Kate: [00:00:00] Just as a heads-up, we wanted everyone to know that we recorded this episode before April 2022 General Conference. That conference mentioned Heavenly Mother. And we just wanted to make clear that this conversation happened before that. And our conversation about what might happen in General Conference happened before. Anyway, thank you for listening and we hope you enjoy.
Kate: Hello, and welcome to Called to Queer, where we hold space for the queer Mormon women, genderqueer and intersex experiences. I’m Kate and my pronouns are she/they.
Colette: And I’m Colette and my pronouns are she/her.
Kate: Today we’re talking with Dr. Taylor Petrey and we are so excited to talk about gender and psychology and all sorts of stuff. But [00:01:00] before we jump into that, we want to start off by seeing what brought us queer joy this week. So Colette, what brought you queer joy this week?
Colette: I actually, I’ve been a lot more purposeful in trying to find queer joy, especially in kind of hard weeks. And so I have a lot to share if you’ll humor me. First off I was watching a couple movies, with a friend and both of them just mentioned queerness totally casually. And it was totally normal. And whenever that happens, that just brings me a lot of queer joy.
Secondly, there’s a professor at BYU doing some research into queer Mormons and their experiences. And it’s Dr. Sarah Coyne in the School of Family Life. And I actually TAed for her when I was at BYU. And so I got to reconnect with her and just talk about queerness for an hour and my experiences. And it was a lot of queer joy to be able to talk about my story and just have her and an assistant just attentively listen and ask questions and celebrate [00:02:00] me, which was awesome.
And finally, I got to guest lecture for an hour in an undergrad psychology class at BYU about sexuality and my story. And it was just really awesome. So it was a really good week for queer joy for me.
Kate: I’m glad you’re paying attention to those things more. And also that you had so much. That’s awesome.
Colette: Yeah. Thanks. How about you? What was your queer joy?
Kate: Mine’s weird. I had a, I don’t know, the people pushing back on my ideas on social media, particularly my Instagram account. And saying, Hey, maybe rephrase something. And to me, this doesn’t sound like queer joy, but actually it was like, Wow. We have a community here of people who are respectful of one another and also can have higher level conversations about gender. And this isn’t just like we’re just at the very beginning, trying to explain what [00:03:00] transgender means. We’re having these elevated conversations about gender within, you know, that context of Mormonism. So that’s really exciting to get to that point. Brought me a lot of queer joy. Even though it felt uncomfortable. It was really nice to be able to engage in that way.
Colette: I’m glad that was queer joy. Cause I know it’s been a little rough for you. You posted about how you have been getting pushback and being tagged in different anti-trans accounts and stuff. So I’m glad that it’s brought you queer joy and you’ve been able to engage in some of these conversations.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Okay, but we’re here with Dr. Taylor Petrey and, oh my goodness. So excited for this conversation. Let me just give a little bit of an introduction into why we asked. I’m going to say Taylor, if that’s okay. Is that okay?
Taylor: please. Yes.
Kate: Why we invited Taylor on because you’re our first [00:04:00] guest who identifies as a cis man. And welcome. We want to welcome you, but,
Taylor: Great breaking boundaries here today. This is great.
Kate: Breaking boundaries The reason is you have expertise in ways that there aren’t very many people who have expertise in exactly what we need expertise in. And that intersects what we’ve been talking about. So a few weeks ago, we released a episode with Freddy Banks and that episode kind of just took off. That was like a big episode for us because people were interested in the sorts of ideas and life experiences of Freddy as a trans man. And after right after we recorded that, I asked Colette, Can we please get Taylor on? Because those things that were bubbling up [00:05:00] in Freddy’s episode are things that, that you can help us unpack a lot more in terms of gender theory and queer theory. So we’re very grateful to be able to do that with you.
Taylor: Thank you. It’s a huge pleasure to get to talk to both of you. I’m like you can’t see me right now, but I’m beaming from ear to ear about this opportunity and really been looking forward to our conversation. So thank you.
Kate: Thank you. So can you just give us a little bit of background?
Taylor: Sure. So I am a scholar of religion and gender and sexuality. I got a doctorate of theology in New Testament and early Christianity from Harvard Divinity School. And I’m now a professor at Kalamazoo College. My area of research originally has been early Christianity and gender studies within that sub field. But as a Latter- day Saint, and as somebody who has, of course been paying attention to the fascinating things that had been happening of course, [00:06:00] contemporaneous with my own experience in the last 20 years. And then increasingly interested in the history of the church on these ideas. I kind of started writing on the side about Latter- day, Saint issues and gender and sexuality. And about 10 years ago or so wrote my first article ever on this topic and thought that was the one and only thing that I would ever say about. And I would go back to early Christianity and never say anything again. And here I am 10 years later and I couldn’t shut up about it. So I kept writing and thinking and following the.
Colette: We’re so grateful for that.
Taylor: So it’s been a pretty interesting adventure. And as you mentioned, as a cis het male, I’m not somebody who necessarily comes at this from the perspective of personal experience, which is how many people engage in or become first interested in these topics. I came at it from an academic perspective, and I think sometimes gives me a different kind of set of [00:07:00] questions than other people have, but also hopefully those questions, other people’s questions, and my questions kind of overlap in such a way that they’re mutually beneficial. And I’ve learned a ton from the communities that I’ve gotten to interact with over this last decade, too.
Colette: And I know a lot of people in this arena probably know you best from your book, Tabernacles of Clay. And I think we’re going to be talking quite a bit about that. Do you want to talk how that came to be and the genesis of that?
Taylor: Yeah. So I originally was writing about theology LDS theology, and gender and sexuality. And became increasingly interested in a response that people would give to me in that area, as they would say. Okay you’ve maybe demonstrated that the theology is more flexible and can kind of go in different directions and there’s maybe space within the theology for what I was calling a post heterosexual Mormon theology. But the tradition has always been, the tradition would be the [00:08:00] response. It was like we’ve always had heterosexuality is always been what it is. And I was a, a historian of sexuality in the ancient world. And just knew like that couldn’t possibly be true that the church had never changed besides the transition from polygamy to monogamy. There had to be other ways that sexuality had been thought of differently in the church.
And so I became interested in the history of sexuality, in the history of the church’s teachings on gender. I also became interested in the idea that heterosexuality was of course at the center of the church’s teachings, but also the idea that gender was eternal. That was an unchanging doctrine and in the church. And so I wanted to kind of look into the history of all of this.
I was coming up for a sabbatical, my first sabbatical after six or so years at Kalamazoo College. And I decided to apply for a fellowship at the women’s studies and religion program at Harvard with pitching this project. And I thought well, if I get [00:09:00] this very competitive fellowship that only, two men in 40 years have ever been accepted to, then I’ll write this book and if I don’t get it, then I won’t. And somebody else smarter and more interesting will come along and they’ll write it, cause I’d been hoping that somebody else would write an LDS history. That’s not my main field. I thought I looked around there, all these brilliant people. Why isn’t anybody writing this interesting history? And so I did it a little bit on a dare to myself. And then I got a phone call from the women’s studies and religion program saying you’ve been accepted to the program. We’d like you to start here next year and spend a year here as a visiting professor and doing the research. And I just started crying. I thought, oh crap. Now I have to write this book. It came about a little bit reluctantly, but certainly, was a huge pay off in terms of finally getting to do this project that secretly deep down I always wanted to do too. So that’s how it came about.
Colette: We’re so grateful it did come about. I was first introduced to you when [00:10:00] you gave a talk at a symposium. I think it was it maybe a Mormons Building Bridges Symposium at the Salt Lake Library? Does that sound familiar?
Taylor: That does. Yeah. Yeah.
Colette: I watched online because I was like, I am not leaving my house. And this sounds interesting, but I’m just, it was a rough week. And then I was listening to you and I was like, oh my gosh, it was, it opened my eyes to like, oh my gosh, this makes sense to me. And the gospel is so queer inclusive. Why are we not talking about this? And so I was really excited when Kate had reached out and you had agreed to come on. Cause I think the, this, you, that talk blew my mind.
