Pope Francis’ long-awaited apostolic exhortation—“Amoris Laetitia,” or “The Joy of Love”—was released earlier this month.

The good news is that Pope Francis urges church leaders to be pastors rather than church bureaucrats.

The request wasn’t surprising because Pope Francis immediately taking the reigns of the Catholic Church displayed a pastoral countenance to his papacy.

Pope Francis’ recent tome might bring a sigh of relief to some Catholics (like divorced parishioners), but for the LGBTQ community, Francis’s message and tone to us are in lockstep with church doctrine—and that message is anything but pastoral.

On the issue of same-sex marriage Francis wrote scathingly: “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual union to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

Further, Pope Francis went on to address gender identity in a section on the “need for sex education”:

The young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created, for thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.

But this isn’t the first time the pontiff’s transphobic vitriol unleaded itself. In the pontiff’s 2015 tome, “Pope Francis: This Economy Kills,” Pope Francis compares transgender people to nuclear weapons.

His reason is that this unlikely pair both destroy and desecrate God’s holy and ordained order of creation.

In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter Francis spewed the following transphobic remarks: “Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings,” he continues.

“Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.”

“With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator. The true custody of creation does not have anything to do with the ideologies that consider man like an accident, like a problem to eliminate.”

“God has placed man and woman and the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth. The design of the Creator is written in nature.”

In 2000 the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also denounced the existence of transgender people.

Pope Francis’ clear denunciation of our present day gender theories and understanding of the fluidity of human sexuality not only perpetuates spiritual harm and alienation to our trans community, but it also unwittingly invites physical harm to our trans community—done in the name of God with righteous wrath and indignation.

For example, I wish Leelah Alcorn was alive today. Rather, Leelah’s memory will haunt us as a society until there’s change. Her 2014 suicide note condemned conversion therapy (also known as “reparative therapy”).

If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue…To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4….When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.

When we miss the essential point that human life is varied, precious, and of equal worth, we ignore the unique gifts that each life brings to each other and to the world.

That’s what Leelah was telling us. I had hoped Pope Francis would, too.