Transgender Man Here! Ask Me Anything! :)

[Aloysius]

On 2/26/2021 at 11:57 AM, Aloysius said:

I think my point on soul/body dualism really should be revisited here, as from the Catholic perspective this is THE issue on the table, one that's relevant both for transgenderism and for Catholics at large who also generally have mistaken perspectives on this, a kind of ghost-in-the-machine thinking is very common especially today.  While you replied to my post that you don't see soul/body mismatch as the issue, many of the things you have said, @CuriositasEtFidem, seem to reveal such soul/body (or at least mind/body) dualistic thinking.  I can hardly blame you as this kind of mindset is so pervasive, but it is wrong, and reflecting on why it is wrong would be a helpful exercise for all of us IMO.

if you'll indulge me for being a bit semantically nit-picky on a couple phrases, I think interrogating those phrases will be revelatory of some attitudes we need to think about on this issue even if it might just be a kind of figure of speech:

the "insides don't match the outsides" phraseology I saw you use at one point in this thread is one thing--what are these insides/outsides?  is it brain chemicals and hormones that don't match the secondary sex characteristics?  I find it very hard to square that as in any way a physical disorder rather than a social mismatch between how you experience the roles you want to take in society and how society expects those secondary sex characteristics to play out socially.  and again, if it's not a physical disorder then, from a Catholic perspective, you are called to love and cultivate your body as identical with you, there is no such thing as 'you' without your body.

and then here's the other phrase "it would have been nice if I had been born with a different set".  I posit to you, based on the Catholic understanding of the unity of the body and soul, that "YOU" would not have been born at all in that case.  there is no YOU except for the united soul/mind/body that was born.   There is no "you" that could have been born with a different body, you and your body ARE the same thing.  You don't just have a body like someone has a hammer.  like a ghost inhabiting a machine.  the body you 'have' is not just something you have, despite the limits of our language where we use that possessive verb, it is YOU, and to whatever extent it is healthy you are called to accept it and cultivate it.  social gender roles are a whole separate issue that could be gotten into as well, but the recognition that you ARE your body, that there's no such thing as a distinction between you and your body, should be the starting point before moving on to any question of what particular gender role one should take in society.

of course if something is a physical disorder like cancer or a deformity you could say 'i wish i had been born without this or without that' and not be violating this anti-dualistic principle, as you'd just be talking about wishing that same body you were born with was born more healthy.  but wanting a different set of genitalia IMO is a much different thing than that--the genitalia you "have" are a part of you, they're a part of your united body-soul person.

That's the point the document I posted before from the Congregation for Catholic Education (Male and Female He Created Them)  was trying to make (I saw earlier folks like @Jaime were still suggesting that there had been no guidance on the issue doctrinally from the church, perhaps my post was missed, as I attached the file of the document it tells me only 2 ppl downloaded it and probably one of those was me checking if i'd uploaded the right file lol, but maybe ppl googled it ... anyway while that's not necessarily the most authoritative document it does seem magisterial in an ordinary way and should be a jumping off point for exploring what the doctrines being intersected by this issue really are rather than needing to resort to an analogy to church teachings on homosexuality).  That document was trying to make its doctrinal criticism of transgender ideology on the grounds of condemning that kind of problematic dualism.  perhaps you state you don't think of it that body/soul dualistic way, @CuriositasEtFidem, but in some other ways you seem to reveal that kind of thinking as lurking beneath the surface of your experience.  the typical narratives around how to interpret the experience of dysphoria are deeply rooted in such dualism, actually, though materialists who don't believe in souls replace the word "soul" with the word "mind" they are meaning largely the same thing--both rejecting the real sense in which your whole body IS you, for the platonic-style dualist the REAL you is your soul, for the modern materialistic dualist the REAL you is your brain/mind; but BOTH are wrong--the real you is the holistic mind-body-soul person.  you can't separate out one and say it's the real you and it's mismatched to one of the other parts, as they're interdependent, they don't exist apart from one another in that way.

