Before Thou Camest Forth: Belonging, Desire, and the Exclusion Policies

I don't know where I was or what I was doing when news spread about what has become known as the November 2015 exclusion policy.1 I might not have known about it at all. At the time, I was a high school senior, a member of the debate team, an active Latter-day Saint, a Boy Scout, a priest. Devout, in a way that doesn't ask too many questions.2When President Russell M. Nelson delivered the BYU devotional “The Love and Laws of God” in 2019, I watched from Arizona on the television. I don't quite remember why. It might have been inadvertent, catching the broadcast while exploring channels. (Cable was very new to our family.) In this devotional, he brought up the 2015 exclusion policy—and while I am no longer sure, it is entirely possible that this would have been the first time I even knew about it—and he explained its rationale: “We did not want to put young children in the position of having to choose between beliefs and behavior they learned at home and what they were taught at church.”3 This seemed to me to make sense. Asking a child to covenant to follow the commandments of God and therefore consider their own parents sinners seemed pretty awful to me. That the baptismal covenant, at least as outlined in the Book of Mormon, doesn't really mention anything about same-sex intimacy, did not, evidently, cross my mind.4 Nor did, more broadly, the idea that someone could accept baptism but reject the Church's queerphobic policies.All this is to say that the November exclusion policy may well have slipped past me. There was, I suppose, no one to tell me about it, or at least no one who knew I would've wanted to know—and I had no conscious reason to want to know. Despite having a nonbinary friend, I hardly understood the LGBTQ experience. Even as I became politically progressive through speech and debate—even as I embraced anti-racism and feminism—I didn't feel curious about queerness. It still felt like something that happened to other people. I faked my way through a practice debate on trans medical autonomy and made a coach very proud—but that was the extent of my comprehension. Which is to say: incomprehension. I was sufficiently affirming that my nonbinary friend didn't spurn me, but I don't think I ever actively considered myself an ally. If someone in the ward had themselves been an ally, they probably would have seen me—all buttoned up in a suit and tie, passing the sacrament each week in a short haircut, a perfect Peter Priesthood—as hardly someone interested in understanding queer Latter-day Saints.Well. I say all that. But I did often wear a rainbow necktie.It had a shimmery look and a fine silken texture. I seemed to remember it coming from a department store in Japan, a gift from my mother while we traveled there to visit her friends and our family. As strange as it might be to believe, in wearing it, I never thought of myself as communicating anything about the queer community or how I felt about them. I just thought it looked nice.Reading into this is tempting. Maybe I should. Maybe I shouldn't. It is hard for the hen to remember ever being an egg.Let's start differently.I don't know where I was or what I was doing when news spread about what has become known as the November exclusion policy. I don't know when I heard about it.I do remember the Face2Face devotional held for the launch of Saints: The Standard of Truth, the Church's new book about its early history.5On September 9, 2018, I was at my parents’ home in Arizona. I had, by this time, gone through the Missionary Training Center (MTC); come home early from the Japan Kōbe Mission because of health issues; been set apart as a service missionary; volunteered at local charities and as a Gilbert Temple ordinance worker. Before the MTC, I had been outwardly dutiful but inwardly blasé, hardly devout. After, I was, to put it plainly and devotionally, converted. I'd had a mighty change of heart. I was also, I personally regret to say on account of my present politics, a little more politically conservative than I'd been as a high schooler. Not a reactionary, I think—I thought nothing good could come out of legislative proscriptions about sexuality, and I wanted the civil rights movement to be the real history of the United States—but I believed in moral suasion, and I prayed for God to create some way for my queer friends to become cisgender and straight without it being awful and painful for them.All that to say that I had become the sort of twenty-so-year-old who cared a lot about what was said in a Face2Face devotional about a new Church history book.Whether I watched on the television or a computer screen, I don't remember.I do remember how I felt when Kate Holbrook answered a question about plural marriage.6The hosts read a question shared by a viewer: “I've struggled for years to come to peace about polygamy in the early Church. Why was it necessary for Joseph Smith and many other leaders to practice it?” This was, more or less, how I felt too. Plural marriage had always been something breathlessly rushed through during a lesson about