The Orthodox Latter-day Saint Case for Trans Acceptance

I.

 The word that philosopher Michel de Montaigne used to title his landmark collection of written musings is telling, and it’s stuck with the genre ever since: Essais, a French word meaning “tests, trials, attempts,” or “trying outs.” 

While I won’t “attempt” anything nearly as spine-tinglingly rapturous as Montaigne did (have you ever written an essay titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die?” Didn’t think so.), I hope this piece can be understood as an essay in the truest sense: my attempt to wrestle with ideas that I can’t get away from.

It is, specifically, my attempt to work out an orthodox Latter-day Saint (LDS) case for accepting the lived experience of trans men and women.

I use “orthodox” here for two reasons. This is an orthodox case because (1) it’s made by an orthodox Latter-day Saint. I grew up in a typical LDS home in a typical American town and lived a typical young adult, male life, and my personal values reflect that. 

But, more importantly, this is an orthodox case for trans acceptance because (2) it’s written, in part, for and to orthodox Latter-day Saints whose views on the matter skew more conservative. It’s my attempt to think through an intuition for trans acceptance founded on classic LDS ideals.

We’ll start with a parable.

II.

They were a peculiar people.

In the first place, they chose names for themselves that didn’t match who they were at all. They looked like one thing but called themselves quite another. They chose new names that made them unrecognizable, alien. You couldn’t call yourself that and believe and act and present the way they did. You just didn’t.

This people—and they were peculiar—said it was all down to what they felt. Yes, they said it was all about a deep, burning, irresistible conviction inside them. They believed that their bodies, while beautiful, were fundamentally flawed. The flaw was evident because of this conviction—because, after all, the conviction was about who they truly were. There was a mismatch, they would explain, between this deep burning conviction about their eternal identity and the bodies that clothed their souls.

So they wore strange clothes, and walked carefully, and tried to be as good as they could. And when they got angry, when they got frustrated with how no one believed them or let them believe themselves, when mobs came and threw them out of their houses and stripped them and humiliated and raped and killed them—well, they were scared to get angry. Because when they got angry, when they got violent, that’s when the mobs really won. “Mass psychosis,” the mobs would say. “Dangerous perverts.”

Even after things settled down a little, even after life got bearable, not much changed. Friends would smile wanly when the peculiar people tried to declare and explain their true name. Friends would try to use it, to be polite, around the peculiar people. But behind their backs, the peculiar people feared not much had changed.

Others were more open about it. “You can call yourself that all day, but you can’t change what you really are. The Bible says it right here. You’re not what you say you are. What you really are instead is [xxxxxx]. Your feelings are deceitful. And you’re not one of us at all.”

Some peculiar people had family and friends who could be a solace from open cruelty. But many others didn’t.

Yet, through all of it, they couldn’t bear to be anything but what they were. They knew it. God knew it. How could they deny it?

“And who is my neighbor?”

III.

You probably guessed who this parable is about.

It’s about trans people, and it’s about dyed-in-the-wool Latter-day Saints. It’s about nineteenth-century pioneers who dared to take up the name of an alien Christ. It’s about the twenty-first-century Saints who emphasize strenuously, anxiously their own Christianness in the face of a larger Christendom that denies them that name at all.

 It’s about women and men of generations past, mostly nameless, who dared to express who they truly were, who brought forth that eternal identity of which they were ineluctably convicted. It’s about the trans men and women today who argue and strain and fight for the right of bare existence.

It would be profoundly tone-deaf, of course, to draw this analogy too closely. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who often still relish the outdated nickname “Mormon,” are not the same as trans people who are deadnamed daily. The former group boasts (or occasionally bemoans) Mitt Romney, Brandon Sanderson, and a Broadway musical as cultural touchstones—the other still struggles for basic rights. 

But I hope you see what this analogy could mean. Whoever you are, I’m guessing you’re familiar with names. This could be the covenant name of Christ—or it could be the carefully chosen personal name. Both are whispered sacredly, fearfully, wondrously. 

