“God knew the DNA, He also knew the gender, and He assigns a 1:1 correspondence.”

I certainly concede that possibility, but I am curious as to why you assert this without answering the questions that I pose to Owen: “I am asking why you think the assignment of XY or XX chromosomes is the will of God, but not XXY. Or, why you don’t think that ambiguously sexed individuals represent the will of God, only unambiguously sexed individuals. Or, why God ensures that a female spirit is born into a female body, even if that body suffers from massive birth defects. Couldn’t he have gone a little further?”

“Because you do not believe that the eternal gender determines what sex God assigns (spirit to body), it must be easier to accept gay marriage as an acceptable alternative.”

Well, just to inform you about these issues, the question of transsexuality has nothing to do with homosexuality. The general divisions of human subjectivity in recent decades distinguish between sex, gender and sexuality. So far I have only discussed sex and gender since I believe that these are the only two that are specifically addressed in the assertion of the eternal nature of gender. Of course, there was once a time when gender and sexuality were conflated, and I would listen to your arguments that the Proclamation makes this conflation between sexuality and gender in a similar way as it does sex and gender, but that would raise a different host of issues. Let’s stick to the question of transsexuality and avoid sexuality per se.

You probably disagree. Because you do not believe that the eternal gender determines what sex God assigns (spirit to body), it must be easier to accept gay marriage as an acceptable alternative. I guess, you assume there’s a possiblity for a masculine spirit being placed in a female body. When I read about Gender being eternal, I hear not only that Gender is eternal, but that God correctly assigned the right gendered spirit to the correct anatomy. Do you have any evidence of this false gendered assignment other than it fits the gay agenda well?

If you do not believe that, these are good distinctions to make. It would be great to ask any of our general authorities what the authors meant.

No, I can’t prove it. It’s just a hunch.

That is my point too, except I don’t understand why you draw the line at God’s intervention into the birth process as only about sex. I am asking why you think the assignment of XY or XX chromosomes is the will of God, but not XXY. Or, why you don’t think that ambiguously sexed individuals represent the will of God, only unambiguously sexed individuals. Or, why God ensures that a female spirit is born into a female body, even if that body suffers from massive birth defects. Couldn’t he have gone a little further?

“I don’t feel any need to account for every type of experience people have. There are too many kinds of crazy out there.”

Wow, this is actually quite offensive. You don’t think that these people are even worth thought? They are simply unthinkable? I think that you should go rent Boys Don’t Cry. Well, besides the fact that they are actual living breathing human beings, including people that I know and love, and including members and former members of our faith as being good enough reasons to think about them, let me suggest a few others. First, if we claim that gender is an eternal and universal human trait, and it turns out that for many people this isn’t the case, then we need to think about what we mean by eternal and universal. We can’t make sweeping claims and simply ignore all the contrary evidence. Second, given that the Brethren have thought about this, and even changed their views moderately over time, I think that it is worth figuring out what is going on here.

As for transsexuals being “crazy,” possibly as “a result of sin and stupidity,” I think that you need to do a little more research on this. The professional evaluation and critical discourses about transsexuality have changed from this view over the last hundred years, especially in the last decades. Further, I have met transsexuals mostly in academia, including one former Mormon (and I know of at least one other). These people are by no means stupid or crazy, nor is their situation “worse” after undergoing surgery.

“I don’t see the point in coming up with a doctrinal explanation for something so rare. The spirit had some (spiritual) gender before that body was ever created, the body ended up biologically damaged, and faith and repentance will still lead to salvation.”

I don’t understand how your second sentence follows from your first here since you say you don’t see the point and then do it anyway. But I don’t get it. Are you saying that the damaged body that houses the gendered spirit could be a mis-gendered body?

I explicitly do NOT assume what the writers mean to say (which I am not sure is either relevant or knowable), but instead analyze what they actually did say. I acknowledge that the document may not be “theoretically sophisticated enough to be aware of the sex/gender distinction.”In the original post I suggest that “the failure to articulate any precise definition opens the text up to multiple interpretations.” This post is an attempt to tease out to what seems to be the most obvious interpretation of the text, namely, that the text is aware of the sex/gender distinction made by second-wave feminists for over two decades before the Proclamation was written. In this view, the Proclamation intervenes in this debate and rejects the idea that gender is culturally conditioned.