Transsexuality and the Canonical Order Urbano Navarrete, S.J. Determination of Sex . Typology of Transsexuality . 2.1 Distinction From Other Sexual Anomalies a) Hermaphroditism Altemative Hermaphroditism . Bilateral Hermaphroditism Unilateral Hermaphroditism . b) Homosexuality. 2. c) Transvestitism ‘Transsexuality and Marriage ae : 3.1 Admission to Marriage : 32 Declaration of Nullity . . eee Transsexualism and Holy Orders. . 4 4.1 Transsexuality and Receiving Holy Orders 42 Transsexuality and Holy Orders Already Received Transsexualism and Vowed Religious Life 10 10 AL 13TRANSSEXUALISM AND THE CANONICAL ORDER Urbano Navarrette, S.J 1997 In our time there have exploded the numbers of transsexual cases, who both submit themselves to many sorts of surgical interventions so that they may have recorded sp ofhical records their new sexual gender and, as they say, be both legally and socially recognized. Anyone can see how many and how grave ate the problems in canon law that cases of this nature can generate, whether in relation to marriage, or holy orders o teligious life, or in relation to the community life of the parish of the person. AS a result, jt ig now seen opportune to provide for an examination Of these issues also in relation to the canonical order. ‘At the outset, let us emphasize the assumption of prescinding from any ethical or moral issues in this subject arca, especially as tegards what touches on the lawfulness or otherwise of these surgical operations in cases of the most serious kinds, if these operations are judged to be the efficacious means to free the patient from an intolerable psychological conflict in order to attain psychic sanity. My study will be restricted to the canonical field 1) DETERMINATION OF SEX First of all, it behooves us to say something about the determination of sex. For in similar situations today, it is not unknown for some people to believe that the determination of sex depends only on psychic elements. In fact, there are some who see the human body as just an object over which the person possesses absolute domination to use and, therefore, can have full personal liberty to express, whether as regards heteresexual or homosexual use of one’s own sexuality. This pertains also to changing sex, if the person does not like the sex to which they have been assigned from physic: characteristics. According to this anthropological concept , since the sexuality of the individual in its essence is something psychic, that physical or somatic sexuality is something connected, like an accessory to be connected or changed, without any ethical difficulty, if the person secks to assign oneself to the opposite sex from that which the physical indications indicate. It is obvious that this concept of the human person is far removed from the concept in Christian anthropology, according to which the man, created in the image and Jikeness of God, is not the master but the administrator of all those elements by which the man is what he is. For man is man precisely from the substantial unity of two clements, namely the spiritual and the bodily. On the other hand, God in his incomprehensible wisdom wishes life, in all its distinetions to be transmitted as a whole but not without those two elements we call masculine and feminine, coming respectively from males and females. In this universal plan of God it is understood that man, whom God created as sexual. “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27), even if, as the Second Vatican Council notes, man’s sexuality and the faculty of reproduction “wondrously surpass the endowments of lower forms of life” (GS 51). Sexuality encompasses profoundly the whole human person, whether male or female. For the human person, as theCongregation for the Doctrine of Faith says .the human person is so profoundly affected by sexuality that it must be considered as one of the factors which give to each individual’s life the principal traits that distinguish it. In fact, is from sex that the human person receives the characteristic which, on the biological, psychological and spiritual levels, make that person a man or a woman, and thereby largely tis obvious that many are the questions, and many not yet with scientific solutions, which touch on the determination of sex. Nevertheless, according to Christian anthropology, a certain absolute dichotomy between spirit and body can never be admitted, as if sexuality can be determined either solely from spiritual elements ot solely from bodily elements. For man is an incarnate spirit that is substantially united to the body through which man operates and is manifest. Therefore human sexuality is something complex for whose determination concems both data of the psychic order and data of the physical order or bodily order. For sex does not subsist only in some superior stages of consciousness which dictates to which sex someone belongs, neither therefore does it consist in a mere intimate and personal perception of one’s sex, but itis at the same time something bodily structured biologically. In normal cases the conscious perception of one’s own sex responds to a bodily and biological structure which today is sufficiently well known in its fundamental elements. It does not seem superfluous to keep before our eyes those stages of growth by which sexual differences are produced from the first moment of the embryonic life of the future male or future female. Genetic Difference: Sex is determined by the compositions of two cells which arc united in the moment of impregnation. The female egg contains 22 chromosomes and one X chromosome. When it is impregnated it can be fertilized either with spermatozoa which contains 22 chromosomes and one X chromosome or with spermatozoa which contains 22 chromosomes and one Y chromosome. In the first case, the combined number will be 444XX chromosomes which determines female sex; in the other case however, the total is 444+XY which determines male sex. Sex Gland Difference: After around five weeks of embryonic life the sex glands of both sexes appear to be already differentiated. Then, even if not in the very same process both sexes evolve so that, at the time of birth, the sexual organs-whether intemal or external— are clearly determined. Phenotypic Difference: At the moment of birth sex is determined so that very often from the phenotypic differences or from the elements that are observable to the naked eye, as we Say, what are simply the external sexual organs. The phenotypic difference of this, sort evolves more and more, especially in the time of puberty, when it will appear much 1 Sucsedl Congregation ofthe Doctrine of Fath, Declaration of Certain Questions Regarding Sexual Ethics, 29-12-1975 ,AASGS (1976) 77. English transation from USCC, Publications Otiice (1976) P3 1