What Authentic Compassion Looks Like

Nowadays, many Christians ignorantly or falsely define what it means to be compassionate. They claim that love and charity demands the surrender of truth and logic as long as it helps another feel good. This misplaced compassion equates to capitulating to feelings over truth and affirming harmful decisions over common sense. 

Modern society promotes a false and overly sentimentalized conception of love and compassion. Too many wrongly believe that you show love by supporting a friend or family member in “whatever is going to make them happy.” But real compassion is actually sharing truth lovingly.

A Christian should not affirm a friend’s or family member’s lie, delusion, or self-destructive choice because he or she does not want to cause waves. Instead of caving under pressure or wanting to virtue-signal, Christians must be courageous and state what is real. Even though it may hurt feelings, compassionately speaking the truth is more Christian than lying or faking empathy.

Gender Ideology Is a Sham

One of our modern culture’s biggest example of misplaced compassion is how people respond to the idea of so-called transgenderism. Gender dysphoria is a real psychological condition in which a biological male or female believes he or she is the opposite gender (sex). But this differs from gender ideology or gender theory, which a set of beliefs that lacks empirical evidence to support it. 

Gender ideology is a belief system that rejects the scientific pursuit of objective truth, believing falsehoods including the following: 

• Both gender and biological sex are a social construct;
• Biological sex is not binary (there are only two sexes) but best represented as a “spectrum”;
• Biological sex and/or gender is “assigned at birth” rather than observed and recorded;
• One can literally be “born in the wrong body”;
• One can become the opposite sex through self-designation or chemical and surgical interventions;

These are just a few of the claims of gender ideology cultists. These claims are all verifiably false, but many choose to believe them anyway.

Beliefs and false ideas can be infectious and spread rapidly, especially now that so many rely on the internet and social media to get informed. Gender ideology has become attractive to people, especially to impressionable children and young adults and especially when made into a so-called social justice issue. 

According to one national report, the number of Americans age 13 and older who so-called identified as transgender was 1.4 million in 2016 and then in 2023 had increased 100% to 2.8 million.  

Contrary to popular belief, being so-called transgender is not innate or biological. There is no brain or blood test that distinguishes a trans-labeled person from someone who does not identify as trans. Instead, social-contagion, trauma, psychiatric disorders, or a combination of some of these cause the fallaciousness of transgender identities. Sadly, most often pushed into believing they are transgender are those children and adolescents on the autism spectrum. 

Knowing that gender dysphoria is a condition that can cause individuals to be confused or stressed, Christians should show compassion towards these people. This translates to treating them with respect and love, but not with lies and faux empathy.

The culture believes dangerous hormone therapies and so-called sexual-reassignment surgery – aka, mutilation – are what those suffering from gender dysphoria need. But just like no rational person would suggest liposuction for someone suffering from anorexia, so too should no one support invasive, physically harmful, and psychologically disturbing drugs and body part removals for a person who suffers from gender dysphoria. 

It is of paramount importance to handle a situation of a friend or loved one with gender dysphoria with gentle and compassionate pastoral skill and concern. Unfortunately, there are countless reports of parents wrestling with a sense of guilt over how best to support their child who is suffering from this mental illness. These parents face pressure from both the prevailing culture and their children’s doctors or therapists to celebrate and reinforce their teenagers’ psychological condition. Much of society and many quacks deceptively compel moms and dads to “solve” the problem by affirming their children’s delusions, followed by supporting the surgical and hormonal “changing of sex” of their kids. 

Parents Must Not Go Along to Get Along

In the case of parents dealing with a child with gender dysphoria, it is imperative to discuss as a family the reality of human biology as a gift from God that we cannot change. A compassionate, loving parent will seek counseling for their child suffering from or diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This counseling must be by licensed therapists or medical professionals who hold the correct Christian anthropology of the human person and who understand and adhere to Church teaching.

