Gender theory and religious beliefs

[Parisite]

I'm wonder how much to make of the fact that the former head of Stonewall is a practising Catholic.

Somebody who thinks you can have a 'true' inner gender identity that is at odds with your body... belonging to a religion that talks about an invisible soul as the seat of true identity, in tension with the body.

Are people from faiths that believe in a soul (eg Catholics, New Agers) more likely to believe gender theory, because they're used to thinking the 'authentic' self isn't their body?

Thoughts sparked by this article, which questions the idea that people have an inner 'True Self' at odds with everyday, embodied life:

https://www.flaneurnotes.com/post/on-not-having-a-true-self

I always want to unpick the concept of if souls are ending up in the wrong body, where were they before birth, where are they after death, and who is the idiot fucking up getting the right soul in the right body and why isn't God on this?

Actually if you're into the concept of souls arriving and leaving into various bodies in the course of multiple lives as part of a spiritual journey, the belief is that a soul will occupy both female and male bodies in various lives as their job is to experience and learn from every possible angle. So getting stuck on trying to correct a body would not fit the belief system and would be a bit of a culdesac for the soul in question.

If he is practicing catholic this is only in word because he is very confused. Catholics are between the very rare christian denominations left who believe firmly that God created us all in His image as male and female. Theories about what the soul is and is it male or female cannot be derived from the Bible. We just know that we are male or female and that is that. Whoever wants to prolong these theories , is re-interpreting the Bible their own way and that is not accepted as a coherent way to please God. That is that.

Ah, another thing. There is the famous lady Dr Jessica Taylor, and I am surprised mums on here do not mention her at all, who is rewriting mental health history right now and she had today a post about what religion did wrong to women over the centuries. She is lesbian and married with a lesbian also. Go and check her out. An interesting doctor

My Born Again sister, Free Church of Scotland, says God doesn't make mistakes, so no-one can be born in the wrong body.

Point taken! But of course Catholics wouldn't believe in souls coming and going in different bodies through history – that's more of a reincarnation kind of thing.

It's part of a lot of spiritual beliefs around Christianity, the journey of a soul.

If it's more strict old school Christian one life and then eternity in heaven (or hell) then let's hear it from the believers about where the souls were before birth and where they go after death? There's no explanation of how this actually is supposed to work.

And if it is the one life by one soul sent from above, then who the heck is the angel on duty in the past decade as rates have been rocketing, why is that angel particularly screwing it up with female bodies across the western world, and why is no one else in heaven doing anything about this?

If you can have faith or total belief in one thing that cannot be proven by science, is it then easier to have faith in another belief that is not based in fact?

In some Asian country, I forget which, bad women are reincarnated as effeminate cross dressing men as punishment.

In a way I'm less interested in whether the idea of the soul is true, or bonkers.

More in whether having a religion that believes in the soul might make a person (in particular the former head of Stonewall) more likely to believe in a gender theory that assumes people have a 'gendered soul' different from their body.

One of the most senior rabbis in Reform Judaism, Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, is TWAW. Absolutely incomprehensible IMO. How can a Rabbi say that God made a mistake and put the wrong soul into a person's body? What about the statements in the Torah that humankind were created male and female, and that because we were made 'b'tselem Elohim', in God's image, we have a duty to look after our bodies - and those of other people - and prevent unnecessary harms or disrespect happening to them. Even if she doesn't feel that every single statement in the Bible should be followed utterly (all religious people pick and choose) does she not consider the principle of 'Lifnei iver' important? Perhaps not, perhaps she doesn't see transition as promising somebody something they cannot have. Perhaps she doesn't see divorcing a person's mindset from reality as causing them future harm.

To my understanding, transgenderism is utterly contrary to the tenets of Judaism.

I would have to check the Catholic idea of body / soul relationship but anyway.

I doubt it has much to do with religious belief, in the sense that this is coming from religious folks.

It's probably more coming from leftist atheists. You have religious conservatives more likely against or skeptical of it. You have the liberal religious likely taking the side of the liberal atheists.

What enables someone to swallow the idea that TWAW? I would say social pressure, conformity and group identity, and the vanity of thinking you have the moral high ground. That's much more likely than it having anything to do with concepts of the soul.

There was a webcomic I read as a teenager based on a very literal take on trans people being "in the wrong body."

Each human soul took the form of a paper file in Heaven. Some incompetent angels shoved a couple of files back into the wrong filing cabinets. One girl's soul was put into the wrong 'age' drawer, so she had to relive the last 2 years of high school.
And one boy's soul was shoved into the 'female' filing cabinet, so he woke up in a teenage girl's body and everyone else was convinced that he had always been a girl.
After some initial horror at the situation, the boy found it very arousing to be able to look at breasts just by taking his top off. [Looking back, now I can see that mindset is typical of a certain type]

For those of us who don't believe in souls and Heavenly filing systems though, the idea is rather more difficult to explain!

My first question would be though, does this ideology reflect a coherent concept of a soul and a narrative? And the whole 'in the wrong body thing' reflects a quasi religious narrative, where the major tenet is faith.

It's incoherent, it's used bits of convenient narrative, there are lots of bits of catholic hooks to hang things on such as transubstantiation and heresy, but it's all bits. Useful bits of narrative, but they are largely used to justify the core wishes expressed to others.

As a matter of interest, not all Catholics think body and soul are separable in the way gender-identity-type souls are taken to be by much gender ideology.

Thomas Aquinas was explicit about this. (Summa Contra Gentiles (II.69), "The soul and the body are not two actually existing substances ...")