I hope I don't come across as vain for quoting my last post that seemed to die as the last post (and probably too long as all my posts end up being lol) of a page just before a debate broke out about what it means to be charitable vs tell the truth vs be kind vs be mean, and all the inevitable mudslinging that comes along with that (with a lot of people with different kinds of emotional temperaments and personality types unable to quite mesh together).  My 2 cents on that before I ever so slightly attempt to steer the convo back to the part of it I'm more interested in (reflected in the quoted post above lol): the balance between being kind and telling the truth as you see it should not result in refusing to confront people you think are wrong, but it does require charity and respect and love.  the gender issue is a very polarizing political topic today, so sometimes ppl feeling like the whole topic is part of a larger thing dismantling things they hold dear might be a bit overly zealous because to them they don't feel like they're attacking an individual in front of them, but get very caught up in defending an ideal view of the world they feel is behind them.  it's understandable, but as an excercise I would suggest to think about people identifying with a different gender as we tend to think of people of a different religion--their gender identity is like the religious belief you don't agree with.  you certainly make it clear to the hindu that you don't believe in Krishna, but you don't go out of your way to insult their religion just for the sake of insulting it (we're not all called to be St Boniface cutting down the sacred tree, while such zeal may have a time and a place, I humbly submit that that time and place is not anonymized-by-text internet forums or phorums where it is unlikely to have the effect of converting whole nations like Boniface did ).  My favorite book in terms of dealing with other religions is Benedict XVI's Truth and Tolerance--and I think those two pillars, along with charity, are something that'd be a suitable thing for us to reflect on in terms of how we approach someone with a different view of gender. 

Another point: transgender people may have a radically different view of gender than the Catholic position--but your neighbor next door who is a biologically born male who identifies as a male but defines being male as being a bully, not caring about poor people, being greedy to get ahead, etc, is desecrating what Catholic doctrine would have to teach about maleness as well.  In a different way, mind you, but still doing that.  The female neighbor who identifies as a woman but sees promsicuity and using abortion as a form of birth control as part of what it means to be authentically female is also desecrating the idea of the feminine too.  Perhaps that perspective might help you to think about what it is you really ought to be promoting as a response to the issue of transgenderism.

which brings me to the point I want to continue from my last post, even if it just turns into me having a convo with myself lol.  When the reformation happened it wasn't the people who first shouted down protestant heretics and told them to sit down and shut up that were the heroes, it was the counter-reformation and the council of Trent that sought to actually answer their complaints by purging bad practices and revivifying the good principles.

When the sexual revolution happened, the church's best response wasn't the rigid people who came out and yelled at the dirty hippies telling them to go back to being 1950's husbands and housewifes; the best response the church gave to the sexual revolution was JPII's theology of the body--it saw a bunch of young people challenging sexual mores they felt they couldn't fulfill and then searched in the church's treasury of doctrines and principles and made them come alive in an answer for people to move forward.  it called on everyone to reexamine their own views and practices of sexuality--not just yelling at the dirty hippies with their free love but also shouting to anyone who was just going through some rigid system of morals to tell them those morals weren't just a set of rules but there was something deeper there to meditate on about the sacredness of sex and marriage.

I think something like that is what we should be looking for when we see a bunch of people challenging gender, feeling themselves disconnected and misfitted to the gender roles they were expected to fulfill in our society, and really it seems that's the kind of dialogue called for in this Vatican document I've been talking about (Male and Female He Created Them).  And it would dovetail nicely with things like JPII's theology of the body as well.  There are some profound things we should all be seeking to learn about our own selves and our own experience of gender, as that document says--to challenge problematic things that our culture might tell us about that, to challenge the kind of dualistic thinking about mind/body/soul we sometimes fall into, etc.  The typical 'conservative' response to transgenderism is to defend the gender roles of our society as natural and therefore good; but the Christian knows that all human societies are built not on nature, but on fallen human nature, so there is definitely something to be said for how we should then move forward as a church to bring alive the kind of gendered lives we should be living as Christians--not just critique transgender people, but recognize that perhaps their experience is emerging out of some sickness in our present society and look to the Church's treasure of wisdom and grace and look to Christ to find what ways we could address that sickness and what ways such sicknesses might be infecting us as well.

[Aloysius]

__________________

[I hope this doesnt merge into the above post and make it even more too-long lol.  I can't seem to help myself from writing whole novels as posts here lol]

this issue of gender pronouns leads me to an interesting reflection.  I actually believe that people ought to use pronouns organically and not deliberately--one should simply say the pronoun that people most look like; if you can't tell you either avoid pronouns altogether or can ask if it's a situation where it's not rude.  but it really should NOT be some kind of deliberate thing--everyone should go out into the world and expect to be called by the pronoun that they most appear by, they shouldn't go around announcing they want someone to call them by some pronoun other than the one that they appear to be according to the cultural norms of their society.  that just shouldn't be a thing.  anyone who cannot handle being called by the wrong pronoun regularly, IMO, should either try to do a better job at 'passing' so that people reflexively and unassumingly use the pronoun without you having to tell them to, or they should develop more resilience and thicker skin.  (and well, if you want to ask people who are closer to you to call you something then fine, but be as tolerant of their refusal as you are of someone who believes a different religion than you; if you are called the wrong pronoun you shouldn't treat that any different than having someone tell you the god you believe in doesn't exist--something that someone might do rudely or politely, so treat it accordingly haha)

