Gender-neutral bathrooms are the product of a lack of understanding about identity, a Wicklow-based priest has said.
This comes as the Department of Education recently announced that gender neutral toilets are an option for schools under new design guidance.
In the past few years, a number of secondary schools around the country have sought permission from the Government to install gender-neutral bathrooms, with gender neutral bathrooms being one of the measures included in the LGBTI+ Youth Strategy that was published in 2018.
Fr Gerry Young of Greystones told The Irish Catholic that he would be “worried” about the promotion of “self-identity” because “if any of us look back at our lives and consider the things we thought we might be, we were horrified that we thought it and we’re glad that somebody spoke sense to us”.
Fr Young said that our identity doesn’t come about as a result of what we “think we are,” but that “we are what society needs us to be”. It’s not a “personal choice,” he said.
“That’s what we’re called to,” he said.
“I would have very clear and strong views about allowing children to develop in the proper way and self-identity – that we all have to stand back and recognise people’s self-identity – that’s not the issue,” Fr Young said.
“We have to find out, who are we supposed to be for people? I can’t self-identify as a priest. I have to identify being a priest for the needs of my parishioners.”
He said that “proper sexual behaviour” needs to be cultivated, because we have to “learn how to be people; how to be male and how to be female”.
“Everything has to be cultivated, our whole lives. The plants, the animals, the way we deal with people. Everything is a cultivation,” Fr Young said, continuing “proper behaviour is not a given”.