Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, has written a lengthy piece that argues that being transgender, in most cases, is likely some sort of mental disorder, not a mix-up in biology. She cites anecdotes and Catholic dogma as well as medical data to back up her argument in the Catholic World Report.
A few weeks ago, readers of the New York Post were confronted with a story whose sensational title was characteristic of the tabloid: “I’m a Guy Again! ABC newsman who switched genders wants to switch back.” Replete with pictures of Don Ennis both as a woman and a man, the article informed readers that the ABC news editor “strolled into the newsroom last May wearing a little black dress and an auburn wig and announced he was transgender and splitting from his wife. He wanted to be called Dawn.”
By August, Ennis said that he had suffered a bout of amnesia, which led to the realization that he wants to live his life again as Don. The newsman is now asking his co-workers and “all who accepted me as a transgender to now understand that I was misdiagnosed…I am already using the men’s room and dressing accordingly.” He also has reassured the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community that “even though I will not wear the wig or the makeup or the skirts again, I promise to remain a strong straight ally, a supporter of diversity and an advocate for equality and other LGBT issues including same-sex marriage.” …
Catholics are called to treat all—including all within the LGBT community—with compassion. Yet the Church maintains that people may not change what Pope Benedict XVI has called “their very essence.” In a speech at the Vatican last December, Pope Benedict directly addressed transgender issues by cautioning Catholics about “destroying the very essence of the human creature through manipulating their God-given gender to suit their sexual choices.” Pope Benedict warned that “when freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God.”
Certainly, Church teaching allows for the acknowledgment that there can be a biological reason for gender-identity disorder. But it also allows for the possibility of other dimensions to this disorder—a sociological dimension and a psychological dimension—that can never be addressed through cross-dressing or surgical intervention. But, in the secular world, it has become heretical even to suggest such a thing. …
Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was so concerned about the psychological origins of gender-identity disorder that he halted the practice of sex-reassignment surgery at his institution. He wrote about this decision in the November 2004 issue of First Things and concluded that the research demonstrated that Johns Hopkins should no longer participate in what he called “unusual and radical treatment” for “mental disorders.” McHugh … identified two different groups seeking sex-reassignment:
One group consisted of guilt-ridden homosexual men who saw a sex change as a way to resolve their conflicts over homosexuality by allowing them to behave sexually as females with men. The other group, mostly older men, consisted of heterosexual and some bisexual males who found intense sexual arousal in cross-dressing as females.
McHugh began to realize that continuing sex-reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins was “fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness,” concluding that “as psychiatrists, I thought, we would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
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