While American healthcare institutions have long supported medical interventions for transgender minors, including the use of puberty blockers to delay the physical changes of adolescence, the European medical community is displaying scepticism towards this approach.

Five countries— the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and France—have now begun urging caution and limiting the use of puberty blockers for minors, citing a lack of evidence on the benefits outweighing the risks.

The UK's National Health Service recently restricted the use of puberty blockers to clinical trials, effectively making them inaccessible to most children.

"These countries have done systematic reviews of evidence," said Leor Sapir, a fellow who studies transgender care at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute think tank. "They've found that the studies cited to support these medical interventions are too unreliable and the risks are too serious."

While some nations, including Canada, Spain and Australia, still permit puberty blockers as a clinical option, there are increasing calls for restrictions in these countries as well.

For example in Italy, the president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society expressed "serious concerns" in a public letter to the prime minister about the use of puberty blockers..

During a recent congressional hearing, Republican politicians highlighted European examples of growing caution and criticised Democrats and the US medical community for making treatments readily available for minors. They lauded the European countries' reassessment and portrayed the issue of transgender care as a pivotal one for the 2024 campaign.

Transgender youth used as political pawns

Conversely, Democrats accused Republicans of using transgender youth as political pawns and argued that bans and restrictions on treatments would harm children.

"They are telling parents that Republican politicians know better than they do what is best for their child," said Rep Frank Pallone Jr at the hearing last week. "This is the height of hypocrisy from a group that supposedly believes in limited government."

A Washington Post and KFF poll conducted late last year revealed that 68% of respondents opposed the use of puberty blockers in children aged 10 to 14.

Since then, over a dozen Republican-led states have implemented restrictions on medical interventions as part of transgender care. For example, a Texas law scheduled to take effect in September threatens healthcare providers with the loss of their medical licences if they offer puberty blockers, surgeries or hormone treatments to most transgender minors.

While Republicans push for increased parental involvement, some Democrat-led states are embracing transgender minors seeking treatments.

New York, for instance, introduced public school guidance allowing teachers to protect the privacy of students undergoing social transitions without parental knowledge due to safety concerns or lack of acceptance at home.

Sources

The Wall Street Journal

CathNews New Zealand

There are features of our Western world's culture that seem to fit the image.

Important aspects of our lives seem to have become disconnected from what gives them meaning. If this is true, it is hardly healthy. I offer the following examples.

"Me" disconnected from "we"; and "my" from "our"

To say modern culture suffers from acute individualism is by now a truism.

Clamours for "my rights" often involve little or no sense of "my responsibilities".

It seems incredible that some would regard public health requirements as infringements of their rights - it's as silly as regarding the road rules as violations of their freedom.

During the pandemic, some have been willing to put other people's lives at risk for no better reason than to enjoy themselves. Obviously, legal restrictions are no substitute for moral formation.

But all is not lost:

• Catastrophes can still bring out the best in people.
• It is still easy to admire individuals who are generous, even risking their own lives for others.
• It is still easy to dislike gross forms of self-centredness and self-aggrandisement.
• People still give generously to charitable causes.
• And it is still easy to pity individuals caught up in over-anxious self-concern.

But there are also subtler forms of disconnect that we can become used to; they become ‘normalised'.

For example, in most if not all cultures, marriage has been a moment of celebration for whole communities. Now, "what we do is nobody else's business". Within an individualist culture, it isn't easy to see anything wrong with this. It's the culture that has become reductionist.

Work used to be regarded as an expression one's person and relationships with others. Now, within the culture we are regarding as ‘normal', it is reduced to a commodity and business transaction. Commercial value attaches to the work, not the person doing it, so work becomes unmoored from its own deepest meaning.

The common denominator to all forms of self-centredness is failure to realise that we can become our own true selves only through being "for others".

This paradox is at the centre of Jesus' teaching.

The drift away from his Gospel has become a drift away from what we need to become our own true selves. This will show up in the uglier kinds of self-centredness.

Facts' unmoored from truth

When truth is reduced to whatever we say to get whatever we want - whether it is true or not - we are targets for manipulation. We become vulnerable to every kind of spin - commercial spin, political spin, and agenda-driven ideologies.

Scientists work hard to establish facts.

They know we need to act on what is objectively true.

Solving crimes, the judicial system, and research in every field are all based on the premise that truth matters.

