Gender should be tied to human reproduction

To the Editor:

I was grieved to read the National Institutes of Health description of various described misgendering as generic harassment. (“What matters is that it matters,” July 27, 2023)

Opinion Columns

Gender neutral pronouns: What matters is that it matters

• In Musing | Carole Vasta Folley

I guess I’m the culprit here. I wholly believe, in premises philosophical and religious, that a person’s gender should be tied to the constitutive elements of that human reproduction that is responsible for each of our existences on earth. I wish to present no arguments, only affirm I’m happy to say “they” referring to any person seen as a brother or sister in the human family.

It is because I wish to be “my brother’s keeper,” with equal biblical obligations to my sister, that I cannot pretend that a God-given body ever displays a “wrong kind” of humanness.

You may or may not share my philosophy of objective social terminology. I still wholeheartedly agree that who you are matters, and I ask all people to try to understand that the concern comes from my religion, not my philosophy on how to speak about biochemistry or genetics.

The Jewish tradition first penned the immortal rumor that each woman or man is individually a walking image of God (Genesis 1:27). We Christians adopted the phrase in a unique way, for we have always addressed our most important dialogue partner in the plural.

It is just such a lesson I would invite people to think about in religious terms. I just cannot speak in a way that seems, to me, to pit our bodily existence as members of a human family, sons and daughters all, against my belief that this world has a good and loving God behind it, who gave me such very brothers and sisters. In that belief I confess I have felt the call to imitate a complete self-giving, a total love, which is near our very articulation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who I dare to refer to as the original they.

Fr. Timothy Naples, Pastor

St. John Vianney Catholic Church

South Burlington