Do Catholics need to accept third genders?

Have you ever had to sit through some “training” where everyone knows the “correct” answers before it starts? I experienced one such training from the Pride organization at the local university. It was full of dubious claims and its pretense to open-mindedness was paper thin. Honest questions were met, not with serious answers, but with invitations to “do more research.” The research materials offered begged more questions than they answered.

Studies show that courses like this — even those with laudable goals — often backfire, reinforcing the very attitudes they aimed to change. It turns out that people don’t like being condescended to.

Still, such courses can be instructive, even in spite of themselves. One particular instance from the course stood out in this regard. In a long list of gender identities, we came to “two-spirited.” At this point, we were warned very sternly that not just anybody can be “two-spirited,” but that it is a culturally specific gender identity only available to people of North American Indigenous heritage.

This is exactly right — more so than the presenter imagined. It is right because every single gender identity is a cultural construct. To identify Joan of Arc as, say, trans is something like an act of colonialism, as even some on the radical left acknowledge.

Continued below.