Transgender and communion?

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They know less about how to treat GID that secular experts who haven’t come up with anything and it’s been decades. The Church is appropriately, even if infuriatingly, slow on most matters.
 
The Church has a lot to do and it focus is not really on GID. Also the Church doesn’t really do that much science in general. Probably that’s why the Church hasn’t really said anything about it.
 
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It’s not a priority, true . But they can’t say anything binding until they look into GID.
 
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Bruised_Reed said:
They know less about how to treat GID that secular experts who haven’t come up with anything and it’s been decades. The Church is appropriately, even if infuriatingly, slow on most matters.
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If you already had your answer concerning whether the Church was competent to judge medical ethics, why did you ask me?
 
No it’s not. The very goal is to tear away at the norms of western society and culture. I dare say many involved in pushing such agendas and ideologies is an enemy of the Church in all three categories; the world, the flesh, and the devil.
 
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You make huge assumptions here. Many of the people you claim to judge simply support basic civil rights for gay people. Hardly an indication of lacking sanctifying grace.
 
I continue to say that hormones and surgery do not change your sex and that the Church teaches in the Catechism that sexual identity is something we ought to acknowledge and accept because it is true. The premise that hormones and surgery are necessary to give someone their true sex is false. It may lessen distressing symptoms but it requires enforcement of a false pretense–that is, that hormones and surgery can make a physical male into a female. It doesn’t happen, no matter how the male has always experienced life as a male.

In medicine, after all, there are therapies that are untenable even when no one can think of anything else to do. More to the point, establishing one therapy as a legal right, establishing the idea that sex is indisputably a matter of self-identification and shouting down people for whom the “therapy” does not work essentially guarantees that no better alternative will ever be found, doesn’t it?
 
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It seems that a structure of sin is created when procedures are advocated and performed that are contrary to God’s creation.
This is not to minimize anyone’s struggles, but to point to real solutions instead of impatient attempts to solve problems by mechanical solutions like surgery.

In my experience…which is just my experience and nothing else…attempts to mess with gender are disastrous, and are a misguided attempt to solve a real problem that asks for real solutions, not simply surgery.

And it seems to me this is where our Catholic teaching enters the picture. The more serious sin is deception and scandal over and above a person’s acting out on sexual drives or intense feelings of gender: leading people to believe things that are not true and contrary to human nature the way God created us. (not saying you are doing this)
 
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How do we all decide whether a medical treatment is untenable? In the case of hormon and surgical treatments for GID, are these really untenable from a medical and psychological standpoint? I sometimes get the feeling from the arguments here in this thread that they are mostly seen to be untenable from a Catholic doctrinal standpoint, rather than from a strictly medical standpoint.
 
Thorolfr said:
How do we all decide whether a medical treatment is untenable?
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When it involves perpetuation of a falsehood. If your treatment requires lying to your patient and expecting all of society to perpetuate that lie, the treatment is not ethically tenable. A patient might be kept ignorant of something for their own good–obviously, a psychiatrist could not be required to bluntly tell every patient the entire truth concerning his thoughts on their cases–but that is different than a treatment that depends on perpetuation of a falsehood. Perpetuating that falsehood as a civil right goes beyond even that! We do have people who want to make it illegal (and who are already implying that it is cruel and immoral) to refuse to cooperate with the perpetuation of that very falsehood. This is not just the patient’s private business any more. It is forcing violation of conscience.
Thorolfr said:
I sometimes get the feeling from the arguments here in this thread that they are mostly seen to be untenable from a Catholic doctrinal standpoint, rather than from a strictly medical standpoint.
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Are you saying that sometimes immoral medical treatments are medically ethical? How? This isn’t about requiring patients to believe in God. This is about refusing to concur with treatments founded on a convenient deceit. Don’t you see that it does not matter how effective that deceit could be at relieving suffering? It is still a deciet!! It is not ethical to force people to commit deceit!! (Honestly, this is getting to be like the plot of a dystopian novel.)
 
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You might get a lot of undermining comments from people.
 
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It is in the realms of possibility that’s what they think from a scientific perspective. GID does seem to border on mental illness.
 
Your arguments are all religious arguments, not medical or scientific ones. You describe things as being true or false, but what scientist would use such terms? No scientist would say, for example, that the theory of relativity is “true.” My doctors and the psychologists and psychiatrists I’ve seen never talk about things being “true” or “false” either.

Just to give an example of my own, I was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD. A couple of years ago, a well known neurologist wrote a book called ADHD Does Not Exist. Even though I don’t agree with him, he made a medical and scientific argument to support his opinion. He didn’t make an argument about how all his fellow doctors are practicing “deceit” by telling their patients that they have ADHD and that they are all dealing in “falsehood” while he is speaking the “truth.”

Or to give another example on the same topic, my doctor is treating my ADHD with an amphetamine based stimulant. But some doctors and psychiatrists are dead set against giving stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall to their patients. They’re Schedule II Controlled Substances like opiates which have the potential for addiction if they’re abused. Although this hasn’t really been demonstrated in any studies, some doctors are concerned that stimulants can lead to heart problems and high blood pressure. We also don’t know for sure what the long-term health consequences of using stimulants might be. And giving them to children has also caused a lot of controversy. Nevertheless, using a stimulant helps me function so much better on a daily basis that I’m willing to take the risks. So, is the use of stimulants a tenable treatment for ADHD? It depends on which doctors you ask. But the debate is not one based on notions of truth and falsehood or deceit.

So, I don’t think that arguments that rely on notions of truth or falsehood are appropriate in making decisions about medical treatments for GID either.
 
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