Taylor: Wow.
Colette: Would you, and I don’t know how much you remember that specific talk and I don’t know if maybe this is a good place to start, but could you provide an overview of some of the things you said there that blew my mind and might be new ideas to some of our listeners?
Taylor: You’re digging into a [00:11:00] little bit of my memory here to see, and we’ll see how good it is. You can remind me if there were things specifically that jumped out to you. But one of the ideas, you know, that I mentioned earlier that I had become interested in was the notion that gender never changes or that gender is eternal in LDS teaching. And I was suspicious of this idea that that the doctrine had never changed at when I started researching it. And kind of knew a few places to look where I had suspected that there were going to be challenges to that idea, even in the relatively recent past. And so I became interested in unpacking the history of that idea.
And I looked specifically in the middle of the 20th century and in the sixties and seventies, and it turned out there were a number of Latter- day Saints that did not believe that gender was eternal. In fact, quite the opposite. They thought that gender was a very contingent feature of our identity, that it was something that could be either achieved or not achieved. They had a very sort of performative [00:12:00] theory of gender that if you practice it in the right ways, then you would have it. If you practiced it in the wrong ways, then you wouldn’t have it. And they very explicitly said that there is neither male nor female in the afterlife for the vast majority of people.
And this was a very sort of heteronormative. I don’t want to say that these were, queer affirming understandings, but they at least acknowledged the idea that gender was fluid. That gender was contingent, that in some cases, gender is even chosen. And so there were all of these kinds of fascinating aspects that were happening during that time period.
Now, the church ends up kind of swinging pendulum in the other direction and saying no, it’s never chosen. It’s fixed by the 1980s and certainly codified in the Proclamation on the Family in 1995. But just a generation before that, Latter- day Saints were teaching the exact opposite of that. So it’s not necessarily the case that this was a sort of fixed doctrine in the history of the church. But rather we’ve seen a lot of variation on this. Again, even in the [00:13:00] relatively recent past.
Kate: Thank you. Fascinating. I could just jump off there from there and ask you a million different questions, but I want to be able to answer some people’s questions right off the bat, because we’re not in, this is not an audience of experts in gender. And a lot of these concepts might be new to folks. So is there any way you can break down sex and gender and these differences and what role the body plays in that?
Taylor: Yeah. So. There are really in the 20th and 21st centuries, a number of competing ideologies about gender, about sex, by which we might, sometimes people mean bodily sex. Sometimes people mean biological sex, which we also know are not necessarily the same thing. But Yeah.
They’re really number of competing ideas that, that emerge. The most dominant one that still holds a lot of kind of popular sway is really the [00:14:00] result of 1960s, 1970s what we call second wave feminism that says gender is something which is culturally variable and sex, the body itself, is somehow sort of fixed. And so there are women and there are men, but the roles, those gender roles, are totally contingent in, in some ways. And this really has a, as I said, the sort of popular sway. It’s sometimes called the sex gender distinction and it says, there’s culture on the one hand and then there’s nature on the other. And nature is a sort of fixed essence.
Now there were a lot of people that were challenging this idea, trans people were actually saying the exact opposite. They said, Sex, bodily sex, is actually the thing that we can change and gender the thing that is the interior part of who we are, is the thing that is immutable, that can’t change. It’s who we are. And so there were these fascinating conversations that were happening between these [00:15:00] two communities, for instance, in that same time period. And by the 1990s, there’s an emerging perspective that comes to be known as queer theory that challenges the sex gender distinction as one of the various things that’s not the only thing that queer theory is doing. But one of the things that is doing is challenging that more traditional feminist perspective and saying now, actually the distinction between sex between male and female is itself a cultural production. And that the ways that we’ve come to interpret bodies in these specific ways is an ideological perspective, not just a natural one, right?
And so we have a, really a kind of new emerging paradigm that comes out of that. That starts to suggest that maybe the difference between male and female is a lot more of a blurry line than we had originally thought of. Not to say that there are n’t differences between bodies. That’s not to say that there aren’t differences between experiences, between certain kinds of males and certain kinds of females. Of [00:16:00] course, there’s an acknowledgement of all of those things, but there’s a sort of looking at that boundaries, those categories as being a lot fuzzier than they had been before.
So I wanted to look at that history, the evolution of thought about gender and sexuality in secular contexts, and also try to understand, what’s happening inside the LDS church during this time period about their ideologies. And I want to point out two different competing ones that are related to what I had just said, but one is what we call gender essential ism.
And it’s the view that there is a sort of fixed difference between male and female. We had mentioned already that, second wave feminists thought that the body was the fixed thing and that gender itself was more mutable. But gender essentialists have a number of different ideas about that, including Latter day Saints, who are often thought of as gender essentialists, that these fixed differences between male and female, aren’t just bodily, but they actually are things like the kinds of attitudes that one might have. The [00:17:00] dispositions that one might have. The roles that one might be more naturally attracted to. So gender essentialism tends to push a little bit more in the direction of of looking at those differences between male and female, as essential as fixed in some way.
And then gender fluidity, on the other hand, suggest that the boundaries between male and female are much more fluid and much more contingent.
Not just at the role at the level of gender, but even at the level of bodies and so on. And so, gender essentialism and gender fluidity are really kind of these two competing ideas in some ways that map on as I said to second wave feminist and queer theorists, but also you start to see those tensions popping up within Latter day Saint thought as well.
Is gender fluid or is it essential? And as I mentioned before, there are competing ideas, even within the tradition. Gordon B Hinckley gender essentialist, right? Joseph .Fielding Smith, gender fluidity guy. you know? So [00:18:00] we can see that there are these competing ideology and one isn’t necessarily good or bad. And I want to emphasize that too. I certainly have my preferences for which one I think is a better one, but there are gender fluidity people who are very much are using it in negative ways. And there are gender essentialists who are very much trying to use it for liberatory ways including trans individuals who are gender essentialist.
So I want to caution. To not say, only one is only good and one is only bad if you have a preference for another, but to look at the ways that they get used sometimes for different purposes.
Kate: You answered the second question I wanted to ask, which is about gender essentialism. But for me, when I was first introduced to gender essentialism and the word essential, which you point out in your book, the Family Proclamations that uses the word essential that gender is essential, right?
Taylor: Right, yes. And then that becomes the kind of official position of the church since since the 1990s.
Kate: So [00:19:00] for me, it was hard to grasp what essential means, because I think often we think of it as necessary. And in this case it means like the most fundamental, basic element. How do you break something down to its most fundamental parts? So for a gender essentialist, you say you can break down gender to make a coherent category that all people either fit into one or the other. Is that fair?
Taylor: Yes. Yeah. That’s a great way of explaining it.
Kate: Okay. I actually have a quote from your book here. That’s about everything that you just talked about. So you give a definition of queer theory. That says queer theory takes as its subject, something more fundamental, namely the categories and distinctions between sexes, genders, sexualities, races, abilities, and so on. This paradigm challenges the idea [00:20:00] of the natural and self-evident, and instead seeks to historicize and question claims about essential and stable identities by looking at where those boundaries were thin.
So you start out not necessarily with the way that this happens with gender you explore how this also happens with race. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Taylor: Yeah. So one of the interesting developments in queer theory has been the challenges to its own boundaries. Queer theory wants to look at where these boundaries between sexes, right? That’s. This is where it starts out between sexes, between sexualities are contingent or themselves are fluid.
And people started to say, yeah Why shouldn’t we be thinking about race in relationship to these things? Why shouldn’t we be thinking about ability in relationship to these to these things as well? And so queer theory has, very productively expanded its own purview beyond its sort of traditional look at gender and sexuality.
[00:21:00] And I really was persuaded by that perspective and started to look at the way that race. It seemed to me that you couldn’t tell the story of the 1950 sixties and seventies understandings of what was happening with gender and sexuality in the church without paying attention to what’s happening in with respect to race during that exact same time period.
