Guest post by Alma Frances Pellett (formerly Frank Alma Pellett). Alma has been happily married 20 years and has sired 5 children. She has enjoyed being a software engineer for the Church History Library for the past 8 years and looks forward to many other opportunities in the future. Her hobbies include reading, woodworking, playing euphonium, and trying to be the best stay-at-home-mother she always dreamed she could be.

My most recent reconstruction of my faith and membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (“the Church”) had to do with the teachings on gender and sexuality.  My understanding has diverged from the documented beliefs of most Church leaders, but I know that what I have managed to work out is good and right. It may change in the future as I learn and grow, but that should be expected. I also know that the Church is where I need to be, even if the Church reduces or removes my membership because of the actions I am now taking in physically and socially transitioning to womanhood.

I was fortunate that, growing up, my parents were good examples of seeking, wrestling, and re-examining their faith before and since they were each converted to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Various bits of theology were gathered from both inside and outside the Church, examined, good bits folded in, and the bad bits forcibly rejected. I may be much more liberal than they are now, but they taught me the basics of how to handle the shifting stones and beams that made up their faith.

One of the first doctrines I remember being taught in Primary is that “our spirits in the pre-existence looked much like our bodies do now.” It fit into my own growing theology, nestled in with many other assorted thoughts about the duality of mortality that grew and shifted over the years. It made sense for the world I knew.

Several years ago, while trying my hand at several Church-themed blogs, something started to shift. I started to read a lot more about the lived experiences of the people in these groups. The internet had made it possible to hear more stories about people on the edges of life than I’d ever heard before. It just took a bit for me to do more listening and learning than “trying to contribute.”

The question about “not choosing your sexuality” nagged at me. I’d known my sexual orientation since my teen years to be solidly attracted to women and not at all attracted to men. Didn’t everyone think that through? Apparently not.

The cracks started forming. If others knew their sexuality as well as I knew mine, then why would God do that?  Maybe it’s one of those “whole life challenges,” like a disability. I have a chronic condition that won’t get better in this life, so maybe being gay is like that.  But wait, gay people have options. They can have relationships and be really, really happy. Do we really need at least one of each gender in the afterlife, and why can’t they be happy like everyone else now? I hoped to let this settle at being ok with gay marriage and “true” marriage is what God wants for the afterlife.

But there was another aspect becoming part of the discussion. I came across a recent news article of an intersex person having their gender marker changed on everything, including in Church records. I learned that there are so many more variables than chromosomes and genitals. There were many stories of people knowing that their gender was assigned incorrectly. A medical term grouped these experiences together.  Gender Dysphoria.

Something in my roughly built theology was creaking. So many of the stories of dealing with gender dysphoria were bringing up memories of similar experiences in my own life.  My philosophizing and theological pondering had suddenly become personal. I have gender dysphoria.

I could almost let it rest as a “whole life challenge.” I mean, I had (and have) a marriage and family that I’d like to keep forever.  But that old load-bearing beam had to change. There were too many cracks, too many possibilities that I had to work out.

The Church has some complicated history on marriage, sex, and gender. Polygyny became an oddity, then was embraced as a necessity, then stopped. People were sealed to the Prophet, the leader of the Church, as a way of securing a place in the afterlife. A person was sealed as a servant. It didn’t matter if you even liked the person you were married to, the important thing was to be sealed together in the afterlife.

People were baptized for their ancestors of a different gender (though it was stopped because gender mattered). Crossdressing (for more than stage performance), openly gay couples, and even transgender people can be found throughout Church history. (Brigham Morris Young, Edith Chapman, and Eva McCleery to name a few). A transgender woman was permitted by the First Presidency of the Church to be considered female and later to be married to a man as a woman in the Temple in 1980.

Mixed into all this were the continuing scientific discoveries of how gender is not consistent across physical structures. This slurry of history, science, and theology was what I had to work into some sense of stability. All I had to work with were the tools that had served me so well in my life: faith and prayer.

What finally came into shape was unexpected, nuanced, and beautiful. God made this world, with all its imperfections, tragedies, and miracles. Some people have been set with conditions that may mean that their gender doesn’t match to what they were assigned at birth. What they do about these conditions, fighting against them, living quietly with them, or doing something to accept them, is between them and whatever God they may or may not believe in. Inside or outside the Church, I cannot deny their journey, because it is theirs, not mine. Joy was meant for everyone as much as possible in this life, not merely stored away for the afterlife.

Personally, I knew that I could manage my dysphoria, though the longing that I hadn’t a name for throughout my life remained. The relief from prayer that confirmed my beliefs of who I am gave me a peace that I didn’t know I was missing. I now tearfully and proudly join with my sisters as we declare “I am a beloved daughter of heavenly parents, with a divine nature and eternal destiny.”  I’ve done my best to anticipate the possibilities of the afterlife, fully understanding that even with so much prayer there is the possibility that I may be completely wrong.  This leans on the solid pillar I’ve kept from the observation made in 1 Nephi 11:17 – “I know that [God] loveth [their] children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.”

The knowledge and understanding I’ve been afforded in my life has caused any number of shifts, breaks, and reinventions of my faith and relationship to God and the Church. I expect and hope there will be more in the future, even if they threaten or break parts I thought would never change. Even if it is as seemingly foundational as “your assigned mortal gender is the same as your premortal gender.”

This post is part of the series, Reconstructing Faith. Find more from this series here.