All these, and most of life, would be turned up-side-down if it were enough to say: "truth is whatever the individual thinks it is - it is true for her/him" and "right is whatever the individual chooses - it is right for him/her".

How could we even say rape or sexual abuse are wrong if it might be "right" for the person doing it?

So, we cannot escape the need to acknowledge an objective difference between true and false, and right and wrong.

Conspiracy theories during the pandemic duped some people into believing claims that were far more bizarre than anything the sciences ever present us with.

What kind of culture is it when they are so gullibly believed?

Parroting cliches is a lazy alternative to serious thinking. For example: lazy thinkers don't distinguish between judging a person's actions (which we may do, and sometimes must), and judging their conscience (which we may not - because we cannot know whether or how much they are guilty before God.)

That is the meaning of the saying: "who am I to judge?"

"Who am I to judge", doesn't mean we can't judge their actions!

But even when we rightly judge that another's actions are wrong, it is often necessary to look further.

Their offending can have deep roots in early experience of abuse or deprivation or cultural alienation.

If we are personally attached to truth, we will look more deeply, and avoid superficial judgments and demonising.

Lazy thinking also buys the slogan used to justify abortion: "it's my body," even though the sciences leave no doubt that the embryo is actually someone else's body.

Sexual activity unmoored from sexuality's meaning

I recently heard some young people say they felt it was wrong to send sexual imagery online, but they didn't know why.

They will not come any closer to knowing through "consent education".

"Consent education" is right to teach the need to avoid activities that are not legal or consensual or safe. But that is as far as it can go because it is unconcerned with sexuality's meaning - other than it being a source of pleasure.

That kind of ‘education' allows, if it doesn't promote, the idea that anything goes provided it is legal, consensual and safe.

But is it?

A more holistic education would allow young people to learn about virtue.

Modesty is the virtue that protects chastity.

Of course, if society has given away the virtue of chastity, then it won't feel any need for modesty. Chastity is the virtue that applies self-respect, restraint and respect for others, to sexuality.

Unchastity involves a lack of self-respect, restraint and respect for others.

The Department of Internal Affairs' statistics regarding the extent of attempts in NZ to access child sex sites, and the increasing demand for younger children, and more violent forms of abuse, show where we go when the meaning of sexuality is ignored, or reduced to pleasure.

There have been strong, organized and determined cultural movements whose agenda has been to "liberate" sexuality from all previous restraints.

We look back incredulously to the 1960's through 1990's when some activists described themselves as ‘victims' of harsh laws aimed at preventing "man-boy love"; and children as ‘victims' because harsh parents didn't want them to have that kind of loving care!!

"Inter-generational sex" and "man-boy love' were euphemisms intended to promote the acceptability of what society calls pederasty.

For some, the aim was to shed categories such as ‘heterosexual' and ‘homosexual' in favour of more fluid and non-binary language. Even though by the 1990's those movements had mostly lost their credibility, the underlying ideologies have a way of re-surfacing.

So sooner or later, we do need to come to the question: what is sexuality's meaning?

What is its purpose?

Yes, it is for pleasure.

But so is unchastity. So, there must be some meaning beyond that.

Honest reflection recognises two purposes that are entwined and come together uniquely in marriage: they are sexuality's potential for deeply nurturing the love of two people, and in a way that is also designed to generate new life as the fruit of their love. And because new life needs to be protected and nurtured, the child's parents need to be in a relationship that is stable, committed and faithful.

Whatever allowances we rightly make for people of various orientations or preferences (see below), ultimately it is marriage that can fulfil sexuality's deepest meanings.

Detached from marriage, sexual activities are detached from sexuality's meaning.

Gender identity unmoored from sexual identity

Gender identity is not a label that is put on us, by ourselves or by others. It is given by nature long before we start making our own decisions.

But what about the tensions between biological reality and psychological/emotional reality that some people experience?

We move closer to an answer when we allow both faith and the sciences to be part of our thinking: the world is a work in progress, and we are part of this evolving world.

This means that none of us is a finished product. We are all at one stage or another of being unfinished.

We can be born with deficiencies, or incur disabilities, some of which last through life.

In fact, we are never finished while death is still in front of us.

When there is something that cannot be resolved or fulfilled within our present span of life, it helps to remember that our life was not something we had a right to in the first place; it is simply a gift. And our present life is not the whole of it.

In that kind of world, personal development does not always take place at the same pace or even follow the usual pattern.

Those who are caught in any of the dilemmas resulting from different stages of, or lines of, development have a right to the same respect and unconditional love as everyone else.

