New Diocese of Green Bay policy follows Church teaching on gender

The new policy will only recognize students, parents, and faculty by their biological sex.

The Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin, has released an update to its educational policy, which states that its schools will only refer to students, parents, and faculty by their biological sex. The new policy will be enforced in the 54 schools within the diocese, as well as at institutions of religious education.

New policy

The policy, released in July, stipulates that diocesan schools and religious education programs will not adhere to the preferred pronouns of students or their parents. The policy went on to note that students may only dress and participate in competitive athletics in accordance with their biological sex. Furthermore, schools within the diocese will ban puberty-blocking or cross-sex hormones on their properties.

“The Church teaches that our identities as male and female are part of God’s good design in Creation, that our bodies and sexual identities are gifts from God, and that we should accept and care for our bodies as they were created,” the diocese wrote in the policy.

The missive explains that the diocese “understands that truth is the correspondence of mind to reality” and that “assisting the person in his or her disconnection with this reality” is contrary to the pursuit of truth. The new policy states:

“Truth is not relative and subject to mere human redefinition to fit human wants. There is concrete truth in God’s creation. Jesus himself told us, ‘I am the way the truth and the life.’ (John 14:6) Truth is unchangeable because all truth is of God. It is in Jesus that we have truth; it is in Jesus that we have life.”

Milwaukee

The update to the Diocese of Green Bay’s policy falls much in line with a similar policy update to schools within the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. In January, Aleteia’s own John Burger reported that the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s policy also eschews personally chosen pronouns for those of one’s given sex at birth.

In its policy update, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee quoted St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, which states:

“It cannot be changed because it is bestowed by God as a gift and as a calling,” the document says. “Biological sex is a gift because in the very act of creation, God bestows upon each human person a biological sex — ’Male and female he created them’ — two sexes that are different, equal, and complementary. It is a calling because we work out our salvation via our masculinity or femininity. In other words, human persons do not experience the freedom and joy of salvation despite their biological sex, but only in it and through it.”