I was disappointed to see that Pope Francis, someone who gave me hope that the Catholic Church was starting to catch up with modern society on many social issues and world problems and was pushing back strongly on the American brand of conservatism that wants to pull society back into the dark ages, released a statement today that gender fluidity and transition surgery are “an affront to human dignity.” Not only was the statement itself an affront to the dignity of transgender individuals and the vast majority of people who support them, it was strange to see such a level of simplicity applied to the topic of gender.

I am male. However, I’ve come to recognize that gender really can’t be defined simply by what lies below the belt, so to speak. I had the illuminating experience of writing a nonbinary character in my latest novel, Knight Without Ceremony. Prior to writing this character, I had read a number of books by nonbinary and trans authors about such characters, including “If I Was Your Girl” by Meredith Russo and “Man O’ War” by Cory McCarthy, to gain insights and understanding into how they thought and acted and their perspectives. I confirmed what I had assumed but had to verify, which was that these characters are no different from anyone else except for the struggles that they go through to be accepted for who they are. They know who they are. They know their gender, which may not match their physical features, something that the Pope cannot see (it seems he can only see physical features) but the rest of us understand to be the result of genetics and the fetal and early development processes that develops a person’s gender identity.

Writing the character of Ayana in KWC helped me—a person who was raised in a binary world—to recognize that gender is a spectrum. My maleness has to do with so much more than my physical features. You line ten people up with male physical features and they are not all going to seem the same in terms of “maleness.” I’m looking forward to seeing how neurologists and psychologists will start to define gender as it actually is: a spectrum that is defined not simply by a physical feature but is comprised of a whole host of things about who we are, including preferences and personality.

If there is any nonbinary or transgender person reading this, I want to say two things. First, I admire you for the fight that you are in right now with the minority, conservative part of society that does not want to accept you for who you are. But just like women were eventually recognized as equals (though conservative parts of our society still do not); just like Black people were eventually recognized as equals (ditto as above); and just like non-heterosexual couples were eventually recognized as equals (ditto, Thomas and Alito), so too will everyone on the gender spectrum one day be recognized and accepted as equals. It’s inevitable.

Second, I can tell you with certainty that God does accept you for you are. Remember, God was once invoked as a justification to treat women as unequal (a mere rib of Adam); to treat Black people as unequal (their skin color a result of Ham’s curse); and to treat non-heterosexuals as unequal (Leviticus). Society at large has ignored those earlier justifications and now these groups are accepted. So too will the minority of society that rejects transgender people one day accept them. I hope that with enough prayer and reflection, Pope Francis will recognize this error in his latest letter and issue a retraction and correction. But there’s no need for the rest of us to wait. We’ll all keep moving forward in our progress as a society and hope that one day the Church will decide to join us.