Interview with Mary Rice Hasson

[Music] hi i'm fran mayer and welcome to another napa institute webcast mary rice hassan is an attorney a nationally respected author and lecturer and the cato byrne fellow in catholic studies at the ethics and public policy center in washington dc mary is also the director of the catholic women's forum a network of catholic professional women and scholars seeking to amplify the voice of catholic women in support of human dignity authentic freedom and catholic social teaching mary's work focuses in a special way on topics related to women faith culture family sexual morality and gender ideology the knapp institute is also fortunate to have mary as a member of its board so it's a special delight to welcome her today mary thanks for being with us for this conversation thanks so much fran it's wonderful to have this conversation with you mary uh people are all over the lot in terms of their understanding of the kinds of territory that you cover in your scholarship they're particularly unfamiliar with the actual content of something like gender ideology that terminology so what does it mean i mean uh what makes gender ideology and ideology and what's the difference between sex and gender yeah i think the simple way to understand gender ideology is to think of it as a world view as an anthropology because it's a vision of the human person that is radically at odds with the christian vision of the human person and and even the vision of the human person proposed by natural law and so we became familiar i think as a culture with this term gender ideology really through the papacy of pope francis because even though pope benedict had spoken about this alternative world view he didn't kind of put those two words together and call it gender ideology but but pope francis early on uh warned about gender ideology as being wicked as being a global war on marriage in the family and at the same time pope francis has reached out to persons who are who are struggling with issues about identity and or who might identify as transgender so as catholics we've got to put those two things together and understand the ideology piece of it even um even before we start talking about the difference between sex and gender and and in terms of ideology i think it's important to think of it as a system of beliefs and a set of beliefs that has its own premises and these premises are radically different from uh from christianity be and and the chief thing that pope benedict had mentioned and pope francis as well is that gender ideology sees the person as self-defining the person is self-creating in other words there's no room for a creator who's created us because he loves us our dignity comes from being loved and created by god but who are created according to a design that there's a way that we're made and that we should live and gender ideology puts all of that in the hands of of the individual person you get to create yourself and and there's more to it than that but but let me just throw that out there uh for starters what does the what does the expression gender transition actually mean i mean it's an it's almost an antiseptic way of uh putting things but what's actually involved and does it ever really work yeah no great question so to go back to you know the tail end of your your first question what's the difference between sex and gender so when i mentioned that gender ideology is a different worldview a different anthropology a different vision of the person we understand the person as being unity of body and soul so we're created male and female gender ideology on the other hand says that your body is just one aspect one dimension that is under the control of your will that who you are really depends on your feelings and so what has become popular what most people are probably familiar with through the culture is not just the idea of gender which many people sort of conflate with the idea of sex male female but this idea of gender identity in other words who i am is defined by my feelings about whether i'm male female man woman both neither something else and those feelings are often determined by comparing yourself to stereotypical notions about roles that males and females have had through the culture so sex is something that's fixed it's it's biology it's our our who we are according to our reproductive role and that's across species so our whole body's organization towards a reproductive role that's what makes us male and female you can't change it it's in every sex of i mean every cell of your body is imprinted with this identity but along comes gender ideology and says sex is not really significant what matters is you're feeling that again separating this idea of body and soul unity the person who is uh who has bought into gender ideology believes that my body is really a tool that i can use in any way to carry out that that will or in interior conviction that i have and that what matters is that the person's feelings are given expression and that the law and the culture makes room for the person to define their own reality and their own concept of of um human life so you had asked about gender transitions what happens is the person that we uh who identifies as transgender is someone whose body is male or female but their feelings say no i reject that i'm i'm that's not who i am i identify as some one else whether it's the opposite sex or whether um and now there are hundreds of identities you could be gender queer gender fluid you know all these different things and someone who identifies then as transgender rejects the reality of being male or female and takes steps to express or live out this alternative identity and those steps this idea of transition can be social it's purely external your hair your clothes your name it could be medical which we can talk about at more length but medical surgical but also legal where you change your documents and your birth certificate erases the fact that you were born male and now is going to read that your gender is something else female or or x or or something else so transition is this idea that the person who's rejected the the biological truth of who they are and has adopted or or wants to express a different identity is going to make changes in their lives to live that new identity out and their what they're looking for is affirmation and validation from the culture at large from every person they encounter so that's the idea of transition and we can we can talk a little bit more about kind of those stages but also the success and and how to think about yeah mary it seems that that what you're describing seems to be a kind of trigger of not only social and cultural