Transexuality

Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons is the director of the Institute for Marital Healing outside Philadelphia and has worked with several thousand couples over the past 34 years. Trained in psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center, he participated in cognitive therapy research with Aaron T. Beck. In 1986 he wrote a seminal paper on the psychotherapeutic uses of forgiveness in the treatment of excessive anger and in 2000 coauthored Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope with Dr. Robert D. Enright, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for American Psychological Association Books. APA Books also offers a DVD on forgiveness by him and Dr. Enright.

Dr. Fitzgibbons is an adjunct professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at Catholic University and is board member of the International Institute for Forgiveness, www.forgiveness-institute.org. He is also a consultant to the Congregation for Clergy at the Vatican.

The Desire For a Sex Change
Ethics and Medics October 2005 Volume 30, 10. National Catholic Bioethics Center, Phila.
Richard P. Fitzgibbons
 
How should the Catholic community respond to men and women who think that a sex change operation would solve their problem? Catholic teaching in this area is clear. It is impossible to "change" a person's sex. Hormone treatments, cosmetic surgery and surgery to mutilate the sex organs do not change a person's sex.
 
Confusion in this area has come about because people tend to defer to scientists, particularly in areas where their personal experience is limited. Therefore, when doctors, including those from the prestigious Johns Hopkins, have promoted "sex change" operations for physically normal men who believed they were really women trapped in men's bodies or women who believed they were men trapped in women's bodies, many have accepted the idea that it was indeed possible to change a person's sex.

The Psychotherapy of "Sex Reassignment" Surgery: Assessing Its Medical, Psychological, and Ethical Appropriateness
Richard Fitzgibbons, M.D., Philip M. Sutton, and Dale O'Leary

Dr. Fitzgibbons recommends a web site that has a chapter on gender (sexual) identity disorder which explains the psychological reasons which lead children to identify primarily with the opposite sex and to desire to cross dress. GID is the most common childhood precursor to transsexual issues. The primary emotional conflict in these children is the failure of the child to identify with and accept the goodness of one's masculinity or femininity. Drs. Zucker and Bradley in their textbook on GID report that 80% of children with this disorder experience a resolution of their symptoms. Zucker and Bradley's research also demonstrates serious emotional conflicts in the majority of the mothers of these children.

Gender Identity (Sexual) Disorder, Cross-Dressing, and Transexual Conflicts
Richard P. Fitzgibbons, MD