The postulates of gender theory and the position of Catholic orthodoxy. Is a dialogue possible?

Abstract

Gender theory expresses the idea that each person’s gender is socially and culturally constructed on the basis of differentiated social roles and stereotypes. In this perspective, physical difference, defined as sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, called gender, is emphasized to the maximum and considered primary. The theory holds that a person can be born with a body that does not correspond to his perceived or rather unspecified male or female identity. Consequently, gender identity depends on each person’s subjective mindset and therefore can also change over time. Gender theory, with its conceptual and interpretative system, has been transformed into an ideology, capable of transforming gender issues in the international political agenda.

The article, starting from the roots of the theory of gender, highlights the influence that socialist ideology, feminist thought and post-structuralist philosophy have had on this theory.

Subsequently, the document presents the teaching of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and explains that the complementarity between the sexes does not want to be a source of oppression or inequality, but testifies to the beauty of God’s plan for humanity. Catholic orthodoxy emphasizes that the theory of gender, which can be seen as the new ideological colonization, denies the difference and reciprocity in the nature of a man and a woman and predicts a society without sexual differences, thus eliminating the anthropological foundations of family.

In the final part, the article presents the ecclesial approach that emerges from the document “«Male and female he created them». Towards a path of dialogue on the issue of gender theory in education” of the Congregation for Catholic Education, which opens the road to dialogue on the topic of gender, especially in the educational field, promoting research in the educational field to adequately explore the way in which sexual difference is experienced in different cultures between men and women.

The path of dialogue, which involves listening, reasoning and proposing, turns out to be the most effective because it can help develop a network of relationships that is at the same time more open and more human. Positive dialogue with the proponents of gender theory/ideology can help bring out a harmonious and complete anthropological vision of a person, to be positively assumed as a resource also on the educational-parenting level, which does not reduce the role of corporeality and sexual difference to the biological sphere only, but also extends it to all aspects of the individual’s personality.