Why this issue?
Since the late 1960’s, sexual orientation and gender identity have become major social and political issues in the Western world. The Church is being challenged to extend Catholic anthropology to explain them and to develop pastoral support for those experiencing these conditions. Below are links to various sources that provide a background for the Church’s developing understanding of these complex issues. The rights of LGBTI persons as well as those of Catholic institutions and also the larger society need to be respected. Pastoral decisions should be made on the basis of a sound understanding of human nature, the latest objective psychological and biological research, respect for individual freedom, and avoidance of ideological bias.
The order of the sections in this bibliography reflects the strong conviction that the Church’s position on sexual orientation and gender identity issues is most effectively presented to most people by starting with the human experiences and then progressing to Catholic doctrine.
Resources
A. Definitions
Sex – the sexual act; the state of being biologically male or female; determined by chromosomes; binary and stable; not contradicted by exceptions or altered by social/cultural conditioning or surgery.
Sexual orientation – a pattern of romantic or sexual attraction to another person; homosexual (gay) / heterosexual.
Gender identity – a person’s self representation as male or female; the conformity or lack thereof with biological sex; transgender / cisgender.
Gender theory – a recent academic discipline which examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and social events shape the role of gender in different societies; looks at sexual differences and less binary definitions of gender categorization; denies that there are two biologically determined sexes (“binary essentialism”); has no scientific basis.
Gender – originally meant “class” or “sort;” later, classes of nouns in grammar (masculine, feminine, neuter); today often synonymous with biological sex; there are said to be a fluid range of multiple genders.
Transgender – an umbrella term including transsexuals, cross dressers and drag queens.
Transsexual – more commonly referred to as “transgender;” a person born with male or female sexual organs and chromosomes, with a gender identity of the opposite sex – “a boy in a girl’s body” or vv.; primarily a psychological condition; sometimes the term is used to refer to someone who has undergone surgery to alleviate gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria – (confusion)/GD; formerly called “gender identity disorder/GID;” “the presence of clinically significant distress” associated with transsexualism (DSM-V).
Intersexual – Previously called hermaphroditism, now called intersex or Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD); a group of conditions in which sexual identity is ambiguous due to factors such as a discrepancy between external and internal genitals or chromosomal abnormalities, e.g., 47 XXY or 45 XO.
