Specific Church Teaching on Gender Transitioning?

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JimG said:
From desisters who believe they were pushed into surgery and from those suffering chronic health problems from hormone injections
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Hormone injections are very serious business, and do indeed have serious side effects.

I know men who get hormone injections for metastatic prostate cancer, and they don’t like it at all. Of course, they have a very serious medical condition and since they are elderly already before they are diagnosed, the benefits outweigh the costs. Injecting a young person , even a child, with powerful hormones should not be taken lightly.
 
How do you know it’s a delusion? The OP isn’t going to find any definitive Church teaching on this because there isn’t one; only opinions. Not enough is known about gender dysphoria: it’s origin, what causes it, how to treat it. Speaking of using the preferred pronouns or name as “humoring:+” a transperson really minimizes the anguish they feel.
 
What else woud you call it if you think you are something that you are not? If someone thinks they are Caesar or a chicken, we call those delusions, so why do we give the exception to gender? No amount of hurt feelings changes that reality. The best we can to is help people accept what they physically are.
 
Whether it’s a delusion or not you cannot change sex. I’m just not convinced everyone who transitions these days does so with realistic expectations.
 
redbetta said:
What else woud you call it if you think you are something that you are not? If someone thinks they are Caesar or a chicken, we call those delusions, so why do we give the exception to gender? No amount of hurt feelings changes that reality. The best we can to is help people accept what they physically are.
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If someone thinks they are a chicken, you can tell them a thousand times a day but they are still going to think they are a chicken. Nothing you say is going to change their mind on that. Eventually you may start clucking at them, out of charity so they will feel comfortable. They are already so crazy ,what difference does it make.

Personally, I don’t believe people suffering from gender dysphoria are crazy at all. But if I did think they were crazy, I would do whatever I could to make them feel better in the moment. You can’t fix crazy, as the saying goes.
 
If I knew somehow who actually thought they were a chicken, I would take them to a psychiatrist. I would never go along with it.
 
Of course. Mental health care is always good. But there is, at present time, not much in the way of a cure for a person who believes they are a chicken. You would need to develop a strategy for how to help them live comfortably on a day-to-day, assuming you cared for them.
 
I think it depends on the relationship you have with the person.
 
I do not care what people do with their lives, but I do not want to be forced to go along with it or my children taught that it is normal and healthy behavior.

It would be infinitely better to help people accept who they are physically. What I am worried about is people being afraid to research noninvasive cures for gender dysphoria because suggesting that people could be helped to change their mindsets about this could be considered transphobic.
 
I understand. I think you raise a valid point. I don’t even think “cures” need to be investigated. The research should be on the origin.

There will always be those who say “It is normal” and “There is nothing wrong with it”. When it comes to gender dysphoria, I have to disagree. The physicality of the body doesn’t match what is going on in the brain. (Not the same as homosexuality, at all, in my opinion). Therefore, it would be helpful to know how to avoid the condition altogether.

All transgender peopleI know wish they had been born “normal”. This isn’t just because of the social hate they experience. Their lives aren’t easy. Even if they are fully accepted, going through treatments and surgery is not a fun experience. It is painful on a lot of different levels for the patient. Acceptance is a totally different issue. That isn’t what I am talking about here.

Anyhow, with all that said, we aren’t “There” yet. There are a lot of people who hate transgender folks for no reason other than they are different. If they took that energy of hate and instead put it into advocating for research to determine the origin of the condition, I think the world would be a much better place.
 
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There are also practical problems with widespread acceptance of this as normal. For example, sports. Biological women would be at a disadvantage competing against men. Eventually, in the big leagues, there would no longer be men’s and women’s teams: just two men’s teams.

Also, about the hate, a lot of it is backlash of people sick and tired of the bully tactics of activists, most of which are straight and cis and presume that they know what is best for what they consider oppressed groups. And the people they are supposedly helping get the brunt of it.
 
redbetta said:
Also, about the hate, a lot of it is backlash of people sick and tired of the bully tactics of activists, most of which are straight and cis and presume that they know what is best for what they consider oppressed groups. And the people they are supposedly helping get the brunt of it.
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No doubt about it, human sexuality is about as personal as you can get, so people take these issues personally. But at the end of the day I just want to see everyone treated with kindness. It is a terrible thing to be tolerated. Anyone who has ever been just “tolerated” knows this. So I would like to see acceptance.

As the human race, we will move forward. We will learn what causes these things that are considered by many to be so objectionable today. Hopefully it will get sorted out. Probably not in my lifetime, though. There are so many complicated issues, like the one you raise about competitive sports. There isn’t an easy answer, unfortunately.
 
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I just think we have to do what’s best for as many people as possible and I see this as creating more problems then it solves. A whole society cannot be rearranged to tailor to a fraction of a percent.

Also, I don’t want to live in a world in which speech is policed and you need to walk on eggshells around everybody for fear of offending someone.
 
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That is a fair view. Deciding what matters and what doesn’t is the hard part. What may matter to you, may not matter to me. I think that is the hard part!.

And as far as your remark on free speech goes, I am with you! I think we have raised a whole generation of marshmallows when it comes to that. We have a lot of thinskinitis. We need to figure out how to legislate for thick skin!
 
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You know humanity’s lost when you need to legislate common sense.
 
If I weren’t a Catholic, I would be in the camp of “screw it: let people mutilate themselves until they are sterile and themselves from the gene pool.” Just grab some popcorn and watch the world burn.
 
Well I am not Catholic but that isn’t my view. My view is that we have to work with what we have right now. So for me, that means doing whatever I can to help someone else feel better about being in their own skin. If that is hormones and surgery, I support it because that is the best we have. If someone can tell me how talk therapy or religion can help someone feel OK about feeling like they are in the wrong body, then I would be all for that, too. But I would need to see the data before I could support those methods. I can’t begin to understand what it must feel like to feel like I am in the wrong body. I was a fat person and sometimes I felt like I was in the wrong body. LOL. That isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, compared to what these people feel.

I don’t pretend to know why someone has this challenge in their life. All I know is that I believe we are supposed to help each other through this life. That is what I try to do. I don’t know what the answer is to this issue, because we don’t know what causes it. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. Maybe the test is how do we treat people who have challenges that are different from our own (?).
 
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