Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Olympic champion Bruce Jenner has just appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair as the woman he claims he always wanted to be – and in spite of the dismal statistics about those who undergo a gender transition, the public is raving about it.
FoxNews.com is reporting on Jenner’s transition, which came about after undergoing hours of facial feminization surgery, breast augmentation and hormone therapy, which supposedly transformed him from Bruce to Caitlyn. He’s depicted on the cover wearing a one-piece corseted lingerie outfit and if one didn’t know who it was, they would never know this was the decathlete who won the gold medal in the men’s decatholon event at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.
For those who don’t remember his glorious past in the sports arena, he’s better known as the husband of Kris Jenner and the father of two of the now famous Kardashian clan – Kylie and Kendall.
Jenner claims he always wanted to be a woman. “Bruce always had to tell a lie. He was always living that lie. Every day he always had a secret from morning till night. Caitlyn doesn’t have any secrets,” he told the magazine. “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, ‘You just blew your entire life’.”
He looks positively glowing in the photos, shot by famed photographer Annie Liebovitz in Jenner’s Malibu home, but statistics show that the gender confused who undergo these transitions are rarely better off afterward.
And these aren’t new findings. As long ago as 1979, experts in the field such as Dr. Jon Meyer, head of the now defunct Johns Hopkins gender clinic, told The New York Times: “My personal feeling is that the surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.”
Kylie and Kendall Jenner – Bruce’s children with wife Kris (Kardashian)
His conclusion is shared by many in the medical community which began tinkering with sex change therapies in the 1960s but eventually withdrew from the field due to lackluster results, leaving it mostly in the hands of private physicians.
This is why Catholics need to speak out on behalf of our brothers and sisters who are living with gender confusion. Transitioning to a perceived gender does not appear to be working for a majority of people with these issues, and this is not just according to the medical community. It’s also according to those who have undergone the treatments and learned the hard way that denying one’s biological gender might be politically correct, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
The Church has been confronting the issue as well, although it doesn’t get nearly the media attention it should. For instance, during his Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2012, Pope s Benedict XVI said the whole idea of gender theory is inherently false and a social danger.
After quoting Simone de Beauvoir who said, “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” Benedict goes on to tell the Curia that these words are laying the foundation for what is being put forward under the term of “gender” these days, which amounts to a new philosophy of sexuality.
“According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
This defies the biblical creation account in which we learn that the being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. “This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves.”
This kind of thinking can have catastrophic consequences, particularly for children. “ . . . If there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation,” he continued. “Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”
This has resulted in the child becoming an object to which people have a right to obtain, rather than a being born with his or her own rights.
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being,” he said. “The defense of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.”
Rather than applauding Bruce Jenner’s transition into what is being called a “woman” is not to be applauded but viewed with concern and compassion, so that he might receive the help he needs to be at peace with the man God created him to be.
As for the press who fuels acceptance of this deeply flawed trend by neglecting to inform the public of the very real consequences of actions such as Jenner’s, they are only confirming what Benedict sees as the result of the rapid decline in our national morality that is causing these bizarre issues to arise.
“We live in an age rushing headlong into darkness, while it professes to be enlightened.”
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