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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

  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.