Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman

laurie lee hall served as a bishop and stake president in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and committed her life to the architectural design of major churches and temples. But, after embracing her life as a transgender woman, the LDS Church excommunicated her. Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman (2024) tells her story.Dictates will be helpful to readers new to understanding how Mormonism, and religion more broadly, can exist as a source of both exclusion and refuge for trans people. Dictates explores Hall's lifelong struggle with gender dysphoria, showcasing how, as a young adult, Hall continuously yearned to dress in women's clothing. While converting to Mormonism initially helped Hall to silence these gendered desires, as she married, had children, and moved up the ranks of church leadership, she could no longer ignore her identity as a woman. Living contrary to herself, she endured physical illness, depression, and suicidal ideation. Hall's suffering was inseparable from religion, as she viewed “being female” as “a category of personal sin that I deceived myself into believing I could suppress and control” (108–109).Dictates reveals Hall's evolving journey toward self-acceptance as a Mormon devotee. Praying for the first time as Laurie Lee, she felt God's approval. But God's approval did not translate to familial embrace. Her wife demanded that she “cease thinking about womanhood entirely” (170). Her son reported her to church authorities, which catalyzed her excommunication process.Dictates succeeds at illuminating the systemic oppression of trans Mormons by Latter-day Saint authorities, demonstrating how Hall was stripped of her temple recommend and employment, and pressured to de-transition “back to male or write a letter and resign your membership in the church” (237). In refusing to de-transition, she lost her church membership and her livelihood.The book exposes the structural isolation and exclusion of transgender Mormons. For example, Hall's trans-affirming bishop was prematurely released from his position (241). Hall's wife was threatened with disciplinary action if she decided to remain married to Hall, as authorities considered same-sex relationships “apostasy” (260). Hall and other trans Mormons were and are barred from participating in Relief Society, a gender-segregated church group Hall describes as “the most social of the three Sunday meetings” (235). Ultimately, Dictates captures how Latter-day Saint authorities deprive transgender Mormons of work, community, and access to divine space.Yet Dictates also introduces how trans people challenge the limits of institutional power by showcasing how religious oppression cannot (always) foreclose trans people's access to the divine. For example, Hall maintained an intimate and affirming relationship with the Holy Spirit. The first time Hall prayed in women's clothing, she experienced what she describes as joy through the Holy Spirit's acceptance and love of her identity. When she later received a priesthood blessing from a bishop instructing her to wear “appropriate men's clothing” (178–179), she instead felt the Holy Spirit's presence, telling her, “‘It mattereth not what clothes you wear.’” She goes on, “I had never felt the Spirit so strongly contradict what I heard in a priesthood blessing” (178–79). Ultimately, Dictates reveals how trans Mormons like Hall navigate structural oppression while maintaining, transforming, and strengthening their connection to the divine.Dictates offers an essential lens into the life of one trans woman, but suffers from both an inattention to the racial, linguistic, and class politics of missionizing work abroad (91) and deleterious comparisons to Black civil rights figures (271). But more sustained is a meritocratic approach to religion that reinforces harmful expectations of queer and trans people specifically and all gendered subjects more broadly.Hall repeatedly establishes herself as a model Mormon. But in doing so, she enforces a binary between good and observant Mormons like herself, on the one hand, and unobservant Mormons, on the other. For example, in reflecting on her training as a missionary, she tells readers that she was taught that temple undergarments are “a reminder of a person's covenants and commitment to God” (87). Hall disapprovingly discussed the actions of her peers who “wore gym shorts over the bottoms with the garment legs still extended well below the shorts.” She says: “It all seemed sacrilegious and immodest to me, dismissive of the sacredness of temple garments as I understood them. I stayed dressed in my white shirt and slacks until bedtime” (88). Here, Hall showcases herself as a devout Mormon upholding tradition.This reveals a central irony. While slacking Mormon men can remain congregants within the church, obedient trans women like Hall are excluded from religious life. This discourse of “good/bad Mormon” has several limitations. For trans people, it establishes a politics of respectability where one needs to act as the perfect and appropriate Mormon to vouch for acceptance. Second, it polices and restricts the bodily expressions of all gendered-religious subjects by holding them to a strict standard dictated by church authorities.Moreover, Dictates advances a theology that could make trans people responsible for transforming oppressive religious structures even when they are subject to violence and continued rejection. Hall felt that it was her theological calling to improve Mormon institutions and their views on trans people. She received a message from the Holy Spirit to “read the Book of Esther” (171). “The message was clear,” Hall says. “I had been brought to the ‘kingdom’ and found favor with the church leaders, but I was secretly transgender. It would become my responsibility to come before these leaders, who loved and trusted me, to change their hearts and save my people, the gender-variant Latter-day Saints” (172). I do not take issue with Hall's revelation from the Holy Spirit or her personal theology. But viewing herself as a “modern Esther” (266), I wonder how Hall's theology may place pressure on trans people like herself to stay in oppressive religious institutions even when authorities repeatedly dismiss trans people's concerns and experiences.Overall, Dictates of Conscience offers fundamental insights into the world of being devout, Mormon, and trans. It will be of particular interest to Mormon practitioners, scholars, and undergraduate students interested in learning about gender dysphoria, Latter-day Saint policies related to LGBTQ people, and the oppressive religious treatment of LGBTQ Mormons.