but anyway, it's not possible to do that organically and non-deliberately on the internet.  and I think this may reveal a broader trend of a way in which the internet is increasing people's dualistic thinking about things.  when I say you should be referred to organically as the pronouns you appear to be, that's because you shouldn't be expecting someone to be addressing some "true self' that's invisible and inside you, your body as it is physically presented to the world is YOU and people interact with that.  this whole issue of intentional required gender pronouns as it is even more intense on the internet requires us all to be addressing each other as disembodied minds, and I have a feeling all of us could use some spiritual reflection on what that's doing to us.

[Machine_Washable]

51 minutes ago, Aloysius said:

The typical 'conservative' response to transgenderism is to defend the gender roles of our society as natural and therefore good; but the Christian knows that all human societies are built not on nature, but on fallen human nature, so there is definitely something to be said for how we should then move forward as a church to bring alive the kind of gendered lives we should be living as Christians--not just critique transgender people, but recognize that perhaps their experience is emerging out of some sickness in our present society and look to the Church's treasure of wisdom and grace and look to Christ to find what ways we could address that sickness and what ways such sicknesses might be infecting us as well.

Do Catholics believe that there are set gender roles at all? If a couple wanted the wife to provide for the household and the husband live off of her would that be acceptable?

[Aloysius]

There should definitely be gender roles, and they should be built around complementarity.  Much like the Church would lay out some principles for the proper government of peoples but not endorse any one particular form of government, we can think of gender that way too--there are many different social/cultural forms that complementarity between the genders might take.  what is important is that people are invited to culturally and socially elaborate on their sexual differences in some form that best builds up good families, good communities, and good societies.

so it could certainly be ok if in a cerain socio-economic / cultural context that complementarity took on the form of the woman making the family's living and the man 'staying home' to raise the children, as long as there are male and female poles that are complementing each other in the complex dance that is the relationship between the sexes, not just being two interchangable units.  i kind of think the capitalistic / industrial/ postindustrial model of either party being so wrenched away from family life so much is a problem but the zoomification of the workforce may end up helping that out; but in terms of what it should mean for the gender roles--there should be an interplay of male and female that complements each other in a way that best benefits the children and the community.  generally the female role is the one of more stability and immanence for the child while the male one is the more external to the child, as the child has never been as physically connected to the male as to the mother then the male role is generally the one wrenching them out of the safety of a home and hearth to press them into becoming a member of society in their own right (physical bodily experiences are very important, we're not just minds and we're not just spirits!); but how that particularly manifests itself and gets elaborated culturally is open and can be changed.  but whatever way it's elaborted, there should be two distinct roles that are socially and culturally elaborated--the ways in which they're culturally elaborated shouldn't be too rigid, IMO, but that's just my opinion, how rigid or fluid any of the arbitrary aspects of those things are can be open to debate) and the core principle is that the two roles be complementary .

for example, it is arbitrary that women wear dresses and men wear trousers.  but that doesn't mean we should just throw that out completely, we should have some socio-cultural distinct forms of dress; society could just as easily have had men wearing long flowing robes and women wearing parachute pantaloons.... it's also arbitrary to have a man in an office desk chair behind a computer doing work and a woman behind a sewing machine, you could swap those out or reverse them, but utlimately there should be some kind of complementarity in the roles, there is still something deep about the gendered lives we live.  actually I think gender best defined not on its own, but as your relationship to the opposite gender (and that is what it is, a single 'opposite' gender), a truck or a pair of pantaloons or the color blue aren't inherent to 'male-ness', but when they're part of a social system of the way males relate to females they take on that role.

long story short (I'm bad at that as you can see lol): yes there should be two distinct gender roles, and they are best defined in relation to each other in terms of 'complementarity'.  actually the document I keep referencing makes some good points in this regard as well.  http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_20190202_maschio-e-femmina_en.pdf

[Machine_Washable]

17 minutes ago, Aloysius said:

