked up the theme in Amoris Laetitia, speaking of “an ideology of gender that ‘denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, ….Consequently, human identity becomes the choice of the individual, one which can also change over time” (n. 56).

In 2019, the Congregation for Catholic Education beat the same drum, while misusing some basic terminology: “the concept of gender is seen as dependent upon the subjective mindset of each person, who can choose a gender not corresponding to his or her biological sex, and therefore with the way others see that person (transgenderism)” (n. 11).

Most recently, Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City attacked “the transgender movement” this way: “The transgender movement is rooted in a modern form of dualism where body and soul/mind/spirit are separate realities. In this view, the human person is the immaterial inhabitant of a physical host. The material body therefore can be manipulated in service to the immaterial soul/mind/spirit.”

Repeating a silly idea doesn’t make it true. Further, this accusation is exactly backwards; any body/soul dualism here is in the magisterial minds, not those of the people they attack. Let me explain. 

Fundamental Catholic anthropology holds that the human person is incarnate spirit, in other words an inseparable body/soul composite. Resurrection (Jesus’ and, in time, our own) is not merely a matter of disembodied spirits floating around but involves physical bodies: the risen Jesus ate and drank with his friends, invited Thomas to touch his wounds, grilled fish on the beach for breakfast. His body wasn’t identical to his previous body—he had an unsettling tendency to show up in closed rooms, for example—but he was still a body, flesh and blood, not spirit alone. In Catholic thought, we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. We are not merely material, but ensouled matter; our spirits/souls/minds inform and enliven our bodily selves.

So the Popes et al., got that part right. (Phew!) Where they went wrong was in their description of trans identity: they seem to think that trans people simply choose their bodily form the way one might choose clothing for the day, a matter of personal whim or taste. I see two mistakes in this assumption.

First, trans people are the last to say that bodies are a matter of whim or simple choice. (A caveat: I do not claim to represent here the experience of every trans person, but only those I’ve read and spoken with.) Many trans people transition out of a profound sense of a disconnect between who they know themselves to be and how they are labeled, dressed, addressed, and have been socialized. For some trans people, this begins at the age when children first express gender identity, about 2-4 years of age; for others this becomes an urgent matter later on, at puberty or beyond. Transition may take enormous courage as people risk relationships with families and friends, career, and safety: trans people are subject to hate crimes at a rate surpassing that of LGB people, who are themselves attacked disproportionately to the general population. Transition at every stage is a statement that bodies matter a great deal, and must align with one’s deepest sense of self.

Second, an increasing body of psychological and neurological evidence shows that trans identity is not a matter of mind alone, but involves certain aspects of brain function—a biological/bodily, not a purely psychological phenomenon.[1] For example, some trans men on testosterone note psychological and social effects of the hormone beyond “merely” physical effects. Intriguingly, some neuroscientists are raising questions of whether gender causes epigenetic changes in the brain. Epigenetics explores how one’s environment and experience can influence how genes are expressed, which could affect biological sex (at least if “biological sex” is understood–correctly–as more than a matter of X or Y chromosomes, but descriptive of the whole organism). Thus, again, the magisterial accusation that the “immaterial mind” is imposing itself arbitrarily on the material body is simply untrue. 

Any body/soul dualism, clearly, is in the magisterial mind, not in the experience of trans people or in an increasing body of scientific evidence that affirms their sense of self.

I suspect that the fundamental error in the magisterial stance is a failure of moral imagination. As cisgender guys, they probably cannot imagine trans identity as anything other than contradictions of their incarnate cis selves. Indeed, for them, it would be—but not for trans people. All in all, they might make an effort to listen to trans people, not just talk about them.

—Lisa Fullam, May 11, 2023

[1] For a popular account, see Francine Russo, “Is There Something Unique About the Transgender Brain?” Scientific American, Jan 1, 2016.