I am Woman

Having been raised according to the principles of Catholicism, I have always followed the Church’s teaching regarding the LGBTQIA+ community. I knew it was a sin to act on an attraction to the same sex, but it was not until I learned about St. Pope John Paul’s Theology of the Body that I finally understood why this was a sin. Even now, when I personally accept the logic of the pope’s philosophy, I struggle to speak about the subject for fear of offending someone. Since I have never experienced same sex attraction, I believed I could not relate to the hardships the LGBTQIA+ goes through until recently.

About a month ago, I listened to an interview with Christopher West, a well known theologian today, who has devoted his life to the study of the Theology of the Body. He spoke of icons and how humans gravitate to them and love them because they seem to reflect the love of God. We are God’s creatures, so it is a natural desire to seek His love, but sometimes we mistake something else as God’s love—icons. Christopher West argued that society adopts this attitude toward sexuality; it started with Elvis Presley and the way he shook his hips while he sang. The sexual revolution involved society using sex as an icon for the main source of love, instead of God. The problem with icons is they always fail to live up to expectations and we end up hating what we once loved. Essentially, this emergence of LGBTQIA+ community is a result of the failure of the sexual icon. We started madly loving our bodies, but those bodies are not God, so now we are beginning to hate our bodies to the point where we tear them apart, even going under the knife to change them.

I had come to believe the lie that I could not understand why anyone would want to change what God created as sacred. I had not realized I had already fallen prey to the temptation to reject my gender identity. When I was diagnosed with diabetes I lost the ability to have a monthly period. At the beginning of my recovery, I tried to restore my period but quickly gave up, pretending I had it again. My reason for this was that I had to risk weight gain in order to have a period and sacrifice the control over my body to prevent gaining weight. For almost 15 years I never had a period and my ovaries became dormant, so I could lose weight quickly and easily. I didn’t understand at the time that I could do this because I rejected God’s gift to me at birth—my female identity.

This past year, I have been blessed by my God and Father who restored my menstrual cycle. It has taken a long time, but I am finally reaching a “regular” cycle, though there is still much hardship involved. Last month was basically hell for me, filled with mood swings, uncontrollable hunger, eating to the point of being sick, skyrocketing blood sugars no amount of insulin could correct, and the usual bloating, cramps, everything that PMS often entails. In conclusion, I have realized it actually hurts to be a woman. It is excruciating and undeniably involves one of the most painful life processes imaginable. No wonder people want to get rid of their ovaries—I would love to do that after this month! Returning to the numb feeling when I didn’t have a menstrual cycle is a huge temptation.

In this anger and frustration I recognized what he referred to in his interview on the Theology of the Body. I was experiencing the sheer hatred some people have for their bodies. I fully understand the desire to eliminate gender from the body since it causes nothing but pain—or so it is perceived. However, at the end of the day, in the midst of the distress, I still choose to be a woman. It may have been easier when my body was numb and without one of my female functions, but I was not whole and knew I was incomplete. I longed for the Holy Spirit to enter in and heal me. Now each month when I get my period, I have beautiful evidence that I am who God created me to be. I am a woman.

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Originally published at Kitty in the City

Photo: Church of the King, Unsplash / PD-US