Church Teaching Needs to Acknowledge Gender Is Not a Binary, Writes Catholic Journalist

The pastoral nods from Pope Francis to the LGBTQ+ community have marked new territory in the way church leaders engage gender identity at the pastoral level, but his distinction between such ministry and so-called “gender ideology” illustrates that much of the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex and gender is still based on flawed and unsubstantiated ideas about biological realities.

In the National Catholic Reporter, Rebecca Bratten Weiss, the digital editor for U.S. Catholic, explores the way that claims of “gender ideology” fail to reflect gender realities in nature in favor of the church’s doctrinal claims. Even Pope Francis, with his emphasis on synodal listening, separates pastoral ministry from a modern “ideology of gender” that he has called “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations…making the world all the same, all dull, all equal.”

Weiss commends Pope Francis for his pastoral instinct to “judge less and listen more,” naming his 2013 “Who am I to judge?” comment as “an important shift in perspective” after “centuries of dehumanizing rhetoric from Catholic authorities,” including by his predecessors, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Many church leaders like Francis, frame their positions on gender as immutable and binary by claiming they are defending God’s created order against modern ideas that understand both sex and gender as more complicated and multifaceted. Weiss points out, “[t]he categories of male and female, as they exist in nature, are not an either/or, nor an absolute binary. Rather, they reside on a spectrum.” In humans, too, scientific understandings of what makes a person male or female continue to evolve, and they do not depend simply on chromosomal makeup or sex organs. In other words, fixed ideas of either male or female, with nothing in between or outside of these categories, is not the reality for either humanity or the rest of the natural world.

Because of these evolving understandings, Weiss notes that Catholic theology is not actually defending “reality” against “ideology” as it often purports to do:

“[T]he church already has a preferred ideology of gender, which is complementarian, essentialist, and committed to a rigid binary view of the entire natural world. The real debate is not over whether gender ideology is bad but over which ideology about gender aligns better with reality.”

An understanding of gender that is both mutable and on a continuum, she argues, is more aligned with both nature and the Gospel example of Jesus’s welcoming of all people as created in the image of God. It also reflects “an understanding of the person as dynamic, capable of growth and transformation, mirroring divine creativity.”

In contrast to Pope Francis’ charge of “gender ideology,” the perspective Weiss argues for takes into account the diversity of nature “acknowledges and honors the complexity and uniqueness of each individual, the many different ways every created being mirrors the image of God.”

The LGBTQ+ community remains a target of hate and discrimination, experiencing overt violence as well as legislative and political attacks. For Pope Francis to categorize new understandings of gender based in nature as “dangerous” risks greater harm and exclusion for people already marginalized. Weiss writes about a different, better path: 

“The church has changed before. Magisterial teachings develop. Maybe it’s time for church teaching to develop once again, to better reflect truth and offer pastoral care to those who do not fit neatly into the artificial gender categories on which our church leaders seem fixated. Our LGBTQ siblings are vulnerable to new threats of anti-Christian and anti-life violence. Catholics who claim to be defenders of the truth and living witnesses to the Gospel should not be compounding these threats. And church leaders, including Pope Francis, might do well to ask themselves whether their stance toward trans people is truly in line with the teachings of Jesus.”

—Angela Howard McParland (she/her), New Ways Ministry, July 21, 2023