This was originally written in July 2014 and I have updated it with a few recent happenings to demonstrate how we are truly following this illogical path of insanity which the LGBT philosophy aggressively pushes...
I came across an article the other day. It was about a family whose child, at the age of 2, kept insisting that she was a boy. After much persistence, the parents decided to accept that and began to refer to her as a "he" and dress her in boy clothes and treat her as a boy. She didn't have a sex change operation; she still has girl genitals, but identifies as a boy. The article was in favor of allowing children to choose their gender and applauded the parents for their loving support and acceptance.
As I read through the comments, most were in favor of this and the whole transgender and genderqueer movement. Genderqueer are those who do not identify either as a male or female and prefer to be called by gender-neutral pronouns like "xe" or "they" or "them."
Now before I continue on, I want to clarify that I'm not addressing the individuals who experience this interior struggle, but rather the underlying philosophy and ideology of this all. Those who feel this way about themselves need to be treated with dignity and respect because they too are made in the image and likeness of God. I remember a girl I used to work with who came out as a lesbian at the time. I truly enjoyed her friendship and had so much fun with her. However, I did not agree with the way she chose to live. But that didn't affect the way I treated her. I just wouldn't tolerate that sin just like I wouldn't "ok" a friend who decided to cheat on their wife or husband. Sin is sin.
Christians are called to love
Now as Catholics and followers of Christ, we are called to love all people. But because of the over-sentimentality of movies and music today, everything regarding love is reduced to a sentimentality of emotion and physical pleasure. "If you feel it, it's love." It's all about this bond of attraction you feel between one another. It's all about the high-charged, emotional feeling. But love is more. It involves that, yes. But love is more.
What is this action of love, then? According to our Catholic faith, love is willing the good of the other. Read more in the Catechism of the Catholic Church to understand more deeply what love is. It's beautiful.
Ok, so what is the "good" of the other? Well...what is our ultimate and final and most perfect good? Heaven! Eternal salvation! Eternal life!
So to will the good of another person, to love them, is to desire that which will bring one to that perfect and final happiness and bliss, heaven itself. God Himself.
But this is the problem among many Christians: We live without our final end in mind. We forget the final destination that all humanity is called to one day: Heaven (or hell if we don't die in a state of grace).
Christians, mercy and love are false when they are not rooted in the truth. St. Paul tells us this in his letter to the Corinthians. “Do not accept as love anything which lacks truth,” St. Edith Stein reminds us.
One is not loving a person by silently standing by, accepting, or encouraging another's sin; instead, one is directing them to hell.
And even if that other person doesn’t believe in Christ, but yet we as Christians do, we too are guilty for what we do not say to warn God's children of the dangers that lie ahead if they make decisions opposed to God's law. If only we could understand the severity of preaching the Gospel and our Christian duty to invite others to live in relationship with the Lord! St. Paul in Scripture cried out, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!”
Our pilgrimage toward heaven may sometimes involve struggles. This is what our Lord referred to when He said that in order to be true disciples, we must pick up our cross and follow Him. He never promised it'd be easy, but He did promise that living by His ways would bring us eternal life and unending happiness in heaven.
A divorce from concrete realities
I'd like to go back to my original story I began in the beginning. So I came across various articles about school districts and universities who are beginning to implement gender-neutral housing (Boston University, Tufts University, NYU among a few), transgendered bathroom laws that allow students who are transgendered to choose the bathroom of their preferred gender (California, Louisville school district, Maryland, to name a few), and a push for use of genderless pronouns (PGP - preferred gender pronoun) among "elite" college universities like Cornell. UPDATE: NOW PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA IS MANDATING THAT ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO THIS UNDER PENALTY.
Today, it is considered appropriate to ask what a person's name is when you meet them, followed by what their preferred pronoun is in case he/she is not what they appear to be by sight. Finally, after reading a lot of arguments in favor of these things, a common thing that is being explained is that people have a "gender brain" which may be different from their sex, which is their biological body. So gender is what you feel you are inside, and sex is the biological part of your body; those male or female genitals are what determine your sex, but your gender "brain" may be different.
Does anyone find this all really confusing?
So I genuinely asked various people who support these things: "Can you please tell me then what a boy is and what a girl is? What makes a boy, a boy? And what makes a girl, a girl? Can you please give me a clear, concise answer?"
Sadly, no one could answer that question. Not one person could tell me what a boy is and what a girl is. This is a tragedy to humanity. If your genitals and biological make-up really don't matter in the end and you can be what you feel like you are inside, then how ironic is it that the entire existence of humanity depends upon our male and female complementarity?
We are denying reality. We are deny nature which God clearly created from beginning as male and female (Genesis 1:27). This is a movement driven by diabolical forces for,
...our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil... [Ephesians 6:12]
The dangerous underpinning ideology or philosophy of all of this is that you are whatever you feel or think you are. It divorces the body from the soul. Nothing is really as it appears, along this line of logic. I can look at a tree and declare it is really a bird because I refuse to acknowledge any type of concrete reality that I can see. Even though I have a girl's body, I can also use this same line of logic - one that rejects concrete realities - and I can think I'm a cat.
And there are actually people who claim these things because they deny concrete realities and their very nature inscribed in their bodies. In fact, if you don't believe me, there was a recent documentary made in England called The Secret Life of Human Pups and it's about a growing group of men who think themselves to be dogs. Now, you may think, "Yeah but that's weird and extreme..." Yet I challenge you, isn't this still the same line of logic they are applying? These people honestly feel they identify better as a dog. Who is to stop them? After all, they too deny the concrete reality of their nature inscribed in their body as being male or female and a human being. It's the same philosophy. Yet we refuse to drag it out to its logical end to realize where we are going is insanity and immoral and against God's created order.
