John Birch has written a book about gender ideology and what it's about, called Loving God's Children. He s actually argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, including Obergefell, which was the decision that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage.
00:00:00.000Ave Maria Mutual Funds, seeking the moral high ground for 20 years.
00:00:10.000Pro-life, pro-family, and Catholic values have guided us to the top.
00:00:30.000We need to do the accompanying, we need to reach out, we need to show compassion, we need to show empathy, but then we have to go the next step and take it the rest of the way.
00:00:38.000Explain to them, for example, that in the best long-term study that we have, adults who transition, that suicide rate goes from 12 times the general population to 19 times the general population.
00:00:49.000Hello, my friends. You know, one of the most difficult things we deal with today is this whole issue of gender, gender ideology, but it gets real personal when we want to talk about it at our place of work or even sometimes in our families.
00:01:10.580But then it gets even more complicated when it is a loved one, one of our children, who are engaging in some of those, some of our friends and family.
00:01:22.460How in the world do we deal with it? How do we talk about it in a way that still honors the truth, but, you know, perhaps doesn't kill our family life or what do we do? It's so confusing.
00:01:35.200It also involves the teaching of the church. And what exactly is that? Because there's a ton of voices out there that seem to speak for the church that are telling the opposite of what the church teaching is.
00:01:47.920We need someone to help us suss out what is what. And there is a great lawyer who works for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is one of the premier groups defending life, faith, family and freedom all over the world.
00:01:59.500And this lawyer, John Birch, has written a book about gender ideology and what it's about. It's called Loving God's Children.
00:02:10.300And we're going to speak with him about this issue, the hardest of all issues.
00:02:14.480He's actually argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court, including Obergefell, which was the homosexual marriage decision.
00:02:21.060So stay tuned for this episode of The John Henry Weston Show.
00:03:07.660But the reason that I wanted to write this book, not something I ever aspired to do,
00:03:11.480not something you go to law school thinking, yeah, I'll write a book on gender ideology someday.
00:03:14.880But because it became such a pervasive part of our culture.
00:03:18.960At Alliance Defending Freedom, where I work, over the last five years or so, our religious freedom and free speech dockets have changed dramatically.
00:03:28.560And they now focus almost entirely on the issue of gender ideology.
00:03:32.160It started with boys identifying as girls in private spaces, like showers and restrooms and locker rooms, dormitories.
00:03:41.160There was even a case up in Alaska involving an abused women's shelter, where a man identifying as a woman wanted to sleep in the same room as these women who had been victimized and abused.
00:04:07.380From there, it then moved on to preferred pronouns, people being compelled to use pronouns that they thought were a lie in schools, both at the high school and the college level, but also in their places of employment, even non-public employers.
00:04:19.720And now we're to the point where you're seeing kids taken away from parents in California and some other states if they refuse to give in to a child's demand that they'd be transitioned.
00:04:30.100We're seeing Catholics who are declining the ability to foster or adopt children unless they agree ahead of time that they'll transition the kids.
00:04:37.700And we see states that are engaged in curriculum that not only ask kindergartners and first graders what their gender identity is and then encourage that, but they hide it from the parents.
00:04:51.880And I felt like it was time for someone writing from a Catholic perspective to bring all these pieces together, to talk about the way the church teaches and how we should understand that, to talk about the science and how that aligns completely with the church's teaching of the truth.
00:05:06.140And then finally, how to interact with the rest of the world and our own family members in ways that show that we alone, not the other side, are the ones who are acting lovingly in this situation.
00:05:17.360This is kind of like the one-stop soup to nuts package for any Catholic who wants to understand the topic.
00:05:57.420And there are even many Catholics who say, well, it would be the loving thing to do to acknowledge the way that someone identifies themselves, whether that's through a name change or a change in pronouns or honorifics or whatever.
00:06:09.160But the problem is to be truly loving.
00:06:11.640We're not talking about the soupy, sentimental feelings that you see in movies or books, but loving the way the church defines it in the catechism as willing the best of the other person.
