What Dignity Means Now: Part Four of Commonweal’s Symposium on “Dignitas Infinita”

Maura Tumulty

Earlier this summer, Commonweal published a symposium entitled “What Does Dignity Mean Now?” The series offered four scholarly perspectives on Dignitas Infinita, the Vatican’s 2024 declaration on human dignity, which also put a negative cast on new ideas about gender identity. Today’s post is the fourth and final installment. For Bondings 2.0 previous summaries of the essays, click here, here, and here.

In her contribution to Commonweal’s symposium on Dignitas Infinita, philosophy professor Maura Tumulty argues that the Vatican declaration discusses transgender people and transgender rights in a “murky and unclear” way, providing little knowledge and information in the sections titled “Gender Theory” and “Sex Change,” while at the same time including “good suggestions for addressing questions about sex, gender, and rights” in other sections.

Tumulty states (parenthetical numbers reference sections of Dignitas Infinita):

“The document reminds us that respecting the dignity of every person may require us to ‘build alternative social structures’ (31). Precisely because of differences in wealth, health, and liability to historical injustices, not everyone is able to exercise their freedom fully. Some people are living in situations that ‘contradict their inalienable dignity’ (8). Rectifying those situations can require that we create structures—spaces, resources, forms of social organization—that will liberate people subject to oppression and discrimination.”

“We are also reminded that each of our individual selves develops in the midst of the human community; our rights are rights of individuals in communities of other rights-bearing individuals (25–26). So the concept of a right will differ from the concept of subjective preference. Not everything a person prefers, nor even everything that improves her happiness, is a right. It takes hard work to figure out the best way to understand ‘rights,’ and hard work to enumerate the specific rights every individual has.”

Such considerations, brought forward by Dignitas Infinita, are crucial to discussions of rights in the realm of sex and gender. Tumulty highlights the possible complications that can arise in these discussions, pointing to the recent changes to Title IX regulations in U.S. federal law which add protections against discrimination based on gender identity to existing protections against discrimination on the basis of sex. According to Tumulty, Dignitas Infinita does a good job of inviting reflection upon such questions of “individual self-understanding, social structures, and competing goods.”

However, at the same time, she acknowledges:

“There is no evidence that the drafters of Dignitas Infinita spent time in dialogue with transgender people…Along with the document’s lack of attention to the pastoral care of transgender people, this absence of dialogue expresses a lack of respect.”

Tumulty recognizes that different understandings and definitions of what it means to be transgender and what transgender liberation may look like abound, and while she suggests (contrary to what many trans advocates would argue) that deference to gender identity over biological sex is not always necessary or beneficial, she does emphasize the importance of deference to personal experience, stating:

“We ought to defer to one another with respect to our claims about experience. . .This deference is especially important on matters that cut to the heart of one’s sense of self. Such deference is a key part of respect. Deferring to your claims about your pain, your hopes and joys, your sense of purpose—that’s part of recognizing you as a distinct person whose point of view is not reducible to anyone else’s.”

For Tumulty, Dignitas Infinita “leaves much to be desired,” especially when it comes to the rights of women, just as it does in matters of sex and gender generally. How would  the document have been written if greater listening and respectful deference led the authors. What role might deference play when we consider the lives and experiences of women and queer and trans people in the church? What does it mean to truly listen to another person’s experience and self-disclosure, to see a person as they truly are, and how might that inform how we operate as a church?

—Phoebe Carstens (they/them), New Ways Ministry, August 27, 2024