the Doctrine and Covenants, something awkwardly laughed about because it was too strange, too weird. I clung to anecdotes about Brigham Young wishing he could die rather than marry polygamously because it just seemed so obviously wrong.7 This was not a feminist antipathy born during my high school speech and debate days. This aversion had preceded those and had persisted through the mild conservatism of my early adulthood.I was, in other words, as far as I have been able to tell, a relatively typical Latter-day Saint of my generation, as far as the question of polygamy went. Faithfulness and a mighty change of heart did not make it stop seeming gross. I paid close attention to the screen, and when Elder Quentin L. Cook asked Kate Holbrook to answer, I paid close attention to her.Holbrook initially emphasized how plural wife ancestors of hers set a moving example of faith, and how plural marriage was a rare exception while monogamy was the Lord's rule. This was, in some sense, comforting.But then Kate Holbrook pushed back a little on the question's assumptions—gently, so gently. But push she did.“When some people heard the 1890 manifesto announcing an end to plural marriage, they were relieved,” she said. “Plural marriage had been hard for them, and they rejoiced.” This was as I had figured.“And when some people heard this manifesto,” she continued, “they were devastated, and they cried. They had sacrificed so much, and they had testimonies of this principle.”8I was surprised—confused, even. Devastated? Cried? About the end of polygamy? This seemed to have the story backward. Wasn't the agony supposed to come with its adoption, not its conclusion?For all that I knew people who were LGBTQ in one way or another, it hadn't really sunk in that someone could want to be something other than “normal.” Something other than, in this case, monogamous.Looking back, I suppose it was a typically imperious attitude for a Latter-day Saint. It hadn't sunk in that someone righteous could want to be some way other than normal. The memory is old enough that I don't flinch at it. But I blame myself for it a little. Sure, the Church had shaped me. But if young Latter-day Saints I meet these days are any indication, self-righteousness isn't inevitable.In any case, the strangeness stuck with me. It stayed with me all the way until the second volume of Saints released in 2020. This volume gave much of the stage to the story of Ida Hunt Udall, who was so avidly for plural marriage that she turned down a proposal from a monogamous suitor.9 This, too—the thought that there were women who wanted plural marriage so much that they wanted it more than monogamy—left me thunderstruck. Monogamy (implicitly heterosexual) had seemed so obvious, so automatic, so inevitable. Variation therefrom was the realm of nonmembers or inactive members. But here was Ida, on display in a Church publication as practically a protagonist—as someone worthy of sympathy and respect, even emulation.Between Holbrook's injunction and Udall's life was something that felt like a revelation, albeit not then in so many words. It was a discovery at least. Until then, I hadn't imagined that “righteous” people could genuinely want to do things I had been taught to consider wrong. I'd never thought that someone might want to marry polygamously. I'd never considered that someone might want to be queer.I'd never imagined that someone might want to be me.Not until Holbrook said that some Latter-day Saints mourned the end of polygamy, not until I saw how Ida Hunt craved polygamy, not until I realized that monogamous (and, with that, implicitly, heterosexual and cisgender) was not the only way people I admire and with whom I identify could want to be.I can't be completely sure I wouldn't have started to question my gender without these experiences. But I have usually thought it no coincidence that it was later that year, in 2020, that I began to try in earnest to understand what being trans meant and felt like. At first, I thought I was trying to understand a character I wanted to write. Then, I thought I was trying to understand my nonbinary friend.Pretty soon, I was trying to understand myself.In the parlance of the trans community, my egg cracked.10And I wondered if Ida had felt the same thing, so many years before.Let's start differently.The exclusion policy and the way I'd learned to think about desire and gender did not emerge ex nihilo in the twenty-first century.11 Both had roots in a much larger, older story about empires, nations, and race. Historically speaking, heterosexual monogamy has long been a marker for white supremacist, Christocentric, heteronormative imperialism. Or, to put it in less abstruse terms, during the age of overt military imperialism, especially the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, white people have tended to be Christian people and because of that have tended to be monogamous people and because of that have tended to assume that monogamy was a sign of “Christian civilization” and that nonmonogamy—that polygamy—was equivalent with “heathenness,” with “savagery,” with “backwardness,” with