(LifeSiteNews) — Speaking in a pro-LGBT Catholic church in Lexington last night, the controversial transgender hermit Nicole Matson defended her “sex-change” surgery, decried the Vatican for ignoring “transgender voices,” and praised Bishop John Stowe for hosting her in the diocese.
Standing before an audience of around 65 people, Matson delivered her testimony and background of how she came to undergo a “sex-change” surgery and now live as a male diocesan hermit – a hermit whose story has caused significant controversy in the last year, leading her to become a leading figure for the pro-transgender movement in the Church.
“I feel like religious life is exactly where I’m meant to be,” she said, speaking of her current life as a male diocesan hermit.
St. Paul’s Church in Lexington, Kentucky, prides itself on its openness to LGBT individuals, and it was there on Monday night that Matson delivered her rescheduled talk. It had originally been due to take place last month, but was postponed due to pushback from the faithful, the parish announced on Facebook.
Now known as “Brother Christian,” Matson is a woman who now identifies as a man and lives as a diocesan hermit in Bishop John Stowe’s Diocese of Lexington. Matson became the subject of international Catholic media controversy when she announced her transgender self-identification earlier in 2024.
Matson was welcomed by Stowe into the Diocese of Lexington as a “transgender hermit,” despite the bishop having full knowledge of Matson’s “sex-change” surgery.
After Matson’s public revelation of being a professed “transgender” last year, Stowe publicly supported her in the face of Catholic consternation. He defended Matson’s life and identity as a “transgender man” and said he was “grateful to Brother Christian [Nicole] for his [her] witness of discipleship.”
She has since emerged as a leading figure in promoting transgender ideology in the Catholic Church, even meeting Pope Francis last fall.
The Church teaches that God creates every individual male or female at the moment of his or her conception, and that sex is an immutable trait that “characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions.”
Catholic teaching condemns mutilation and sterilization as “against the moral law” and denounces gender ideology.
From young girl to bearded hermit
Addressing the audience, Matson recounted how she refused to wear dresses as a young girl, and that her transgender realization started “very early,” identifying as male while a youth. This obsession with identifying as male led her to believe that “something odd was going on,” Matson said, recalling her time prior to undergoing a “sex change.”
Her attention to wanting to live and identify as a man was also fostered by watching a program on transgender individuals on television, which Matson said she remembered saying at the time “hits too close to home.”
She cited praying to be a boy when younger, citing many examples of experiencing gender dysphoria in school. For Matson, such instances – rather than evidence of dysphoria – were evidence of what she claims to be her real identity, namely being a man.
“I couldn’t see a way for me to exist in the world,” Matson said of her high school years, citing the growth of her gender dysphoria and referencing suicidal tendencies because of this.
But this changed, she said, in her junior year of college as she discovered the term “gender identity disorder,” and decided that the only explanation was that she was in fact, biologically and mentally, male.
Deciding to pursue a “medical” solution to her dysphoria, Matson described in detail exactly how she “transitioned.” First she lived as a man for a year before any physical interventions – a process she styled as “social transitioning.”
After this, she began taking hormonal treatment and “had surgery” to become male, changing all her legal documents in the process from female to male. This entire process was accomplished before she started graduate school, as she entered this under her male identity and with the name “Cole.”
“That was 20 years ago,” she said on Monday. “That transition felt like coming alive, like I suddenly had a way of living.”
After many years studying in Maryland, Matson said she “fell in love with the Eucharist, the real present of Christ in the Eucharist, I wanted to know who that was.” She pursued entry to the Catholic Church while studying theology in Oxford University, not mentioning having undergone “sex-change” surgery to them and only meeting a priest after starting catechism classes.
Stating that she “knew” she wanted to enter religious life – as a man – Matson also admitted that she knew at the time of her Catholic instruction that her “medical history was going to be a problem.”
Matson revealed she sought advice from a canon lawyer about which sacraments in the Church required detailed information on sex. After she realized that priesthood and marriage were thus not an option, she took his advice for pursuing religious life or a hermetic life.
Running with the idea, Matson developed her idea for a religious community for artists, while simultaneously approaching various established communities. Due to her “medical history” Matson said she was told “we don’t know what to do with you,” noting how they cited a “secret” Vatican document from 2000 prohibiting transgender individuals from marrying or entering religious life.
Matson lamented how she was unable to find a religious order for about 10 years, so in the meantime was “working for the Church” by building a community of artists around her.
In order to attain her goal of living as a male religious, she eventually decided to find a bishop who would host her, saying how “Bishop Stowe was at the top of the list” of bishops who would be open to “someone with my medical history.”
Explaining her full story and history of “sex-change” surgery to Stowe, Matson said he expressed great interest in hosting her in the diocese. He sent her first to do formation with a community of Benedictines, which began in 2021 after the monastery welcomed her with open arms.
“I feel like religious life is exactly where I’m meant to be,” she said, speaking of her current life, which she lives as a male diocesan hermit.
Matson: Catholic Church must accommodate ‘transgender voices’
Matson emerged into the Catholic news last year as a “transgender” individual, something which she said had never been planned.
She decried moves to criminalize “sex-change” surgery and to strip back Medicaid provision for hormonal drugs used in sex changes.
But she pointed to growing pushbacks in society against transgenderism as a negative development, attacking the Church also for its teaching. She slated the Vatican’s 2019 document “Male and Female He Created Them” on gender theory for allegedly not paying attention to the opinions of “transgender people.”
This ignoring of “transgender voices” was “not acceptable,” she argued, as was the Vatican’s condemnation of “gender ideology.”
She also decried the use of the term “gender ideology” by U.S. Catholic bishops, attesting that transgender individuals did not practice their lifestyle due to gender ideology. “As Catholics we believe in the goodness of God, in God’s creation, and we understand that how we are made is how we are made by God and it is good, and that God creates diverse experiences that are more complex than can be felt through the building of the Church. That’s not in anyway a complication or challenge of Catholic anthropology.”
Outside the church, Catholics staged a Rosary demonstration in protest to Bishop Stowe’s platforming of the woman.
The Rosary rally captain explained to one of the audience members that:
Hosting an event to present a woman pretending to be a religious man as a role model or encouragement is a sin against God’s commandments: Loving God and loving our neighbor. God is omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely wise, and infinitely good. He knew us before we were conceived. To suggest that God place anyone in the wrong body is blasphemy. To validate someone’s erroneous concept of him or herself due to mental illness or evil is not charitable. We are here to offer reparation for the blasphemy perpetrated by Church leaders.
Lamenting protests against her life as a transgender man, Matson attested that “I love the Church, I believe in the authority of the Church.”
Expanding after her personal history, Matson argued for the defense of transgender individuals. “Our Church has not yet taken into account the actual complexity of human sexuality,” she said.
Matson also argued for the differentiation between gender ideology and transgender lives, saying that transgender individuals did not “choose” to live the way they do because of an ideology, but because of being made that way. “All these things [Catholic teaching] can still be true, and transgender people can still exist and have our gender be given by God and be made in the image of God. Nothing to do with ideology.”
“The existence of transgender people in no way contradicts essential Catholic belief and anthropology,” though that may “have to adjust based on what we are continuing to learn,” she said.