And in a way I was even more surprised by what I found. In retrospect, it seems so obvious, but I was even more surprised when I started to just discover that the way that Latter day Saints often talked about race was to talk about it as a sexual problem. That is, that they were very concerned with the intermingling of the races, not only socially, but that social intermingling would lead to a sexual intermingling and therefore children of mixed descent.
And there was a whole kind of racial ideology that Latter day Saints had during this time period that there were [00:22:00] different lineages that were promised certain blessings or certain lineages that were cursed and were not promised certain blessings. And so the blurring of those lineages through sexual exchange and through reproduction posed a real threat to that ideology. And so they were very much segregationists during this time period because they thought that it would lead to sexual integration.
And so I said, listen, we can’t understand Latter-day Saint sexuality without thinking of it as a raced issue in the middle of the 20th century. And it dawned on me that the big conflict that Latter day Saints had over the meaning and definition of marriage was not just with respect to polygamy and monogamy at the beginning of the 20th century.
And it certainly wasn’t just with respect to same-sex marriage at the beginning of the 21st century, but it had to do with interracial marriage, just in the lifetime of many of our parents or in many of our own lifetimes, in some [00:23:00] cases. Interracial marriage was a hugely controversial topic in a Latter day Saint culture. And in some respects, remained so. And I don’t want to say it’s not anymore because we continue to have the republication of certain teachings of LDS leaders especially Spencer w Kimball who cautions, he didn’t oppose it in a sort of principled stance, but he cautioned against interracial marriage. And so I wanted to just point out that Latter-day saints have had conflicts about the meaning of marriage and the meaning of marriage in sort of secular culture where secular culture culture came along. And there was a Supreme court decision and said, this is fine. We’ve got to stop discriminating on this issue. And latter day saints were like we’re not really fine with that. Our doctrine opposes that, at least it did for more than a decade after that Supreme court decision in 1967, Loving versus Virginia.
So we have Latter-day Saints in this contest over the meaning and definition of marriage as it has to do with race. [00:24:00] And thinking about race as a problem of sexuality for me was a light bulb moment as I was writing this of oh yeah, this is also something that wasn’t that long ago, and that latter-day saints for the most part have really changed their teachings on this, that it ended up representing a huge change.
I’ll just give one little anecdote on this point, which is that in the same issue of the Church News announcing the 1978 revelation that the priesthood had been opened to all men, there’s another article that says interracial marriage is still discouraged in the exact same issue. So they’re trying to change the change, the doctrine with respect to race, but still we want segregation still after all.
Kate: Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. Frustrating. Because so often we talk about things not changing. And I do think that we have to be careful when talking about race in the church and talking about sexuality and gender in the church, [00:25:00] however, I think this is a really interesting place to overlap those in this queer theory discussion where queer theorists are working through these issues more generally.
So race, we thought in the 1950s, and sixties and seventies as Mormons was fixed, we thought that there was a category that made sense that was race. And then we learned, this is actually a historical moment, a historical phenomenon that’s not based in nature. How do you see that transitioning to talking about gender?
Taylor: Yeah, that’s a great question. And in some respects, I’ll answer it in two ways. Maybe one that you are suspecting, maybe one that’s not. Certainly I think we can see a parallel. For me, it’s a pretty obvious parallel between the way that the church dug its heels in on race. And as you said, as a sort of fixed category of identity and really as an essential teaching of Mormonism, [00:26:00] and this goes all the way back to, not only Joseph Smith and Brigham young and the early founders of the church who believed in these racial categories, but even in the Book of Mormon and even in the Book of Abraham, it’s, in some ways, these ideas were scripturally based for them as well of these sort of lineages that have these certain promises. And they really just couldn’t see any way around those doctrines. They said like these are essential to what Mormonism is. If we don’t believe in lineage based blessings, then what is Mormonism? It seems so essential to them.
And we’ve ended up in many respects in the same place now with respect to sexual difference. That for many Latter-day saints, a certain understanding of male and female, a certain understanding of heterosexuality, they can’t imagine another version of Mormonism that doesn’t have those because they’ve become so intertwined and so entangled with one another.
So certainly we can see the [00:27:00] parallels there where the church has ended up with holding on to a particular understanding of its own doctrines as historically based as doctrinally based, as essential and unchanging. You can’t do anything. How would you do anything different?
So on the one hand, I think we can see that parallel. Where I think it’s also worth digging in a little bit deeper is that it’s not just a kind of accidental parallel. But rather one that was intentionally done. And what I mean by that is to say that as the church abandoned its doctrines of fixed race, its doctrines of racial hierarchy and racial difference.
Those same doctrines get transferred to gender and sexuality. And as the church is speaking less and less about race, they’re speaking more and more about sexual hierarchy, about gender differences, about heterosexuality and so on. And it’s not just a kind of historical accident. It’s actually very [00:28:00] much the trajectory that as the church ends up kind of making some progress in some areas, it often takes a more aggressive stance with respect to others.
And we see this pattern happening in progressive movements all the time. The feminist movement of the 1960s and seventies was anti-lesbian because they were very concerned that the lesbian movement that the lesbian stigma was going to infect affect their movement overall. And so they said we’re anti-gay, we’re anti-lesbian the lavender menace is a problem.
So we see that oftentimes progressive movements do exclude others that they perceive to be more radical. Trans people were often excluded from the gay and lesbian movement in the 1960 seventies and eighties. And it’s really been in the last 15, 20 years that we’ve seen a kind of mainstreaming of trans identity in those movements. The LDS organization Affirmation just in the less than a decade ago, changed its name to be trans inclusive.
I want to point out certainly that the church is [00:29:00] engaged in this kind of deflection as they change from one doctrine and start to abandon one, to sometimes dig in, even deeper to say what these things are the things that are really important now. But that’s actually something that we see in a lot of progressive movements is a sort of otherization of some, even more marginal group as the as the new way of mainstreaming or normalizing, what was once considered to be outside of the boundaries.
Kate: Still super upsetting to have that transposed onto a different group. But so you’ve seen this gender fluidity in a pre-World war II context playing out in, within Mormonism. And then you’re saying after world war II, there’s this move towards essentialism. What did the gender fluid fluidity movement or. How did that look? And what you’re saying now is that race shaped [00:30:00] that post-World war II movement?
Taylor: Yeah. Let me try to just unpack one, one piece of it. I think that the gender fluidity piece was part of the post-World war II era as well. I mentioned Joseph fielding Smith and other kind of popular leaders during the 1960s and seventies are writing and publishing about this, saying that gender is not eternal, that you Can lose it in the afterlife and so on, that you maybe didn’t have it before you were born. That is another teaching that latter day Saint leaders are putting forward. And that in some respects, I also want to point out the way that, that gender fluidity doesn’t ever go away in the LDS tradition, even as we move to gender essentialism. And there are a couple of places where I point that out.
One is where church leaders are opposing feminism and another is where they’re advocating for repairative therapy for homosexuality. And the places where that shows up with respect to [00:31:00] anti-feminism is that the church leaders are often teaching that if we have a women out in the workplace, if we have equality in the home, if we have some of the things that feminists were pushing for during that time period, that’s going to erode the boundaries between male and female, that men, the women are going to become more mannish. And man are begin going to become more woman ish, and we’re going to live in a unisex society.
And they were freaking out in the 1960s and seventies and eighties about a unisex society that there’s no differences between male and female. And they meant that seriously, they didn’t, they weren’t saying this like metaphorically, like they thought like the differences between males and females, if they weren’t practiced and enforced would disappear.
Now in some respects they were right, and in other respects what I want to point out is the way that sexual fluidity and gender fluidity is actually at the core of that idea, that sex isn’t fixed. If it’s not [00:32:00] enforced, if there aren’t legal and social sanctions against transgressing gender boundaries, then then Latter-day Saint leaders were teaching that it’s highly fluid.
So even when they move to the rhetoric of gender essential ism, they don’t really believe it, right? They’re trying to make it a norm. That gender is thought of as essential, but they actually believe that gender is highly fluid and highly contingent.
