A Sound of Sheer Silence

There was a piece in Commonweal  magazine  that I read a week or so ago that I wanted to write about, but it took me a while to put together my thoughts.  It's about, in broad terms, a Christian (or, in this case, explicitly Roman Catholic) approach or response to the transgender questions that have become very prominent and contentious in the U.S.  It's worth reading, even though I don't really agree with either of the authors. Let's start first with David Cloutier's article.  As I see it, he raises three basic points--two of which I basically agree with, if not in the way he means it, and one that I disagree with very strongly.  Cloutier's first move is to point out the core conundrum of at least some presentations of this issue.  On the one hand, gender identity is presented as being so sacrosanct and central to one's core nature that forcing someone to live in a manner inconsistent with that identity is to do violence to the person; on the other ...