confusion but real personal confusion personal harm would you talk about that a little bit yeah and for there have always been some people who were confused or experienced these desires to be someone different and rejecting their body but really not until the sexual revolution and external political pressures came about was this thought of as anything but mental illness in other words to identify in a way that rejects your your body your bodily identity people understood that's uh that there was something uh not healthy about that to be at war literally interiorly to be divided in terms of your your body is is who you are and yet you're rejecting that and you're you're trying to live something else so um this psychological community unfortunately has buckled to political pressure and changed the diagnostic descriptions and the codes that apply to people who are suffering from these things so it used to be called gender well it went from being called transsexual there were a small number of people usually older men who would experience this discordance with their body and and their desires and when surgical techniques became available principally in the 50s 60s they sought surgery to sort of remake who they were and yet it was still considered a mental illness it wasn't until this political pressure came along in the 70s and then later in the 80s they uh changed the description to gender identity disorder and then that was considered still stigmatizing because of the word disorder so now the psychological community looks at it and says yeah there's nothing wrong with the identity so the only thing that can be diagnosed is gender dysphoria if you experience distress over this mismatch between body and identity so so that's that's what we've seen in terms of psychology but the promise that was held out was that if we just get rid of the stigma if we just uh get rid of you know telling people that this is not normal that it's somehow better to have this unity between your your mind and your body then everything will be fine and in reality that just has not been the case and you know i think that's something i want to emphasize here fran is that the people i know who have or continue to struggle with this and their families experience great suffering and and great difficulty because because there's an internal division and the attempt to modify the body in order to validate the feelings can only work for a time and so what we see when we look at studies that have been done not so much with children who are going through this because that's more of a new phenomenon but with adults who have taken steps to alter the body through medication hormones or surgery is that in the long haul even if they experience an initial euphoria or sense that wow i finally got what i want in the long haul they continue to have high suicide rates they continue to have high rates of mental health issues um and there's a wound there that it can't be fixed by hormones or by surgery you really have to figure out and answer the question well why you know why what's what down deep is happening to make someone want to reject their body and then to take all these steps that are really going to destroy function destroy fertility um make them dependent for the rest of their lives on on medication and medical help so mary that the i want to go back to the historical roots of this for just a moment because it's always struck me as it seems there's a certain logical sense for me that um the the breakdown of the family for example and the breakdown of sensible relations but sexual relations between men and women can flow out of the development of the contraceptive pill i mean blaming everything on the contraceptive pill obviously doesn't work but nonetheless it was a very important trigger but i honestly don't see how we got to this point from that point i mean why how did this become such a significant social debate issue uh in such a short time in american culture yeah so there are two things going on one conceptually they are linked because once you you look at the person and you separate the idea of sex and reproduction then the question is well what difference does it make where your sexual desires are oriented but you get the flip side of that and he says that says well what difference does it make what kind of body i have because what matters is what i choose what i desire so it it really is rooted in that phenomenon of instead of looking at the person accepting that as sexual beings we're male or female we're oriented towards a reproductive role males and females one for another and that from the the meeting of male and female we get we get children that that's intrinsic to who we are whether or not we actually go on to have children that's that's part of our makeup our identity but as a culture we've forgotten that sex has something to do with reproduction that being male or female has something to do with that reproductive role and just as we've forgotten that uh sexual activity has something to do with reproduction so once you erase that then you sort of have a free-for-all which is really what our children are being taught in schools now that who they are is whoever they determine themselves to be who they love is wherever their feelings direct them to be what kind of family they establish is really a result of those feelings and and those desires so you've you've sort of taken out the whole foundation of the family once once you deny the truth about who we are as a person and then you deny the truth that we're oriented males and females one for another just looking at our bodily design you deny those two things then you you're also denying the family and so that's that's exactly what we're seeing but you asked you know why why are we seeing all this and and how has this taken root i mean one of the problems has been that as the culture as a whole has forgotten this truth about who we are you know and i think many people my age and and older you didn't have to necessarily state things these things clearly because when the culture was pulling everyone in the right direction certain things were implicit but we're in a very different culture we're in a culture that is repudiating the truth about who we are so to the younger generation we have to be explicit about explaining we're we're created we're creative beings there's a design to who we are we're created for relationship we're males and females and science you know supports faith and reason are completely compatible you know our science tells us you cannot change sex so even when somebody uh has these feelings of identifying in a different way and wants to take steps by hormones or for surgery you know