Furthermore, here are some resources for parents of children who are confused about their gender:

• A video that can be useful on how to approach conversations about gender identity and transgenderism with both sensitivity and clarity: https://canavox.com/videos/transgender-talking-points-kids/
• A document produced at the Vatican by the Congregation for Catholic Education – Male and Female He Created Them:  http://www.educatio.va/content/dam/cec/Documenti/19_0997_INGLESE.pdf
• A video with the theme, “If you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfO1veFs6Ho
• One Catholic bishop’s pastoral guide on the subject of gender dysphoria and gender identity: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=12309
• One Catholic priest’s explanation on the difference between one’s perception of gender and gender reality, and encouraging us to be there for someone who is confused about their gender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-9_rxXFu9I

The Catholic Perspective on Transgenderism

The Catholic Church teaches that our identities as male and female are part of God’s good design in Creation. Our bodies and sexual identities are gifts from God that we should accept and care for. A person should accept and seek to live in conformity with his or her sexual identity as determined at conception. The human person is a body-soul union, and the body – created male or female – is an inherent aspect of the person. 

The bottom line from a Catholic perspective is a person cannot change his or her gender. The Church states that transgender ideology is a false ideology which ignores biological reality. In 2024, the Vatican published a declaration which included the following statement:

“Respect for both one’s own body and that of others is crucial in light of the proliferation of claims to new rights advanced by gender theory. This ideology envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family. It thus becomes unacceptable that some ideologies of this sort, which seek to respond to what are at times understandable aspirations, manage to assert themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised. It needs to be emphasized that biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated. Therefore, all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected. We cannot separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation, which is prior to all our decisions and experiences, and where biological elements exist which are impossible to ignore.”

Authentic Christians know that the destruction of healthy sexual and reproductive organs is a type of mutilation and intrinsically evil. Therefore, we should prohibit on moral grounds any drug, surgery, or therapy designed to assist a person in “transitioning one’s gender.”

Besides not supporting a loved one who wants to take drugs or undergo procedures that are immoral and illogical, a true Christian must also insist on the fundamental norm that the sex of a person provides the basis for one’s interactions with them. Thus, we should always address and refer to others with pronouns that are consistent with their biological sex.

Moreover, people must use bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex. In other words, it is imperative to speak the truth about gender and sex with clarity, but also with charity.

A person may be free to call themself whatever pronoun they wish, but they have no right to expect us to speak the same lies. So-called “preferred pronouns” are not only confusing and grammatically incorrect, they are dishonest. Chaos ensues when truth is denied.

For example, regarding traffic rules, in order for people to be safe and for traffic to flow, we must have an agreed-upon time for going and a time for stopping. Chaos would ensue if someone decided that for them – for their truth – green would now mean stop and red would now mean go. Similarly, if a man is walking blindfolded toward a cliff, nobody says, “Who am I to judge?”, shrugs their shoulders, and insists on not imposing “their truth” on someone else. No. Instead they would yell at the blindfolded man that he is in danger and would tell him to stop.

Likewise, if society is propagandizing that a woman can have a penis and a man can so-call chest-feed a baby, Christians need to warn their friends and family members of the danger they face in freely choosing deceit and delusion over the truth. 

Don’t Tell Lies; Tell the Truth

Telling the truth in love is what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).  Over 100 years ago, Pope Saint Pius X proclaimed:

“Catholic doctrine tells us that the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in the theoretical or practical indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren plunged, but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well as for their material well-being. Catholic doctrine further tells us that love for our neighbor flows from our love for God, Who is Father to all, and goal of the whole human family; and in Jesus Christ whose members we are, to the point that in doing good to others we are doing good to Jesus Christ Himself. Any other kind of love is sheer illusion, sterile and fleeting.”

What does authentic compassion look like when discussing the topic of transgenderism? It is the support for and presentation of the truth of God-created sexuality. It is presented with love and clarity, not with misplaced compassion and falsehoods.