Another example of this, as I mentioned, is with respect to repairative therapy. Church leaders believed that sexuality could be changed. That if someone was heterosexual had heterosexual inclinations, if they were exposed to homosexuality in such a way, it might be very attractive to them and they might want to do that. And so they said, we can’t talk about it. We can’t think about it. We can’t just show it as normal in, in modern American culture in any way, because it’s going to become a temptation for people to to, to want to engage in these kinds of [00:33:00] things. They even would say things like if homosexuality is normalized, within one generation, everyone will be having homosexual sex. They thought it was super attractive to people if it wasn’t highly stigmatized.
And then on the reverse side of that, they believe that if someone did have attractions to someone of the same sex, that could be fixed by engaging in repairative therapy. Again, that sexuality was fluid in some ways it could be changed. And so they really saw it as going both ways here and so they taught especially gay men. They taught them how to play basketball and they taught them how to work on engines and they would advise them to find a masculine mentor who’s going to show you what it means to be a man. And if you work on an engine, all of a sudden you’re going to start being attracted to women now. And so they had this ideology of sexual fluidity here of sexuality [00:34:00] being something that had to be shaped and practiced by culture rather than being an inherent or essential feature of your identity that couldn’t be changed.
So in a number of ways, this notion of gender fluidity, even after it starts to get stamped out, lives on, in the tradition, in the way that church leaders are attempting to enforce that gender essentialism and that, that perspective that sexuality and gender can’t change and shouldn’t change.
Kate: Yeah. Can we also mention here the historical context for the LGBTQ movement, as far as these distinctions between transgender folks and homosexuality, can you maybe give it a little bit more historicity or historiography about that?
Taylor: Yeah. And if I don’t say what you want me to say here, then you can fill it in here. But there was a long period of time in popular culture. And certainly in LDS understandings, that trans sexuality was the kind of like extreme [00:35:00] version of homosexuality. That if you were a gay man and you were a bottom, you were essentially a kind of feminine figure here and that feminization would eventually lead, to transsexuality or vice versa.
Right? If you were a sort of Butch woman, you may end up as just wanting to be a man all altogether. And so there, there was this sense that transsexuality was a version of homosexuality. And That’s the way that latter day Saint leaders often talked about it as well. And warned that, look, this is what, oh, you want to have gay sex? Then why don’t you just become a woman right. Altogether? And so this often misogynistic understanding of homosexuality and of transsexuality really determined the ways that church leaders saw them as conjoined phenomenon.
Kate: Great.
Taylor: Is that what you, is that what you were hoping I would say? Or was there something else?
Kate: it’s better than I was hoping. So thank you.
Taylor: All right.
Colette: One thing [00:36:00] that really stood out to me, Taylor, from your presentation I listened to was when you said does the gender of a couple really matter, because when we look at the creation account, it’s kind of could be construed as a queer couple. Could you talk more about that? That’s one thing that really blew my minds to, wow. This is a lot more inclusive than I had originally thought.
Taylor: Yeah, this is one of my favorite things. I remember the moment that I was like, wait a second here. You’ve got in the temple video, for people, for Latter-day saints who have been to the template have been endowed, you’ve got these two men, this male couple that’s like getting sent down to create the world and to create human beings out of dust. And so on. Just thinking wait a second here. This is not the sort of model of heterosexual reproductivity that so many latter day saints sort of assumed to be what the heavens are all about and so on.
[00:37:00] And so I’ve become very interested in thinking about queer companionship and queer kinship as a feature of Latter-day Saint cosmology of latter day Saint theology. Certainly as we’ve mentioned in the temple but in other spaces as well, even the whole concept of the kind of male Godhead is a sort of male throuple here that that we might think about oh, there are all of these fascinating counterexamples to the heterosexual pair or even the polygamous a community that other latter day Saint versions of the afterlife have often imagined.
They’re already there. You don’t have to say you don’t have to reinvent the theology. It’s already there that we have these examples of male companionship. There are, I think a number of important limitations to that to, to that kind of approach to it as well. And over the last decade, I’ve been in a lot of conversations about this.
Where do women fit into this? And we really do have such a kind of [00:38:00] structured theology around sexual difference here with respect to the priesthood, for instance, that there aren’t really good models in LDS cosmology of women acting independently of women forming their own relationships and, being goddesses together, for instance.
So I want to kind of say there are some limitations to the androcentrism of Mormon queer theology sometimes. And that’s an important piece that’s worth working out and continuing to think through and what the implications of what broader shifts in the theology might mean for women’s place in the church. But yeah I’ve become really interested in looking at the things that are, again already in the theology as examples of queer relationships.
Colette: I love it so much, like seriously, that, that blew my mind when you were talking about yeah, there are limitations to it, but I think. How has this not been talked about before, when you were talking about it? I’m like, oh my gosh maybe I’m not wrong for [00:39:00] thinking I can have a non-male partner in the afterlife and it’d be okay. Because I always felt as I was wrestling with my sexuality, I’m like, why would it be essential that I am sealed to a man? If the goal is to be sealed to God, why should it matter the gender of my partner? And so to have you explain it so clearly I’m like, oh my gosh, I can get behind this gospel. This is awesome.
Taylor: Thank you so much. I’m glad that had such a huge impact for you because it certainly did for me when I started putting some of those pieces together.
Kate: Taylor, do you want to follow up with any of that, about what you’re thinking about bodies? Cause part of this conversation thinking about gender does have to do with bodies and I know that you’re exploring some of those ideas.
Taylor: Yeah. One of, one of the interesting things that comes out of that mid 20th century theology around the fluidity of gender is also to start thinking about bodies as fluid too. Latter-day saints didn’t[00:40:00] think that, you wouldn’t always necessarily have male and female genitalia in the afterlife.
And so again, they didn’t come to see sexual difference as necessarily an embodied phenomenon, but more as a kind of dispositional one, right? Like you are a male. If you learn to act in male ways and you’re a female, if you learn to act in female ways, but our bodies, even in LDS theology are in some ways epiphenomenal to who we are.
We think of ourselves as first an intelligence. And then gaining a spirit body, and then that body becomes a sort of mortal body that we have now. And then that body is lost for a period and then we don’t have it again. And then we get another new glorious body, right? We believe in transitions, we’re constantly transit. Our bodies are constantly changing. The thing that makes us our body is something that we see is totally mutable. And that all different kinds of [00:41:00] bodies are available to us to inhabit. Whatever it is that we think of ourselves as who we are in so many ways, our bodies are actually not that thing in some totally fixed way.
And that’s not to diminish the importance of bodies because in the end, like in some ways that’s all that we really are, is bodies, right? We are just these material clumps, and so I don’t want to dismiss that, but I want us to point out the way that the theology itself actually thinks about the contingency and mutability of the body as actually as the fundamental thing of what we are things that are going to be in changing bodies and in changeable bodies for a long time. And especially for thinking about non-normative bodies as a kind of model in some respects for the possibilities that our bodies may experience the kinds of things, the kinds of identities that we may have because of our bodies for me also became another kind of important piece to, to think with.
Kate: Yeah. [00:42:00] Cool. Thank you. I would like to transition to talk about masculinity because this is a topic that’s come up a couple of times and it’s hard to get a grasp on these distinctions between femininity and masculinity and whether they’re valuable distinctions and whether feminism is inclusive of certain types of masculinity. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Taylor: Yeah, hopefully. One of the fascinating things and the way that gender was often discussed, not only in LDS context, but really as it comes out of the feminist movement. And I think that there are important reasons for this, is that gender often meant women and gender often meant femininity.
And I think that one of the important correctives to that that was especially led by [00:43:00] gay men and trans individuals of starting to think that no gender really is all of the different ways that we might do gendered things. And so thinking about masculinity as an important piece for better understanding femininity, for better understanding sexual identities and so on, was a really important corrective in the scholarship that I tried to take a look out a little bit more in my own work here.