as a lawyer i look at things like the informed consent documents and on the informed consent documents they don't talk about changing someone's sex because you can't about feminizing or masculinizing the appearance of the body by introducing hormones that are not natural to the body that they're they're designed to induce a different effect so so this is has been promoted partly because of an ideological embrace of a different vision of who we are but then you have a lot of other elements coming in whether it's the pharmaceutical companies there's a profit to be made from this the medical establishment there we went from in 2007 there was one gender clinic for children there are now over 65 just in the u.s you know so people there all these other motivations come in and then we've had the corporations getting behind this because it's part of woke ideology and and it's just being pushed it's it's just flooding the culture and and unfortunately we're seeing a lot of it seep into the church and where people are getting mixed up about who we are and and what it means to be compassionate to people who are struggling with that's the next question i mean how do you you come at this from a a uniquely catholic perspective so what are the moral principles that we're supposed to apply in a situation like this and how can we simultaneously speak about the truth of who we are and exercise compassion toward people who disagree with us it seems to be almost an impossible task well it is it's a huge huge issue and and i think that's one of the things that again pope francis has emphasized and i think our own bishops are are really seeing that if you get the idea of who we are as a person wrong a whole lot of things fall apart because of that how do you talk about how do you do just basic catechesis christ becoming man what meaning does that have in a culture that no longer believes there is such a thing as a man or a woman that it really depends on how you how you identify you know so so this is foundational to our faith um and and how it has spread has been these cultural influences and again the the medicine the politics but through the education system [Music] so it's it's huge it's really troubling and i forget what you're what was the exact question you were you were honing in on there oh ration yeah yeah sorry about that um so you asked about compassion if this is a radically different conception of the human person and so there's a huge stake in getting it right and also pushing back against laws and policies that are trying to institutionalize this into the culture and disrupt the foundation of the family how do you be compassionate to people who are dealing with this and and so a couple of things i i think one we affirm the dignity of the person as a person created by god so every person has dignity we're not we're not denying that but your dignity doesn't lie in your expression of a desired identity or a feeling it's something deeper it can't be taken away from you you know your dignity is that you're created by god love forever and called to live with him for for all eternity i mean that's an amazing thing you can be the worst person in the world and you have human dignity i think one of the most disturbing things about this mary is i remember reading in after virtue allister mcintyre's point about we live in an emotivist culture and listening to what you're saying it really strikes me that um so much of this is illogical and that logic doesn't even fit into it because emotions are what are driving the whole thing you know if i feel something it must be true i can't be denied it and and that's not something to build a culture on it seems to me let alone a political order right no and you're exactly right this is very much morally relativistic but even even detached from um the truth about nature and and what our senses can tell us and what we can discover very driven by feelings and and because of that and because there are people who are clearly suffering and clearly struggling because of these issues i think sometimes people whether in catholic circles or christian circles get drawn into a false compassion so they say i see this suffering person before me and we can never forget you know the the individuals who are struggling and i want to be kind i want to affirm them and what they're asking of me is that i affirm them in this identity and we have to be able to say i love you i love you unconditionally and you have dignity and i'm going to affirm your your worth and your value and your dignity because i know who you are and god made you and loved you and you're worthy of that but i'm not going to affirm you in living a lie and there is a truth about who we are you know our fundamental identity has got to be as a son or daughter of the lord and it's we can't um there's so much at stake in just accepting that that basic fact but i think too mary though that some of this is the fruit of just generations of being told not to impose our views on other people i mean people it seems to me a lot of catholics that i know um are you know they're good people but they really don't want to fight because they have been trained essentially that disagreeing uh is an imposition of one's views and uh it seems to me that that only leads to a really negative situation in terms of the inability of the church to witness at all on these matters yeah and we don't do any service to the person who's suffering because a lot of times people say well you know you can't judge someone well we're not judging them in terms of of their final destiny and we're not even saying they're a bad person maybe they're maybe they're confused but there is a truth about the situation that we need to speak so it's a false compassion that tries to make someone feel better in the short term with little regard for the long-term harm that may result and so when someone is suffering from this identity confusion the immediate short-term compassion is i want to make them feel better they're asking for hormones they're asking me to use this pronoun i'm going to do that because they will feel better and yet when you affirm them in that lie you're you're helping them go down a path that is nothing more than a dead end and they are never going to find the peace that they're seeking and in working with people who've who've struggled with these issues and their families one of the things especially young women who have gone through these transitions and still suffered mental health problems and then finally got the mental health problems addressed and detransitioned in other words they kind of came out on the other side you listen to them and and they say that because they were chasing