The Vatican has issued a teaching guide for Catholic school teachers to address what it has called an “educational crisis” in the field of sex education.
The guide, titled Male and Female — He Created Them, rejects the idea that people can choose or change their gender identity, and insists on the sexual “complementarity” of men and women to make babies.
The 31-page teaching guide also insists that transgender communities only exist to be “provocative” against “traditional frameworks” and to “annihilate the concept of nature”.
“Efforts to go beyond the constitutive male-female sexual difference, such as the ideas of ‘intersex’ or ‘transgender’, lead to a masculinity or femininity that is ambiguous,” the document states.
“This oscillating between make and female becomes, at the end of the day, only a ‘provocative’ display against so-called ‘traditional frameworks’.”
Pope Francis has issued no statement as yet on the new Vatican education guidelines, yet has made a number of anti-LGBTI statements in the past.
In 2016, Francis slammed the teaching of gender theory in schools, describing it as “ideological colonisation” and “insidious indoctrination”.
The following year, the Vatican released a transcript of remarks made by Francis in which he slammed schools for teaching trans inclusivity. At the time, Francis claimed the increasing acceptance of trans people was due to “ideological colonising” and called it “terrible”.
And on another occasion, Francis said that getting rid of “gender-associated behaviours” would render straight men and women infertile, and condemned the idea of non-binary people.
“Rather than contrast negative interpretations of sexual differences, they want to cancel these differences out altogether,” he said at the time.
He added that activists were “proposing techniques and practices that render them irrelevant for human development and relations.”
The recently released teaching guide represents the first attempt to put the Vatican’s position, first articulated fully by Pope Benedict XVI in a 2012 speech, into a comprehensive, official text.