So thinking about the kinds of masculinities that latter day saints were putting forward often had to do with sexuality, interestingly enough. And where a lot of the attention to masculinity kind of gets focused on is is in terms of anti homosexuality. And latter day Saint men for instance, are heavily screened for non-normative masculine behaviors in ways that are to screen for homosexuality. And so this goes back to youth interviews, which start in the 1960s and seventies where they’re going to like regularly interview youth [00:44:00] in order to catch them early on. If there are, things that are starting to go astray. And they’re focusing on a certain set of masculine behaviors that they come to define in anti homosexual ways, especially around something that they’re calling self-mastery.
And this has a lot to do with how one shapes and controls one’s desires. It was especially important for how latter day Saint leaders cracked down on masturbation. There’s a huge masturbation panic in the church in the post-World war II era. And a lot of the screening of the youth was focused on rooting out masturbation for instance. Self-control in terms of that was another major piece of it.
So I think that part of them, the way that latter day saints come to understand masculinity. And as we mentioned, as the sort of masculinity leads to heterosexuality was the sort of belief, right? And so as the way that. church leaders regulated young men’s behavior and, you know, we were involved in the boy Scouts. so all of this kind of stuff were ways of trying to [00:45:00] shape the young heterosexual.
There’s actually a fantastically interesting manual that the church puts out in 1985 called a parent’s guide. A little bit of a confusing title, but once you read it, you realize it’s all about like, how do I make sure my kids are straight? And it’s like, all right, when they’re, zero to 18 months, these are the things that you focus on. And when they’re 18 months to three years, these are the things you focus on. When they’re five to 12, these are the things you focus on. And it is a guide for how to like create the properly masculine and properly feminine subjects in your children. And to see childhood is like this way of shaping children in this regard.
Kate: so some of that rhetoric still exists. And I know this is kind of out of your wheelhouse, but I see this as a spectrum with femininity on one side and masculinity on one side. And if you’re not working towards masculinity, then you’re slipping towards femininity. And I don’t know if there is gender or [00:46:00] queer theory, that’s going to help us preserve a sense of what it is to be a man and what’s okay to do as a man in regards to masculinity and all of those things. And I’ve had pushback on this. There’ve been folks who have said yeah, you need to be mindful of a lot of this binary stuff, but I, I think the binary is femininity and masculinity. And as long as you have femininity, you’re gonna have the binary of masculinity.
Taylor: Yeah, I think this is a really important point. And we’re certainly, in a little bit of a cultural transition around the metaphors here. The spectrum metaphor, I think has become kind of popular, where you’ve got on one far end, you have the manly masculine male, and then you have the hyper feminine, female on the other end of the spectrum. And then other people are kind of in between those, right?
That’s a metaphor that I think has a lot of limitations. Number one, [00:47:00] I think that it’s still sorta privileges the masculine manly male as the ideal and the feminine female as the ideal on the other end. And then everybody else is like a weird hybrid or mixture or something.
So I don’t think that really works. And even with respect to sexuality, the same thing that there’s like the ones and the fives on the Kinsey scale. And I think that this sort of spectrum language obscures more than it clarifies in, in some respects.
So not that I necessarily have the solution to this, to the problem of what’s the right metaphor, but I want to put forward ones that I would like to have us be thinking about ones that don’t sort of privilege certain kinds of identities as the idealized versions of those. But rather, and this is where even the whole language that we have around male and female and masculinity and femininity as these binaries, to unthink those things is very difficult, right? Non-binary and gender queer people are often trying to push [00:48:00] against these. Not only that the binary itself is artificial and that the kind of in-betweeness that some people are forced to occupy in that spectrum language is problematic, but that we need to really unthink the very categories themselves as reinforcing the categories that we’re trying to undo.
And this goes back to some of that analysis about queer theory that I was mentioning at the very beginning of our discussion that the sex gender distinction was really another way of kind of smuggling back in binary male, and female, and saying that, yeah, there’s just this natural difference between male and female.
And queer theorists were again, trying to pull the rug out from underneath that, that, that argument is saying, you’re just smuggling gender back in by saying there are some things that are natural and some things that are cultural. Again, I don’t know what the best metaphor, what the best alternative is. People are looking at like grids or people are looking at Venn diagrams and bell curves [00:49:00] and all other kinds of ways besides the kind of spectrum language. But I think that you’re right to point out that we have exhausted in some way, the utility of some of these and unthinking them is posing a little bit of a challenge.
Kate: You’re part of this group of scholars. I think that folks put you as like a Mormon scholar, religious scholar, and all of that, but you are a queer theorist, you’re a gender theorist. So you engage in these communities. So is there a place where you’re seeing these grids and things that we can tell people where to go to explore that a little bit more?
Taylor: Oh, yeah. Good question. No, yeah. Good question. In some ways. A lot of the places that these things are happening is not necessarily in the scholarship. The scholarship is not on the front lines of some of these cultural discussions. These are happening in social media circles. These are happening in, it used to be on tumbler and in blogs. And then, now on Instagram, so the kinds of [00:50:00] conversations, Kate, that you’re engaged in that you mentioned at the top of the episode, that’s where a lot of these fights are kind of getting worked out. And in many cases, scholars are lagging behind sometimes.
On the other hand, I will say that there, there aren’t any real orthodoxies that have emerged, I don’t think yet. And that queer theorists don’t always agree on some of these things. So there are some that are very committed to alternative pronouns altogether, G GG J and th things along these lines, that’s not necessarily something that has caught on to, all queer theorists necessarily accept some of those positions.
So even within these communities, you may find somebody who has a really strong opinion about something that it doesn’t necessarily represent the universal position in part, because I think that the conversation is very much still in, in emerging.
Kate: I kind of love that answer because that’s the answer that I give, too. Is that it, because scholarship, you have to [00:51:00] go through peer review. There’s a long time and things are just taking place so quickly on social media that it’s hard to keep up, but I think it is good to, to keep track of that scholarship and where it’s come from, because if you’re not, you’re going to go through ideas again and again, if you’re not keeping track of the scholarship
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Kate: Recently, there’ve been a couple of things that have come up in the past few weeks that I think you can help us unpack a little bit.
One is that the last few days, Heavenly Mother has really become a budgeoning topic. Something that’s really exploded. I know you’ve talked about Heavenly Mother and trying to think through this and almost degendering divinity. How do you, how do we talk through that? How do we work through this process?
Taylor: Yeah. So I’ll say, I don’t know what to make of all of these rumors about Heavenly Mother. And if your listenership isn’t [00:52:00] familiar, there’s basically a bunch of rumors that are going around that the church is going to crack down on Heavenly Mother, literally like the language of crackdown, and that’s not entirely unbelievable because the church has done that in the past in the 1990s, they felt like things were getting out of control and apparently some leaders think that’s where we’re headed right now.
I know fascinatingly a number of people that I would consider to be on the conservative end of things who are big fans of Heavenly Mother, who like talk about Heavenly Mother all the time. And I think that this makes some of the senior church leaders a little nervous, so I don’t want to dismiss it entirely, but I also don’t want to like we don’t know what, who started the rumors. And, I was hearing the rumors before they came up because of my work with Dialogue journal of Mormon thought, for instance, and people were saying, oh, you need to be careful there. But I’m like nobody said anything yet. So why are we all freaking out about this?
So we’ll see if anybody even says anything at all. Or if this is just one of those rumors. Tea is going to be okay now in the Word of Wisdom. All these rumors always get started right before General Conference. And I never know, I don’t [00:53:00] know. I don’t really don’t really believe many of them. But but the conversations around Heavenly Mother I think are kind of at an interesting place in in the church and that are worth thinking about and paying attention to.
Kate, you mentioned that I’ve written a little bit about this in the past. I’ve written a couple of articles, one in Harvard Theological Review and another in a philosophy journal called Sophia. And in those two articles about Heavenly Mother, I kind of try to explore two different problems.