Still, as Professor Kathleen Stock, herself a lesbian, writing about "Why Reality Matters for Feminism," reminds us, there are only two biological sexes and no amount of hormonal or surgical treatment can change that.

She is aware that by seeking surgical or hormonal treatment to support gender change, people are implicitly acknowledging the link between gender identity and sexual identity.

But she is also aware, and critical of, the more recent claim that they should not need to; it should be enough simply to declare that you are male or female, regardless of biological reality.

Is that where the separation of gender identity and sexual identity can take us?

If reality matters, then it matters to acknowledge that, both socially and biologically, male and female find a certain completion in each other, precisely by being each other's ‘opposite' - which is what the ancient Genesis story has been saying all along.

Politics unmoored from the common good

Politics unmoored from the common good is politics unmoored from its own purpose.

The purpose of political involvement is to create a social and economic environment in which everyone has the opportunity to progress towards achieving their own potential and a fulfilling life.

In a true democracy, political parties differ over how to do this, while being united in a common pursuit of the common good.

Partisan self-interest placed above the common good is a throw-back to tribalism, and like ancient forms of tribalism, it undermines the unity that is needed for achieving the common good.

The alternative to the common good is mere partisan power.

This gives rise to all kinds of inequalities and absurdities (e.g. being duped by misinformation and lies that have been discredited by the courts; basing decisions about masks and social distancing not on science but on which political party you belong to!)

We might be surprised at such fickleness, though perhaps less surprised that it happens in a country where States can still pass anti-democratic laws, and that does not yet have a proper separation of powers.

But the lesson for ourselves is how foolish and self-destructive we too could become through unmooring rights from responsibilities. ‘facts' from truth, and politics from pursuit of the common good.

"Religion" unmoored from ordinary life

Early in the Christian tradition, St Iraneus said the glory of God is human beings coming alive through seeing God in all that God has made and all that God is doing in human lives.

We are being drawn to God through the experience of created beauty, goodness and truth.

Popes St John Paul II and Benedict XVI have picked up Iraneus' theme, emphasising that since human beings becoming fully alive is God's agenda in creating and redeeming us, it is also "the route the Church must take."

So, religion is not somehow running alongside our ordinary lives; it is our ordinary lives being made extraordinary, being sanctified, graced - family life, civic life, industrial and commercial life, political life…

Of course, this is unfinished work, and so it will be until God is "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28).

In the meantime, people for whom life's shortfalls create a sense of insecurity are the ones more likely to seek escape into "religion" perceived as some kind of separate sphere, or construct built on to life, or, worse, a kind of bubble (even having its own separate language).

This perception of ‘religion" being alongside ordinary life is the assumption of some bloggers, and it seems, even some bishops (in Britain, Ireland, France and USA) who resent government restrictions affecting church gatherings even during a pandemic.

It is as if the sciences and good government don't apply to "religion's" separate sphere.

A concept of religion unmoored from the needs of the common good is unmoored from the ordinary processes of becoming more truly human and fully alive, which is what gives glory to God.

Conclusion

A culture in which so many aspects of life have become unmoored from what gives them meaning is a culture that is reductionist, superficial, utilitarian…

The question is: within that kind of culture, how well equipped can we be to deal with the epic issues of our time - those that degrade human life, human dignity, human rights and the planet itself?

• Peter Cullinane is Emeritus Bishop of Palmerston North. He has a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Angelicum, Rome and a Master of Theology from Otago University. Bishop Cullinane is a former President of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops' Conference and between 1983 and 2003 he was a member of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL).

New relationships and sexuality education guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education say that schools must "uphold the human rights of all people."

"All people have the same rights and freedoms, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics," the guidelines say. Read more

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said that enrolment forms - where eligible voting New Zealanders can enrol or update their details on the electoral roll - were updated last year. Continue reading

The Pacific is a region that has long-hosted alternative expressions of gender, and this current cultural moment has given its peoples a chance to contribute to a global conversation. Read more

The authors are in favour of a radical change to what they describe as "the outdated structure of the gender division currently used in elite sport".

Associate Professor Anderson and Dr Taryn Knox from the Dunedin Bioethics Centre, together with Otago physiologist Professor Alison Heather, investigate the ethics and science to do with the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) decision in research published in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The recent IOC guidelines allow trans-women to compete in the women's division if (amongst other things) their testosterone is held below 10nmol/L.