There should definitely be gender roles, and they should be built around complementarity.  Much like the Church would lay out some principles for the proper government of peoples but not endorse any one particular form of government, we can think of gender that way too--there are many different social/cultural forms that complementarity between the genders might take.  what is important is that people are invited to culturally and socially elaborate on their sexual differences in some form that best builds up good families, good communities, and good societies.

so it could certainly be ok if in a cerain socio-economic / cultural context that complementarity took on the form of the woman making the family's living and the man 'staying home' to raise the children, as long as there are male and female poles that are complementing each other in the complex dance that is the relationship between the sexes, not just being two interchangable units.  i kind of think the capitalistic / industrial/ postindustrial model of either party being so wrenched away from family life so much is a problem but the zoomification of the workforce may end up helping that out; but in terms of what it should mean for the gender roles--there should be an interplay of male and female that complements each other in a way that best benefits the children and the community.  generally the female role is the one of more stability and immanence for the child while the male one is the more external to the child, as the child has never been as physically connected to the male as to the mother then the male role is generally the one wrenching them out of the safety of a home and hearth to press them into becoming a member of society in their own right (physical bodily experiences are very important, we're not just minds and we're not just spirits!); but how that particularly manifests itself and gets elaborated culturally is open and can be changed.  but whatever way it's elaborted, there should be two distinct roles that are socially and culturally elaborated--the ways in which they're culturally elaborated shouldn't be too rigid, IMO, but that's just my opinion, how rigid or fluid any of the arbitrary aspects of those things are can be open to debate) and the core principle is that the two roles be complementary .

for example, it is arbitrary that women wear dresses and men wear trousers.  but that doesn't mean we should just throw that out completely, we should have some socio-cultural distinct forms of dress; society could just as easily have had men wearing long flowing robes and women wearing parachute pantaloons.... it's also arbitrary to have a man in an office desk chair behind a computer doing work and a woman behind a sewing machine, you could swap those out or reverse them, but utlimately there should be some kind of complementarity in the roles, there is still something deep about the gendered lives we live.  actually I think gender best defined not on its own, but as your relationship to the opposite gender (and that is what it is, a single 'opposite' gender), a truck or a pair of pantaloons or the color blue aren't inherent to 'male-ness', but when they're part of a social system of the way males relate to females they take on that role.

long story short (I'm bad at that as you can see lol): yes there should be two distinct gender roles, and they are best defined in relation to each other in terms of 'complementarity'.  actually the document I keep referencing makes some good points in this regard as well.  http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_20190202_maschio-e-femmina_en.pdf

Jazakallah. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the comprehensive answer.

[CuriositasEtFidem]

When I started this thread it was with the objective of educating fellow Catholics on trans/qwerty stuff and the general qwerty experience, not so much with hard theology and doctrine, though the discussions on those have been very interesting to read. So, to start anew, anyone have any questions on the things I mentioned? (i.e., what the transition process is like, what gender dysphoria feels like, how I cope with it, deadnaming/misgendering, what changes come with taking testosterone, etc.)

Hmmm... I guess the phorum censors the word "Qu*eer"

[little2add]

28 minutes ago, CuriositasEtFidem said:

So, to start anew, anyone have any questions

Is this a test? 
are you sincere Or just jerking everyone’s chain?

[CuriositasEtFidem]

1 hour ago, Peace said:

Your thread has been hijacked. Think of it as a Phatmass rite of passage.

Well, I've finally learned after 19 pages of this lol

37 minutes ago, little2add said:

Is this a test? 
are you sincere Or just jerking everyone’s chain?

Yes, I'm sincere

[Aloysius]

I absolutely get the sense that there's sincerity here, based on the posts I've seen from @CuriositasEtFidem there seems to be a genuine engagement with the Catholic faith behind these posts--if it were a troll it'd be a troll that had done their homework and was playing a pretty long game lol.  For continuing the discussion, I'd suggest following along with the different sections of the document I keep harping on about (Male and Female He Created Them)--listening, points of agreement, points of critique, and then the proposed Christian anthropology that it sets out as a vision that we would all learn from.  Curiositas is calling you to come back to 'listening' which is difficult when it's a polarizing topic, but it is useful.  while Fides Jack pointed out Christ rebuked people all the time, Christ's rebukes were often based upon the fact that He was the perfect man, and he often rebuked others for their acts of rebuking on the basis that despite rebuking others, they weren't learning something for themselves (let he who is without sin throw the first stone doesn't mean the woman didn't need to be told not to sin, as He did then say "go and sin no more", but that all those throwing stones needed to learn lessons about sin as well)--that 'listening' aspect is part of that--there is something to learn here for all of us, if you do feel something from curiositas needs to be rebuked make sure that as part of that rebuke you're rebuking yourself too, then you and curiositas could maybe learn something together

