It has sparked controversy because of how unfavorably treated transgender people are treated. But its own quarrels support their right to self-determination.
In the US government conversation, anticipating the bottom line has become almost innate. We’re eager for a comprehensible lesson. It’s safe to assume that the majority of users skimmed the content, if they even read past the title, when The New York Times just announced that a new “Vatican Document Puts Gender Change and Fluidity as Threat Human Dignity.” It’s the kind of title that zeroes in on the individual interests of a substantial part of the Times’ visitors, addressing political hot buttons in language that, rightly, arouses strong emotions in the audience. Many people were likely already making up their minds about Dignitas Infinita when the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) released it on April 8; it’s not clear how many actually read it. However, those who did, especially those who have the most compelling reason to feel threatened by it, may have been perplexed.
It was only after I had gotten to page 10 of the declaration without once encountering the word “gender” that I realized that, following the Times’ lead, in a very real sense, I was reading Dignitas Infinita backward. When the actual stage of the file is a protracted theological and philosophical protection of the claim that the dignity of each human being can be understood as eternal, I was looking for what it had to say about my transgender and intersex friends. In impact, the “bottom collection” approach to media tends to nourish not only the divisiveness of modern legal discourse but, worse, our joint incomprehension.
This isn’t to preclude the DDF. The document’s most regular criticism is that it lacks any knowledge of trans people’s lives. Gerard O’Connell, a long-time observer of the Vatican, points out that Pope Francis generally meets with transgender people. But it’s one thing to welcome poor trans women to the pope’s Wednesday audiences—many of whom are foreign-born and engage in sex work—and support them in their needs, and another thing to actually listen to them, much less listen to trans people who are not poor, not immigrants, who are engaged in “respectable” professions, and are met as social equals. Listen, after all, is not just letting somebody else talk in your presence. To claim, as the document does, that “personal self-determination” with regard to gender “amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God” not only grossly oversimplifies what most transgender people would actually say about themselves; It really engages in speculative fiction about their moral life.
Even the few oil departments that are provided in the report are lacking. The section on gender theory starts by affirming, in terms that recall the Catechism, “The Church wishes, ‘first of all, to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her respect and treated with attention, while ‘every mark of unjust prejudice’ is to be carefully avoided, especially any type of anger and violence.” (The interior quotes are from Francis’s 2016 Amoris Laetitia. The phrase “unjust discrimination” suggests that the authors of that statement believe there can be “just” discrimination when it comes to LGBTQ individuals, aside from the apparent conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and expression. Given the numerous recent US laws that target queer people, this is particularly dangerous. Doesn’t the inaction and civil disobedience toward transgender lives constitute a form of “aggression and violence”? Not to mention the possibility that someone who is only aware that the Vatican has once more condemned those who do not uphold gender norms as “threats to human dignity” uses it as a pretext to commit the violence Dignitas Infinita condemns.
However, it would be absurd to completely reject and reject the declaration. It is to criticize Dignitas Infinita for not taking the experiences of trans people seriously and interprets their actions enough to beg the question of whether or not it has taken its own argument seriously enough. It goes without saying that honoring a person’s dignity requires acknowledging that they are better than anyone else, even the pope, to do so. It’s to say that a trans individual can discern, in words of John Paul II, which the document cites, that their “physical and mental integrity” is in some sense already impaired, and that transition is an act of repairing that integrity that demands respect. The church has, it seems, from its earliest days, been aware that the creation stories in Genesis call for a thorough, figurative interpretation, including a literal translation of the phrase “in the image of God he created them”; He created both the male and the female.”
I can only say these things in so far as I have read, understood, and share the document’s claim that “every human person possesses an infinite dignity.”
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