(Lisa Fullam. New Ways Ministry).
A recent pastoral letter by Detroit’s Archbishop Allen Vigneron, titled “The Good News About God’s Plan: A Pastoral Letter on the Challenges of Gender Identity,” starts with an affirmation of the goodness of humanity and reiterates a key aspect of a Catholic understanding of the human person: we are “an integrated union of body and soul.” In a Catholic understanding, we are not spirit imposed on unruly (or evil) matter, nor are we merely matter somehow come to self-awareness, but always incarnate spirit. The human person is a body-soul composite.
That’s a great start, but then with regard to transgender people, Vigneron asserts that there is afoot “an alternate, ‘dualist’ vision of mankind [sic], growing in popularity in recent years. This vision sees the human person as inherently divided and separated; it claims that there can be opposition between a person’s body and soul.” The archbishop presents this view as a belief that one’s gender identity is freely chosen (he implies capriciously chosen, though he does not use the term), in disregard of one’s biological sex.