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Oswald's avatar

Seems to me like a lot of dancing around the questions in an attempt not to offend anyone, and mainly just restating general guidelines and canon laws. The answer to question 2 is the most concerning to me, even though I could envision some narrow circumstances where a transgender person could be a godparent. There could be a possible situation such as someone who had surgery and later regrets it and reverts back to identifying as their biological sex...but then they wouldn't really be identifying as transgender, would they? I suspect the DDF was referring to people who identify as "transgender" and all that entails, so I'm not sure this kind of situation is what they had in mind. This is not even taking into account the requirement that two godparents have to be of the opposite sex, which is a whole other can of worms when you have a godparent who "identifies" as the opposite sex.

Overall the vagueness and imprecision in these answers is going to lead some priests to take advantage of the apparent permission of transgender people to fill these roles "under certain conditions" and it will be interpreted very liberally. And then on the other side there will be priests who will turn down some transgender person's request to be a sponsor and be vilified for a lack of "mercy" and for "discriminating", or whatever.

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Matthew K Michels, OblSB's avatar

A natural question arising from the DDF response to Question 1 (which I was surprised wasn't addressed in the response) is: if transgender-identifying individuals are to be baptized, what name are they baptized with? Is he or she to be baptized with the name given to them in accord with their actual sex, or with their post-transition name? Will Jimothy be baptized as Stacey? Will Barbie be baptized as Ken?

The name thing actually matters (especially since the person's name is explicitly stated as part of the formula), and I can imagine that baptizing a male individual ("Jimothy") with a socially-female name ("Stacey") would be a cause for scandal and thus impede the imposition of the sacrament.

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