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| Meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Science |
It is the story of Ashley Dimond of Rome Georgia
who was born male thirty-six years ago but who in adolescence began living as a
woman and who, for 17 years now, has been undergoing hormone therapy designed
to support her transition to female. Ms. Dimond had achieved some small
degree of professional success as a song-writer and singer before falling into
the trap of drugs and petty crime. She eventually ended up in the Georgia
Penitentiary system where she was placed in a men’s prison—she has male
genitalia (a word, by the way, I never thought I would be using in my blog)
where she has not only been subjected to humiliation by prison officials but
raped more than a half-dozen times by fellow inmates. She was denied
continued access to the hormone therapy she has been on the past 17 years and
that has had serious physiological as well as psychological impact on
her. Now I know that this posting is going to get some hostile and even
vulgar remarks from various krazies—if they are offended by what I write about
the Traditional Liturgy they sure aren’t going to like what I write about a
transgendered person—but actually Ms. Dimond is not my primary subject.
This article stopped me in my tracks. I don’t believe I have ever met,
much less have known, a transgendered person. Consequently, I have never
given the issues regarding transgendered people much thought. When I read
a newspaper story or heard something on the news, I think I just shoved it into
a pre-fit category in my mind and moved on to something more within my
experience. We had a neighbor, when I was growing up, that liked to
wear his wife’s underthings around the house. We kids weren’t supposed to
know what our parents and the other neighbors were laughing about, but kids
aren’t stupid and eventually find out the story. I have certainly met my
share of effeminate men and even a few who, while not exactly dressing in women’s
clothes didn’t exactly dress like men either. (I mean people other than
certain prelates who like to get all frilled up Cinderella style.) But I must
admit that I am totally unfamiliar with this transgender phenomenon and so I
think I just lumped a wide spectrum of people into a single category and not a
very flattering one. This article has made me stop and realize that I
need to learn more before I rush to judgments or even stereotypes. I realized reading this article that I had
always misidentified transsexual persons as transvestites when in fact it is
something very different and that I know very little, and understand even less,
about either phenomenon
In the course of writing this blog I have several
times suggested that the Church too must rethink certain issues “from the
ground up.” A variety of the sciences
–the medical, the sociological, the anthropological, the psychiatric—have made
discoveries that fundamentally change the way that we are able to understand a
variety of moral quandaries from in vitro
fertilization to same-sex attraction to embryonic stem-cell research to gender
identity. I am not saying that this
demands that we come to different conclusions, but we do need to take the new
knowledge into account as we theologize for a Christian response to people
whose lives are locked into these and other complex realities. In the past it has too often taken us, as
Church, far too longer to make the interface between our faith and the contemporary
world, especially the sciences. I am not
going to get into the whole Copernicus/Galileo thing, but with the knowledge
explosion in contemporary society we cannot afford not to engage in that
dialogue now. The Church’s—and indeed
religion’s—credibility has already been all but lost to the under 30
generation. It will take work for the
theologians to absorb the immense motherload of new scientific data and it will
take trust for the Magisterium to delegate the research to competent scholars,
but our faith should assure us that while the way ahead seems dark and filled
with pitfalls, the Holy Spirit ever guides the Church towards the truth. There is nothing to fear about knowledge; nor
is there any reason to block inquiry.
There is but one Truth and we cannot be afraid to search for it.
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