No Playing Politics With Trans People’s Lives

In a recent National Catholic Reporter column Daniel Horan discusses the dangers of turning trans lives into a political debate or “cultural issue,” and why the way we talk about trans people in Catholic and secular spaces must change. 

“I want to draw attention to the insidious trend of treating trans rights as some kind of optional, progressive, out-of-touch agenda at best,” writes Horan, a theology professor at St. Mary’s College, Indiana,, “and as a political or corporate liability at worst instead of treating the need to protect trans rights—including safe access to gender affirming care—as a fundamental human right.”

According to Horan, trans rights have been lumped into a category that “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently called “Woke 1.0.”” This lumps everything from political slogans to police brutality and LGBTQ+ rights into one debate. While these topics are all worth public attention, their weight is unequal:

“While some of the talking points of such backtracking and internecine debates are worth reflection and reconsideration (for example, the unwise adoption of sweeping protest slogans like “defund the police” by political candidates), other subjects that are not merely about language must be treated differently, including the realities of anti-Black racism and transphobia. 

“People of color, including George Floyd, really were murdered; and transgender men and women really are targeted today. These phenomena are not merely theories to be debated but lives that are affected by real-world policies and practices.

“While there may be legitimate reasons to have good-faith debates about how we create more inclusive spaces in our communities, educational institutions, and churches and whether or not acronyms like DEI (for “diversity, equity and inclusion”) are helpful or distracting, it is never OK to treat the actual human lives of minoritized and marginalized persons in the same way.”

This, Horan claims, is exactly what both the political right and the left are doing, in different but equally insidious ways: discussing trans advocacy as something that may help or hurt in the polls, rather than something that affects the lives of real people. The right frames trans advocacy as an “overreach,” while those on the left and moderates, instead of remaining firm on the issues, openly debate whether abandoning the trans community will benefit progressive politicians in the short-term. 

Discussion of trans people is no kinder in some Catholic spaces. Horan points to his NCR colleague, Michael Sean Winters, as an example. Winters calls advocacy for trans rights “cultural nonsense” and claims that Democrats must abandon such issues that don’t “pass the common sense smell test” if they plan to win elections. 

But, Horan emphasizes, transgender people are real people whose “basic human dignity is being eroded,” and whose lives these debates reduce to something trivial. The Catholic moral framework teaches us exactly why that is wrong.

“The foundational moral principle of the Catholic tradition is the inalienable dignity of the human person,” Horan says. “To treat a minoritized and vulnerable population like the trans community as a political liability…is sinful and disgusting.” 

People of faith “need to stand up” against rhetoric that reduces real people’s lives to “matters to be debated like tax-policy preferences or personal preferences in art and music.” These are people who deserve our love and protection. 

“Those who are Christian ought to do everything in their power to make sure everybody’s human rights are protected and preserved,” Horan concludes. “At least from the Catholic Christian perspective, that’s what common sense looks like.”

—Lynnzee Dick, New Ways Ministry, September 15, 2026