Resources related to non gender-binary

Quick

• The Spectrum¹ (The Trevor Project)
• Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and NonBinary Youth (The Trevor Project)
• The LGBTQ+ Guide to Online Safety
• How to respond when a child comes out?

General

• wikipedia: Gender: Social categories (especially “non-binary and third genders”)
• wikipedia: Sex and gender distinction

Relevant Scientific Research

• Sexual differentiation of the human brain: Relation to gender identity, sexual orientation and neuropsychiatric disorders (cited by BYU Bio 461 appendix)
• Gene variants provide insight into brain, body incongruence in transgender
• Only two sex forms but multiple gender variants: How to explain? “… it follows from the principles of Ca²⁺- physiology and homeostasis that all individuals of a sexually reproducing animal population have a personalized gender behaviour”

Multi-cultural

• 5 Genders: The story of the native american two-spirits

LDS Perspective

Especially since the 1995 Proclamation on the Family, Latter-day Saints have tended to emphasize the gender binary. The second paragraph reads:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

Nonetheless, there is still some significant room within broader LDS theology to contemplate non gender binaries or transgender individual realities.²

• Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism (Taylor Petrey)
• Queer Mormon Theology: An Introduction (Blaire Ostler)
  • A Thoughtful Faith Podcast: 193 God, the Image of God, Theosis, Sex and Godly Creation: Blaire Ostler
  • Sunstone Podcast: E99 Queer Polygamy: A Conversation with Taylor Petrey and Blaire Ostler
• “A Welding Link of Some Kind: Exploring a possible theology of same-sex marriage sealings” (Nate Oman)
• The Proclamation on the Family: Scripture or Revelation? (argues that the Family Proclamation was not directly referred to as “scripture” or “revelation” in the two decades³ after the proclamation was given—in fact, when an Apostle referred to it as “revelation” in speech, the reference was removed before official publication).
• Joseph Fielding Smith postulated that those in the telestial kingdom would be “neither man nor woman” (Doctrines of Salvation v2, p 287). This was probably suggested as an undesirable outcome, but regardless it means that some kind of genderless/sexless afterlife was envisioned for some people?
• BYU BIO 461 appendix “Gender”⁴

Related

• Sex and Sensibility (discussion of sex and gender from a biologist’s perspective)
• wikipedia: Fraternal birth order and male sexual orientation
• Sex determination is very complex (from Beyond XX and XY: The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination)
• Human Sexuality part 1, part 2, part 3 (lectures from Professor Robert Sapolsky’s Human Behavioral Biology course at Stanford University)
• On a biological origin of homosexuality podcast, video, overhead slides (BYU Professor Bill Bradshaw lecture)
• BYU USGA resource page
• Finding Your True Voice: A Guide to Gender-Affirming Verbal Communication

1. “The Spectrum” pdf directs youth to “identify today on each line”, but the first line—“Biological Sex”—is typically assigned at birth and is typically accurate. Most fundamental aspects of biological sex (e.g., chromosomal karyotype, presentation of male or female genitalia or both at birth) are not related to how an individual feel about them and are unchangeable (i.e., because they are fixed in either historical or biological fact, or both). Mistakes in sex assignment are possible, but rectification of such mistakes go beyond how an individual identifies (e.g., it might involve karyotyping). This is likely a simple oversight on the part of the author of the PDF, which otherwise is a helpful summary. ↩

2. Admittedly, most of those exploring this territory are progressive and/or queer members, but there still may be some validity to their perspective, even to more orthodox members. ↩

3. Additional statements may have been made since then. ↩

4. The authors engage in a significant amount of speculation and inference, and I personally disagree with many of their conclusions, but their engagement with the topic is more biologically informed and theologically broad than is typical of many LDS circles. ↩