Op-ed: The assault of natural law morality on trans people
The Catholic Church teaches that gender is part of God s design of the human person and that every person must accept his sexual identity as biologically determined at birth. The church catechism rejects theories that view gender identity as flexible or as merely a social construct rather than innate from birth. It sees protecting binary complementarity of man and woman as a core goal.
Accordingly, the Catholic Church does not accept a transgender identity as valid, instead viewing transgender individuals as announcing a sexual identity not corresponding to his or her biological sex. Sex reassignment surgery or hormone therapies to alter one s sexual characteristics are therefore a violation of divine design and so morally unacceptable.
Pope Francis has referred to the ideology of gender, in which children are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex, as ideological colonization. In his 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, Francis writes that an appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves.
One of the people who has most firmly leveled his sights on the transgender community is Ryan T. Anderson, a natural law political philosopher who trained under Robert P. George at Princeton University and Patrick Deneen at the University of Notre Dame. Anderson is the president of the very right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. He is a political animal who has largely built his reputation and influence by skillfully surfing the tidal wave of ignorance and misinformation on transgender realities.
There was enormous hullabaloo when Amazon pulled Anderson s 2018 book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, from its online store it s still not available for purchase there. Anderson leveraged this instance of censorship to further elevate his reputation on the right.
What Mr. Schwartz calls the “natural law” moral philosophy of the Catholic Church is also the common sense view of most people, I should think. Men are men, women are women, and people can’t do much about it. You’re born one way or the other and you just have to deal with it. You can call that natural law (as I do) but whatever you call it, it’s the truth. You can love it or hate it, but it’s the way things are. Ryan Anderson of the “very right-wing” Ethics and Public Policy Center (horrors!) has made something of a career of standing up for what should be obvious. But of course it’s not to many people, so he earns his salary. It’s an obvious truth but an important one, so he should probably be paid more than many philosophy professors.
I notice that Mr. Schwartz does not grapple with these fundamental issues of identity, (I.e., men are men, women are women, Socrates was a man, etc., etc.) philosophy PhD notwithstanding. I almost got a PhD in political philosophy back in the day. If I’d managed to get a job, I’d probably be cancelled out it by now, unless I was willing to say, sure, a man can become a woman, why not? Especially if my job depends on it! Instead, I became a law professor, and lasted several additional years. I’m not sure where he comes down on whether a boy or girl can become a cat or dog, an increasingly popular identity switcheroo these days — just ask any high school student at a big public high school. I deny that possibility as well, intensely controversial though that may be. I have posed this question to my dog Chopi, but so far he has declined to answer. Ditto on whether he could become a cat, which as a large Labrador Retriever, I doubt he would want to, but this might be a hurtful stereotype.
There may be a lot of ignorance and misinformation on transgender realities, but I don’t think they’re what Mr. Schwartz is referring to. If he’s referring to anything. How do you refer to things successfully if their identities can shift around? Don’t ask me. I don’t think you can.