Why Catholics should reject the month and myth of “trangendered Saints”

It’s worth noting that there were fewer Pride flags and celebrations this June than in years past. But Catholics never needed the secular calendar’s permission to know that June actually belongs to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion to Christ’s own love that predates any corporate rainbow campaign.

Now August has arrived, carrying a new label of its own. The National Catholic Reporter, an outlet claiming a Catholic identity, is promoting “Transgender History Month” along with a roster of supposed “trans saints.”

The Church, however, actually asks Catholics to honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary in August. That contrast is the whole story.

The Church does not have Pride Month, and it does not have Transgender History Month. Instead, it has a calendar built around the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, the saints, and singular moments in the life of Christ. In short, the rhyme and rhythm of Catholic liturgical life is anchored in faith.

Attempting to stitch Catholic saints into the ideological fabric of an invented celebration misleads Catholics, especially the young and poorly catechized, about the lives of those saints and about what we celebrate as Catholics.

And suggesting that medieval saints anticipated and endorsed transgender ideology sits in direct tension with the guidance of the Church’s own shepherds.

In our diocese of Arlington, Virginia, for example, Bishop Michael Burbidge published a lengthy 2021 catechesis on the human person and gender ideology, laying out in careful detail why the anthropology behind gender ideology cannot be reconciled with Catholic teaching about “who we are.”

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco and Bishop Michael Barber of Oakland issued a joint pastoral letter making the same case, describing gender ideology as opposed to reason, science, and a Christian view of the human person.

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City wrote his own pastoral letter that same year on the unity of body and soul.

These are not fringe or isolated voices. They are diocesan bishops, writing pastorally and publicly, and their conclusions run in a single direction.

The USCCB has likewise offered guidance prohibiting sex-rejecting procedures at Catholic hospitals. Rome has weighed in as well. The Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith, in Dignitas Infinita (57), characterized gender ideology’s focus on “personal self-determination,” regardless of the body, as a “concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”

Although it is problematic to distort the histories of particular saints, the deeper problem is a grave misunderstanding of what sainthood actually is.

The Church does not canonize people because their biography fits a contemporary cause. It canonizes people because they lived with heroic virtue and cooperated with grace in their lives.

Augustine, for example, spent years before his conversion enslaved to disordered desire. And while the Church did not scrub that chapter to make him presentable, his turning to Jesus matters more than the disorder that preceded it. Mary Magdalene’s witness works the same way. Whatever her life held before she encountered Christ, tradition has always centered on her fidelity to him afterwards.

That is what a saint’s life offers us: proof that grace, coupled with the proper exercise of free will, can direct a life towards God. None of that requires inventing identity confusion in the historical record of any canonized saint.

“Transgender” identification is a politicized phenomenon, not something the Church has ever encountered, much less celebrated, in the lives of men and women it has raised to the altars. Pretending otherwise does not honor those saints. It uses them.

Retrofitting hagiography does not help Catholics, family members, and friends who genuinely struggle with identity distress or confusion. What helps is real accompaniment that is patient, attentive, and never abandons a person, precisely because it takes their good seriously enough not to affirm what is not true. Authentic charity wants the good of the other.

Revisionist history does not serve that good; it distracts from it.

And that distraction carries real costs. The rapid spread of gender ideology has triggered escalating identity distress among adolescents and young adults in recent years. Confusion is disproportionately high among teenage girls, in a pattern experts describe as resembling a social contagion moving through friend groups and online communities.

Young people caught in that dangerous current need clarity and real accompaniment, not saints reinvented to tell them their confusion is a calling. Families, parish staff, and priests who want a serious resource for these conversations have one close at hand in the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Person and Identity Project, which offers sound, compassionate, doctrinally grounded material on these questions.

That is where this conversation should be happening. Not in a manufactured history month that hijacks the dead to bear witness to ideological claims.