Indianapolis Catholic Schools’ New Policy Forces Gender Conformity on Trans Kids
By Val Wilde, June 28, 2020

The Archdiocese of Indianapolis governs its 67 parochial schools with an iron fist under the auspices of Archbishop Charles Thompson.

While the schools themselves lay empty with students under quarantine, Thompson teamed up with Schools Chancellor Annette Lentz to draft a gender-identity policy with the unwieldy title “Policy and Complementary Norms on Sexual Identity in School Ministries of the Roman Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.”

It’s about as pretty as the title suggests.

Roughly half of the eight-page document is spent justifying the actual policy decisions with a blend of Bible quotes, catechism snippets, and good-old fashioned invalidation of trans people’s lived experiences. Yet in spite of all that justification, school administrators were asked not to include this round of policy updates in official handbooks for parents, students, or faculty.

Perhaps if Thompson and Lentz feel so defensive, that’s a clue that they should pause for a moment of critical self-reflection. They don’t, of course. Why bother, when they can just blame the culture?

Today’s cultural and societal norms stress personal “happiness” above the common good. Additionally, young people today are inundated with hedonistic messaging as well as false influences through imagery and language that idealize tolerance (“live and let live”) over sacrificial love and what we know to be the Truth. A loving community can help counter the myths, misinformation, and societal pressure present in public discourse.

So what does a loving community look like, anyway? Well, now we get into the meat of things.

The heart of the plan is “accompaniment,” the process by which parents, teachers, pastors, and “other trained professionals” help young people with “clarifying and defining issues of self (and sexual) identity in accord with Catholic Church teaching.” It’s a polite way of describing conversion therapy, only you never have to call it that if you refuse to understand LGBTQ identities as anything more than a delusion to be fixed, or a moment of confusion that can be “clarified” into non-existence.

That’s no exaggeration. The document outright says that treating people according to the gender they say they are is tantamount to encouraging a delusion:

School officials, teachers, and students are to interact with students according to their biological sex at birth. To do otherwise would in fact be uncharitable, as it would be confirming such persons in their mistaken understanding of their identity.

Accordingly, the identities of trans and gender-non-conforming children are forcibly tied to their sex assignment at birth. Everything about their school life — what they wear, who they befriend, how they date, which extracurricular activities they can access — is dictated by what the doctors thought about their genitals on the day they were born.

On top of that, students are also expected to use only the name and pronouns assigned to them at birth. The document mentions a process for requesting the use of a different name “to reduce the child’s psychological distress,” but the heavy-handed approach to gender in every other area of student life makes it seem untrustworthy. Call me cynical, but it likely exists to create a loophole for cis children who have non-gender-related problems with their names while leaving space for educators to dismiss trans kids’ concerns.