Many people, churches, and religions take a negative stance on transgenderism. This post is not going to argue why I think that they are wrong, but rather, I want to point out that the LDS/Mormon stance is uniquely inconsistent with their other teachings (in ways that probably don’t apply to most other religions).

Many religions teach that there is a difference between a soul and the body, but LDS doctrine takes this further than most religions by teaching that:

• Our souls (or “spirits”, which is the preferred LDS terminology) existed long before we were born.
• Our souls/spirits have an inherent gender.

In The Family: A Proclamation to the World the church leadership proclaims: “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.”

What happens if the gender of the spirit does not match the gender of the body? We know that this happens because:

• Even when the genitalia are distinct, the chromosomes may not match the genitalia.
• When the genitalia are ambiguous (i.e. intersex/DSD), it used to be common for a surgeon to make the genitalia more distinct (often female, as that was easier), but today those procedures are less common.

So if the body does not always have a distinct gender, but the soul/spirit does, that implies that there have been cases where a male spirit has been paired with a female body (and vice versa).

One would correctly point out that intersex births are very rare (between 1.7% and 0.018%, depending on varying criteria), but this is irrelevant. We have no way to measure a spirit, and we certainly have no way of measuring the gender of a spirit. Hence, asking how often misgendering occurs is the wrong question – the real question is whether it CAN happen. If it CAN happen and we have no way to prove that it only happens infrequently, we must be open to the possibility that it happens more frequently than we expect. We must also agree that it makes no sense for a religion to punish a person for living their lives in accordance to the gender of their spirit (if you believe that a spirit really has a gender).