Anyway, I don't have any particular questions, but any aspect of your experience that you want to share can be a good point of engagement for us all to examine these issues.  keep in mind that throwing anything out there should be open to critique, which can often seem harsh (and even sometimes be harsh) on a text-based discussion like this.  Part of why my posts are more abstract (other than the fact that I'm a pompous academic ) is that I'm not quite sure anyone ever benefits from a text-based debate in which one person's personal life is the example being thrown around, that can lend itself to a lot of nastiness unless the person at the center has a lot of thick skin, or unless one side just holds back completely to avoid offense in which case the discussion won't have much merit either.

[Peace]

On 3/1/2021 at 1:37 AM, Aloysius said:

 (Male and Female He Created Them)

You really want us to read that document don't you? Not gonna happen pal. Not gonna happen.

40 minutes ago, CuriositasEtFidem said:

Well, I've finally learned after 19 pages of this lol

It's been about 7 years since a thread here started and ended on the same topic.

Edited March 2, 2021 by Peace

[PhuturePriest]

On 3/1/2021 at 12:37 AM, Aloysius said:

I hope I don't come across as vain for quoting my last post that seemed to die as the last post (and probably too long as all my posts end up being lol) of a page just before a debate broke out about what it means to be charitable vs tell the truth vs be kind vs be mean, and all the inevitable mudslinging that comes along with that (with a lot of people with different kinds of emotional temperaments and personality types unable to quite mesh together).  My 2 cents on that before I ever so slightly attempt to steer the convo back to the part of it I'm more interested in (reflected in the quoted post above lol): the balance between being kind and telling the truth as you see it should not result in refusing to confront people you think are wrong, but it does require charity and respect and love.  the gender issue is a very polarizing political topic today, so sometimes ppl feeling like the whole topic is part of a larger thing dismantling things they hold dear might be a bit overly zealous because to them they don't feel like they're attacking an individual in front of them, but get very caught up in defending an ideal view of the world they feel is behind them.  it's understandable, but as an excercise I would suggest to think about people identifying with a different gender as we tend to think of people of a different religion--their gender identity is like the religious belief you don't agree with.  you certainly make it clear to the hindu that you don't believe in Krishna, but you don't go out of your way to insult their religion just for the sake of insulting it (we're not all called to be St Boniface cutting down the sacred tree, while such zeal may have a time and a place, I humbly submit that that time and place is not anonymized-by-text internet forums or phorums where it is unlikely to have the effect of converting whole nations like Boniface did ).  My favorite book in terms of dealing with other religions is Benedict XVI's Truth and Tolerance--and I think those two pillars, along with charity, are something that'd be a suitable thing for us to reflect on in terms of how we approach someone with a different view of gender. 

Another point: transgender people may have a radically different view of gender than the Catholic position--but your neighbor next door who is a biologically born male who identifies as a male but defines being male as being a bully, not caring about poor people, being greedy to get ahead, etc, is desecrating what Catholic doctrine would have to teach about maleness as well.  In a different way, mind you, but still doing that.  The female neighbor who identifies as a woman but sees promsicuity and using abortion as a form of birth control as part of what it means to be authentically female is also desecrating the idea of the feminine too.  Perhaps that perspective might help you to think about what it is you really ought to be promoting as a response to the issue of transgenderism.

which brings me to the point I want to continue from my last post, even if it just turns into me having a convo with myself lol.  When the reformation happened it wasn't the people who first shouted down protestant heretics and told them to sit down and shut up that were the heroes, it was the counter-reformation and the council of Trent that sought to actually answer their complaints by purging bad practices and revivifying the good principles.

When the sexual revolution happened, the church's best response wasn't the rigid people who came out and yelled at the dirty hippies telling them to go back to being 1950's husbands and housewifes; the best response the church gave to the sexual revolution was JPII's theology of the body--it saw a bunch of young people challenging sexual mores they felt they couldn't fulfill and then searched in the church's treasury of doctrines and principles and made them come alive in an answer for people to move forward.  it called on everyone to reexamine their own views and practices of sexuality--not just yelling at the dirty hippies with their free love but also shouting to anyone who was just going through some rigid system of morals to tell them those morals weren't just a set of rules but there was something deeper there to meditate on about the sacredness of sex and marriage.