René Descartes argued explicitly against the Thomists ('Schoolmen') of his time about this. (And he was afraid of these Schoolmen; he knew about Galileo's brush with them.) Many people now are Cartesian dualists, including all the 'gender-identitists', even if they don't really understand the issues,.

(Although not most queer theorists/post-structuralists. They have an interesting, even crazier, take on the whole business that melds not at all with the gender-identity-as-soul idea, though both sides of that divide, once they realise this, keep it quiet (for political reasons) how incompatible their views are.)

Mainly - oversimplifying perhaps a little - the Thomist v Cartesian distinction goes back to Aristotle v Plato. Plato (and the neo-Platonists) thought a soul could exist without a body ('ante rem' or 'before the thing'), whereas Aristotle (and the Thomists/Schoolmen) decided that souls, as the 'form' of their bodies, could only exist 'in re' ('in the thing') - as an essential part of the (equally essentially embodied) man or woman.

(This is why 'the resurrection of the body' is part of the Christian creed; it harks back to Aquinas' view of body and soul as essentially inseparable parts of a human, so that it would not make sense to have a human soul existing in heaven without its body.)

What is the relevance of this to debate about gender identity and trans people?

Well, over long years we have learned to live with people who don't agree with us about souls (and other things). We no longer allow one particular set of beliefs to be promulgated as part of a state religion; we don't (for the most part) torture and kill those we disagree with about ante rem or in re realism and so on.

And we don't allow teachers in schools to give our children one particular view of all this, although we may encourage some "Here are some things people believe, children ...", for children to compare and contrast with what their own parents and families believe (or know) to be the case.

Except that, regarding trans souls, people have started again with "This is how things are; you must believe ...". They have picked one of the more foolish of the available metaphysical pov, indeed: a naive Cartesian dualism-without-god that cannot be true. But that's not the most important thing, imo.

Let them believe what they want. Laugh at them behind their backs; smile to their faces. Let them be. But keep them away from our children and legal systems. Please. This is one religious war we really do not need.

I am a practising Roman Catholic and I agree with @BeverlyHa.

In 2019 The Vatican published “Male.and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory In Education" it's first extensive statement on transgender identity. While including a call for love and respect, the document rejects the idea that gender is distinct from biological sex. A transgender identity, the document asserts, seeks to “annihilate the concept of nature.”

In catholicism the body and soul are not seperate, they are one and created in the image of God. The body you have now is the same body you will be resurected in on judgment day. It's why catholics don't really do cremation. So if God messed up and gave you the wrong one you'll be stuck with it for eternity.

Recently, I've had to make the split from my local tribal community center bc they've glommed onto the concept of Two Spirits. It's a complicated issue that has more to do with how European colonists saw gnc and gay people back in the day, and only in a few tribes, but the modern conception of it always felt counter to what we generally believe as plains people. Very material, you know?

One weird thing I've noticed is how many people drinking this kool-aid used to belong to cultish beliefs, as part of organized religion or not, and fill that void with another one. That article explains a few questions I had about that, the loss of self many feel today.

Has the census come up with information to show the correlation between being transgender and believing in a religion that includes having a soul as part of that belief (Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus)?

It seems unlikely, especially as being anti-trans is seen as being part of the religious right wing.

A religious person, however, might have been sexually abused as a young person, or been made to feel ashamed for being gay, or ashamed of their sexual body.
This may be more of an influence for some believers, either suffering from gender dyspboria, or maintaining that people have a body of one sex and the mind of another, than their belief in a soul.

For me, having a soul represents a person’s essence, but free from having a sex because the soul is immaterial and so has no body. Having a gender identity on the other hand, presumably would still be part of a material brain, and is dependent on having a sexed body which the identity either rebels against or attempts to escape from. Imo, though, having a soul is already an escape.

Even if having a soul separate from the body is simply something imagined - a prism through which to view life and death - if someone does believe they have one, it seems odd to then also add the extra encumbrance of an imagined sex to the body which then needs added body parts, or adaptations while the old sex trundles on beneath the surface. It is more material not less so.

It may be in fact that people with no belief are more likely to believe in gender identity - in order to add a mystical sense to their lives. Having an orientation towards the mystical does seem to be a natural inclination of many humans, but our irreligious age has left a vacuum.

On the other hand some fundamentalist religious people, who believe homosexuality is wrong, may be urging their family members, whom they suspect of being gay, to be transgender as an alternative.

I'm a Christian (not CofE) and the whole ideas of trans is blasphemous. God doesn't make mistakes, we aren't born in the wrong body, we are formed and known in the womb and we are born as we are meant to be. Male or female.

The only people I know in real that spout TWAW are atheist. Whenever I've discussed trans issues with fellow religious people we're all pretty firm and sure that no mixing up of souls and body possible.

My first question would be though, does this ideology reflect a coherent concept of a soul and a narrative? And the whole 'in the wrong body thing' reflects a quasi religious narrative, where the major tenet is faith.

It absolutely is a faith. It depends utterly on belief in an unprovable principle, just as faith in a deity does.

As for coherence - when words mean just what you want them to mean at that moment and in that situation, there is no coherence.

Agree. I think religion is actually a protective factor against trans ideology.

Thanks to the people with a faith who are contributing – it's valuable to hear your thoughts, as well as those who are more sceptical. And to Redbird87 for what I assume to be a Canadian First Nations perspective.

It's why catholics don't really do cremation

MrTiddlesTheCat Today 21:25
They do do cremations nowadays! It changed in 1963.

Lots of people who are Catholic are Catholic in their own way and for different reasons and with private beliefs.

I know. That's why I said 'don't really do' as opposed to 'don't do'. My own dad was cremated but his ashes were then buried so that his body was still whole, well in one place anyway, ready for resurrection.