Either way, there’s a shared experience here. By dint of cultural memory, Latter-day Saints—particularly American Latter-day Saints, though I won’t suppose the experience I’ve described is exclusive to us—are equipped in a way no other Christian possibly could be to mourn with trans brothers and sisters and to stand for their civil rights.

Trans people express a deep, intimate truth about their personhood that is more often than not rejected outright in public and private settings. Latter-day Saints express a quite different, but still deep and intimate, truth about their personhood, too—that they are literal daughters and sons of Heavenly Parents—“[gods], though in the germ,” to quote Robert Browning. 

For most of the Christian American world, there are no heresies more brazen, more unbelievable, than these two. Orthodox Latter-day Saints, if we are honest with ourselves, have a basic responsibility to honor this fact.

“And who is my neighbor?”

IV.

History and culture alone aren’t the basis for trans acceptance on the part of Latter-day Saints. There is also a uniquely Latter-day Saint—a uniquely Restoration—theology that equips orthodox Saints to embrace trans sisters and brothers. This theology is grounded in becoming.

In the most transgressive and sublime sermon of his life, Joseph Smith put it this way:

“God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man.” 

God is like us, Joseph says, and we are like God. We are the same species as Them (and They are, Latter-day Saints believe, plural and comprising the divine feminine and the divine masculine). This is what it means to be children of God. To paraphrase Tad R. Callister, who himself is paraphrasing the apocryphal Gospel of Philip: a tree gives birth to a tree. A horse gives birth to a horse. A human gives birth to a human. A God gives birth to a…?

Joseph, unlike me, isn’t squeamish. He means what he says: 

“Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves.”

The Book of Mormon says that “this life is the time for men [and women] to prepare to meet God” (Alma 34:32). I believe this is true in the straightforward eschatological sense in which it was first given—but I believe it’s true in a second sense, too: this life is the time when we are meant to prepare to meet the Gods within ourselves. This life is when we are to wake up to our true natures, to develop the capacity to love and honor and nourish that nature. Doing so requires real work—real spiritual and physical and intellectual labor. But the culmination of that work, our joint work with God and Christ, is that we become like Them. We become beings of pure, unrestrained love. 

The problem is, of course, that our present bodies don’t match our divine destinies. In one way or another, as Hebrew and Christian and Latter-day Saint scriptures continually attest, we are “strangers and pilgrims”—not only “on the earth” but in our imperfect, difficult mortal bodies (Hebrews 11:13). The fact that this is part of the Plan doesn’t make it any easier or less infuriating. It doesn’t make the mismatch between our eternal Heirship and our temporal inconstancy any less agonizing.

Our bodies, all of them, all the time, are beautiful and worthy of cherishing. But for Latter-day Saints they are still, in tandem with our spirits, maturing and anticipating perfection in Christ Jesus. 

This bold doctrine of becoming—does it ring familiar to you? Does it taste good? 

Many trans people know all about becoming-with-the-body. For them, in a way it very much is not for me, it is a daily and searing reality. Far be it from me to explicate that.

I’ll leave it at this: the bodily theology of the Restoration is a bodily theology of estrangement, of longing, and, yes, a bodily theology of dysmorphia. If I’m an honest disciple on this road, then I’m bound to recognize my broken fellow travelers.

That recognition involves real honesty about those claims of innate identity that I ask others to respect. If my identity matters so much to me, what should my relationship be to trans identity claims? This is a question I am still, frankly, working out, but the Savior’s restored doctrine, and the whisperings of the Holy Ghost, repeatedly draw me to it.

This recognition involves a willingness to, as a prophet of God has forcibly called me to do, “to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice” wherever they may be found, whether that be in the chapel, the classroom, or the public square.

“And who is my neighbor?”

V.

“And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”

And I said, He that shewed mercy on him?

Then said Jesus unto me, Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:30–37).

(The main Prodigal Press editor who helped me with this piece, Luka Romney, correctly pointed out that I’m mostly focused on regarding trans identity through the lens of the traditional gender binary. Because the binary is the main lens through which I’ve thought about all this, I’ll keep my argument focused on that—but it’s worth acknowledging that limitation.)