Fr Billy Swan
The Enoch Burke case has been in the public eye for some time now. He was a teacher at Wilson’s Hospital Secondary School in Westmeath when controversy arose last year over his refusal to call a pupil by their preferred pronoun of ‘they’. He has been vilified by secular media for daring to refuse to go along with a gender ideology that asks and even demands that others refer to people with the pronouns that they choose for themselves. In recent days, I have asked myself: Would I call a person ‘they’ if they asked me to? Would you?
I suspect that many people would be very uncomfortable using the pronoun ‘they’ for a single person. The reason is not just because it is grammatically incorrect or because they are being unkind to the person in front of them. Nor is it because of a lack of respect. In fact, for many, it is because of a deep respect that they would refuse to call someone ‘they’. This is because of who they understand the human person to be.
For the Christian, Scripture affirms what we observe in human nature that is universal. We are made up of many parts including our minds, our wills, our passions, our emotions and our sexuality. We observe how the energy contained in each of these faculties doesn’t always pull or unite in the same direction. So, for example, our passions might urge us to ‘do this’ while our conscience might be telling us: ‘don’t do that’. St Paul describes the dilemma in his letter to the Romans in a way that all of us can recognise in ourselves: ‘For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing’ (7:19). For Paul, his faith in Christ’s saving love is the only way to solve this dilemma within himself whereby his passions, his will, his emotions and conscience are reconciled and unite in a single gift of himself to God and the service of his kingdom.
In Scripture, the great drama of redemption of the human condition effected by Christ involves the reconciliation of all the dimensions of who we are that unite under the aegis of the ‘I’ or the united self. Therefore, in our encounters with others, we encounter a single self, a single person with a name. For a Christian to call another person ‘they’ would be complicit in the fragmentation of their being and not to recognise their unity as a single person who is loved, not in parts, but as a single self. In the Gospels, when Jesus met the young man who was disturbed by a spirit and asked him who he was, the man responded by saying: ‘My name is legion for there are many of us’ (Mark 5:9). Here is the fragmentation of the person that Christ came to heal and save.
In the video below, a mother of a young girl struggling with her gender identity tells her story that reveals disturbing aspects of an increasingly common and complex issue.
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