Changing gender goes against nature, says Catholic Church

The Catholic Church says changing gender goes against the “concept of nature”.

Pope Francis celebrates a Pentecost mass in Saint Peter's square at the Vatican. The Vatican has rejected the idea that people can change or choose their gender. Picture: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

The Vatican has rejected the idea that people can change or choose their gender, suggesting the movement aims to “annihilate the concept of nature”.

The Vatican office that oversees Catholic schools and universities published a guidance document for priests and teachers yesterday called Male and Female He Created Them.

It describes an “educational crisis” around gender and criticises the view that gender and sexuality can be “fluid”, saying such theories are “founded on a confused concept of freedom”.

New Ways Ministry, a group for LGBT Catholics, said the document was a “harmful tool” that would also be used against gay and bisexual people.

The report, by the Congregation for Catholic Education, adds: “Efforts to go beyond the constitutive male-female sexual difference lead to a masculinity or femininity that is ambiguous. This oscillation between male and female becomes, at the end of the day, only a provocative display against ‘traditional frameworks’. Similar theories aim to annihilate the concept of ‘nature’.”

It says the church agrees with the “laudable desire to combat unjust discrimination”, but warns of a “tendency to cancel out the differences between men and women, presenting them instead as merely the product of historical and cultural conditioning”.

The Times