Statement by H.E. Archbishop Bernardito Auza
Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See
At the Side Event entitled
“Gender Equality and Gender Ideology: Protecting Women and Girls”
United Nations, New York, 20 March 2019
Your Excellencies, Distinguished Panelists,
Dear Friends,
I am very happy to welcome you to this
morning’s event on gender equality and gender ideology and the need to protect
women and girls, which the Holy See is pleased to be sponsoring, together with
the Heritage Foundation.
Each year the Economic and Social Council
hosts the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to promote, report on and
monitor issues relating to the political, economic, civil, social and
educational rights of women. When the CSW first began meeting in 1947 in Lake
Success, New York, there was a clear understanding of what it meant to be a
woman. Even though over the course of the subsequent 62 years, there have been
various debates among women from different continents and backgrounds over the
goals and rights of women and the best means to achieve them, everyone knew to
whom they were referring when they spoke, for example, about gender equality,
violence against women, girls’ education, or equal pay for equal work. Even as
recently as 2011, when the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the
Empowerment of Women, also known as UN Women, was founded, everyone knew whom
it was representing and whose cause it was seeking to advance: the
approximately half of the human race born with the capacity for motherhood,
with two X chromosomes, with particular physical, hormonal, and relational
traits that distinguish them from the approximate other half of the human race,
men.
That consensus has unfortunately been getting
eroded due to the recent phenomenon of gender identity and gender ideology.
Whereas before everyone knew what “woman” meant based on her bodily nature, now
many proponents of gender ideology assert that bodily nature has nothing
intrinsically to do with womanhood beyond how sex is “assigned” at birth.
Womanhood, rather, is looked at as the way one thinks about oneself, or
expresses oneself, and therefore, they argue, those who consider themselves women
must be treated as women, regardless of biological nature at the cellular,
endocrinological or reproductive levels, regardless of primary and secondary
sexual characteristics, or other factors.
This way of looking at womanhood primarily as
a self-identity independent of bodily considerations was raised at the
beginning of this 63rd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women in the
statement given by the LGBTI Core Group, delivered by the Permanent
Representative of Norway, Ambassador Mona Juul. The Statement said that the
LGBTI Core Group — an informal cross regional group of 28 Member States
together with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the NGOs Human
Rights Watch and Outright Action International — spoke explicitly about “transgender
persons” whose “names and sex details in official documents do not match their
gender identity or expression.” It said it “stands ready to work with all
partners to ensure that all women and girls — no matter their sexual
orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics — have
adequate and equal access to social protection systems, public services and
sustainable infrastructure.”
The LGBTI Core Group was saying that the
understanding of “women and girls” should be based on “gender identity or
expression” rather than on their biological sex. This understanding of
womanhood would likely have astonished the 15 original members of the CSW in
1947 and most of the delegates who have represented their governments and NGOs
here each year since.
Whereas 62 years ago, it was not necessary to ask the important preliminary
question, “What is woman?,” because everyone everywhere had a clear and
univocal understanding of what this meant, now, when that understanding is
being challenged and many are seeking to stipulate a fundamental change in its
meaning, the international community must ask it.
The reason is because so much depends on the
answer, not only in terms of law, education, economy, health, safety, sports,
language and culture, as we will hear about today from our speakers — Mary
Hasson, Emilie Kao, Monique Robles and Ryan Anderson — but also in terms of
basic anthropology, human dignity, human rights, marriage and family,
motherhood and fatherhood, and the cause of women, men, and especially
children. To substitute gender identity or expression for biological sex has
enormous ramifications in all of these areas and for that reason we must, with
courtesy and compassion, ask the perhaps uncomfortable questions because the
answers matter.
Pope Francis, while emphatically encouraging
Catholics and all people of good will to support, welcome, accompany and love
all those whose gender identity does not match their biological sex, to affirm
their human dignity and defend their fundamental human rights to be free of
violence and unjust discrimination (October 2, 2016), at the same time has been
very clear about the dangers to individuals and society flowing from gender
ideology.
He says that the anthropological underpinnings
of gender ideology, by denying the “difference and reciprocity in nature of a
man and a woman,” by promoting a “personal identity and emotional intimacy
radically separated from the biological difference between male and female,”
ultimately makes human identity “the choice of the individual” and undermines
the “anthropological basis for the family.” It is “one thing to be
understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life,” he continues,
“and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable
aspects of reality.” We are called, he emphasized, “to protect our humanity,
and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was
created” (Amoris Laetitia, 56). Our sex, just like our genes, our race, our
age, and other natural characteristics, are objective givens, not subjective
choices.
In his encyclical on Care for our Common Home,
Laudato Sì’, which has become perhaps the most commonly cited papal document in
U.N. history since its 2015 release in anticipation of the Paris Agreement, he
said, “Acceptance of our bodies … is vital for welcoming and accepting the
entire world as a gift, … whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over
our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power
over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its
fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology.
Moreover, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary
if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who
is different.” He added elsewhere, “The complementarity of man and woman
… is being questioned by the so-called gender ideology in the name of a
more free and just society,” and stressed, “The differences between man and
woman are not for opposition or subordination, but for communion and
generation” (June 8, 2015). Rather than leading to a more free and just
society, in other words, gender ideology hinders communion and generation
between men and women. It’s a “step backwards,” because “the removal of
[sexual] difference in fact creates a problem, not a solution” (April 15,
2015).
When the natural, complementary duality of man and woman is called into
question, the very notion of being — what it means to be human — is undermined.
The body no longer is a defining element of humanity. The person is reduced to
spirit and will and the human being almost becomes an abstraction until one
discerns what nature one is or chooses what gender one wants to be. Pope
Francis is particularly concerned about gender ideology being taught to
children, so that boys and girls are encouraged to question, at the earliest
ages of existence, whether they are a boy or girl and are told that gender is
something one can choose (July 27, 2016). He has also expressed concern about
cultural pressure, what he terms “ideological colonization,” being placed on
countries, and cultures and individuals who resist this new and indeed radical
anthropology.
So today at this event, we’re concerned with
big and important questions about what it means to be human, what it means to
be a woman, what is the best way to treat with compassion those whose
self-identity does not correspond to their biological sex, how we should
respond to challenges to impute the category of gender identity into legal
protections based on sexual identity, and, within the Commission on the Status
of Women, how best to protect and advance the cause and equality of women and
girls.
I thank you for coming and joining the conversation.