By no way am I minimizing the serious struggle of those who face gender identity issues, but what I am doing is drawing everything to its logical conclusion - which is a denial of concrete realities. This is where modern philosophy fails today - because we fail to draw things out to their logical conclusions. We must sometimes look past the various emotional arguments of agenda-driven platforms such as the LGBT movement so that we can see what the underpinning logic behind it is.
UPDATE AS OF JULY 11, 2016
As I interject with an update here, about 2 years after I first wrote this, I'd like to include how the LGBT movement has progressed in this direction, in case you found this hard to believe...
1. Riki Wilchins, who had undergone "sex-change" surgery had wrote a piece in The Advocate, a leading gay publication, that many LGBT activists are missing the point in what they are fighting for. He stated, in his article We'll Win the Bathroom Battle when the Binary Burns, "that there is a whole group of “non-binary” people don’t identify as male or female and they often want to be referred to as “they” or “hir” or “zer.” He says that what
"needs to be contested here is not the right to use whatever bathroom they want, but the entire underlying hetero-binary structuring of the world queers must inhabit."
Did you get that? This is no innocent civil rights movement everyone - this is war on God and war on our very nature as human beings. This is diabolical. Again, the denial of concrete realities. For more about this story read, Bathrooms are just the beginning: a scary look into the trans movement’s end goals.
2. Recently, in June, an Oregon judge rules state must allow man to change his gender to ‘non-binary.’ This is starting to become law. Other words for this "non-binary" phenomenon are agender, gender non-conforming, Neutrois, and such.
4. As of February 2016, Facebook has adopted 71 gender options (I don't understand this - how can this be?) and a "free-form" field for people who want to describe themselves as whatever they want to be (think "Gender: jfldasuyfda"?).
We're becoming so confused as a culture now - not knowing what a boy is or what a girl is - and we do it all in the name of "enlightened," "progressive," or "tolerant" thinking. We are denying our very nature. There is no male or female, "it's a social construct." Yet...
God created mankind in his image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Genesis 1:27]
To deny this, especially as a Christian is nothing short of insanity and a forsaking of the one true God who desires to save you and love you for eternity. What makes this worse is that whereas most of these things would not be an issue before in years past, this idea is being put in people's heads to "consider the possibility of what you might be," thus planting a seed of confusion and sexual experimentation, especially in the younger generation.
Again, I reiterate...
Again, I'm reminding you, what I'm pinpointing out here is the ideology and philosophy that lies behind these things, NOT those who interiorly struggle with these things. I would not doubt for a minute that it must be a heavy cross to carry, but the greater the cross, the greater of a sanctity one is called to.
This is why I'd like to share with you a video called "The Third Way - Homosexuality and the Catholic Church" on Youtube.
It's about 40 minutes. I like this video because it presents the true Catholic teaching on homosexuality and these gender identity issues. This video gives testimonies of real people who battle with these struggles of sexual orientation - whether due to poor relationships growing up within their family, past abuse, neglect, or molestation, or just because they always felt attracted to their same sex, with no root cause they could pinpoint. Yet still they chose to live their lives in conformity to God's will. It's not sinful to be attracted to this person or that person, regardless of your sexual orientations or inclinations. What is sinful is when one acts out upon them in a physical way, or lusts upon them in their head. But the same virtue of chastity applies to both homosexuals and heterosexuals. In these temptations, we are called to a higher virtue of chastity, which is really self-mastery or self-control.
There is also an apostolate out there called "Courage" for those who have same-sex attraction or other gender-identity struggles. EnCourage is the one for the family members of those struggling with this. I admire these people for being so strong as to live their lives all for God, despite the cross they may carry of being attracted to someone of the same sex, especially in today's world which advocates these lifestyles.
Finally, in light of the terrible shooting that happened to God's children in Orlando, I would firmly say that violence is not the answer and is certainly not the Christian approach. The Christian approach is love and it is love found only in the truth, for "love rejoices in the truth," as Scripture says.
Pope Francis also recently warned us of the evil of this so-called gender theory. He sees what's coming.
Many Christians are sadly confused today, saying that by supporting others towards these choices is "an example of unconditional love." That is a grave error and misunderstanding of love. This is the salvation of souls that's at risk here. As St. John Paul II quoted St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross at her canonization,
St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross says to us all: Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie. [Homily for the Canonization of Edith Stein]
You can certainly love someone unconditionally without leading them to make decisions that send them on the path to eternal damnation.
We must pray for one another, "encourage one another and build each other up" (1 Thes 5:11), so we can support each other in being faithful to God. We must be gentle and meek in the individual situations that arise in coming across these issues and people who feel in such a way yet also firm and strong in our convictions. As this evil ideology aggressively thrusts itself in everyone's faces through media, corrupt and immoral policies and laws and the like, so must we as Christians be ready to proclaim the truth boldly about the glorious design of our sexuality and the crosses we must sometimes carry in being faithful disciples of Christ. We must remain steadfast in the truth and not compromise the ways that Jesus has laid down for us to inherit eternal life.
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.
Remember O most compassionate Virgin Mary that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence we fly unto thee O Virgin of virgin our Mother. To thee to we come, before thee we kneel, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions but in thy clemency hear and answer them. Amen!