And then I’ll kind of preview, I think where these conversations might be going. One was with respect to the way that feminists often talked about Heavenly Mother, as they were trying to promote the notion of the divine feminine was often in ways that explicitly placed heterosexuality at the center of the divine. And that it was this idea of the male and female, when they’re joined together, create this sort of super power God thing. And, women need to be respected because they’re half of this [00:54:00] other part of the, of divinity. And, there’s a lot to to be said to, to credit these ideas of kind of putting women into the center of a Mormon cosmology and a Mormon divinity.
On the other hand, as I pointed out, that really means that heterosexuality is what you’re basing that on. And so I wanted to kind of criticize some of the ways that feminists had discussed Heavenly Mother as not being queer inclusive, for instance. And so to think about alternative models for that, that some of them that Colette raised earlier, about thinking about same-sex relationships as already a part of Mormon cosmos and so on as a kind of models that we might look to.
The other article that I wrote hasn’t received as much attention or much traction, but I think is worth for me at least, I’m a little biased of my own work. I wanted to really look at some of the assumptions that Mormon feminist theology often put forward also[00:55:00] around the idea that if we can just talk more about Heavenly Mother than feminism will follow, right? That, that discourse itself about Heavenly Mother
is liberating, right? The talking about her is liberating. And maybe there’s some, maybe there’s some value to all of that, but it didn’t necessarily seem to be empirically true for me. We have traditions like the Catholic tradition that talk about the Virgin Mary all the time. That talk about exalted female figures all the time.
And even latter day Saint leaders who talk about Heavenly Mother all the time in ways that aren’t necessarily liberatory. And so it didn’t necessarily seem to me to be the case that discourse itself was like the key to what liberation was. And part of that was that the way that latter day saints often experience the divine [00:56:00] is not only through discourse and not only through talking, but often through spiritual experiences, through spiritual manifestation, through visions and so on. And that it was these experiences that somehow actually gave power and force to the way that latter day saints talk about the male Godhead, for instance.
And maybe it’s not just discourse about Heavenly Mother, but it’s other kinds of experience of what I refer to there is as the presence of Heavenly Mother as actually being maybe even more important and more transformational. So I want us to maybe think a little bit more, a little bit differently about the maybe slightly naive assumptions that theology itself is going to is necessarily going to lead to some positive outcomes.
Okay. One other thing about Heavenly Mother is that Dialogue, a journal of Mormon thought in April of this year, which is actually exactly one month and one day. We’re going to be releasing a new [00:57:00] issue that is dedicated to theology and poetry and personal voices essays about Heavenly Mother for the first time in the Journal’s history.
And I’m really excited about it and the timing of a potential crackdown against Heavenly Mother of that was not planned whatsoever, but but hopefully we’ll maybe bring even more attention to this really important topic. And we’ve got some fantastic essays by Blaire Ostler, Margaret Toscano, others who are thinking through both of the issues that, that I mentioned around the kind of persistence of heterosexuality, the importance of women’s bodies as being thought of as divine in Mormon, feminist theology and a bunch of other really interesting issues that I can’t wait for people to read.
Kate: Yeah, I’m excited for that because I’m struggling as a nonbinary person, not just a queer person as a non-binary person too, right? The heterosexuality is already difficult. But then to say there’s some sort of [00:58:00] cosmic, yin and yang is difficult. So I’m looking forward to that.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. And, this is, I think for me and certainly I think for you too, Kate, like the issue that’s worth thinking about, and again, stripping down the theology to reconsider some of these most basic assumptions and the way that we think oh, that’s this great progressive thing. But is again, based on a kind of exclusion of a marginal people who are not in that vision. And so I want us to have a theology that is capacious enough to hold all of those people and all of those identities.
Kate: Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited for that to come out. Margaret Toscano was my Greek teacher, by the way.
Taylor: Oh, really fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah.
Kate: I did want to ask you about the conservative movement right now against specifically against trans folks across the United States, 133 [00:59:00] bills that are up to potentially be passed. Governor Abbott coming out in Texas making statements about affirming care being child abuse, there is a definite conservative pushback. Do you see the historical trajectory for that?
Taylor: Absolutely. And I think that we’re in an era where you know, just as we transitioned from. Race to anti homosexuality, I think that we’re seeing an era where culture is not really supporting the anti homosexuality position anymore. And so now the right house to find a kind of new enemy and trans kids seem to be it. And these are all interrelated, I think not only as expressions of a kind of authoritarian control over the lives of marginalized people, but as a kind of shifting of the strategies of the [01:00:00] right to find these things that other conservatives will think are so extreme and so dangerous, and so the demonization of these figures. And I mean, you can even look literally at the way that these conservative organizations once talked about race and they talked about miscegenation as this terrible thing. And then they said, homosexuality, is this terrible thing. And now it’s trans issues, right? So in a way like the positive spin is I think that we can look at these as the last gasps of these conservative movements as they try and find a smaller and smaller space to occupy.
But it’s a very dangerous time for those who are caught in the middle of it. And I do not envy the individuals and the families of these individuals who are caught up in, in fighting these battles on the front lines and who faced so much unnecessary hatred from these communities in ways that it’s really quite shockening. Shockening? Shockening isn’t a word. Shocking [01:01:00] and sickening to see.
Yeah I hope that we continue to see progress and that these movements lose ground, but yeah we’re in the middle of it right now. It feels like it does in the mid two thousands with respect to same-sex marriage, that we saw a huge backlash against same-sex marriage before society was like that was dumb, and hopefully we get there on this issue as well. But, yeah, it’s a very tough time. It’s been a rough couple of weeks..
Kate: Yeah. Thank you. That’s what I’ve been thinking too, is that a lot about the mid two thousands and even all the way up until 2015, which your article came out in 2011, towards posts heterosexual Mormonism, and, you know, you were caught up in the midst of that. You were speaking in a moment when that hype was there.
Taylor: Yeah. My, my graduate education happened in the two thousands. And as I mentioned, I was [01:02:00] studying gender and sexuality and with respect to early Christianity and I couldn’t not pay attention to what was happening in the church during that time period. And prop eight, as for so many people was a powerful moment in my own intellectual formation where I realized oh, these are big issues that aren’t going away. And they’re hard issues.
Back then before there was, Instagram and all these other things, Mormon blogging was the place where all the LDS folks gathered and thought and hashed out these issues. And so many of us were formed and shaped by by those moments, in that media.
And this was like the topic that everybody was interested in. And I followed those arguments very closely and very, dejectedly disappointed at the level of conversation that we were seeing there. And so that’s what sort of inspired me to say maybe I could offer something that’s a little bit more thought out. Yeah that’s the origins of that and very much shaped by that kind of a, a low point in [01:03:00] certainly at least where I see the church’s relationship to issues related to homosexuality.
There, there are a number of very low points as I discovered in writing my book. But that one seemed to be not one seem to be, for me, at least it was when I was living through a pretty tough one.
Kate: You paint this like very interesting picture throughout your book about psychology through these decades. Where is it now and where is it going?
Taylor: Yeah. So just to recap the history, and then I can say where it’s now and where it’s going. One is that in the 1950s and sixties and early 1970s, very beginning of that decade, many psychologists excepted what was then the DSM, the diagnosticians statistics manual which pathologized, homosexuality, and saw homosexuality and transsexuality when it eventually makes it in, as a sort of mental illness.
And so the church really comes to adopt this perspective in this era. They see [01:04:00] same sex attraction as they come to call it as a sort of psychological malady. And they talk about in terms of a cure and a sickness and an illness, and they have this very kind of therapeutic language around it. And at the same time they’re developing a whole apparatus really for treating homosexuality, but other kinds of, things that they see as trauma based and, bishops were increasingly asked during this time period to be like counselors, you know, and they’re like we’re not trained in any of this stuff. People are coming into them with addiction and people are coming into them with, all of these other kinds of chronic issues. And they’re like we don’t know what to do. Like I’m an accountant or I’m a football coach or whatever. They’re pulling their hair and they’re asking the church to help them out.
