On February 21, 2013, the Holy Father delivered his last address to the Roman Curia as Pope. The whole piece is a remarkable work. I could spend days taking it apart. This section, I found the most remarkable:
“The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as 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.”
I have been fascinated with the idea of sex v. gender ever since I began my studies at UC Berkeley back in the early-1990s. At the time, so called gender and women's studies was all the rage. At first, I kind of bought into the whole Freudian idea that we were all born bisexual, and only later did we choose our gender. After all, gender was only a social construct. I was awash in the same mind-muck. I persistently questioned what made you a man? Was it something I was, had to become, or choose to be. Sadly, I couldn’t comprehend that my sex was a gift from God, and that I needed to embrace my masculinity. As I fell deeper into the world of pornography and gay promiscuity, I realized that men and women were wired in two completely different ways. For example, in the Castro District of San Francisco, I was often shocked by the grossly nonchalant way in which many men paired-up and took each other home; or eschewed the formalities of having sex indoors and just copulated in an alley or wooded park. In the estrogen saturated atmosphere of the all-female lesbian bars, it was always a hot-house of emotion. Very little action existed. Later, when I met my first girlfriend, my libido came crashing down to Earth with a thud, as I learned that women needed to be romanced. Men made no such demands.
Although my examples are crude and base, the Holy Father is essentially explaining the same reality. That we are all born with our sexual identity intact. It's ingrained in our genes. Later, during my graduate studies, I peripherally became interested with the story of David Reimer, the Canadian man whose penis was destroyed during a botched infant circumcision. Tragically, the highly influential quack sexologist John Money took over the case and advised the boy's parents to raise their son as a girl. The boy was never told that he had been born biologically male, was regularly taken to brain-washing therapy sessions, and given hormone treatments. Dr. Money falsified his reports, and the theory that gender roles were completely malleable became the standard for most physicians. But, in reality, the boy always knew that he was male. When the truth was revealed, he went back to his original sex. Only, the years of abuse, could not be overcome and Reimer committed suicide at age 38. The work of the wacko Dr. Money, like his fellow pedophile colleague Alfred Kinsey, is still highly regarded. Hence, the continuing debate on the normality of homosexuality, and the feasibility of same-sex marriage. Lies are persistent, and the Holy father is still fighting them.