Gender theory and religious beliefs

Catholics believe that the soul leaves the body at the point of death and in the future will be reunited with a new spiritual body (Paul spoke at length about this in his 1st letter to the Corinthians).

For clarity, St. Paul says the risen body is “spiritual ” (15:44). These will be the same bodies people had in earthly life—but our resurrection bodies will not die and, for the righteous, they will be transformed into a glorified state, freed from suffering and pain, and enabled to do many of the amazing things Jesus could do with his glorified body (see 1 Cor. 15:35–44, 1 John 3:2).

This is totally inaccurate. Catholics believe that the soul leaves the body at the point of death and in the future will be reunited with a new spiritual body (Paul spoke at length about this in his 1st letter to the Corinthians). Catholics accept cremation but as the body is sacred it is not acceptable for the ashes to be scattered. They should be buried in a cemetery with a headstone so that the dead can be remembered and prayed for. As others have mentioned God made only male and female in Catholic belief.

This is a quick overview:

https://issuepedia.org/Authoritarian_follower#:~:text=The%20authoritarian%20follower%20is%20one%20of%20the%20two,aggression%20in%20the%20name%20of%20their%20authorities%20

Do you have any good links for more information about this? I have searched online but not really found anything satisfactory.

Fascinating thread, thanks OP and all contributors. I’ve learned a lot today. I’ve often wondered about this.

I was brought up Catholic, and found it quite painful to leave though I was infuriated by the sexism.

In decades of activism (feminist, environmental and on social issues, I’ve noticed that many other lefties and activists come from a strong religious background. Strong clear sense of right and wrong, willingness (urge?) for self-sacrifice, belief in a cause that’s more important than the self.

This has been a very interesting thread to read, OP. Thanks everyone.

that personality type can often be combined with a kind of pleasure in putting down those who are seen as transgressing what is right.

The Authoritarian Follower personality. Well worth some research, there's a lot of it about in this political movement.

All very interesting points.

Plus a quick zoom around AIBU and the relationships board quickly locates the few but persistent women who will tell the woman locked in the bathroom with a potentially broken nose to go and give her partner a big hug and make him his favourite dinner because he probably only punched her and tried to strangle her because he's stressed and she isn't helping him enough.

The women whose self image is tied up in shaming other women into surrendering boundaries and putting aside their own needs - I remember a poster a few years back who was one of the 'yes so your MiL burned the house down and ate the children but you just don't like her, do you!' type, and eventually rather heart breakingly admitted that she'd suffered horribly at the hands of an abusive MiL for years, and basically was damned if another woman was going to get to escape it because she hadn't.

The type of woman whose social credentials are all tied up in the right image and virtue signals and whose values and beliefs are a kind of costume, and who has a lot of anxiety tied up in social status in the group.

Dickens 200 years back near enough was taking the mickey out of the Better Than You people whose status was tied up in moral superiority (and wealth) in their community, and who achieved it by shouting Christian slogans while being capable of appalling cold eyed cruelty and vanity - Mr Murdstone just one example. They knew all the words and shouted them, used them to meet their needs and further their agendas, but their actions showed it was as skin deep as TWAW can be from many speakers.

It's where religion provides an outlet for performance and self image and status, and meets with anthropology and psychology.

And that personality type can often be combined with a kind of pleasure in putting down those who are seen as transgressing what is right.

I always think of busybody church ladies from Victorian novels.

I think so too, especially the children and teenagers who are declared or declare themselves the opposite sex to their actual sex. There are some who begin treatment believing that it will actually be able to change their sex and that they will become a fully functioning member of the opposite sex. It is very sad, adults have lied to them and naturally why wouldn’t children believe adults in a position of authority, parents, teachers, health professionals, etc.

I think many believe that they are in some sense intersex. Not so much those immersed in it as activists, but regular left wing progressive people who think it's inexplicable that anyone would have voted for Brexit, or Donal dTrump, unless they were racist. It never crosses there mind that it's even a question that it's a real medical thing and people who are skeptical are bigots.

“I think it is basically about 'Be Kind" and the idea that Jesus wouldn't exclude anyone. I haven't quite worked out why Catholic pro-gender-ideology advocates think it's ok to expect women and girls to accept males in our private spaces, but if I extrapolate from the arguments I've seen used by liberal Catholics who agree with gender ideology, the basic idea would be that girls and women should be willing to make a sacrifice of our private spaces to save the lives of transgender people who would otherwise be suicidal.”

So for me this comes down to personality, not religious beliefs, political or philosophical beliefs but in my experience, a certain kind of woman who is a pathological people pleaser, has a kind of martyr syndrome. I imagine it stems in large part from childhood experiences. This kind of woman is rife in the charity sector, the caring professions and I imagine in various churches too, the kind who probably agrees in part with Andrea Long Chu - see other thread, on Pulitzer Prize Winner, that womanhood is about self sacrifice, about having no boundaries, no self respect, just putting your body at the service of others. I can see how the message of Christianity or Buddhism (other religions and philosophies too) could be misinterpreted this way, selfless self sacrifice for the desires of others. It is a kind of masochism.

I think some people do believe they literally change sex. As in a boy could then get pregnant and have a baby because they think it's possible to really become a woman. Seems to be a rather shaky hold on biology, fuelled by tiktok.

Yes, at root, very few people genuinely believe in a literal sense that people change sex.

Surely?

I think it's a lot more "being kind", and, "I need to think this if I am to fit in with the political left", than anyone is worrying about human nature and how to consistently explain someone being a woman when they are the opposite.

Of course some of them have to try to justify it, but then I think it's more appealing to "social constructs" rather than anyone literally being born in the wrong body.