that affirmation and validation externally they became so hyper focused and obsessed on whether someone was gendering them correctly or misgendering them or whether they were passing could people tell if you're a young man who's identifying as a female and you're wearing a dress can people tell that you're really a male it becomes an obsession so it's not it's not healthy but in the long term you're encouraging someone when you affirm that you're encouraging someone to live a life that's fundamentally untrue and where you're you're committing to being at war with yourself you're taking the opposite sex hormones you're taking surgery to cut off your body parts and to reshape and fashion new ones and that are never going to work the way they're supposed to and you're destroying your natural function and this continues and continues and continues you know they're so it's a um it's a mistake for those of us who love someone who's experiencing this to think that you're you're being kind and compassionate by affirming them or facilitating them down a path that simply cannot lead them to happiness you know mary as a parent uh it strikes me as being especially egregious that any parent would encourage a minor to do this at a point in the minor's life where the minor has really a very malformed sense of who he or she is i mean could you talk a little bit about i was struck by your comment about 65 65 clinics now that deal with minor transition that just sounds insane to me i mean uh how is that even justified i mean what kind of science supports that well there isn't science i mean this what has happened is there was a political decision that decided they were not going to treat this situation where someone identifies in a way at odds with their body in other words a transgender identity that was no longer pathological but also in terms of treatment that it was no longer going to be preferred to help someone integrate their feelings with their identity in other words psychology took this stance that said it's just fine for a person's feelings to match their body or not match their body we're not going to say one is better than the other that's as if a doctor who specialized in cancer said we're going to step back and say it's neither better nor worse to help a person's cancer cells be eradicated from their body or or you know help them find healing we're just not going to make a judgment but that's that's what's happening so with children what we're seeing is that generally they learn about this whole idea that they can choose who they want to be by either school where these concepts are introduced or by social media or now just children's media children's books and and children's tv has introduced all these characters and the lie that our children are told is that who they are is up to them it depends on their feelings you know and i often think i i think back to when our kids were young and one of our kids used to wake up every day no matter whether it was february or july and say is it a pants day or a short stay because the world is full of possibilities and it was up to us as adults to help him make sense of the world the rhythms of the world but today when young children wake up and and they especially younger children they see something they like toys and that's quote a boy toy well does that make them a boy are they and and is an adult saying oh you're interested in the boy toys so maybe are you identifying as a boy so adults adults it's it's unfortunately true and the odd thing here is that you know i grew up at a time when women were trying to get rid of stereotypes right we're trying to say hey we're just women let us do what we can do according to our talents and interests and now our children are being encouraged to look at stereotypical things interests colors activities clothes and decide their identity by how well they match or fit those stereotypes which is just a backwards step um but but the other thing that that's happening we're seeing the greatest explosion in the number of kids who are identifying as transgender or non-binary among adolescents you know which is a time of of natural um discomfort psychological searching and especially for girls just really difficult uh times of accepting your body and and embracing what that means and a woman's cycle and all these things so body discomfort is not that unusual but now our children are can learn on the internet or learn at school that if you're uncomfortable with your body and your interests are not the stereotypical boy or girl interest we've got a solution for that that's the cause of your unhappiness you will find happiness if you embrace this other identity this means you are transgender and we're gonna we're gonna encourage you to embrace that and so there's something called the gender affirming approach to therapy which has been adopted here in the u.s that tells teachers social workers counselors doctors that when a child expresses either discomfort with their body or a preference for to identify in a different way that adults only only response should be to affirm not to ask why why is it so scary to think of yourself as growing from a girl to be a woman that opens up a lot of great conversations but instead you're supposed to say to a young girl who says i this isn't i don't feel like a girl i must be i'm i'm a boy i identify as a boy you're supposed to say you're right it just sounds to me like a complete subversion of language that expression gender affirming healthcare something right out of george orwell it is it masks an entire world of potential big problems yeah and even to the point that in children's educational programs they now have what's called gender inclusive puberty education so puberty talks about the development of our bodies as male and female well they race male and female so you only have bodies with parts so you have people who have ovaries not females but people who have ovaries experience you know periods etc and so children are being taught under the guise of science just lies about their bodies as if any person just might randomly happen to have ovaries and the reason why they do this is because then it normalizes the idea down the road that a child who doesn't like their body and for example wants to get rid of rid of their breasts and and um have surgery to acquire male genitals or pseudo gentle genitals that that's just as normal that these are just parts that are can be replaced and identity is something up here nothing to do with gary some of the sharpest questions and some of the harshest of the the this transgender moment uh have come from women why is that i think it's because of this idea that um women have asserted our