The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) recently released a doctrine explaining its stance against medical interventions, transgender surgery and genetic engineering, a stand that Tyler Bishop Joseph Strickland supports.

“I applaud this clear statement by my brother bishops,” Strickland said in a March 22 tweet about the doctrine. “Let us continue to teach with clarity and charity. The world is desperately in need of the truth found in our deposit of faith.” 

The USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine issued the statement as guidance for providing moral guidelines to Catholic health care institutions to help them differentiate between medical interventions that promote the well-being of individuals and those that are harmful. The USCCB's Administrative Committee approved the statement on March 15, according to USCCB's website. 

The committee directs Catholic health care services to use appropriate resources to alleviate the suffering of people who are struggling with gender incongruence, but it says that the methods used must align with the natural order of the human body to truly benefit individuals instead of causing harm.

The bishops have criticized transgender ideology. They consider it a modern version of dualism, which denies the human body's fundamental role in defining a person's identity. They have argued that this ideology, which asserts that people can be born into the wrong body and should be able change it to match their gender identity, fails to recognize the intrinsic relationship between the body and the soul, as well as the natural differences between male and female bodies, according to Life Site News.

The bishops referred to Pope Pius XII’s teaching on how to determine the ethical validity of medical procedures that affect the natural order of the human body, including surgeries, amputations and genetic modifications. They asserted that such interventions must uphold the intended purpose and design of the human body.

"The body is not an object, a mere tool at the disposal of the soul, one that each person may dispose of according to his or her own will, but it is a constitutive part of the human subject, a gift to be received, respected and cared for as something intrinsic to the person,” according to the Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body. "As Pope Francis affirmed: 'The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.’"