Maybe some hear the stuff about a woman being a social construct from their fellow lefties and think they really do have a more advanced and sophisticated position.

I suspect that there is no real correlation between religious believers whose faith teaches them that the soul exists and gender identity ideologues. Any concept of a gender identity / soul equivalence is likely the result of ideological cherry picking by those grasping at anything that they think backs up their worldview. This is why we hear so much about things that are irrelevant to human sex and reproduction, such as clownfish, while myriad relevant biological facts and examples are handwaved away.

Catholic theology is that humans are a unity of body and soul. There are two different ways of having a body: male, and female. Both are good and part of God's plan. Sidebar: claims that Aquinas and Augustine called women "defective males" or similar are incorrect and based on mistranslations of the original writings which I believe were in Latin (not a theology scholar or anything).

In Catholic theology, suffering, disability, and death, are consequences of Original Sin. Although many people think of Original Sin as saying that it's your own fault if life is cr@p, it's essentially saying the opposite: we are meant to have a good life, but because of this implacable factor of original sin, sometimes we don't. Because of the wounds inflicted on us by original sin, we need healing (Jesus Christ, basically). OS is not a science concept, it's a metaphysical concept. With this concept, gender dysphoria is something that causes suffering that is not your fault. The suffering is from the dysphoria, not from having the "wrong" body. Gender dysphoria would be in the same category as any other suffering inflicted by illness/disability, e.g. measles, lupus, etc.

There isn't a final answer yet by the Catholic Church on what types of treatment for gender dysphoria would be licit - there are some documents but a lot of pushback, so it's in flux. Bodily mutilation normally is illicit but women can have mastectomies to treat/prevent cancer, because of "law of double effect." So mastectomies are not always disallowed. Likewise, opposite-sex hormones - lots of people take hormones licitly for other reasons e.g. HRT for menopausal women, Thyroid hormones for hypothyroid, etc. So cross-sex hormones is not a clear cut thing either. But you have to balance risk and benefit and part of the key is what does healing look like? If you are born male, then Catholic theology would be that being healed would mean being happy in your male body. Trying to become female if not born female would not be a type of healing, and would be impossible in Catholic teaching.

That's a basic overview but Catholic theology on such issues is complicated. But a definite thing is that male cannot become female because that is how God gave us our bodies and to be born male is not a disability, nor is being born female a disability. (i.e. You can't heal what's not broken).

By this reasoning, Catholic Church should be against allowing males to be in private spaces of females, e.g. where females get undressed etc. Some liberal Catholics apparently are opposing this. I have been trying to figure out why. I think it is basically about 'Be Kind" and the idea that Jesus wouldn't exclude anyone. I haven't quite worked out why Catholic pro-gender-ideology advocates think it's ok to expect women and girls to accept males in our private spaces, but if I extrapolate from the arguments I've seen used by liberal Catholics who agree with gender ideology, the basic idea would be that girls and women should be willing to make a sacrifice of our private spaces to save the lives of transgender people who would otherwise be suicidal. Again, this would be a distortion of Catholic teaching but you wouldn't know that if you didn't understand what the Church teaches about matters where sexual differentiation is important. This is another matter in flux and I'm fighting hard as a practicing Catholic to make sure my voice is heard speaking up for women and girls.

I also wonder how much it's a case of 'being kind' meaning being willing to say something for someone else's benefit while knowing perfectly well that it's factually absolutely untrue.

Catholicism for years has had transubstantiation - who actually, really believes that the priest turns the bread and wine into Christ's body and blood? As opposed to it being a symbolic representation not to be taken as actual factual truth?

Yes, I was just thinking about conservative (small c) versus reactionary when I read your post.

I agree that there are both types in each group, but that, as with transactivists, it’s the angry atheists with a superiority complex who tend to be prominent. I think there are fewer loud, angry conservatives because being conservative is unfashionable and probably doesn’t attract so many angry, young and wannabe-young, older men.

Absolutely, and it's interesting to read the Catholic statement on soul/body as being indivisible.

Often I guess we are stuck on a very basic, blunt version of religious teachings and forget there is dissent, or at last a variety of nuanced opinions within even individual congregations, let alone churches, let alone faiths!

'Buddhism' for example, being the religion/structure I have most experience of, is made up of many different - and wildly differing - schools, with different histories, cultures and doctrines. And within all of them, much difference of opinion (and sometimes ignorance, and misunderstanding, to be fair, too).

Sorry, she is apparently currently practising. Well, even so she perhaps compartmentalises it. A bit like Joe Biden, and Boris Johnson and lots of other people. I don’t think she is translating it to gender identity rather she holds those two beliefs in tension or she doesn’t genuinely believe one or the other thing at the moment.

Maybe she does think of male souls and female souls swopping bodies. If she were simply thinking that people are what they are, and we should be kind, it would be easier to understand her.

If this is her belief than we can all be sure she is not a practising Catholic as this goes against basic Catholic teachings. * *

Helen Joyce and I believe also Kathleen Stock are lapsed Catholics. Do we think Catholicism might have influenced them in a significant way too.

I am not convinced that Ruth’s previous Catholicism has much bearing on her actions at Stonewall or her beliefs in queer theory and gender identity.

She's a she, Ruth Hunt. I don't know much more than that she says she's a practising Catholic, but she's definitely a she
Thank you for the correction. I just went and looked that up too. (I am not sure whom I was thinking of when I said a man.)

She seems to have started the “TWAW get over it” era, and also to still be a practising Catholic.

Maybe she does think of male souls and female souls swopping bodies. If she were simply thinking that people are what they are, and we should be kind, it would be easier to understand her.

www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/19/ruth-hunt-stonewall-moral-responsibility-fight-trans-people