By Leila Marie Lawler

But first a note from Robert Royal: The most important issue about the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith's recent response regarding "transgender" baptism is the use of the word "transgender." A quick "so-called" is not enough of a qualifier. No real answer to the various problems it involves can be given before we have a free and frank conversation about what this word signifies and why it is used as an identity.

Now for Mrs. Lawler: Accepting the word "transgender" and using it in an official document represents a capitulation to an ideology that is completely contrary to, and the enemy of, the Catholic faith and indeed reality itself. This is not the first time, either. For years now, bishops have used this word in, for instance, statements on bills before legislatures on bathrooms and pronouns. They lose the argument before it begins, for defining terms is everything in seeking the truth and helping others find it.

The late Fr. Paul Mankowski, in his First Things review of Fr. James Martin SJ's book, Building a Bridge, pinpointed the word "gay" as, above all, political:

One does not find among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people - taken as a collectivity - distinctive commonalities of religion, nativity, culture, recreation, or fellowship. Their shared interests are political; they are aggregated not as a true community but as something like a caucus.

The forces of gender ideology well know how to shape public perception. They offer pictures of clean-cut men holding hands to embed the idea of anodyne "gayness"; they censor anyone using the word sodomy. They sanitize "queerness" as a wacky, boa-wrapped library outing. When it comes to "transgender," they hold speech hostage by insisting that any dissenter from the current craze simply wants young people dead.

This slick campaign works: its perpetrators are emboldened by its triumph. Having won the so-called same-sex marriage question, they quickly pivoted to an even more primal one: the nature of man himself.

But it's the job of the Catholic Church to hold fast to eternal things and not to abandon the faithful as pawns in a political game. Questions do not have to be answered using the vocabulary tendered. We ought to challenge how they - and who are they? - characterize themselves and others (who gave them sovereignty over their victims?).

The rise of transgender ideology has many facets, hard to marshal into one place but known by those with common sense who pay attention. Anyone not born yesterday can remember a time when it didn't exist.

Sure, there have always been a few men in drag here and there, and the odd Parisian female in a man's suit and tie. People once accepted such things as part of the weird parade of life. They also kept their children away from them.

But now, in the very young, we observe vulnerability where there is divorce and father-absence, and a form of child abuse where the parent, usually the mother, imposes a pathology on the child.

In older children, social media has created a virus that infects the weak immune system of young people formed by a culture opposed to their normal development. And this is now bolstered by a school system submissive to LGBTQA interests. Everyone with a child in public school knows the ubiquity of signs, books, programs, and events designed to pick off the vulnerable and indoctrinate all.

The medical establishment geared up during lockdown to monetize the trend. "Gender affirming care" - that Orwellian and remarkably effective phrase - assures a strong bottom line for surgical wards and pharmaceutical companies, and not only for the horrible procedures, but for the creation of a life-long patient.

Several states have adopted regulations that detach children from parental authority so that procedures can move ahead over their objections. The child just needs to indicate he may think he's of the opposite "gender," and the machinery goes into operation. Planned Parenthood has chan...