God made them Male and Female: Or did He?

Pastor's Corner

4th Sunday of February: Second Sunday of Lent

America has always been known as a land where you can reinvent yourself, start anew, even escape from a former life. In Massachusetts, state school administrators are taking the concept of reinvention to dangerous new levels.

Under a new mandate (dishonestly called "guidance") published by the Massachusetts Department of Education, infused with input from "advocacy groups" and "other interested constituents" (read: noisy homosexual partisans), public schools in Massachusetts are required by law to honor a student’s request to change his or her "gender identity."[1]

This means that a kindergartner not only could pretend to live as the opposite of his "assigned birth sex," he would have full access to restrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex. This also means that a teenaged "transgendered" student now has unrestricted and unsupervised access to students of the opposite sex as young as age five–with absolutely no documentation needed.

The concerned experts at the Massachusetts Department of Education have eliminated red tape and made it easy for a student to change his gender identity. No need to involve the parents (though there are not a few parents who are supportive of such self-abusive behavior): Simply have a friend write a letter on your behalf and go claim your new gender identity. Or just tell a guidance counselor. As long as he thinks you’re sincere, you can begin playing your new gender role right away.

And just in case you’re wondering about whether your child will have to endure a lot of medical and mental health testing in order to claim such ennobled status, the guidelines leave no room for doubt.

There is no threshold medical or mental health diagnosis or treatment required that any student must meet in order to have his or her gender identity recognized and respected by a school."[2]

The preceding statement is a striking one. It acknowledges implicitly what it ignores expressly, namely, the role that mental illness plays in the lives of "gender changing" children – and their parents.[3]

In an article for First Things, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, Paul McHugh, bemoaned the mental health damage caused by the artificial "fabrication" of children’s sexual identity:

I have witnessed a great deal of damage from sex-reassignment. The children transformed from their male constitution into female roles suffered prolonged distress and misery as they sensed their natural attitudes. Their parents usually lived with guilt over their decisions—second-guessing themselves and somewhat ashamed of the fabrication, both surgical and social, they had imposed on their sons."[4]

The same thing can, of course, be said of parents of girls.

Another eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, observes that, biologically, "[i]t is not possible to change a person’s sex ...as each cell of a person’s body contains chromosomes which identify that individual as either male or female."[5] Surgery and drugs simply mask (often poorly) the impossible attempt to change the unchangeable.

The truth is that there is treatment for those who suffer confusion over their sexual identity that involves neither surgery nor surrender to the homosexual lobby’s "solution."[6] Once the underlying mental health and emotional issues are resolved—and the list is generally long—a person can grow up happy and confident in his or her sexuality.

The Massachusetts Department of Education utterly ignores this common sense understanding of the human body, backed up by science. In many cases, parents act as accomplices in destroying the lives of their children.

But are we really shocked at this effort to make one’s sex optional? What else should we expect from those whose moral compass points instinctively towards Viceland?

The Victorian poet W. E. Henley wrote the oft-repeated lie so frivolously esteemed by modern men:

    I am the master of my fate:
    I am the captain of my soul.[7]

In rejecting God as the Author of life and conferring on himself powers and authority which are not his, modern man repeats the sin of Eden and separates himself–and thus his soul–from God. And, as usual, children are the first victims of this selfish and vain attempt to reorder God’s creation.

In a saner age, parents who collaborated with someone who suggested something as irrational and harmful as changing a child’s "gender identity" would have been thrown in jail and their children removed from their home. Today, such parents are called "extraordinary" as they reminisce over their dead "transgendered" daughter’s troubled, tortured life—and their unacknowledged responsibility in making it that way.[8]

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Footnotes

1 Cf. page 1 of: "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity", Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

2 Ibid., p. 5

3 Cf. The Philadelphia Guild of the Catholic Medical Association, "Gender Identity Disorder".

4 "Surgical Sex", published in November 2004 on FirstThings.com.

5 "Our Gender Is Not an Accident" published on CatholicCulture.org on October 15, 2005.

6 Ibid.

7 Invictus.

8 "Quincy couple talk about transgender son’s sad journey", published in The Boston Globe on October 6, 2102.