When Teddy Brewster charged up the stairs in Arsenic and Old Lace, believing it was San Juan Hill, the audience laughed, as well they should. It is certainly a sign of insanity to think we are something we are not, and poor Teddy was certainly not in touch with reality. But Teddy Brewster has nothing on the 21st century.
Transgenderism is a mental illness in which a man or a woman claims to be a member of the opposite sex. At times, the illness leads the victim to not only cross-dress, but even to attempt bodily mutilation, via a combination of drugs and surgery, so as to conform the external appearance of the body to the internal mental dissonance. The attempt is the most futile form of play-acting. Transgender victims cannot, of course, change their DNA, their biological identity. All they can do is play dress-up, via either clothes or the more insidious somatic manipulations. As a mental affliction, the victims are at least as unfortunate as Teddy Brewster.
The question is, to what extent should such an affliction be humored? Should we imitate Cary Grant's example and acquiesce in Teddy's lunacy (and the emerging lunacy of his aunts) in order to keep all of them from facing their mental disorder? Or should we refuse to participate in the insanity? The Church has several centuries of example in how to handle such people which we can use as a guide.
It is a point of Christian doctrine and dogma that there is but "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph 4:5). Put succinctly, once a person has been validly baptized, that person has become Catholic. The Methodist or Lutheran or Baptists minister and the person he baptizes may both believe that the subject has been baptized into the Methodist or Lutheran or Baptist faiths, but all of them are mistaken. Since there is but one baptism, every baptism is a baptism into Catholic Faith.
A sacrament is created through proper form, matter and intention. Proper form is using the liturgical words and actions, drawn from Scripture itself, to perform the sacrament. Proper matter, in the case of baptism, is that the person be unbaptized. Proper intention, in the case of baptism, is simply the intention to join the person to Christ. As long as these three things are present, the baptism is valid, the subject is now Catholic.
Now, there are different ways of being Catholic. One might be Franciscan, Jesuit, Dominican or a follow a host of other perfectly reasonable spiritualities, in very much the same way that a secular man might be a butcher, a baker or a candle-stick maker. All are noble and useful ways of living out one's baptismal grace.
And living baptismal grace is a matter of being, a matter of ontology. Grace is more central to our existence than even our DNA. It is, after all, the foundation by which DNA exists. So, to deny the sacrament of baptism after having once received it is to deny something even more basic than one's own identity, one's own DNA.
When the baptized individual refuses to acknowledge that s/he is Catholic, but insists instead that s/he is Methodist or Lutheran or Baptist, they have wandered far afield from their core identity. A Franciscan or Jesuit, by living out the flavor of Catholicism which resonates with his soul, is living his core identity. A Methodist, Lutheran or Baptist is (un)knowingly distorting aspects of Catholic Faith in order to accommodate some malformed aspect of his own soul. But, even here, while such a baptized person is repudiating some logical consequence of his baptism, he certainly is not repudiating his baptism in total.
Such a repudiation would only come from a baptized person who has become atheist or agnostic, someone who has attempted to fully embrace Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. Only a person who attempts to step entirely out of the divine economy of grace has truly denied his own identity, in a way similar to Teddy Brewster or any garden-variety person claiming to be transgender.
Even in these cases, however, the reality cannot be contravened. Anyone who has been validly baptized cannot be baptized again. A Lutheran or Methodist who wants to enter the Catholic Church is not baptized, for that has already been done. He is merely confirmed and given first Eucharist - the sacraments of initiation are completed. Even if that Lutheran spends a decade as an avowed Muslim or Hindu, nothing changes. The person who then desires to enter the Catholic Church is still not baptized, because he has merely denied, for a time, a reality which is greater than himself - he is baptized. He may have left the realm of the real, but the real has not left him.
The Church has used a variety of methods to deal with those who have left the realm of the real. In some cases, often the best-remembered cases, harsh punishments were imposed. But any honest study of history also demonstrates the Church engaging in decades or centuries worth of patient conversations with the people suffering these delusions and the poor souls who follow them. Indeed, entire religious orders, such as the Dominicans, were often founded simply to act as "psychologists", dialoguing with those who had gone astray.
Teddy Brewster denied his own identity in order to take on the identity of a man more powerful and renowned than himself. Transgenders deny their own sex in order to take on a sexual identity they find more powerful or beloved than their own. But what do you do with people like Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden, people who affirm their Catholic baptism but insist their Catholic identity permits insanity like support for murdering children or enabling euthanasia?
Such individuals display a new level of crazy. They are like a man who acknowledges himself to be male, but insists his testes produce eggs, or his intestines allow him to carry a child to term. The Catholic transgender clothes himself in the word "Catholic" but lives the delusions of the serial ax murderer.
But are Joe and Nancy different than many other Christians? The Catholic Church calls Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians by the names they have chosen for themselves, even though these names forsake the baptism they received. Even the baptized who have denied their own baptism, who have joined Hinduism, Islam or Buddhism, are named by the Church with the names they have chosen for themselves. Joe and Nancy are as Catholic as any other baptized Unitarian, but they wish to be called not Lutheran or Unitarian, but "catholic."
They aren't wrong, in the sense that every validly baptized person is certainly Catholic, but they aren't right either, because their beliefs and actions more closely conform them to some Lutherans, or most Unitarians, than to any Catholic spirituality.
Mortimer Brewster : The name Brewster is code for Roosevelt.
Teddy Brewster : Code for Roosevelt?
Mortimer Brewster : Yes. Don't you see? Take the name Brewster, take away the B, and what have you got?
Teddy Brewster : Rooster!
Mortimer Brewster : Uh-huh. And what does a rooster do?
Teddy Brewster : Crows.
Mortimer Brewster : It crows. And where do you hunt in Africa?
Teddy Brewster : On the veldt!
Mortimer Brewster : There you are: crows - veldt!
Teddy Brewster : Ingenious! My compliments to the boys in the code department.
If we are willing to call someone Anglican instead of Catholic, we are telling them the same thing Mortimer Brewster told Teddy - a just-so story meant to keep the peace. And if we call a man "she" or a woman "he", it is another just-so story meant to keep the peace. But can we call Joe or Nancy "Catholic"? If we do, we are not wrong, but there are many caveats that need to be acknowledged with a nod, a wink, and a "sure you are, bub, sure you are" smile. The easiest way to do this is, perhaps, to just acknowledge them as Transgender Catholics.
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