Bishops Ban Reassignment Surgeries In Catholic Healthcare
New guidelines have been issued by the United States Catholic Bishops in response to the left and the medical community’s attempts to push gender confusion, with bishops announcing a ban on surgical and chemical intervention that would alter the “characteristics of a patient’s body” to try to make them appear as the opposite gender.
In a “Doctrinal Note” issued on March 20, bishops have prohibited certain forms of medical interventions from taking place in Catholic healthcare institutions — such as puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery. According to the bishops, these procedures do not promote the authentic good of the human person, and are instead injurious to the individual.
The note states that “Catholic health care services must not perform” surgical or chemical “interventions” that are designed to “transform” a person’s body into the opposite gender. The bishops also prohibited taking part “in the development of such procedures.”
While modern technology has allowed for the creation of important interventions to cure many afflictions, the bishops argue that it has also produced “interventions that are injurious to the true flourishing of the human person.”
The doctrinal note goes on to state that the treatments for so-called “gender dysphoria” or “gender incongruence” do not respect “the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul,” and therefore Catholic healthcare services must not perform these treatments or procedures.
The bishops also emphasized a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith — that “there is an order in the natural world that was designed by its Creator and that this created order is good,” and thus, Christians are called “to respect it.”
According to the doctrinal note, the respect for God’s creation is fundamentally important in the case of the human person, as “humanity occupies a singular place in the created order, being created in the image of God.”
As man did not “create human nature,” man does not “own” our human nature “as if it were something that we are free to make use of in any way we please,” the bishops continued.
They then refuted a common argument of radical gender ideology, pointing out that no person is born with the “wrong body.”
“The soul does not come into existence on its own and somehow happen to be in this body, as if it could just as well be in a different body,” the bishops wrote. “A soul can never be in another body, much less be in the wrong body.”
Citing Saint John Paul II, they point out that man is created from the very beginning as either male or female and is thus marked by a “primordial duality,” which radical gender ideology tries to contradict with abstract “non-binary” alternatives.
While the bishops urge Catholic healthcare services to use all appropriate resources to aid in alleviating the suffering of individuals struggling with gender incongruence, the methods used to do so “must respect the fundamental order of the human body.”
“Catholic health care services are called to provide a model of promoting the authentic good of the human person,” the statement reads. “To fulfill this duty, all who collaborate in Catholic health care ministry must make every effort, using all appropriate means at their disposal, to provide the best medical care, as well as Christ’s compassionate accompaniment, to all patients, no matter who they may be or from what condition they may be suffering.”
Meanwhile, Republicans have been calling for bans on transgender surgery for minors. Democrats, on the other hand, have been pushing these procedures and claiming that anyone opposed to transitioning children is essentially advocating for the death of so-called “trans kids.”
