Greg Daly
The Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA) has distanced itself from suggestions that it supports a programme aimed at 11 and 12 year olds which endorses the view that children can change sex.
A pilot programme entitled ‘Altogether Now!’, currently being tested in some primary schools, describes itself as “supported by” an advisory group whose members include the CPSMA and the Church of Ireland Board of Education.
The programme, billed as “a pilot educational awareness programme on homophobic and transphobic bullying in primary schools” is funded by the Department of Education and Skills and is a partnership between St Patrick’s College and BeLonG To Youth Services, which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people.
The programme accepts that people can change their ‘gender’, or be born into the ‘wrong gender’, a view that is against Catholic teaching.
Programme
A spokesman for the CPSMA told The Irish Catholic that while “all forms of bullying were inappropriate in a Catholic school”, the organisation “haven’t endorsed any one particular programme”.
Nothing should be inferred from the presence of a CPSMA representative on an advisory committee, the spokesman said.
‘All Together Now’ documents define a transgender individual as “a person who was labelled as a boy or a girl when they were born but deep inside they feel they are a different gender and they want to live their life as that preferred gender”.
‘Gender theory’ is the view that a person’s ‘gender’ can change and can be different from their biological sex. ‘All Together Now’ introduces children to terms like ‘cisgender’, which is usually defined as a person who is happy with the sex they were ‘assigned’ at birth.
Pope Francis has repeatedly challenged gender theory, saying in February 2015, for example, that gender theory “does not recognise the order of creation” and two months later describing it as something that seeks to obliterate rather than face sexual differences. “The removal of the difference, in fact, is the problem, not the solution,” he said.
The final document of last year’s Synod on the Family likewise rejected gender theory as destructive towards family life and incompatible with Catholicism.
The Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA) has distanced itself from suggestions that it supports a programme aimed at 11 and 12 year olds which endorses the view that children can change sex.
A pilot programme entitled ‘Altogether Now!’, currently being tested in some primary schools, describes itself as “supported by” an advisory group whose members include the CPSMA and the Church of Ireland Board of Education.
The programme, billed as “a pilot educational awareness programme on homophobic and transphobic bullying in primary schools” is funded by the Department of Education and Skills and is a partnership between St Patrick’s College and BeLonG To Youth Services, which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people.
The programme accepts that people can change their ‘gender’, or be born into the ‘wrong gender’, a view that is against Catholic teaching.