Is it acceptable for a Transgender Person to be a Communion Server?

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What is the church’s position on a transgender person being a Communion Server? Our church is allowing this person to serve Communion and it bothers me. Am I wrong to feel this way?
 
tribarkin said:
Communion Server
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An Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, you mean?
tribarkin said:
transgender person
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What do you mean? Do they simply want to transition, but don’t, and are otherwise living in accordance with the teachings of the Church?
Are they in the middle of transition, or post-transition?
tribarkin said:
Our church is allowing this person to serve Communion and it bothers me. Am I wrong to feel this way?
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Certainly one would hope that the ministers of the Church would be staunch defenders of her values. Determining that would require a more detailed answer to my second question.
 
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How do you know the person is transgender? Are they someone you personally know, or did they tell you they were trans?
There are a number of medical conditions that can cause someone to appear transgender when in fact they are not. I am aware of several people with these medical conditions who are active at Catholic parishes.
 
Male person who does his best to look like a female, long hair, jewelry, long nails. This person is a hairdresser at the salon I go to and I was told he was a male transitioning to a female. He/she is an extra ordinary Communion Server at Mass and I am very uncomfortable and trying to find a way to deal with my feelings about this.
 
tribarkin said:
I was told he was a male transitioning to a female.
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Hearsay is seldom reliable…

If it continues to trouble you, and you know for sure the person is in fact transitioning, perhaps go to your pastor and say “Father, I am uncomfortable and troubled by X distributing Holy Communion. It could appear that the parish is endorsing a sinful lifestyle that is contrary to the Church’s teachings on the matter of human sexuality by allowing someone in serious, public sin to carry out such a role.”
 
If the hairdressers he/she works with don’t know the situation, then they shouldn’t be trying to explain to their customers.
 
tribarkin said:
If the hairdressers he/she works with don’t know the situation, then they shouldn’t be trying to explain to their customers.
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Certainly.
They shouldn’t, but they still may well do so.
 
I wonder how this person feels about you?

(It’s a rhetorical question, and not meant to be mean - just trying to give you a way to put it in perspective.)
 
Talk to the preist if that gives you no satisfaction talk to the bishop and if that does not work and you still feel uncomfortable then change churches.
 
Not even addressing the sexual nature but just the whole gender “confusion” issue is where my discomfort comes in. From the time you are young, you learn how to distinguish males from females, and how to interact appropriately with each. I feel uncomfortable because the whole way we have learned to identify one another is changing with people suddenly “identifying” as something other than what their outward appearance would tell you that they are. I am not trying to discriminate against this person, but, wondered how this fits within the Catholic doctrine. My instinct keeps raising it as wrong, but if the pastor allows it, it must be ok? This is basically my internal struggle just trying to figure out how to accept it and no longer let it bother me.
 
Unfortunately I think a big problem is the words we are using. “Gender” decades ago used to just be a concept in grammar but eventually became a substitute for the word “sex” meaning male or female. Nowadays gender is often used in a different way than meaning the biological sex of a person. We are almost all born either male or female with a tiny, tiny percentage of people who are born with intersex issues but the majority of those are clearly mostly demonstrating secondary sexual characteristics of a certain sex. We now have chromosome tests that can be done on newborn establishing which sex they are. There is no such thing as a biological sex “spectrum” of people.

In the past without chromosomal testing drs and parents had to make educated guesses as to an intersex baby’s biological sex and they would be “assigned” a sex at birth, that unfortunately sometimes turned out to be wrong. This does not happen any more but transgender ideology has picked up the vocabulary from past intersex conditions and now they describe EVERYONE as being “assigned a gender” at birth. This is clearly nonsense, noone is standing in the delivery room with a clipboard randomly assigning babies as a boy or girl. All they are doing is recording the biological sex of the baby which was decided at conception.

The word gender now doesn’t mean an alternative (maybe more puritanical for those shy to say sex) word for biological sex. These days it describes the roles the society we are born into ascribes to us on the BASIS of our biological sex. So sex stereotypes in other words. So baby boys are expected to be boisterous, active, mischievous etc. While girls are quieter, placid and feminine (remember I am describing stereotypes!).

So trans people have an ideology that if your personality doesn’t fit the stereotype, if you are a very feminine man, for example, you should change your body with hormones and surgery. Or maybe not go that far but still transition socially and call yourself a woman.

This is against Catholic teaching but unfortunately some Catholic communities can be among the worst for not accepting very feminine boys and very masculine girls.
 
Your priest recommends to the Bishop and then the Bishop approves EMHCs.

Speak to your priest, pray that you may be kind to your fellow parishioner.
 
While it is not a policy set in stone, it is likely that a transgender person should not be serving in a visible, public role in the Church such as this. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled a couple of years ago that transgender persons (fully “transitioned” to the opposite gender) cannot serve as sponsors for baptism, and many dioceses have similar requirements for serving in public ministries such as EMHCs.

If this person is indeed transgender and fully “transitioned”, they likely should not be allowed to serve. I would delicately raise the issue with the priest and inquire about the situation if you are reasonably sure that this is the case.
 
So, it would seem that the question is whether a female impersonator should be an EMHC.
 
The Church opened a hornet’s nest. While there may be people who consider gender fluidity the “in” thing, the vast majority of transgender people could really be that way because that’s what God chose for them (just like he chose some to be intersexed). Scientists know next to nothing about the human brain and the human genome, because they can’t experiment on us the way they do rats. Chromosomes are simply the current way by which sex is determined. Given sufficient time, science may discover that that is only scratching the surface of sexual identity. If a boy hates toy soldiers, wants to dress like a girl, and play with dolls, (in spite of the bullying they receive from their parents, peers, and society), then there’s probably a reason for it. Who am I to judge?
 
Why can’t he do all those things without having to change his biology? Taking cross-sex hormones for years has never been tested long term but likely to have very serious side-effects. The only long term study - which I believe was either in Sweden or the Netherlands (Holland) - that followed all transexuals after their sex change for decades showed an INCREASE in suicide after 20 years. That’s when John Hopkins closed down their sex-change unit. So for people with body dysphoria dramatically altering the body does not solve mental anguish.

Also of course noone can actually change sex, our sex is coded into all our DNA and every cell so can never be changed.
 
Talk to your priest and ask him. There are so many variables in this situation. Hairdressers do tend to be rather expressive with their appearance. Long hair, polished nails and jewelry do not “make” someone female or transgender. Neither does the clothing they wear. Surgery and hormones are a different situation and I take it you don’t have first hand knowledge in this area.
 
If this man, by his attire and mannerisms, is creating a scandal, he should not be distributing the Body or Blood. Period.
 
The study was done in Sweden 2011 at Karolinska Institutet. This is the closest I could find in English.


Their magazine is called Medical Science. Past copies can be read. The magazine Medical Science | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

From what I have read from the study, there was a 40 % rate of trying to commit suicide before the sex reassignment and around 20 times more likely to take their own life in the coming 10 year period after the sex reassignment compared to general population. This suggests to me that the sex change is not the issue.
 
I think first we must realize none of the “communion servers” are sinless.

Then the words of our Lord, “Then neither do I condemn you.”

Then explain your issue with your priest & try to understand your situation.

Then pray
 
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