Catholic Church appears to soften — a bit — on opposition to gender-affirming care

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and Vatican City

Antonio Masiello/Getty Images; Pajor Pawel/shutterstock

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández in 2023; Vatican City

A high-ranking Vatican official allows that there are "exceptional situations."

Trudy Ring

Trudy Ring is The Advocate’s senior politics editor and copy chief. She has been a reporter and editor for daily newspapers and LGBTQ+ weeklies/monthlies, trade magazines, and reference books. She is a political junkie who thinks even the wonkiest details are fascinating, and she always loves to see political candidates who are groundbreaking in some way. She enjoys writing about other topics as well, including religion (she’s interested in what people believe and why), literature, theater, and film. Trudy is a proud “old movie weirdo” and loves the Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s above all others. Other interests include classic rock music (Bruce Springsteen rules!) and history. Oh, and she was a Jeopardy! contestant back in 1998 and won two games. Not up there with Amy Schneider, but Trudy still takes pride in this achievement.

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Trudy Ring

March 06 2025 7:55 PM EST

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The Roman Catholic Church appears to have softened its opposition to gender-affirming care for transgender people — just a bit.

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The church still opposes gender transition, a Vatican official told a conference of Catholic theologians last month at Cologne University in Germany, but he allowed that there are “exceptional situations” that “must be evaluated with great care.” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, who heads the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed the conference via video, and a summary of his remarks was posted in German on the Vatican News website.

“Gender reassignment is not just an external change or comparable to normal cosmetic surgery or an operation to cure an illness,” he said, as translated by various sources. “It is the claim to a change of identity, to the desire to be a different person.” Most trans people would say, however, that gender-affirming procedures do not make them into a different person — they simply allow them to be the person they have always known they were.

Fernández’s comment is in keeping with the church’s long-standing opposition to what it calls “gender ideology,” even though Pope Francis has met with trans people and shown empathy for them. The church’s stated position is that gender is God-given, fixed at birth, and immutable.

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Pope Francis has shown a more conciliatory attitude toward trans people and LGBTQ+ people in general than his predecessors. In 2015, he met privately with a Spanish trans man, Diego Neria Lejarraga, who said he found the pope to be “kindness personified.” Francis has also met with groups of trans people several times and has said Jesus Christ would not abandon trans people. Under his leadership, the church has allowed trans people to be baptized as Catholics and to be godparents.

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