To drill down to the root cause of the sexual identity crisis creating gender confusion today among an increasing segment of young people, a Catholic psychologist suggests looking to the creator of all beings for the answer.
“The fact that we are creatures means that we come from someone; we don’t create ourselves. We come from another, and that other is God Who gives us being, and He sustains us in every moment. So that means we don’t get to decide who we are as if we were a blank slate,” explained Dr. Andrew Sodergren, Psy.D., director of the psychological services branch at the Cincinnati-based Ruah Woods Institute, a healing and education apostolate centered around Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” writings.
Sodergren presented an hourlong “Who Am I? Faith, Science and Gender” talk on Tuesday evening, Nov. 29 in the Worthington St. Michael School gymnasium before an audience of approximately 75 people including parents, parishioners, educators, pro-life leaders and others interested in the issue.
Ruah Woods was founded in 2007 to help spread John Paul II’s teaching on the human person. Its education branch has developed the world’s first K-12 Theology of the Body curriculum to teach children in an age-appropriate way what it means to be human and to be made in the image and likeness of God.
Diocese of Columbus schools are among a number of dioceses and schools throughout the country using the program.
At the core of Ruah Woods’ Theology of the Body is helping children and young adults understand that they are sons and daughters of the God Who created them.
That fundamental understanding has taken on added significance in modern culture as a secular perspective has emerged that espouses gender to be fluid or nonbinary, that each person has the right to decide his or her gender, that it’s changeable and the gender assigned by God is not definitive.
In 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 1 million Americans consider themselves transgender, a term describing persons who identify with a gender not aligned with their biological sex. Data from 2016 put the number of youth age 13-17 in this category at 150,000, but research shows a significant increase in recent years.
The Catholic view on sexual identity (Sodergren prefers using “sexual identity” rather than “gender identity” because of the confusion today surrounding the latter term) has two components, he explained.
“There’s an objective component, which refers to my maleness or femaleness that’s in the body that’s given to me,” he said. “And then a subjective component, which is my growing understanding of myself as male or female and what that means. So, my subjective understanding is in harmony with what is revealed by my body.”
By the time most children reach kindergarten age, they can correctly label themselves as a boy or a girl, Sodergren said.
At that point, several factors come into play that could create identity confusion in a child’s mind, and Sodergren stressed that it’s important for parents to not overreact when, for example, a boy likes an activity such as art that might be associated more with girls.
“Family is hugely influential in child development, including this subjective sense of our maleness or femaleness,” Sodergren said. “So, what is witnessed in the home about the roles that men and women take on, how the sexes relate with each other, but also how they interact with me as I go through life, and we learn from these things.
“Children tend to be best off when they’re growing up with biological mom and dad, ideally in a happy marriage.”
For a generation now, there has been an emphasis on raising and educating children in a gender-neutral fashion in which each individual is treated the same. That’s not good for the child, Sodergren said.
“And that’s impossible – and the research seems to show that it’s impossible,” he said. “Despite our best efforts, we still tend to treat boys and girls differently, even unconsciously.
“And the fact that our bodies are different is often treated as somehow irrelevant or unimportant. But if you simply look at the human body of an adult, the average adult man and the average adult woman, you see profound differences.”
Family dynamics also factor into the development of a child’s identity “in a very pre-verbal but urgent and survivalist sort of way,” Sodergren said. “What do I need to do to secure my place in this family? And for some kids, in some situations, they may come to the conclusion that it’s better for me to identify with and act like opposite-sex parents or an opposite-sex sibling.”
Other reasons for gender confusion include high rates of attachment wounds, developmental traumas and peer relations.
“Gender identity is not one thing,” Sodergren said. “It’s a highly complex, subjective feature of our psychology, and it develops over time. It’s not something that’s fixed and is impacted by all sorts of different experiences we have.”
John Paul II noted in his writings the sexual differences in human persons. Distinctions between the sexes can be identified by behaviors and characteristics starting in the womb.
“All of us share one human nature,” Sodergren said, “but there’s two modes or ways of expressing that nature, a male way and a female way. And he (John Paul II) says this creates what he calls unity in distinction.
“In God, we see one divine nature but distinction of persons, and it’s this distinction of persons in the one nature that creates the possibility of communion of persons, which is one of John Paul II’s favorite terms.
