Responding to
Transgender Ideology
Now Available
Freeing Your School of Gender Ideology
Principals Course
The speed with which gender ideology has spread is head-spinning. If yours is like most Catholic schools, it snuck under the door unnoticed, and now you’re left wondering what to do.
Enroll Nownow available
Freeing Your School of Gender Ideology
principals course
The speed with which gender ideology has spread is head-spinning. If yours is like most Catholic schools, it snuck under the door unnoticed, and now you’re left wondering what to do.
Lesson Plans
Use these lessons to help young people in your classroom understand the truth of the human person. New content added each month!
How to Answer Tough Questions
Click each video for an example of how you can answer. Start with videos 1 and 2 for general principles to guide all conversations.
Concrete Help for Teachers and Parents
Talking points for speaking to kids on gender and pronouns, and other tough topics
- You are a boy/girl. You are wonderful in the way you [list special talents and gifts].
- As a baptized Christian, you are a child of the Most High! God is your loving Father. He wants what’s best for you and so do we as your parents.
- A boy can like to do things girls usually like, and it doesn’t mean he is a girl. A girl can like to do things that boys usually like, and it doesn’t mean she is a boy.
- There are many things about ourselves that we choose. You choose to be kind to your little brother, or you choose to be a soccer player, or a violinist, [use examples specific to your child] and we choose the job we want when we grow up.
- There are other things about ourselves that God chooses. Some examples are our birthday, whether we have siblings, and whether we are a girl or a boy.
- Being a girl / being a boy is something very special. It is part of who you are.
- Even before God made you, He knew who you would be, and He had a plan for you. He loves you, and so do we. We can trust that God chose your sex correctly.
- Our very bodies tell us something about how God created men and women to complement each other. We were made male and female, and God’s instructions were to “be fertile and multiply” (Gen 1:28).
- Each person is male or female from the moment of their conception.
- Sex is determined at conception, observed in utero or at birth, is in every cell of the body, and never changes.
- We talked about how there are things we choose about ourselves and things God chooses. [See #2 above]
- It is true that a tiny minority of people are born with disorders of sexual development, but these individuals do not choose or change their sex either.
- This includes those who experience body- and identity-related distress, or who reject their sexual identity and self-identify as a person of the opposite sex (or something else).
- God has a plan for each one of us, and through prayer and discernment we can discover it, and do our best to live it out. We are all in need of God’s grace.
Sex refers to our biological make-up as male or female. The words “male” and “female” refer to sex, while “masculine” and “feminine” refer to gender: the expression of sexual identity. “Masculine” means manly, and “feminine” means womanly. Females can have masculine traits, but that does not make them men; males can have feminine traits and that does not make them women. Notably, the word “gender” is a linguistic term that was first used by Marxist and feminist theorists to refer to a subjective, psychological entity that is self-created and separate from sexual identity.
A person’s gender is determined by their sex.
Not really, no. It may surprise you to learn that the word “gender” in the way it’s being used today is a recent historical development. Technically, the word gender refers to words in languages like Spanish or French, where certain nouns can be masculine or feminine. But this is a grammar issue and unrelated to transgender ideology.
The word masculine means manly, and feminine means womanly. Transgender ideology invented the idea that gender is something completely different than sex, that gender is based on someone’s feelings of being male or female (or something else), that can’t be measured, observed, or even defined other than by the way a person feels at any given moment. According to this false concept, our gender can be whatever we want it to be.
Gender is not simply a societal norm, a result of environment, or even a performance as some Marxist and feminist theorists first claimed that it is. Masculinity (manliness) and femininity (womanliness) are essential parts of our identities. We are, body and soul, male or female, and this essential truth is reflected not only in our bodies, but in the way we think, the way we respond to the world around us, and so many different aspects of being human.
Maleness and femaleness are not socialized concepts but are truths we inherently know.
A woman does not have to wear exaggerated clothing and heavy make-up like drag queens do to be recognized as women. We automatically recognize and understand the truth of maleness and femaleness because it is so essential to our human nature. Further, God’s plan for married men and women takes the complementarity of the sexes into account: marriage is a sign of the union between Christ and His Church, and marriages especially flourish when husbands are manly and wives are womanly. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote, each person is called to love: “[Each person] is called as a person in the truth of [his or her] humanity, therefore also in the truth of [his or her] masculinity or femininity, in the truth of [his or her] body.”
- Your friend is a boy/girl who is wonderful in so many ways [mention some of the good qualities of the friend that your child admires].
- We do not understand fully why sometimes a boy thinks he is a girl/a girl thinks she is a boy.
- Emphasize our duty to treat every person with respect and dignity.
- A charitable response emphasizes our love and concern for our friend, including for his/her soul.
- We do know that we are all wounded and experience the effects of Original Sin. We all need the grace of God.
- You may need to decide whether this is a friendship that should continue, depending on the circumstances. Keep in mind the friend’s parents’ approach to their child’s transgender identification, as well as your child’s age and maturity, when discerning whether the friendship is in the best interest of your child’s innocence and spiritual growth.
- You could say, ““I know Jane from your class is confused about her sex right now. We will pray she and her parents will get through this and that Jane realizes she is wonderful just as God made her to be.”
- Acknowledge the person’s sadness with charity and compassion, and emphasize our duty to treat every person with dignity.
- The sad reality is that those who have this kind of surgery do not in fact have better outcomes overall. The surgery is irreversible, while doing nothing to heal the underlying psychological problems that are causing the distress.
