CV NEWS FEED // Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine, an institution run by Jesuits, is set to teach a “transgender health” class in the upcoming school year as part of its family medicine training, according to The College Fix.
The class, “LBGTQ+ Health,” has eight students enrolled already. According to the course description, the class will “teach students the evidence-based treatment of LGBTQ+ patients in medicine.” The course will discuss “health disparities, mental health, initiation and maintenance of PrEP, initiation and maintenance of hormones for transgender patients, transgender children/adolescents healthcare, and gender confirmation surgery.”
Despite Loyola’s claim to be affiliated with the Catholic Church, this is not the first time its school policies have gone against Church teaching. In recent years, Loyola has offered abortion coverage in its student health insurance plan; now, with its “LGBTQ+ Health” course, Loyola directly contradicts and challenges Church teaching, which states that there are only two sexes.
In an interview in March with the Argentine newspaper La Nacion, Pope Francis called gender ideology, which Loyola is now pushing in its medical training, “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations.”
“Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women,” Pope Francis said, according to CNA.
In an interview with The College Fix, Nathanael Blake, an ethicist at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who studies American and Christian political theory, said that gender dysphoria and mental health issues shouldn’t be treated with irrevocable medical procedures.
“Psychological distress should be treated through therapy, not radical body modification into a facsimile of the opposite sex,” Blake told The College Fix. “Chemical and surgical transition procedures have many side effects and a high rate of often-serious complications.”
Although it has become popular to advocate for transgender “healthcare,” many detransitioning individuals are beginning to denounce the methods and “healthcare” taught to medical students at schools like Loyola.
“Though this course promises to ‘teach students the evidence-based treatment of LGBTQ+ patients’ we know that transition, especially for children, is not evidence based, which is why there has been a wave of European nations restricting pediatric transition after reviewing the evidence,” Blake said.
“Medical students should be taught that gender dysphoria should be compassionately treated with therapy to help reconcile patients to their natural, healthy bodies,” he concluded. “This will require addressing the comorbidities that patients with gender dysphoria often have, as well as the trauma they have often experienced.”
The Stritch School of Medicine could not be reached for comment.
