Tuesday, December 01, 2020

We Are Not Lost Sheep!

We have been marginalized by many religions including by the Catholic Church the Pope has condemned us.

An article in the National Catholic Reporter compares us to sheep.
The Catholic Church must listen to transgender and intersex people
Male/female binary leads to discrimination and bullying
By Michael G. Lawler, Todd A. Salzman
December 1, 2020


When Pharisees complained that Jesus received sinners and ate with them, he responded with a parable. "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing" (Luke 15:3-6).

We argue — contra former St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson's letter "Compassion and Challenge" and a February 2019 document from the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education, "Male and Female He Created Them," both of which address "gender ideology" — that transgender and intersex persons are not sinners, but they are lost sheep in the Catholic wilderness.
[…]
Intersex people, those born with ambiguous genitalia, often struggle with similar questions about gender identity as transgender people do. Transgender and intersex people differ in their anatomical structures at birth, and most intersex people self-identify as either female or male, but they often suffer the same pain from family rejection, bullying, and discrimination in both society and church.

That discrimination is mostly based on the unquestioned acceptance of the female-male sexual binary and the abhorrence, even hatred, of any sexual or gender arrangement that challenges it. The harrowing outcome of that bullying and discrimination was reported in a 2019 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics: Thirty-five percent of transgender teens reported that they had attempted suicide in the past year — more than triple the number of cisgender teens.
[…]
The letter teaches that Catholics should be compassionate toward people who are transgender (and surely also toward people who are intersex), but that "there are limits to how we should manipulate our bodies." The instruction to be compassionate is a decidedly Catholic instruction, the but less so.
I don’t know about you but I am not a lost sheep. I am somebody! I am a person not a sheep. God made me the way I am, I did not choose to be trans.

One of the things that the article got right, “That discrimination is mostly based on the unquestioned acceptance of the female-male sexual binary and the abhorrence, even hatred, of any sexual or gender arrangement that challenges it.” In yesterday’s blog I wrote about the attack on Ms. Cox that attack was because of the hatred of the perpetrator’s being challenged in his belief of the binary.

The church is propagating hate by it teachings, by it opposition to anti-discrimination LGBTQ+ legislation and it endorsement of legislation that is punitive to the LGBTQ+ community. The church continues to sicks to the Nineteenth century of biology of chromosomes and totally ignores the reality of intersex people because they challenge the church’s female-male sexual binary.

There are many religions that are affirming of us including the Episcopal church. It was an Episcopal bishop that spoke up for us when we were trying to pass a non-discrimination legislation here in Connecticut, the Catholic church was silent.

1 comment:

  1. It still amazes me that the Catholic Church has been able to drag their baggage into this century. My goodness when one looks at their history they find mostly blood letting, misery, destruction, child molestations, and a host of other sins. But who am I to cast the first stone. Let these so-called Christians do that and hopefully they will answer to a higher power and be cast into the hellfire of their creation. Of course there have been a few bright lights within shining in an inclusive manner doing what Christians must and should be doing but they are few and far in-between. I think the line that got me was the "lost sheep in the Catholic Wilderness." What!! I have never been, nor am I now in any type of Catholic Wilderness. These folks have a lot of catching up to do with how God has been hopefully moving of late.

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