- Most who experienced gender dysphoria as children identify as their biological sex by the time they reach adulthood.
- Oftentimes in life, unhappiness comes from the wrong expectations about what will make us happy. If we convince ourselves that we cannot be happy without one particular thing, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Worse, if/when we do attain the one thing we think we cannot be happy without, we are inevitably disappointed, leading to even greater sadness.
- It’s important to keep the perspective that nothing in this world will truly and completely fulfill us. True happiness is only possible in Jesus Christ.
- For more information see https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/number-50-fall-2016, and https://lc.org/PDFs/Attachments2PRsLAs/2018/061118SexReasssignmentSurgery.pdf
- No. A person being male or female cannot change, even if someone has surgery, takes hormones, or has other interventions.
- Puberty blockers cause great harm to the child’s health. They are, literally, poisoning the child, preventing their body from developing normally. High-dose hormones stunt bone growth, pose risks to heart and metabolic health, and the loss of natural hormones carries a risk of dementia. The FDA has warned of brain swelling and vision loss in minors using puberty blockers.
- Ninety percent of children put on puberty blockers go on to be put on cross-sex hormones. The risks of cross-sex hormones, which induce an artificial “puberty”, are also high. Females who put on high-dose testosterone will develop facial hair, acne, baldness, and experience vaginal atrophy. Boys and men on high-dose estrogen will increase breast size, put on weight, and will also experience genital atrophy. The risks, including infertility, pulmonary embolism, metabolic syndrome, coronary disease, and cancer, continue even when these drugs are only used for a short time. But remember these high-doses of hormones have to be taken for life if someone is to maintain the appearance of the other sex while suppressing their natural hormones. There is no long-term data on what effect they will have later in life when given to children and teens.
- We should treat those experiencing body- and identity-related distress with compassion. We should lovingly encourage and help them to accept their body including their identity as male or female.
- Just as we would not withhold food from someone with a body image disorder, we should not encourage someone to mutilate or poison their body to align with a mistaken belief about their sexual identity.
- Many who have been encouraged to undergo irreversible surgical procedures experience deep regret, along with ongoing complications, pain and trauma.
- No. Girls need private spaces of their own.
- Boys experiencing gender dysphoria deserve to be treated with compassion, and so do girls. They deserve places of privacy where they can be free of the gaze of boys/men while they are showering/changing clothes.
- No. While some believe it is harmless or even compassionate to use someone’s preferred pronouns, the truth is that it is harmful to do so. It is never compassionate to lead someone away from the truth.
- Pscyho-social transitioning, including the use of opposite sex or other pronouns, encourages a person in a false belief, and also makes it more likely they will seek more dramatic hormonal or surgical interventions.
- God calls us to tell the truth, but we must always tell it with charity.
- We must find charitable ways to express ourselves that do not require us to break the Eighth Commandment.
- You can reference your biological sex and the pronoun that goes with it, e.g. “I am a female, so the pronoun is ‘she.’”
- You can also simply not respond to the question.
- No. The reason we have separate sports for girls and boys is because of the inherent differences between males and females, and the physical advantages most boys have over most girls.
- It is true that some of the strongest women are stronger than the weakest men. But on average, men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women, making meaningful competition between them unrealistic in most sports.
- Girls deserve teams of their own to fairly compete.
- It is not bigoted. Manhood and womanhood are realities. They are not feelings, no matter how sincerely those feelings are experienced.
- you can’t separate compassion and truth. The Church’s teachings on morality and the human person are compassionate because they are true.
- Those who struggle with a confused sense of sexual identity must be lovingly accepted as persons created in God’s image with the same dignity as any other person.
- Further, as Christians, we must pray for peace in their unique struggles and support them with Christian charity, all the while upholding the truth of God’s plan for life and love.
With respect to all of these issues, communicate with your child’s teachers and be aware of what is being taught, especially with respect to sexuality and gender. Get actively involved when needed.
Classroom Resources
Overlay 20-50 minute activities into your existing curriculum
Everyday Theology of the Body for grades K-8
Easily weave Christian Anthropology into your existing curriculum in age-appropriate ways all year long with this guide containing over 50 ready-to-use, interactive activities. Each mini-lesson is tied to the Catechism of the Catholic Church as well as Standards for Christian Anthropology.
Apologetics II: The Catholic Response to Challenges of the Modern World
Give your students the understanding they need to respond to the important and difficult moral issues of our time.
This high school course focuses not simply on what the Ten Commandments say, but delves deeply into the reasons WHY we should follow them.
Students will be equipped to defend the Catholic position on today’s toughest topics, including homosexuality and gender ideology, as well as the virtues we must cultivate in our response.
Each chapter includes a study of primary sources from Church history, focus and reflection questions, complete instructions for interactive activities, art and other visual reflections, scripture readings, and inspirational stories of the saints.
Human Sexuality (High School)
This guide for upper middle and high school students includes 15 lessons on God’s plan for human sexuality. Students explore the teaching of Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and learn how to live out the Christian Faith in the modern world, exploring the importance of purity, alternatives to assisted reproductive technologies, and fertility care methods that work with, rather than against, the human body.
Spirit of Truth: A K-12 Religion Series Featuring Christian Anthropology
Lead your students on an immersive journey through the Catholic Faith! Spirit of Truth features a full year of varied lesson plans that engage students and help them become saints by integrating what they learn into their daily lives.
