But - who is he to judge?

Cool Pope continues his transphobic jihad.

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The Catholic Church are doing very well this month.

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If the vatican was scooped up and rocketed into the sun, leaving nothing but a 100 foot deep crater, the world would be significantly better off.

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I realize that ā€œnatureā€ is typically a term used to whitewash oneā€™s own assumptions when begging the question in the context of these sorts of Catholic pronouncements(as well as more generally when someone wants some words that can be used like ā€˜goodā€™ and ā€˜evilā€™ while sounding like you arenā€™t hammering directly on your metaphysics, just substitute ā€˜naturalā€™ and ā€˜unnaturalā€™ or ā€˜against natureā€™); but I have to wonder how much disbelief suspension this is requiring in some Catholic circles:

Anyone involved in delivering babies, say, isnā€™t going to have to wait too long to see, or at least hear colleagueā€™s reports of, one of the various flavors of phenotypic ambiguity. That includes a lot of Catholic medical types. Even if you think that the correct approach to such matters is to have the attending physician do a quick and quiet surgical amendment to whatever seems easiest and never speak of this again; that still makes the argument that a neat binary is ā€˜naturalā€™ tricky.

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instead of a crater, could we instead leave uninhabited buildings? i say that because there are phenomenal works of art from furniture to paintings to sculpture to drawings to architecture. letā€™s leave all that for the collective good of humanity.

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Unfortunately, this was for a very long time the accepted approach to the intersex baby. Results were, umm, awful.

http://www.intersexinitiative.org/articles/consensus.html

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Iā€™d be fine with launching the inhabitants into the sun. The architecture, libraries and thousands of years of looted art can stay.

ETA: what @navarro said.

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I wouldnā€™t be surprised if it continues to be the preference among the peevish reactionaries this is pitched at; and I suspect that it wonā€™t go any better(and that practitioners of it will continue to somehow imagine that what they are doing isnā€™t gender reassignment surgery because reasons; somehow that fact never seems to bother them).

Iā€™m just a trifle surprised that it wouldnā€™t undercut the ability to talk about a natural gender binary with a straight face. Thatā€™s why I picked the example where the definitely-not-binary can be both difficult to wiggle out of(presentations and causes vary enormously; but thereā€™s a solid swath where even someone who very much wants to has a hard time determining the ā€˜correctā€™ answer) and not involve dissonance between phenotype and identification that can be dismissed as psychiatric and/or spiritual deficiency.

That said, Iā€™m not that surprised. Thereā€™s both the basic human ability to believe what one wishes to be true; and the issue of counterexamples cropping up to any nontrivial teleological account of the world has been well known(though not terribly convincingly solved) since Aristotle had a go at nontrivial teleological accounts of the world; so I assume that, if pressed on the point, theyā€™d have recourse to essentially the same arguments he used.

They might use a politer term than ā€˜monstersā€™, however. Maybe.

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one thing i assume about being transgender is that it is pretty much innate. like maybe itā€™s just that the outsides at birth donā€™t always match the insides. also, i guess that it can take a lifetime for a person ( any person ) to figure out their own relationship to their own body and their own gender. ( even for a cis man, what does being a man mean? that seems like a lifelong question right there. )

maybe iā€™m incorrect about all that, or that itā€™s different for different people, but regardlessā€¦ these declarations by priests about what the christian god wants seem pretty damned ( oops ) presumptuous.

suddenly they know the will of god? i thought godā€™s divine plan was unknowable to man.

and how can it be that a person in search of their truest self isnā€™t following the path of god? better to ignore what god has created and replace it with a lot of human preconceptions? that seems bonkers.

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Well, they may have issued this document but theyā€™re not making it easy for anyone to actually read it.

The best I can find is this:

and I have no idea whether that is the actual document or not. Itā€™s clearly badly transcribed with sentences cut off and running into each other.

When they said religion would be opium for the people, they obviously referred to feeling numb.

ā€œConservativeā€ politicians are rubbing their hands in glee today.

@LDoBe @GulliverFoyle

Repo%20Man%20Neutron%20Bomb

Perhaps a petition at Change.orgā€¦?

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Boy-That-Escalated-Quickly-Anchorman

Not that Iā€™m judging.

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Escalation is such a tricky thing.

There you are, riding along, and before you know it youā€™ve gone too far and youā€™re well and truly stuck.

escalator

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Even Jesus had trouble with the Moving Stairway to Heaven.

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I know I can get way-in-the-weeds nerdy on the science end of things, but this is pretty important to understand:

In brief, genital differentiation of male:female takes place long before neurological differentiation, and both are subject to hormonal and environmental influences. Therefore, having noncongruency regarding physical appearance of gender and neurological sexual identity is not all that shocking. Oh, and science does not care about religious opinions or political dictates, it just is.

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