00:06:20.820We know that affirming the pronouns leads to a lifetime of hardship.
00:06:24.720And let me give you some stats on that.
00:06:26.580For most children, we're talking, you know, adolescents, teenagers who are going through some kind of gender dysphoria.
00:06:32.840And we're not talking about the kids who, because of social pressure, just en masse all of a sudden declare that they're transgender, 10 at a time in a classroom.
00:06:40.940These are the kids who are suffering from a clinical psychology diagnosis that their mind is not aligned with their body.
00:06:47.980Well, if you leave them to their own devices and you don't encourage them to pursue the gender identity, 80 to 95 percent of them will naturally align their mind with their body.
00:06:58.200But if you start to affirm the pronouns and you allow them to wear the other sexes dress and you allow them to use the opposite sex bathroom and the athletic team, nearly 100 percent of them will continue with their dysphoria for the rest of their life.
00:07:10.480And as I'm sure we'll get into, when you pursue the dysphoria by aligning your body with your mind, that leads to total failure, higher suicide rates, worse incidents of mental health issues, as well as other health problems and ultimately loss of fertility.
00:07:26.600So the pronouns is kind of the camel's nose under the tent, and we have to stop it before it gets there.
00:07:50.420You can see the photo on the screen in front of you now.
00:07:52.320Well, it was two women, one of whom is so-called transitioned to become a man, so took drugs for many, many years, therefore has facial hair, altered her body to look like a man, destroying her physical look.
00:08:10.740It appears the pope has given in on the pronoun wars.
00:08:14.100So the teaching of the church, what is it nowadays?
00:08:17.240Well, the church has taught for millennia that we are not souls trapped in a body that can be manipulated, however we might feel.
00:08:27.160Instead, we are embodied souls, and that means that our body says something about who we are, our male or femaleness.
00:08:33.500It's why we celebrate the fact that at the end of time, at the last judgment, our bodies will actually be reunited with our souls in heaven, and we will continue to be men or women.
00:08:42.280And although Pope Francis made some of those comments, I think that's where he's trying to carefully balance this issue between accompanying individuals, welcoming them into the church and loving them.
00:08:54.140But he has been crystal clear about the church's teachings about gender ideology.
00:08:59.120He has said in no uncertain terms that it's a tragedy, that it's terrible that we're teaching kids in schools that they can be a gender identity that's different than their sex.
00:09:07.960He has said in encyclicals and in public statements that if you deny the reality of your body as male or female, that you are rejecting a gift from God, and it puts a barrier between you and other people and prevents any kind of meaningful, intimate human relationships.
00:09:23.840So we need to be careful that we don't fall for the media headlines, which take a picture like that and say, oh, that the church is confused about this, and look at the actual teaching documents.
00:09:35.480And I have to say that the U.S. bishops have been absolutely terrific on this.
00:09:39.520I'm sure many of your viewers heard about the USCCB's recent statement about Catholic health care and how we're not supposed to be doing gender transition therapies or surgeries in Catholic hospitals.
00:09:50.840You know, that's all well and good. What people may not realize is that over 30 dioceses now have adopted policies making sure that their schools and their parishes comply with the church's teachings about the truth of the human body.
00:10:04.760And some of them have gone into great depth about the theology.
00:10:07.720I quote them that length in the book and in the question and answer session, you know, about this idea of an embodied soul, how, in some sense, the gender ideology movement is just a re-raising of the Gnosticism heresy from the second century, which said that our souls and our bodies were different, that they were separate somehow, that have talked about the medical transitions, how those are wrong, how the pronouns.
00:10:31.100We have to continue to continue to tell the truth and about the importance of loving individuals in the way that we talk, the way that we teach, and the way that we respond to these things by willing the best of the person.
00:10:43.080And that is only by recognizing the truth of their human sexuality as male or female.