identities from the feminist movement for what 50 years now and fought long and hard to have laws that permit us to participate fully as women in society but at the same time we've also been able to keep a zone of privacy and safety that recognizes something particular about women's vulnerability you know women are 9 out of 10 sexual assault victims are women anyone could be a sexual assault victim but women are uniquely vulnerable and yet when you erase this idea that being male or female means anything that it's it's just how you identify well then you get the situation that they're experiencing in canada in the uk where they're already down this road where in female prisons for example you have men who have been sex predators child abusers who are incarcerated and then identify as women and they ask to be put in the women's prisons well we know what happens then then women get assaulted so right now at this time there's kind of a unique coalition that's been built between radical feminists who say no there's don't erase our sex-based rights you know they're we fought long and hard for those and people of faith who say there's there's a truth about who we are people who are simply um biological rigorous you know they they want the truth and they say no you cannot change sex and it really means something that your bodies are different and society should take that into account and so you have this this very interesting coalition that has come together to push back against the transgender agenda but the it's pretty formidable out there because even even uh some of the state laws that have been proposed to limit the ability of the medical community to perform medical transitions on children younger than 18 right to put them on puberty blockers which literally arrests their development stops their bone growth affects their executive functioning and 98 of the time puts them on that path towards cross-sex hormones and and further transition even something like that what you would say is common sense don't you know maybe you think it's okay for adults to do this to their bodies but don't allow adults to do something to kids that's going to have just lifelong impact when a child can't even understand what that is there's been such pushback to that with the usual labels and you're a bigot you're a transphobe and yet people common sense tells you you why should a 13 year old girl yeah operated on and given a double mastectomy yeah she feels uncomfortable in her body very i remember uh this is 20 years ago or so i mean yuval 11 wrote a wonderful book on social science where he where he makes the distinction between the credibility of the hard sciences like um physics chemistry and biology right and the social sciences and one of the points that he made was the um was the vulnerability of the social sciences precisely to the kind of political manipulation that you've been talking about in this interview and elsewhere too i mean the fact that psychologists tell you something does not necessarily mean it's it's you know it's absolutely accurate certainly doesn't have the same kind of credibility as biology or chemistry or physics right and a troubling development has been that a number of the medical schools have become woke and harvard is leading the way they have a program that is meant to familiarize med students with what they call transgender medicine and but it's teaching this false vision of the person and it's encouraging these physicians to put aside not just common sense but their own scientific knowledge about the difference between male and female bodies that was that was in advance right 20 years ago when they started acknowledging that women's bodies and diagnoses and and manifestations of certain diseases and illnesses were different from from men because our bodies are different so they're teaching in in the med school that sex doesn't mean anything what matters is to validate a person's gender identity and then to learn techniques you take an um anatomy inventory instead of looking at the person and saying well this is obviously a woman because this person's female and instead you just you make no assumptions and you let the person identify who they are and then you take an inventory of which organs they still have or don't have i mean it's crazy stuff it's a corruption of medicine and science but it's been just pushed forward by ideology that has just taken over uh so many of our cultural institutions mary one final question and that is um and particularly since you've been involved in napa institute for so long and know it so well one of the things that the napa institute is focused on is empowering and informing lay people to actually make a difference in the culture so what i mean what would you recommend that uh people who see this interview people who are involved in the naf institute what can they do how can they remain informed what should they read i mean how how can they play a role in trying to heal the culture great question i and i think it's um it's incumbent on all of us to play that role in healing the culture so the first thing i'd say is go to a new website that i and several colleagues have started it's called person and identity dot com and what we've done is we've gathered church documents but also medical research uh we have faqs toolkits for parents for parishes for schools to help the laity get educated on this issue so that you understand what's at stake you understand what the languages is being used and really how the language has been corrupted you understand how to express the truth and then we have to have the courage prayerfully to speak up and be bold because what i've found is that for every person who speaks up and says no you know someone cannot change sex and this is unhealthy to encourage children to believe that if they just feel like the opposite sex they really are for every person who speaks up there are five other people who are going to nod their heads but who are too afraid to say something before then and it's a tough thing to do in this canceled culture yeah but we have to know the truth and we have to speak it and then we have to prayerfully and compassionately deal with the person who's who's hurting but with the understanding that true compassion leads them towards the truth not over a cliff because that's where their feelings want to take them person and identity.com sounds terrific mary you're really a light and and thank you so much for this interview it's really been marvelous and very informative thank you for all you do thanks very much

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Length: 38min 7sec (2287 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021