Heather says this is significantly higher than that of cis-women.

"Science demonstrates that high adult levels of testosterone, as well as permanent testosterone effects on male physiology during in utero and early development, provides a performance advantage in sport and that much of this male physiology is not mitigated by the transition to a transwoman," she says.

However, not all researchers have interpreted the existing studies in the same way, or agree that trans women have unfair advantages.

Human Rights researcher Jack Byrne said studies about testosterone were red herrings because the majority of trans women reduced their testosterone to very low levels.

The Otago team propose possible solutions. Some options value inclusion more than fairness and vice versa.

They include:

• Excluding trans-women from competing in the women's division
• Creating a third division for transwomen and intersex women
• Calculating a handicap for transwomen based on their testosterone levels - similar to that used in golf

Their preferred option is an extension of this with a proposed algorithm that could account for a range of parameters.

Source

• eurekalert.org
• rnz.co.nz
• Image: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Which is all the more embarrassing when you remember how he formerly introduced himself to Arnold Schwarzenegger as Australia's next Prime Minister.

But, incredibly, not only did all of the media pundits get the election result wrong, but so did our nation's leading betting agency.

Because according to The Australian, the only other people to lose as much as The Australian Labor Party, were Sportsbet. As Brighette Ryan wrote:

It has been an expensive federal election night for betting agency Sportsbet, which has had to pay out both Labor and Liberal punters.

On Thursday, the agency opted to pay out all bets on Labor, in a strong signal the race was already over.

Over $1.3 million was paid out to those who threw money behind Labor and its leader Bill Shorten, with someone walking away with a $128,000 win.

Sportsbet were obviously not alone in suffering from a bad case of The Bradley Effect.

The illustrious Peter van Onselen predicted that Labor would win 86 seats, whereas Waleed Aly went with a more conservative 81.

Although, he somewhat presciently alluded to the victory of Trump in 2016 when pressed with the question as to whether or not there was any way for Morrison to win: "Waled Ally predicts @australianLabor to win around 81 seats".

But before analysing the decalogue of reasons why Labor lost, we should all honour Rowan Dean—our leader at The Spectator Australia—who was the only media pundit that had the courage and foresight to predict a Coalition win.

As Dean tweeted all the way back in April: "49-51 As I and I aloen have said for the last six months, Scott Morrison can and will win this election."

Unfortunately, Dean never really explained why he was so sure about his bold prognostication. But what follows are ten reasons why Sportsbet—and every other media polling agency in the country—got it so wrong. Continue reading

• Image: Courier Mail

The guidance, endorsed by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops' Conference, is for principals, boards of trustees, staff and whanau.

It provides a point of reference in the support and accompaniment of children and young people who may be experiencing gender dysphoria in New Zealand's Catholic schools.

The director of the National Centre for Religious Studies, Colin MacLeod, says the document is intended to provide appropriate and practical guidance regarding this complex issue in our schools.

"It does not cover every aspect but acknowledges the need to treat every person with love and respect and to support students in their growing self- identity in a kind and sensitive manner," he said.

Gender Complexity in Schools, guided by faith, spirituality and the sacraments, sets out principles for the Catholic school community which has a responsibility to ensure that all young people are respected and accepted.

Complexity in Schools is available online at www.tci.ac.nz/ncrs.

The document looks at the faith and theological context, the sociological context, and the school and cultural context.

It provides some points for consideration and some practical suggestions.

It concludes: "Catholic schools are committed to providing a kind, nurturing, faith-filled environment that respects everyone's dignity and personhood.

"Every situation is unique and demands caring, prudent and wise accompaniment.

"The example of Jesus, in responding to so many different people with diverse needs and concerns in the Gospels, consistently shows us that love and truth needs to be at the heart of our response - and in a particular way when supporting and accompanying children and young people who may be vulnerable in our schools."

Source

• Supplied: Gregan NZCBC
• tci.ac.nz
• Image: onlineparentingcoach.com

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: "XY" and "XX" are genetic markers of health - not genetic markers of a disorder.The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female.

Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species. This principle is self-evident.

The exceedingly rare disorders of sexual differentiation (DSDs), including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design.

Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.

2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.

No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child's subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward.

People who identify as "feeling like the opposite sex" or "somewhere in between" do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.

3. A person's belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.

These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V).

The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved. Continue reading

Sources

• American College of Pediatricians
• Image: YourNewsWire.com