00:10:48.220So it's easy for folks to get confused, to look at the media and think the church is confused, but we've got a 2,000-year history, certainly through Jesus' teaching up today about the embodied soul, but all the way back to Genesis itself, about God intentionally creating us male and female, and how we need to accept that body as a gift, just as Pope Francis has said.
00:11:09.600So how do we deal with the church leadership?
00:11:15.820So the document that you were talking about put out by the USCCB, that's the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, that should, at Catholic hospitals, stop such transitions, came out from that part of the USCCB that studies theology.
00:11:29.700It was a great document, very well done, laying out the church's teaching very clearly.
00:11:34.820At the last US Conference of Bishops, they weren't able to implement it, because the document, which was just, as you said, church teaching from forever, was fought by Cardinal Slupich, Cardinal McElroy, you know, in the sort of flavor of Father James Martin, who are actually very much against the church's perennial teaching on the issue.
00:12:00.440And talking about a more accompanying, welcoming approach, that truly does confuse the issue.
00:12:09.200So how do we deal with that, when we know the church is teaching on one hand, and you're having this, let's fight the teaching, or let's, like, do it differently, so that in practice, we're able to affirm these individuals in their chosen gender?
00:12:25.160I mean, first, we need to understand the issue, and I hope that people reading the book and some of the resources that I mentioned in there will help prepare them to have those conversations.
00:12:32.860But we need to stand up, because it all has to do with what it means to authentically love someone.
00:12:39.500And if you're not speaking in truth, then any attempt that you're making to help someone is going to be the opposite of love.
00:12:46.800It's going to make things worse for them.
00:12:48.120And an example that I like to use when I talk to young people about this, you know, the whole notion of loving someone and objective reality, is a child that really wants to touch a hot stove.
00:12:58.400And every parent intuitively understands this, that no matter how badly they want it, no matter how much they think they're going to like it, the parent won't give in because they understand an objective truth that the child does not.
00:13:08.740That if they touch the hot stove, it will burn them and seriously hurt them.
00:13:11.960And in the same way, if we welcome, which we absolutely should do, you know, this book is all about accompanying and loving the other.
00:13:18.940But if we welcome and then we don't speak the truth once they've been welcomed into the church, then we're condemning them to this lifetime of heartache and misery and bad outcomes.
00:13:28.040And I'm glad you raised Father James Martin, because he's very famous about this issue, the marriage issue, and about building bridges.
00:13:34.720And at one point, I contemplated naming this book, Building Better Bridges, because the type of bridges that he talks about is to love and to welcome, but then to never extend the truth of the church's teachings on human sexuality, whether that relates to the marriage issue or the human body and gender ideology.
00:13:52.740And ultimately, those bridges are going to collapse and fail, and those individuals will be permanently harmed.
00:13:58.020I mean, not only will they suffer all kinds of heartache in this life, because they are not following God's plan to make them the person that God wants them to be, but ultimately, depending on the choices that they engage in with his encouragement, they could lose their eternal salvation.
00:14:14.580If we want to build better bridges, we need to do the accompanying, we need to reach out, we need to show compassion, we need to show empathy.
00:14:21.020After all, this is a population, again, with a clinical diagnosis, that has a suicide rate 12 times the general population.
00:14:27.500So they need our care and concern as Catholics.
00:14:30.800But then we have to go the next step and take it the rest of the way.
00:14:33.820Explain to them, for example, that in the best long-term study that we have, that over a long period of time, which is when you have to measure it, adults who transition, that suicide rate goes from 12 times the general population to 19 times the general population.
00:14:48.560That incidence of mental health problems increases, that they have the loss of fertility, that they experience heart trouble, that they have bone loss, that they have developmental problems because of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
00:15:02.400You know, all the things that people aren't telling them on the front end, you know, and the thing that should haunt, you know, Father Martin and any other church official and even lay Catholics who aren't willing to speak the truth on this issue is when that person realizes they made a mistake.
00:15:16.540You know, we have thousands of detransitioners now in our country, those who initially made the transition to a different gender identity and then realized that was a mistake and came back.
