by Michael G. Lawler, Todd A. Salzman

When Pharisees complained that Jesus received sinners and ate with them, he responded with a parable. "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing" (Luke 15:3-6).

We argue — contra former St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson's letter "Compassion and Challenge" and a February 2019 document from the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education, "Male and Female He Created Them," both of which address "gender ideology" — that transgender and intersex persons are not sinners, but they are lost sheep in the Catholic wilderness.

The term transgender describes people who have been born with typical female or male anatomies but whose self-experience convinces them that their actual gender identity does not match their gender identity assigned at birth. Transgender is contrasted with cisgender, people whose gender identity matches their gender identity assigned at birth.

A UCLA study in 2016 revealed that there are about 1.4 million adults in the United States who identify as transgender, a small minority lost in the overpowering millions of cisgender people.

They are also lost in the wilderness of the Catholic Church, which continues to affirm only the female-male binary that it accepts as created by God and absolute and to which it attaches unchangeable gender.

Intersex people, those born with ambiguous genitalia, often struggle with similar questions about gender identity as transgender people do. Transgender and intersex people differ in their anatomical structures at birth, and most intersex people self-identify as either female or male, but they often suffer the same pain from family rejection, bullying, and discrimination in both society and church.

That discrimination is mostly based on the unquestioned acceptance of the female-male sexual binary and the abhorrence, even hatred, of any sexual or gender arrangement that challenges it. The harrowing outcome of that bullying and discrimination was reported in a 2019 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics: Thirty-five percent of transgender teens reported that they had attempted suicide in the past year — more than triple the number of cisgender teens. Read more via National Catholic Reporter