Sex Assigned at Birth: From God or Man?

Last updated on: September 2, 2025 at 9:41 am by Dennis Knapp

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Sex Assigned at Birth: From God or Man? 2025-09-02T09:41:37-06:00 Dennis Knapp

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I began thinking about this article before the tragic events in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on August 27, 2025. On that day, a trans-identifying individual opened fire during a Catholic school Mass, killing two children and injuring seventeen others. In my exchanges with supporters of gender ideology, I often see them ignore or downplay the real-world consequences of mental illness and mutilation. They repeat the same warning: affirm or “people will die.” They demand affirmation of pronouns, chemical interventions, and surgeries.

This shooter received affirmation, yet children still died. Why? In his own words, he was “tired of being trans” and wished he had “never brain-washed [himself].” He also voiced hatred for Israel and Donald Trump. He targeted Catholic children because he grew up Catholic and once attended the very school he attacked. Affirming gender ideology in his life destroyed many others. Catholics who affirmed him share blame because they failed to accompany a confused young man in the truth of his dignity as a man created in God’s image.

How does all this connect to the phrase “sex assigned at birth”? Entirely. If man assigns sex, then sex becomes a social construct — arbitrary, malleable, and subject to manipulation. If God gives sex, then sex stands as a concrete, unchangeable reality. Affirming that reality could have preserved both this young man’s dignity and the lives of the children he murdered. Denying it invited confusion, despair, and tragedy.

Where Did This “Assigned” Idea Originate?

The phrase sex assigned at birth quickly supplanted the older simplicity of “male” and “female” in many institutional contexts. Legal scholar Jessica A. Clarke explains in the Columbia Law Review that this terminology aims to “displace the concept of ‘biological sex,’” framing sex as a human designation rather than a natural reality. The phrase first appeared in mid-twentieth-century literature dealing with intersex conditions.

Transgender theorists in the 1990s borrowed this terminology to describe the process of assigning sexes to all infants, and it appeared in legal contexts by the early 2000s. Today it competes with “biological sex” in legal disputes over transgender rights. Clarke also explains that the change did not arise as a neutral alternative but as a critique of the very concept of biological sex.

From the start, the use of sex assigned at birth carried the ideological intent to undermine God-given reality.

Catholic Anthropology: Body–Soul Unity

Catholic anthropology teaches that humans exist as body–soul unities (corpore et anima unus). Both the body and the soul possess sex, which endures beyond bodily death and into the resurrection. Elliott Louis Bedford and Jason T. Eberl (Ph.Ds) make this clear in their essay Is the Soul Sexed? Anthropology, Transgenderism, and Disorders of Sex Development:

For, once God infuses a rational soul into a properly formed human body, the body being the principle of the soul’s individuation as well as of its sex, the soul now carries that individuality and sex with it as an ‘inseparable accident’ insofar as it is the form of its particular body. It serves as the ‘blueprint’ for its body such that one’s resurrected body will be properly his or hers, including with respect to its sex.

Even before the resurrection of the dead, DNA and bone structure reveal a person’s biological sex, not an ideological identity.

Sex as Gift, Not Assignment

So, who assigns sex — God or man? In the 2024 pastoral letter The Good News About God’s Plan: A Pastoral Letter on the Challenges of Gender Identity, Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron reaffirmed perennial Catholic teaching:

“Male and female he created them.’ This line in the account of creation reveals to us that our sex is willed by God at our creation and given to us as a gift. God willed that human persons would be either male or female. Sex is assigned, not by a doctor or the individual, but genetically and biologically by God in the act of creation.

He also condemned, along with Pope Francis, gender ideology as “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations.”

Proposals to change one’s sex presuppose this dualist view of the human person, and so thinks of a person’s sex as malleable. It assumes that a person’s identity as a man or woman is not determined by biological reality—by the person’s given sexual identity as male or female—but by one’s feelings and desires. Feelings are given primacy in this judgment and treated as obviously true, leading to the use of the expression “the sex assigned at birth.”

Anyone familiar with Church history will recognize Archbishop Vigneron’s reference to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.

Neo-Gnosticism and Gender Ideology

In his 2016 article Gnostic Liberalism, Princeton professor Robert P. George observed that the idea of “human beings as non-bodily persons inhabiting non-personal bodies never quite goes away.” Regarding trans-identifying individuals, George argued that those who seek to change their sex actually seek to cease being themselves and to become someone else.

He concluded with this warning:

…these ancient neo-gnostic errors that grip social liberalism represent a tragic mistake behind so many efforts to justify—and even immunize from moral criticism—acts and practices that are, in truth, contrary to our profound, inherent, and equal dignity.

Tragic indeed. Did Catholics receive warnings?

Benedict XVI’s Prophetic Warning

In December 2012, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Roman Curia about the dangers of gender ideology, which denies human existence as given by God. He warned that when humans reject God’s design:

The key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.

And:

When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defense of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears.

With prophetic clarity, Pope Benedict described the consequences of denying God’s design. When man attempts to create himself, he loses himself. When man denies God, he strips himself of dignity. Should we be surprised that those who reject God’s design and invent their own reality ultimately rob others of dignity through violence?

Final Thoughts: God Assigns Sex, Not Man

If only Catholics had heeded Pope Benedict’s warnings. When Catholics adopt the ideology that “gender is a cultural construct” and that “sex is assigned at birth,” the world suffers real consequences. According to reports, the killer legally changed his name and gender at age seventeen. As a minor, he required parental consent — in this case, from his Catholic mother — to make that change. His Catholic mother affirmed him in an ideology that led him to embrace all that Pope Benedict warned against. He denied God’s design, and in doing so, invited confusion, despair, and ultimately, tragedy.