What the Pope has to say about transgender people and nuclear weapons

Less than a month after trying to influence the anti-gay marriage referendum in Slovakia, Pope Francis appears to have compared transgender people to the threat of nuclear disaster.

In a recently published book called Pope Francis: This Economy Kills, the pontiff explains that every historical period has its "Herods" who "destroy, that plot designs of death, that disfigure the face of man and woman, destroying creation".

The National Catholic Reporter, who first translated his comments from Italian, explain that he continued:

Let's think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings. 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.

• Pope Francis

His comments on the "gender theory" relate to the belief that someone's gender can exist along a spectrum rather than the binary (male/female) definition constructed by society.

This is not the first time he has spoken out about the theory, according to NCR. In January, Pope Francis said that teaching the theory to developing countries was a form of "ideological colonisation".

More: Pope tries and fails to influence anti-gay marriage vote