SAN MARINO – We publish the speech of Ilaria Bacciocchiin response to Don’s editorial Luca Bernardi on the recent Arengo requests.
WE ARE NOT JUST OUR CHROMOSOMES
I have carefully read Don Luca Bernardi’s speech on the recent Instances of Arengo.
Don Luca starts from science.
XX and XY. Male and female. A biological datum, therefore an objective datum.
The biological data exists. Nobody denies it.
But the problem begins when one tries to make a conclusion about the person and, above all, a legal rule derive directly from that biological data.
The human being is certainly a biological being. But he is not just a biological being.
If this were the case, much of human history would be difficult to explain.
We have learned to correct our vision with a pair of glasses. To replace a sick heart. To intervene on fertility. To change the environment in which we live. Today we intervene on DNA, we build artificial intelligence and we send machines to other planets.
Even our most natural impulses do not completely determine us.
Man can be hungry and decide to fast. It can transform desire into a poem, into music, into a work of art.
This ability to not be simply determined by nature is one of the most profound characteristics of the human experience.
This is why nature and culture, body and consciousness, biology and identity are not separate worlds. They coexist in the same person.
And it is precisely here that reasoning about chromosomes becomes insufficient.
No one claims that a gender transition turns an X chromosome into a Y chromosome.
But we cannot solve everything by saying: XX and XY exist, therefore the problem does not exist.
The problem exists because there are people who experience it.
And this is where politics should start.
Not from the desire to convince someone to change sex. And not even from the opposite desire to convince him not to do it.
The State must build rules. He must verify that such an important choice is free and informed. It must provide serious paths when they are necessary. It must protect fragile people. He must ask himself the health consequences of his decisions.
But, especially when we talk about adults, he must also recognize a limit to his power: he cannot expect to live in their place.
This is where the issue becomes much more interesting than the chromosome debate.
Because we’re not deciding what each of us thinks about gender transition.
We are deciding what the State should do when faced with a person who experiences that condition.
And here the Catholic conscience inevitably comes into play.
I understand that this is difficult terrain for a Catholic.
The Church’s position, however, must not be manipulated.
Dignitas Infinita expresses a strongly critical position towards gender theory and states that sex change operations, as a rule, risk compromising the dignity attributed to the human body.
It’s fair to say.
But that same document begins by reminding us of something that should not be forgotten: there is an “inalienable” dignity that belongs to each person, regardless of the situation in which they find themselves. And it recalls the duty to avoid discrimination, aggression and exclusion.
Perhaps it is precisely from this point that believers and non-believers can begin to discuss.
It is not necessary to have the same idea as man.
It is not necessary to have the same idea of the body.
It is not even necessary to consider the same choices morally right.
However, we need to look at the person in front of us.
A transgender person is not a debate about chromosomes.
He’s a person.
It can be peaceful or suffer. He may have certainties or doubts. He can make choices that we agree with or that we do not understand.
And it is precisely when we do not understand the life of others that the word “dignity” is put to the test.
Even the data on suicides, cited in the article, requires great caution.
These are too serious issues to turn a correlation into a cause.
And this is precisely why medicine, prudence, accompaniment and research are needed.
I believe that it is also important to avoid a misunderstanding regarding the decision taken by the Great and General Council.
We didn’t vote to say that everyone should consider gender transition a good thing.
We didn’t vote to change biology.
And we certainly haven’t abolished chromosomes.
We faced a problem that affects people who are part of our community.
Politics can ignore them.
He can judge them.
Or it can try to build a system capable of dealing with lives that do not perfectly fit into the categories in which each of us feels most secure.
It’s an important distinction.
Because a free society is not measured by the possibility of living as the majority lives.
That one’s easy.
It is measured above all by the space it manages to leave for those who live differently, without asking others to give up their beliefs.
Perhaps, then, the question is not whether XX and XY exist.
They exist.
The much more difficult question is another.
How far should the state go in deciding who an adult should be?
Science can help us a lot on this.
Faith can question consciences.
Philosophy can offer us categories for reasoning.
But politics remains with a different and very concrete task: finding rules capable of bringing together people who, on life, on the body and even on man, may have profoundly different ideas.
Without any of them having to stop being recognized as a person because of this.
Ilaria Bacciocchi
