Catholic College Wodonga Defies the Bishops to Promote Gender Ideology
Catholic College Wodonga is utilising resources from Minus18, a lobby group whose positions contradict Catholic teaching, in defiance of the guidance Australia's bishops gave Catholic schools. By telling its community that a person's chosen pronouns are the "correct" ones, the school is promoting gender ideology to the families who trusted it to hand on the faith.
A Catholic School Hands Its Platform to a Lobby Group
The Wellbeing Team at Catholic College Wodonga published an Instagram carousel titled "Using Pronouns" in its "Wellbeing Wednesdays" series. The post told the school community it was sharing a resource from Minus18 to explain pronouns and why using someone's "correct" pronouns matters.
The slides are not the school's own words. The "What are pronouns?" slide is lifted from Minus18's online pronouns activity and credited to Minus18, with one expletive swapped out. It tells readers that a trans person who comes out may adopt new pronouns, and it promotes the usage of gender-neutral pronouns such as "xe" and "ey" because they do not imply male or female.
The final slide urges followers to try Minus18's interactive activity. It uses the Minus18 logo, the tagline "Champions for LGBTQIA+ Youth" and a rainbow flag. As posted, neither the slides nor the caption mention Church teaching on the human person, sex or gender.
Minus18: A Lobby Group Whose Message the Church Cannot Endorse
Minus18 calls itself a champion of LGBTQIA+ youth and runs and promotes campaigns including Pride Month, Mardi Gras, Trans Awareness Week and Wear It Purple Day, according to its campaigns page. Its record shows where it stands on the very questions the Church teaches about.
In 2025, Minus18 condemned Queensland's ban on hormone therapy for trans young people as cruel. This is in direct contradiction to the bishops' guide for Catholic schools, which raises serious concerns about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and Dignitas Infinita, which warns that sex-change interventions, as a rule, are contrary to Catholic teaching.
In 2015 it launched OMG I'm Trans, a guide to social and medical transition for Victorian schools, and it co-developed the Safe Schools All of Us materials, which the federal education minister of the day conceded contained sections that were inappropriate for children. Its website bills the Queer Formal as a "night of pride", with drag, for young people aged 12 to 19. And its pronouns resource promotes gender-neutral pronouns that do not imply male or female.
The Church teaches that sexual difference is real and good, but Minus18's materials start from the opposite premise: that a person's stated identity decides how everyone else must speak about them.
This raises the question: why is Catholic College Wodonga promoting this Minus18?
The Bishops Told Catholic Schools to Resist Exactly This
In 2022, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference issued Created and Loved, a guide for Catholic schools on identity and gender. It tells school leaders to be diligent in resisting lobbying groups, ideological postures and movements at odds with the school's mission, together with their language and symbols, and sometimes to decline their involvement outright. Ideas, words and images that conflict with the Christian vision, it says, should be avoided.
The guide explains why. A person's sex is a physical, biological reality, and popular rhetoric that treats gender as separate from sex, or as fluid by personal choice, is inconsistent with the Catholic Church's understanding.
It also says wellbeing and pastoral programs must reflect Christian anthropology. A wellbeing post that lifts Minus18's wording runs the other way. The Vatican's 2024 declaration goes further, calling it unacceptable for gender ideologies to present themselves as absolute and even dictate how children are raised.
Catholic Education Sandhurst, which governs the college, cannot claim it was not told. Its chief executive, Paul Desmond, commented publicly on the guide when it was released in September 2022. The college's own 2026 enrolment handbook says it operates with the consent of the Bishop of Sandhurst, with formation and education based on Catholic doctrine.
The guide is direction for local decision-making, not canon law. But the bishops wrote it for exactly this situation, and the college's post runs against it.
Also read: St Joseph’s College Refuses to Surrender to Gender Ideology
Why the "Pastoral Care" Defence Doesn't Hold Up
The college will say this is about kindness and belonging, and the post's own caption speaks of respect and being welcoming. It may add that the bishops' guide allows pastoral care for individual students.
That is a long way from their conduct. Catholic College Wodonga is broadcasting a lobby group's identical material on pronouns to its whole community, on a public platform, using that group's branding.
Nothing in their post teaches people what the Church believes about the human person. Families were told in the college's enrolment handbook that its formation rests on Catholic doctrine. What they got was the message that a person's chosen pronouns are the "correct" ones.
The college's own handbook calls parents the first educators of their children. When a school passes an advocacy group's framework to those children through a friendly wellbeing post, a rainbow flag and a link to the group's website, that is propaganda, not pastoral care.
Catholic parents are entitled to ask Catholic Education Sandhurst a plain question: why is a school operating with the Bishop's consent promoting the language and symbols of a movement the bishops' own guide tells schools to keep at a distance?
It raises concerns for the Catholic parents sending their children to this school that the staff there have already been infiltrated by gender ideologues opposed to Catholic teaching.
Last updated: 26 October 2026 22:51