And the churches, promising bishops can cure your homosexuality and bishops are like, I don’t know how to cure homosexuality. And so the church launches with the whole uh, this whole arm of the church they ended up actually taking it over [01:05:00] from the Relief Society, but it was LDS social services, or sometimes it’s called LDS welfare services and has different names, but it’s always the same organization and they hire a bunch of psychologists. Bunch of Latter-day saints are going off to graduate school and studying counseling and getting PhDs and masters in psychology and social work. And the church starts hiring these people to provide a kind of para ecclesiastical care. And in some respects we can see okay this is the professionalization of this project. And it’s maybe better than having bishops deal with, incest ,trauma, or whatever kinds of things that they’re dealing with. Maybe we should have professional counselors deal with this stuff.
On the other hand, this became the tool for for continuing on what had once been normative of psychological theories of homosexuality as a pathology. Once those are abandoned by secular institutions in the 1970s, the church and other conservative organizations continue to pick them up and continue to say no. It really is a psychological pathology and [01:06:00] psychological treatment and care and repairative therapy and all of these kinds of psychological approaches are going to be the solution here.
And there was a lot of faith in the methods of psychology as the treatment, as the proper treatment and cure for homosexuality. That lasts up until the nineties and the church’s starts to take a little bit more of a nuanced position on this. They’re very much still all in on repairative therapy. And they’re co-sponsoring an organization that rises during this era called Evergreen International, which is one of the ex-gay ministries in the broader ex-gay ministry world. But the church actually has a kind of unofficial relationship with it and they’re utilizing their services and so on.
And that organization ends up folding in the early 2010s along with other ex-gay ministries, famous other ex-gay ministries also fold. And there was really a kind of reckoning with the [01:07:00] promises that had been made for decades at that point, that there was going to be a cure that certain people could at least be cured or, and a lot of people saying I was all in on this, I was a counselor in this, and it didn’t work.
And so there was really a kind of coming to terms with the failures of the promises that had been made for so long. And really in some respects, maybe even the devastating loss of life that had happened under the watch of this whole program, as well as people who quote unquote failed to live up to the expectations that the psychologists were promising them took their lives or all sorts of tragedies that sort of emerge out of this era. That still exists. There are still ex-gay ministries that service Latter-day saints. There are still some repairative therapy organizations, but my sense at least, is that over the last decade, the church has walked back and taken a much more cool stance. [01:08:00] There’s even evidence of them shutting down in some cases ex-gay organizations that are trying to speak on BYU’s campus or BYU Idaho’s campus. And really, I think trying to distance themselves a little bit from this movement.
And the church at the same time became much more comfortable over the last decade and a half with church members identifying as LGBTQ, which they didn’t use to support at all. They used to say well, if you say that, if you identify as that, then you know that it’s going to cause the problem it’s going to lead to it. And you’re actually, a child of God, you’re not gay. That’s the identity that you should have. And I think through the work of a number of activists, primarily behind the scenes, as I understand it, church leaders have come to take much more nuanced perspectives on those and have come out with documentation, websites and other sorts of support and church leaders stating that it’s okay to identify as LGBTQ which goes, I think in part with it backing away from repairative therapy.
So that sort of is [01:09:00] where we’re at right now. Certainly a lot of mixed reactions that LGBTQ church members have in this new era. Some finding themselves in a very supportive environment, others, not at all. And the sort of afterlife of some of these older theories continue to live on. But yeah, what’s the future? I don’t know. I dunno. I wish I knew. Yeah. What are you, what do you all think is the future here?
Colette: I don’t know. It’s interesting. I actually, I don’t think listeners probably know this cause it’s not something I talk about a ton, but I actually worked for LDS Family Services as an intern during my master’s program in 2011, 2012. And so it is, back then, I wasn’t aware of my queerness and I did have some queer clients. It wasn’t pushing at that time any conversion therapy. I was just very, okay. Well, What do you want to do with this? How does this fit in with your worldview? And that sort of thing. And I, I don’t know. I’m just really curious. It’s been interesting since, you know, the decade, since I’ve worked for LDS Family [01:10:00] Services, just the changes they’ve made in other areas, highlighting in particular dropping the adoption program they used to run. I remember I helped with different groups, like a birth parent support group, groups in helping prospective adoptive parents get prepared and things like that. And they’ve gone away from that. They’re no longer an adoption agency in part, probably because of some of these queer issues and potentially being forced to accept queer couples as potential adopting couples.
So I don’t know. We’ve already seen changes. I remember when I was there again in 2011, 2012, they were starting to get more towards the model of focusing on, these are our core issues that we focus on as therapists. And if it’s more generic, then we want to refer out to therapists in the community that can do that. We really want to focus on. And I’m going to forget exactly. I want to say it was like focus on couples counseling, keeping couples together in sealed marriages,[01:11:00] focus on pornography things that they feel they have a very ecclesiastical pull and view on, whereas, oh, more therapists in the community can help with generic. I don’t wanna say generic depression, but you know, that sort of thing and specialize in these intersections. I know that’s been moving a bit in that direction since then. It was starting a decade ago and I’m here that’s they still do quite a bit of referring out when necessary. So I don’t know. We’ll see.
Taylor: That’s so fascinating. And it doesn’t surprise me that even a decade ago or so that, conversion therapy wasn’t, the number one goal. That’s, that doesn’t surprise me because I think that there, that was already, when we started to see. some walking back of some of those ideas. Very famously Elder Bruce Hafen gives a talk at Evergreen, I think in that same year where he praises all of the benefits of repairative therapy and so on.
But it’s happening, I [01:12:00] think at the same time that even the LDS Social Services psychologists are like, yeah, we’re not all in on this anymore. And I think at one of the interesting places to watch and places to look at is the way that the therapist community has often led the path on changing LDS attitudes and teachings on some of these things. Certainly, for a very way, too long, in some ways they were caught up in the repairative therapy ideologies and teachings that had survived for a long time in these conservative circles. But at the same time, you go back and you can look at the articles that are being published in the 1980s and 1990s by psychologists who were saying, we’ve got this homosexuality thing all wrong. This is the way that we need to do it. And that’s the psychologists who were leading the path and challenging the dominant ideas. And so I, I think that’s a space to take a look at it Like they’re often on the Colette, the kind of work that you’re doing is often actually leading the way for where we’re going to.
Colette: But it is [01:13:00] interesting. I think I’ve referenced this story before. I worked for the church until last year. And I can’t remember if it was 2019 or 2020. I was invited as a therapist working for a CES institution. And by invited, it was like, you’re going to this. To a training that was for all LDS Family Services, counselors that were full-time in anywhere. They were flying people in from all over for this training. And I’m like, oh, great. Free CEUs. This is awesome. The first day was great. It was talking about attachment based couples counseling, awesome stuff. But then the second day, they were talking about the upcoming handbook changes around queerness.
And so, again, I can’t remember it was 2019 or 2020. Kate, you might know which changes I’m referring to. And I was just sitting there so uncomfortable. Hearing some anti queer rhetoric, but also seeing [01:14:00] the contradictory nature of what they were saying was going to be coming out in this handbook within the next month and wanting the counselors to be prepared for how to interact with ecclesiastical leaders and clients around these issues.
Where as I, as a queer person is like this makes absolutely no sense. And I don’t know how all the counselors wrestle with that. I was so grateful that though I didn’t have to interact much with ecclesiastical leaders because I was not going to be comfortable holding what the church’s new line was around these handbook changes. When again, talking about, yes, we support trans individuals in being able to make social changes as far as they can, we can use their name and update their name on the records of the church, but then saying very contradictory things within the same handbook about [01:15:00] trans individuals.
I think some of these therapists are just in a very odd position and coming at it from a slightly outside point of view, was just mind-boggling. And I’m not sure what else they have to add to that, but I think the church is still continuing to wrestle and figure some of these things out and they’re wrong still in some of this.
And you can tell they’ve talked to queer individuals, but not fully heard or listened. Cause again, it was so contradictory and I was just so confused and it just hurt my soul to hear some of these changes that now are in the handbook. People are aware of them. It’s public now. It was just such an odd experience. And so I am curious as a church potentially continues to double down with all the different anti queer rhetoric going on socially. I don’t know where it’s going to go.
Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. I’m curious to know where they will land on some of these issues over the long-term. We [01:16:00] know that there are going to be more changes, because there have been changes. So many changes over the last several decades. Of course, they’re going to continue to change on these issues.
I think that whether they as you said, Colette, double down and say, this is the thing that we’re going to like, you know, identify ourselves as, that certainly is an option. And church leaders seem to be indicating that all the time. They keep, seem to be saying very loudly. Like we aren’t going to change on these issues. There’s some sort of fundamental thing that we don’t see it possible. We’ve taken it to the Lord and we’re not going to change.
The other thing that we might see is that sort of smaller continued accommodations. And this is a way that in some ways the church did with respect to women’s issues is they said here’s our bright line. Women are not getting the priesthood. Women can exercise the priesthood vicariously out of all sorts of weird things that they’re doing now, how they say the women sorta have the priesthood, but don’t. But they’re going to make all these [01:17:00] accommodations, women are going to be invited to ward council meetings more often, and women, we want women’s voices here. Women are going to pray in general conference and speak more in general conf. They’re going to try to make as many accommodations as they can while stopping short of that line. And we may see that’s what the church does on a lot of these issues with respect to gender and sexuality, that there’s a sort of line that they’re going to stop at.
We may see them admit same-sex married couples, but not to the temple or something like that. There are all kinds of things where they say that’s our line, but they’re going to do as much as they can up to that line.
And then the other option in some ways is going to be what they did with respect to race, which is just to say, we’re going to get rid of this restriction altogether. And we’re going to forget about it. We’re never going to talk about race again, except for 30 years later, we’re going to say, What? There are still racists around here? What’s going on? And the church may go in that direction too, where they try to just change the doctrine altogether as they did with respect to race. Which one of those [01:18:00] three directions we go?
I don’t know. I don’t know which way the church is going. Right now, they seem to be telling us that they’re going in direction number one. That they’re going to not make any changes. But at the same time, they are doing things very much in re with respect to direction number two, where they are making a number of accommodations. They’re making, slowly, changes that allow LGBTQ individuals to identify as such. Allow trans individuals to use their preferred names and preferred pronouns in church. It’s some accommodation, right? And in some respects, better than the kinds of policies that we had before, but is definitely stopping short of the kind of full equality that trans members deserve and expect and should be accorded. So I don’t know, I don’t know where we’re going to go, but those seem to be, as I’m reading the tea leaves the options that are on the table, at least.
Colette: And it is interesting, because I just remembered one specific thing that freaked me out and confused me was they had as part of this, rolling out the handbook changes [01:19:00] talking to prepare counselors about what they may be dealing with queer individuals, they focus specifically one of the presentations on detransition therapy. Talking about how, we really shouldn’t be pushing people to support transition, because there are people who end up detransitioning.
Taylor: Right, right.
Colette: I just thought that was such an odd approach and argument to supporting trans individuals because yeah, sure people do detransition but they were making it sound like this is an inevitable outcome for so many people and knowing the science and the research, how few people that is. And so I was just like how they were twisting the science and research to suit this is our current worldview was just so odd to me.
Taylor: This is the way that the ex-gay narratives worked for a long time too. So I think we’re really just seeing the same playbook over and over again. They would take all of these [01:20:00] ex-gay testimonials and say, I used to be gay. And then I found Jesus or whatever, and now I’m not anymore as proof that these worked and that the gay lifestyle was dangerous and that, you had to stop it and change.
And I think that the you’re exactly right to point to the very few cases of detransitioning as the sort of primary evidence and primary argument for a lot of the anti-trans positions that we’re seeing. And that’s not to diminish the importance of thinking about detransition narratives and taking them seriously. I do think that they’re worth thinking about, but the way that those get weaponized against people is a very potentially dangerous situation that I think we’re getting into the same territory that we had with respect to the ex-gay work that the church was involved in for a really long time. So that’s fascinating to see, thanks for the front lines perspective, Colette.
Colette: Couple of years removed. Who knows how it’s going on now. But yeah, that was fascinating to [01:21:00] me knowing exactly highlighting what you said about holding up gay individuals who are no longer gay or no longer acting on it, where as we know that’s not the typical story. And, going back to this is the way a good church member should be acting, even though I really appreciate the efforts people have been making lately to say, this is my story. I’m choosing to be celibate, or I have chosen this or that, but this should not be weaponized. I think that word weaponized is a very important one to be aware of. We should not be using other people’s narratives to weaponize and say, look, if this person can stay celibate, that means you can too. And same with the detransitioning.
Taylor: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you.
Kate: So, how do we get around though, this really interesting point where we have a prophet who is a surgeon [01:22:00] and is constantly talking about the medical field and making these relationships between the medical field and then also making these claims that go against medical science, right? Medical science. How do we deal with that? Like, how does that fit in?
Taylor: Ah, yeah, I, yeah. Other than to say what I said again, I think that we’re in a little bit of a transitional moment where. We’re always in a transitional moment. Like everything is always temporary. We’re going to get another prophet in the next five years probably. And they may have a different perspective on some of these issues. And maybe in the next 20 years we’ll have a different one and will. So I don’t know. But I think that, the best way to counter some of these things is to just explain the science and explain the the psychologic perspectives and to, I Colette that you’ve got firsthand experience and say, these are the clients that I talked to, and here’s how they think about it, to tell our stories. Kate, I know that the work that you do the sort of activism that you do on [01:23:00] social media is a huge benefit to doing this, right?
So you all are much better situated than any. I’m a historian, right? I sit in my office and read books and, whatever. I don’t go on the front lines very often, but you all are. And so you have a much better take on all of this I’m sure than I do. But yeah, I think it’s just patience. And a lot of, just getting the right information out there. People are just misinformed.
Kate: But the, But the historical point is that these, the historical transition then is that the sciences were developed and centered on supporting what the church was saying. And now it’s just a complete rejection of those same social science practices. And I don’t quite know where that line took place, where we’ve now decided this isn’t a scientific endeavor anymore.
Taylor: I’m sometimes skeptical of our uses of science because when you look at the history, you see the way that science supported [01:24:00] all kinds of really terrible things like eugenics and repairative therapy. These were mainstream scientific positions for a long time. And so there is some warrant to having some skepticism about this and where many counter epistemologies would say, listen, you’ve got to pay attention to my experience. These studies have their own problems and so on. Listen to my experience. And that’s often the basis for kind of new scientific paradigms that then emerge. But but yeah, no I think you’re right to to be aware, at least of the history of our scientific projects is often supporting the positions that are the opposite of the ones that the science supports today. So yeah, there’s always some I dunno kind of mature reflection on that, on those limited. limitations.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just interesting that we have that the BYU instance, you were saying, how counselors are the ones that were kind of pushing things in the departments themselves. They were [01:25:00] advocating on behalf of clients, but the larger structure was inhibiting it. And that’s what we’re seeing exactly at BYU right now, The departments for the speech therapy clinic is advocating for something that’s very different from the structural support. And yeah, I just see the churches has promoted. All sorts of scientific endeavors at BYU specifically. And now it’s like, yeah we’re willing to lose accreditation. We’re willing to do all of these things.
Taylor: Yeah. Yep. Exactly.
Kate: Thank you, Taylor so much.
Colette: This has been so good. I know we could keep talking to you forever, but this should probably cut off at some points.
Taylor: Thank you. both. And thanks for all the work that you both are doing. And I’m glad that you found your audience and just keep up all the great work.
Colette: Thank you so much.
Kate: Thanks for listening. We appreciate you joining us today. If you’re liking these episodes, we’d love it if you would rate and review Called to Queer on the podcast player of your choice so that [01:26:00] other people are more likely to find us. We’d also love it if you would share a podcast with a friend who could benefit from hearing these stories. if you want to contact us, you can reach us at hello@calledtoqueer.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram @CalledToQueer. See you next time.