I think something like that is what we should be looking for when we see a bunch of people challenging gender, feeling themselves disconnected and misfitted to the gender roles they were expected to fulfill in our society, and really it seems that's the kind of dialogue called for in this Vatican document I've been talking about (Male and Female He Created Them).  And it would dovetail nicely with things like JPII's theology of the body as well.  There are some profound things we should all be seeking to learn about our own selves and our own experience of gender, as that document says--to challenge problematic things that our culture might tell us about that, to challenge the kind of dualistic thinking about mind/body/soul we sometimes fall into, etc.  The typical 'conservative' response to transgenderism is to defend the gender roles of our society as natural and therefore good; but the Christian knows that all human societies are built not on nature, but on fallen human nature, so there is definitely something to be said for how we should then move forward as a church to bring alive the kind of gendered lives we should be living as Christians--not just critique transgender people, but recognize that perhaps their experience is emerging out of some sickness in our present society and look to the Church's treasure of wisdom and grace and look to Christ to find what ways we could address that sickness and what ways such sicknesses might be infecting us as well.

 

10 hours ago, Aloysius said:

I like Fr RIpperger in a lot of ways, but I would definitely disagree with absolutizing gender roles in that way.  the complementary roles of a man and a woman in a relationship could be elaborated in various ways--it is indeed a priority to ensure that the mother-child relationship is exhaulted and protected in the best way possible.  but when it comes to how this divides between inside and outside the house labor, I don't think that's so static or clear cut.

it is certainly one beautiful articulation of complementary gender roles when a family is able to have a stay at home mother and a man whose labor keeps mother and children protected.  but it is not the only way, nor has it been the primary mode of family life for most Christians at most times--but in former times the man's labor for most people was also somewhat 'at home' as it were, so both were doing some sort of 'at-home' labor, just in roles that complemented each other.

anyway, like I said, I think there are principles relating to gender, but taking too rigid a view is like a Catholic who insists that based upon the Church's principles we all ought to support monarchies.  complementarity, the primacy of the child, and ensuring there is a safe and protected position for the special mother-child relationship would be some principles to start with; for many people the integration of meaningful careers for both spouses can be incorporated into those principles.  no system is perfect, and those principles can be strained even in the 'traditional' gender roles, too.

anyway, that's a whole rabbit hole of a conversation.  I think we should agree on an umbrella idea that there should be complementary gender roles even if we may have some different articulations of the details.

I just really want to express my appreciation for your thoughtful posts. You are getting me very close to actually reading that document, which is a significant feat since I hate reading Vatican documents.

[Aloysius]

32 minutes ago, Peace said:

You really want us to read that document don't you? Not gonna happen pal. Not gonna happen.

haha I mean we are Catholics discussing the issue of transgenderism and that is basically the main document that's ever come out of the Vatican on that topic, I feel like it should be the starting point of any discussion among Catholics on these issues lol.  but fair enough, no need to read it if you don't have time, but I keep referring to it because it says a lot of things better than I could (or at least has more weight coming from the Vatican than just my own random opinion) so I hope some casual reader might go take a look at least . 

[Anomaly]

On 2/26/2021 at 10:14 AM, Anomaly said:

@CuriositasEtFidem  The answer probably got lost in the heated exchanges in this thread, but my question really is what are the parameters of gender behavior that you feel you cannot express as a female?   What are the internal and or external “things” that compels you to be Transgender, not female AND who/what the person you want to be?   I’m not judging, trying to understand.  

That was my question 

[Ash Wednesday]

47 minutes ago, Aloysius said:

Ash Wednesday et al, I'd support a thread split that included Fides's Fr. Ripperger video as the first post, with Peace's reply to that, then Fides's last two posts and then this one.  you don't have to but it'd probably be beneficial haha, then the two distinct conversations could have their space to breathe

Agreed 100%, had a feeling that the post would springboard so I'm happy to help with that

[Peace]

1 hour ago, fides' Jack said:

My general feeling is that he's many, many times more qualified than anyone here to speak about it.  And yes, that's an appeal to authority on my part, but in moral matters appeals to authority matter.

Well you can literally find a priest somewhere to say whatever you want nowadays. You really gotta go to official catechisms, encyclicals, the summa, doctors of the church, etc. if you want to make an appeal to authority. You can find a priest on Youtube to say anything.

1 minute ago, Ash Wednesday said:

Agreed 100%, had a feeling that the post would springboard so I'm happy to help with that

Aw come on. Let it ride!