“Male and female represent two ways of having that nature – two ways of, you could say, incarnating what it means to be human – and that creates the possibility of male and female coming together through a total gift of self in love, which we call marriage, and their love becoming embodied, personified, if you will, in the gift of a child. And so, man, woman and child become an icon of the Blessed Trinity.”
Those sexual differences affect every aspect of the human person and are not just an add on, like the color of hair or something that can be changed. Beyond physical characteristics, each person finds maleness and femaleness in the core of their soul, Sodergren said.
“Even the Catechism (of the Catholic Church) affirms this in paragraph 2332, where it says sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul,” he said.
To combat the confusion on sexuality and to grow into an understanding of one’s maleness or femaleness, experts agree that children need the help of parents, family, educators, community and church in their development.
“We don’t get to choose who we are fundamentally,” Sodergren explained. “It’s given to us. We discover it through our bodies, through our relationships in our family.
“But we are also called to grow into it and to enrich that identity, and that’s where the vocational piece comes in. That sons are called to become husbands and fathers through spousal love, through that total gift of self, and daughters are called to become wives and mothers.
“This is what John Paul II referred to as the spousal meaning of the body – that our body tells us that we are called to make this total gift of self that is forever faithful and fruitful. And this is universal.”
Research indicates that females are oriented toward motherhood and the capacity to nurture, to love specifically in a motherly way, which is complementary to the essence and purpose of maleness that a father innately embodies.
“We’re going to see a mixture of nature and nurture, always together, with nature meaning our biological heritage and nurture our social experience, especially in the family but also in society, culture, education and so forth,” Sodergren said.
A growing, worldwide transgender movement is founded on a divergent set of secular notions that a person as young as preschool age, sometimes through the encouragement of parents, should be able to choose his or her sex based on feelings.
“Research suggests with gender dysphoria is that the vast majority of adolescents and young adults who are showing up in gender clinics with this phenomenon tend to have a history of other problems preceding it – other emotional problems and social problems,” Sodergren offered in response to a question.
“And the gender dysphoria is sort of just one new symptom, a new expression of some other problem that, as I mentioned before, may be related to attachment wounds early in life or developmental trauma.
“In some cases, it’s been peer issues. There’s also some evidence of high rates of autism spectrum disorder among adolescents showing up at gender clinics.”
The sense of dysphoria can be heightened through social media and peer groups.
“They are exposed to this idea of being trans or being nonbinary or something like this, and they seize onto that as an explanation for why I’m so unhappy and why I don’t fit in,” Sodergren said. “It takes us back to three psychological tasks – identity, community, mission – and it provides an answer to those three issues because it tells me who I am and where I belong. And now I have a cause that even presents me with a path to fulfillment.”
Sodergren cautioned parents in particular when considering recommendations from medical organizations that lack a Christian perspective. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, has offered public support for health care policies affirming transgender youth.
Recently, this new phenomenon known as gender identity disorder has become more prevalent with girls than with boys.
“A few decades ago, a small number of boys in grade school would be struggling and saying that they don’t want to be a boy and that they’re a girl or they want to wear dresses or do different things like that,” Sodergren said. “Traditionally, it was three to five times higher in boys than in girls.
“In the last 15 years or so, the fact that it’s changed is also really interesting, because it raises the question of what’s driving this, because there’s no precedent in the research literature for this new phenomenon.
“Adolescent girls are now showing up at gender clinics and saying that they’re trans or nonbinary and they want transition at a rate higher than their male peers and much, much higher than has ever been observed before.”
The Catholic psychologist referenced a study that recorded a 7,000% increase in female adolescent referrals to a gender clinic over a span of about two years that one researcher called “rapid onset gender dysphoria.”
Sodergren recommended that Catholics and Christians refrain from encouraging confused persons to change their names or pronouns and to avoid allowing children to make premature decisions on their identity that could be irreversible later in life.
“With gender dysphoria, most of the time, when they get to adolescence or get through adolescence, it’s resolved in one way or another,” Sodergren said. “Now, there may be other aftereffects. Some of them will experience same-sex attraction or other sorts of issues, but the cross-gender identification tends to go away.
“That’s the solid, robust research finding. But it’s more difficult now because kids at that age would be encouraged to persist and be told to embrace it, and the parents would be coached to allow it.”
Sodergren contributed to a book released this year that explores the topic in greater depth. “Sexual Identity: The Harmony of Philosophy, Science, and Revelation” is available through Amazon and other outlets.
For more information on Ruah Woods’ programs, visit ruahwoodsinstitute.org.