00:15:25.660We should all be haunted when they ask the question, why didn't anyone tell me the truth?
00:15:29.880Because I can't imagine having to face someone, having not told them the truth ahead of time, only to watch them pursue this course of misery when it could have been prevented on the front end.
00:15:40.820And keep in mind, too, that for many of these individuals, you know, 60% of them endured some kind of child sexual abuse that led to a gender dysphoria.
00:15:51.240For others, it's a broken relationship with a mother or a father for others that may have been a grandparent who dressed them as the opposite sex because they wanted a granddaughter rather than a grandson.
00:16:01.180Maybe it was broken friendships early on in their life.
00:16:03.440You know, if we're just putting a bandaid on by giving them the drugs and giving them surgery, we're not addressing those underlying mental health issues that need to be resolved if they're going to have any kind of happiness and meaningfulness in this life.
00:16:16.280So, again, building a bridge is great, but if you don't tell them the truth, it can be the most devastating, horrible, evil thing that you could do.
00:16:27.660Hey, my friends, now is the time to stand up and fight.
00:16:30.800We are just about to have the Synod on Synodality, and everything that you've seen indicates that it's going to be an absolute disaster.
00:16:40.280We have Father James Martin as a personal appointee of the Pope speaking at it.
00:16:58.300And at these times of great crisis, the Church, especially those called in the laity to work for the glory of Christ and His Church, are called to gather and strategize.
00:17:11.620Back in 2014, LifeSite launched something called Rome Life Forum.
00:17:15.820It was a gathering at that point of some 75 life and family leaders from all around the world to strategize as to what we could do.
00:17:24.280And when we gathered, the majority of people were most concerned about what?
00:17:28.700About Pope Francis, about what was going on in Rome.
00:17:31.920But this was 2014, but the life and family leaders saw it first.
00:17:38.940Now, a decade on, we are confronted with some of the most severe challenges the Church has ever faced.
00:17:46.280And so, our tradition at LifeSite is to continue with Rome Life Forum, which has continued every year until we had to take a break over COVID because we weren't permitted.
00:18:20.040And your book, Loving God's Children, the Church and Gender Ideology, available through Sophia Press, actually does a great job in terms of giving people the actual references, the studies themselves.
00:19:09.660Well, the reality is all of those things are lies.
00:19:11.900That the gender transition community and health care professionals who get lots of money from these procedures are really peddling to people.
00:19:19.640You know, Planned Parenthood now is getting millions of dollars from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
00:19:25.760And these surgeries can cost up to $70,000.
00:19:28.800You know, so there's a lucrative business on the other side of this.
00:19:31.020But, you know, the reality, let's start with the puberty blockers.
00:19:33.560Puberty blockers are a legitimate medicine for kids who are going through something called prepubescent puberty, where for whatever reason, socialization or chemicals in the water are going through puberty earlier than they're supposed to.
00:19:46.040And they've been approved for that purpose, to delay puberty for a short time until they're at the appropriate age.
00:19:51.320But the FDA has never studied and never certified puberty blockers for the off-label use of stopping someone from going through puberty because of gender identity issue.
00:20:01.700And there is no such thing as a pause because you're missing out on that time when you're supposed to be growing, when your bones are going to be getting bigger, getting denser, your muscular system is developing, and all of your sexual organs are developing.
00:20:14.700And if you stay on those puberty blockers for a sufficient amount of time, then those developments won't ever happen the way that they're supposed to.
00:20:21.240You can develop permanent infertility just from using puberty blockers for an extensive period of time.
00:20:26.840And then once you get to the cross-sex hormones and the surgeries, what you're doing is you're encouraging someone to do something to their body that will never accomplish what they want.
00:20:40.020First, physically, even if you go all the way through surgery, every single cell of your body is encoded in its DNA, its chromosomes, male or female.
00:20:48.380And so you can look however they reconstruct you on the outside, but a doctor will always be able to tell what your body is on the inside.
