Shortly after Pope Leo XIV's leadership of the Catholic Church began on May 8, 2025, a rumor circulated online that the first American-born pontiff once said the "promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don't exist."
The claim spread on X, Instagram and Facebook; NPR and the The New York Times also attributed the quote to Leo.
The quote appeared to originate from 2016 reporting by Peruvian newspaper Diario Correo, which did, in fact, attribute this quote — albeit in Spanish — to Robert Prévost, bishop of Chiclayo, Peru,
In a post published by New Ways Ministry, an American LGBTQ+ Catholic organization, author and academic Adam Beyt defines gender ideology as "a catch-all term for many social conservatives, including Pope Francis and other Catholic leaders, who interpret discourse involving 'gender' to deviate from what they believe to be the revealed laws of nature."
The Vatican itself helped coin the term "gender ideology" sometime in the 1980s or 1990s, according to academic research; one study from the University of Chicago said the Roman Catholic Church's efforts to condemn a "complex of issues it has for a quarter century lumped together as 'gender ideology' was already fully developed in the early 1980s."
Context of Pope Leo XIV's reported comments
Diario Correo's story came amid an effort by Peru's Ministry of Education in 2016 to update the country's national education curriculum to promote gender equality and sexual and reproductive health education. Conservative groups reportedly said the curriculum attempted to educate children on gender identity, not gender equality, despite assurances otherwise from ministry officials.
The Peruvian bishops conference took part in the campaign against the curriculum, reported Catholic News Agency; presumably, that would have included Leo, who Pope Francis appointed as bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, in 2015.
Here are the comments Diario Correo attributed to Leo, then known as Prévost, about the curriculum, translated into English from Spanish with the help of Google Translate and Snopes reporters who speak Spanish (emphasis ours):
The topic of promoting gender ideology is already a source of confusion because it seeks to create genders that don't exist — God created men and women, and the attempt to confuse the ideas of nature will only harm families and individuals.
[…]
There are men and women; we must respect the dignity of every person, including the options that adults may have. Introducing [ideas of gender ideology] to a child who hasn't yet reached the developmental stage to make choices regarding their sexual identity and orientation will create a lot of confusion.
[…]
This campaign, apparently, is going to create a lot of confusion and do a lot of harm. We mustn't confuse the importance of family and marriage with what others want to create, as if it were a right to do something that isn't.
It is worth noting scientists increasingly believe that both sex and gender exist along a spectrum, rather than the traditional male-female binary. (The terms "gender" and "sex" are intertwined but by no means the same; per Merriam-Webster, among those who study sex and gender, "sex" is usually the preferred term for biological forms — such as male and female biological traits — whereas "gender" refers to "behavioral, cultural and psychological traits.")
Snopes previously explained more about the scientific understanding of sexual differentiation in a story about Trump's executive order on the matter. We also debunked a claim that Leo once urged people to be "woke."
Aleksandra Wrona and Jack Izzo contributed to this report.