(LifeSiteNews) — An amicus brief filed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on October 15 argues that transgender surgeries are “immoral and contrary to God’s will,” and that if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the novel practice it would be “disastrous” for the Church because it would hold Catholic teaching to be inherently bigoted.
The USCCB is lending its voice to the growing number of organizations concerned about the Court’s upcoming fall schedule, which includes a crucial hearing on a case out of Tennessee, United States v. Skrmetti, over whether states can ban “sex-change” operations and similar “transitioning” treatments for gender-confused minors.
The bishops’ filing draws heavily from previously issued Church documents, including a statement released by the U.S. bishops in 2023 on the moral limits to technological manipulation of the human body.
The 26-page document, which can be read here, begins by noting that Catholic teaching on the matter predates the LGBT movement, as it is based on metaphysical and anthropological arguments apart from divine revelation. Human beings, it says, are body-soul composites that form a united, “constitutive” whole. Claiming that a person can be born in the “wrong body,” which implies that the body and soul are at odds, is absurd because human beings do not “own our human nature, as if it were something that we are free to make use of in any way we please.”
The brief further argues that “transgender body manipulation objectifies the body” as it “views the human body as a mistake to be corrected.” But God created us male and female with bodily and “sexual differentiation” that affects us “at the psychological and spiritual level.”
Another problem with a “sex-change” operation according to the brief is that it “sacrifices healthy bodily functions and organs for reasons other than to serve the body as a whole.” But morally justified medical interventions must be undertaken only while respecting the “sexual differentiation” between men and women and not attack it wholesale.
Legitimate reasons for serious medical intervention, the brief further notes, includes situations when there is a need to “repair a defect in the body” or when “the sacrifice of a part of the body is necessary for the welfare of the whole body” as is the case of cutting off a gangrenous limb. “Where an intervention has another, immoral object as its aim, the intervention cannot be morally justified.”
The document does not fail to strike a pastoral tone. It notes that “some individuals experience discomfort in their body’s sex, a condition known as ‘gender dysphoria.’ These individuals are loved by God and possess the same inherent dignity that all human persons possess.”
“Nonetheless,” it continues, “transgender body manipulation is not a moral medical intervention for individuals suffering from gender dysphoria because the aim of this treatment is neither to repair a defect in the body nor to sacrifice a part of the body for the welfare of the whole body. These interventions ‘are intended to transform the body so as to make it take on as much as possible the form of the opposite sex, contrary to the natural form of the body.’”
The bishops’ brief concludes by noting that when the Court redefined marriage to include same-sex persons in its Obergefell ruling in 2015, it assured religious believers that it would protect their deeply held beliefs. But “despite these assurances … the promise of protection for religious believers has not been realized. To the contrary, religious entities and believers, including Catholic institutions and individuals, have now endured years of resource-consuming litigation across various contexts.”
The brief therefore argues that “if the Court holds that transgender status is a protected trait – either because transgender classifications are sex discrimination or because transgender persons are a quasi-suspect class – that decision would destroy any protection the Court has previously sought to preserve.” Indeed, “a holding for Petitioner would effectively make classifications that turn on longstanding Catholic doctrine – i.e., classifications based on traditional views of marriage, sexuality, and the God-given human body – presumptively suspect. In short, this Court will have declared that the Catholic Church is presumptively bigoted. This is not the world the Court promised.”
As previously reported by LifeSiteNews, a significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done to children. Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” persons who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their real sex, have attested to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”