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Notes -
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Touching on this subject, and also following on from the previous Culture War thread where I was asked how I feel about the current state of the Catholic Church, here we go - something to offend everybody!
Declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith “Dignitas Infinita” on Human Dignity, 08.04.2024
The RadTrads are already heresy-hunting, the media will be all over the bits about abortion, surrogacy, and transgender rights, and of course the Spirit of Vatican II types are disappointed, sorely and gravely disappointed, as per usual.
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! As someone allegedly said, the Church may be a whore, but she's my Mother 🙆♀️
I don’t understand the distinction between curing congenital defects and sex changes? Surely the person undergoing the procedure would consider them one and the same? If the one doesn’t affect the unique dignity of the person, why should the other? Why does the natural order of the human person exclude some chromosomal ”abnormalities” but not others?
I’m not Catholic, but I’d readily accept some argument to this end. This one feels really light on God.
It's about Natural Law. The problem is, moderns confuse the natural in "Natural Law" with natural as in "what happens naturally, what happens in nature, anything that happens that nobody tried to make happen on purpose" and that's the wrong kind of "natural".
In Natural Law, there is such a thing as a human, and such a thing as a male or female human, and these things have certain characteristics. For instance, humans have two legs. Even though some humans are born with only one leg, it remains the fact that the "natural" human has two legs. There is something wrong with a human who is born with only one leg, because humans are "naturally" supposed to have two legs.
By the same token, humans are "naturally" male or female. If you're born with bits that don't match either, then something is wrong with you: that's why we call it a congenital "defect" or "abnormality", we're comparing the condition to "natural" males and females and noting that it does not match. This kind of thing happens sometimes, just like you get humans born with only one leg. So if you surgically intervene to correct the abnormality, you are doing much the same thing as a doctor who removes a tumor (humans are not supposed to have tumors in them) or who performs plastic surgery to repair the skin of a burn victim (humans are not supposed to have their skin all melted off). You are correcting a disease, returning them to as "natural" a condition as possible by medical science.
In contrast, lets look at a male to female sex change operation. The genitals are surgically removed, and a kind of pseudo vagina is made. This is taking a physically healthy and "natural" male and turning it into a defective and unnatural male: a male with no penis, no testicles, and a hole where a hole shouldn't be. What's more, it removes some of his "natural" capabilities, such as being able to sire children. From a Natural Law perspective a sex change operation like this is completely analogous to cutting off someone's arm or leg or nose: you're maiming them, turning them from "natural" humans into unnatural and defective humans. Under Natural Law it may be acceptable sometimes to maim a human in the pursuit of a greater good: for example, amputating a limb that is badly infected before the infection can kill the patient. In that case the amputation is still an evil, but it is an evil that is allowed because it is in the aim of preventing a worse evil, death (a dead human is about as far from a "natural" human as you can get). This shouldn't be confused with consequentialism, because Catholics are not consequentialists: they call it the "principle of double effect". The doctor's goal is to save the patient's life, not to maim the patient. If the doctor could save the patient's life without amputating his arm, then the doctor would do that. This is different than if a BIID individual came to a doctor asking for the doctor to amputate his limb: in that case the whole purpose of the procedure is to maim the patient, there is no scenario in which the doctor would not amputate the arm if he could, since amputating the arm is the whole point.
(You could argue the actual point is to cure the individuals BIID symptoms, and if the doctor could cure the BIID without amputating then he would. That might be permissible under Natural Law, but it leads us naturally to the question of whether there is a non maiming way to cure BIID or not. If there is then the principle of double effect doesn't apply).
This begs the question of whether the patient was supposed to be a man or a woman. They could be thought of as having been born as a defective and unnatural woman, lacking the parts and capabilities she is naturally supposed to have; the operation would then be turning her into something closer to her natural form.
Admittedly she would not be entirely there with the current state of medical practise (e. g. unable to bear children); however, this is less an ironclad proof of the One True Ontology Of Gender and more of a Skill Issue on the part of surgeons.
If we had the technological capability to turn a man into a "natural" woman with all the parts and capabilities of a "natural" woman, then it would lead to an interesting Natural Law question. Arguably it would not be against Natural Law, but may still be against Catholic doctrine: the whole "creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created” bit. But from a Natural Law perspective, it may well be licit.
Though there is the question of how you would know that someone is "naturally" a woman despite having a healthy male body. It may seem more likely that their abnormality is not having the wrong body, but having an abnormality of the mind. Imagine we had the technology to perfectly change someone's sex, and also had the technology to cure their GID (as in, they won't feel like they're in the wrong body anymore). From a Natural Law perspective, curing the GID seems to be the superior treatment. After all, humans are not "naturally" supposed to believe they are in the wrong bodies and suffer depression and anxiety and the rest around that belief.
In any case, what is certainly not licit under Natural Law is to take a natural human and lop off bits of it to make an unnatural human, unless the alternative is even more unnatural.
From a 'considering second-order effects' perspective, 'curing' someone's mind to make them accept their existing body opens a slippery slope to those who do not accept 'Natural Law' to 'cure' their workers of the desire for humane working conditions.
Therefore changing someone's body, into a form which exists naturally (men and women both naturally exist), may forestall the un-natural transformation of human beings into something that does not naturally exist.
Again, that is begging the question of whether a trans person, prior to medical interventions, is a 'natural human'.
The same can be said the other way: 'curing" someone's body by radically transforming it into the opposite gender opens a slippery slope for those who do not accept Natural Law to 'cure' their workers by giving them new body forms that make them better workers. The solution in either case (assuming we have such powerful technology) would be to keep to a Natural Law ethic which would oppose radical modifications of the human mind from what is normal (for instance, modifying a mind not work for 16 hours a day without a break and not mind it) or the human body (by, say, modifying a body so that they are 50% more efficient at their job by giving them six arms, twelve eyes, and three brains or something).
Well they are physically "natural". They have all the parts and pieces a male should have (as opposed to someone with an intersex abnormality). Given the healthy and natural body, the question becomes whether this natural body is actually unnatural because the it does not match the mind, or if the mind is unnatural because it does not match the body.
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