Everything seen on the news about this individual indicates they were disturbed and confused.
Even if they were to have spoken their specific wishes out loud, it is unlikely that those wishes would, in fact, be in their best interest or even their actual will.
But you do bring up in an interesting point. Is it morally defensible to lie since it was the dying wish of an individual?
I do not believe so. As Catholics, we have an obligation to speak truthfully.
You are quite correct. The church has not made a specific teaching concerning pronoun usage.
There are far too many languages for the church to bother with something like that.
However, the church does have a specific teaching concerning the truth.
This individual was male. They may have tried to change that through various medical procedures, but that cannot change what is.
The proper pronouns to be used are masculine.
To refer to the individual with feminine verbiage is to contribute to a falsehood. A falsehood that says that we can change reality to suit a delusion.
This falsehood is, and was, incredibly damaging.
This falsehood, quite likely given the various writings the individual left behind, contributed to the entire tragedy.
In using the pronoun that according to the information we have so far matches Robin Westman's wishes, I treated her with dignity , following Dignitas Infinita (2024).
After years of considering homosexuals "disordered", the Catholic church accepted scientific evidence that homosexuality was not a choice, but determined at gestation. Thus, an homosexual orientation is no longer considered a sin (for example, pastoral letter "Always our Children" 1997).
There is consistent evidence from mature transgender people, that their sexual identity is durable, and constitutes an important part of their personalities. This fact, amongst others, has been a driver in the study of transgender issues, which is in its infancy. There is much to be learnt yet.
Being truthful means to search, read and honestly attempt to understand all relevant information.
Being a good Catholic means to not judge people, not to make assumptions about them. Blaming the tragedy on transgender issues is most probably incorrect. Transgender people do not commit more violent crimes than any other group, although they themselves are more frequent victims. Based on analysis of National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data from 2017 to 2020, transgender people in the U.S. face a disproportionately high risk of violent crime compared to cisgender individuals. High suicide rates in the transgender community are not a result of gender identity itself, but rather the compounding effects of stigma, discrimination, rejection, and lack of social and medical support. These factors fall under the
minority stress model, which highlights how social marginalization creates significant mental health disparities.
Saying that Robin Westman's gender identity is a falsehood does not confer her the human dignity that is exhorted in the Declaration of 2024. None of us is in a position to know what her feelings were, how genuinely she felt about her gender. We do bad in classifying transgender people as disturbed, just as once the Catholic Church erroneously labeled homosexuals as "disordered". It is quite possible that the mismatch between her psychological identity and her biological exacerbated a depressive disorders, especially if she did not feel accepted by her peers, increasing her marginalization in school. It seems her mother and family were supportive- in the papers and videos left behind, the one people she felt sorry to harm by her decision was her family. Her mother signed the petition to change her name to Robin, in doing so, she acted in accordance to the guidance to support her adolescent child in "Always our children". That it was not enough to appease Robins sense of inadequacy, is not a failure of love, but a sign of how deep identity and sense of self matter, especially in sensitive people. The obsession with annihilation and school shootings point to other underlying mental health conditions. In that, she is probably closer to Nicholas Cruz, the Parkland shooter. On social media, both shared obsessions with mass shootings and expressed antisemitic and xenophobic views.
When we know as little as we do, the honest option is to try our best with compassion.
Compassion trumps doctrine every single time. Jesus showed that when debating in the temple, when accusing the established powers of hypocrisy. When he sat at the table with tax collectors (who were closer to Mafia enforcers at that time than to an IRS functionary)
Being truthful is not separated from being compassionate, they are one and the same, Jesus showed that.
I graduated as an economist. I studied economics because I wanted to find the best systems to help the poor. In 2005 the news were not encouraging, after years of research, the models were hopelessly incomplete. Then, came a revolution- a new approach, that now is recognized and taught in all economic programs, the authors won the Nobel Prize for it- the key? They combined compassion with statistics and in doing so, they found a way to the truth; in academic terms, they develop a methodology to establish causality. The only way to do this, to discover what truly works for human beings, was to think about them and their situations with compassion.
Academia followed compassion.
I think Doctrine will be updated constantly by compassion, and we will increasingly be better people.
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