Pope Francis on Thursday denounced
technologies that allow people to transition from one gender to
another.
According to Newsday,
Francis made his remarks while speaking to the Vatican's bioethics
board.
The pope said that “rather than
contrast negative interpretations of sexual differences … they want
to cancel these differences out altogether, proposing techniques and
practices that render them irrelevant for human development and
relations.”
These practices “risk dismantling the
source of energy that fuels the alliance between men and women and
renders them fertile,” he added.
Francis has a mixed record on
transgender rights. While he has said that priests should minister
to the LGBT community, he's also drawn a distinction between
ministering to transgender people and “indoctrination.”
“It is one thing if a person has this
tendency and also changes sex. It's another thing to teach this in
school to change mentalities. This is what I call 'ideological
colonization,'” Francis told reporters last year.
Also last year, as Italy debated
whether to recognize gay and lesbian couples with civil unions, Pope
Francis reiterated the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to marriage
equality.
“The family, founded on indissoluble
matrimony that unites and allows procreation, is part of God's dream
and that of his church for the salvation of humanity,” he said.