00:20:55.300So what you're doing is entirely cosmetic.
00:20:57.700The second thing is that it's devastatingly dangerous to tell someone that they should align their body with their mind rather than the other way around.
00:21:07.540And we would never do that with any other type of dysphoria.
00:21:10.000So, for example, if you had a child suffering from anorexia, in their mind, they think that they're fat, even though the objective reality of their body is that they're not.
00:21:18.400Maybe they're even too thin or emaciated.
00:21:20.860No doctor, no loving parent, no one would encourage that person to eat less or to have a surgery, say, to make their stomach smaller so they eat less, to encourage them to align their body with their mind.
00:21:52.020And it causes such distress, real distress, that they would do anything to get rid of that arm.
00:21:56.720But no doctor will remove that arm, not without committing malpractice.
00:22:00.360And no person would hand that person the tool to take their arm off because we recognize that removing the arm isn't going to solve the underlying issues that led to the dysphoria.
00:22:10.540We need to treat the mind and allow it to recognize the reality of the body so that they can be in sync.
00:22:16.920Now, when you get to gender dysphoria, it is the only mental health issue where you have these disconnects between mind and body, where we encourage the person to align the mind with the body with the mind rather than the other way around.
00:22:29.440And it doesn't even make sense the way they talk about it, because on the front end, a gender activist will say that the whole notion of male and female is just a stereotype.
00:22:40.120You know, that sex is assigned at birth because of stereotypes.
00:22:44.040But their solution to gender dysphoria is to change the body that doesn't matter, to fit with gross stereotypes of what it means to be a man or a woman.
00:22:52.880You know, and one 11-year-old who's been a boy their entire life knows what it means to feel like a woman.
00:22:58.460You know, it's not because they like to play with dolls and that they're emotional and empathetic.
00:23:02.960You know, those are stereotypes about what it means to be a woman, but they're not actually being a woman.
00:23:07.340And so you put all this together, and you can see why the science shows us that these treatments don't work the way they're supposed to.
00:23:14.120That's why you end up with the higher suicide rates.
00:23:16.280You end up with the greater incidences of mental health issues as well as all these physical malformities and problems.
00:23:23.100It's because they're treating something in the exact opposite way psychologists and doctors have treated.
00:23:28.460Dysporias for all of the existence of American medicine.
00:23:31.920And the countries that really pioneered this type of medicine, places like the UK, Finland, Sweden, they are all countries now that are pulling back on these recommendations and going in the opposite direction and saying, you know what?
00:23:46.520The best thing to do is get into counseling and watchfully wait and see what happens with these kids, because the best data that we have shows that it's not helping when we do this and in many cases is making the problem worse.
00:24:43.200At least in Canada, that's the way it is.
00:24:44.640And I'd like to hear your take on how that is in some of the states.
00:24:47.500Yeah, it's criminal what they're doing.
00:24:49.300There are over 20 states that have passed what I call counseling censorship laws like that.
00:24:53.680And when you include local jurisdictions, it's more than 100 different places that have these laws.
00:24:58.540And I actually represent two people right now, one from Colorado, one from Washington State, both counselors, Christian counselors,
00:25:05.200who want to be able to talk to young people to align their bodies with their minds.
00:25:09.320And if they do that, then they can lose their professional license.
00:25:12.820The gentleman from Washington State, Brian Tingley, we actually have a request where we're asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case.
00:25:20.320And if it's not his, it'll be another one of these because it's outrageous what they're doing.
00:25:24.620First, speaking from a constitutional sense and then from the medical sense,
00:25:28.540constitutionally, there is one thing that the government cannot do when it comes to speech, and that is pick sides.
00:25:35.200It cannot say we're going to promote one viewpoint and prevent the other viewpoint from speaking by censoring it.
00:25:41.480And yet, that's what they're doing with these counseling censorship laws.
00:25:44.940Like you said, if the counselor wants to encourage same-sex relationships or encourage the pursuit of a gender identity different than sex,