deserving to be colonized. In history, these boundaries have usually been more porous than given credit for—there have been more white polygamists and Brown monogamists than imperialists found convenient to recognize—but the imagined lines still carried (and carry) enormous power and meaning.12Latter-day Saints instituted plural marriage in this context and became that context's victims, accused of being “uncivilized,” of being less-than-white, less-than-American, unfit to govern themselves—of deserving to be colonized.13 Church leaders, whether strategically or desperately or cynically, tried to “compensate” for the “stain” of polygamy by overperforming whiteness and patriarchy—assuring the United States that polygamists though they were, they were racist polygamists, sexist polygamists, colonialist polygamists, polygamists who belonged in a racist, sexist, colonialist America—to no avail. No disidentification was pointed enough to satisfy the empire of liberty,14 and the Church became, in Wilford Woodruff's words, “politically speaking, a dependent or ward of the United States,” at risk of losing sovereignty over themselves like the trajectory of American Indians all around them, like the very Utes and Shoshone and Paiutes and Goshutes and Diné they had helped the United States displace and dispossess. Trying to avoid this fate brought about the 1890 manifesto and, with it, eventually, the end of plural marriage in mortality as a practice of the Church.15 Indeed, if anything, the Church became avidly monogamist and staunchly antipolygamist, even collaborating with law enforcement to prosecute and eliminate polygamy on earth.16 To this end, during the twentieth century, the Church instituted a policy prohibiting the baptism of children of polygamists.17Oh.When the Church instituted the 2015 policy excluding from baptism children living with parents in a same-sex relationship, apostle D. Todd Christofferson cited the extant policy against baptizing the children of polygamists as a precedent. “For generations, we've had these same kinds of policies that relate to children in polygamist families,” he said, and the children of same-sex couples are in “the same sort of situation.”18 Some Latter-day Saints, understandably, tried to contest this analogy, arguing that polygamy could be taught while same-sex attraction could not be.19 That may be so. But I think Elder Christofferson's sense of analogy is more on point than some realize. Attraction cannot be taught, but acceptance can be. Acceptance of polygamy as a reasonable, potentially loving, non-sinful practice between consenting humans is precisely as teachable as acceptance of same-sex romance as a reasonable, potentially loving, non-sinful practice between consenting humans.20 Church leadership evidently believed that both could undermine their authority to clarify what they consider God's will for how humans should arrange themselves intimately.In 2019, the same year that the Church rescinded the 2015 exclusion policy for children of parents in a same-sex relationship, the Church also ended the exclusion policy for children of polygamists.21 Instituted for the same reasons; terminated for the same reasons. The rise and fall of the 2015 exclusion policy clarifies that Latter-day Saint leaders’ fears of polygamy and queerness are ultimately one and the same. The nineteenth-century Church tried, desperately, to reassure the United States that even though they were polygamists, they were as racist and misogynist and colonialist as the rest of the nation and deserved citizenship rights in a racist, misogynist, colonialist America. Likewise, the twenty-first-century Church tries, desperately, to reassure the world that even though they are Mormons, they're as sexually and socially normative as the rest of the cisgender, heterosexual mainstream and deserve a seat at the same tables, a share of the same power. The Church's gerontocratic leaders do not project muscular machismo. Their albeit-male ecclesiastical hierarchy are prone to weeping at the pulpit, their insistence on marital chastity eschews the misogynistic sexual double standard (at least formally), and the long-standing discouragement of facial hair—once upon a time perhaps meant to distance the Saints from polygamists and hippies—now is reason to think of Mormons as permanently baby-faced. To say it more blithely, Mormons are not particularly manly—not, at least, in the superficial ways that have so much political currency with contemporary authoritarians.22 In a young century filled with noise from “manosphere” influencers and trans-exclusive, quasi-feminist talking points, I am not surprised that the Church's leaders are all too eager, whether consciously or not, to make another pointed disidentification—all too willing to assure the world that for all their weirdness, all their unmanliness, all their closets full of polygamous skeletons, they are as cis and as straight as any colonizer.In this essay, I've used the term “queerness” somewhat broadly, including under its umbrella the same-sex marriages targeted by the 2015 exclusion policy, the genderqueerness involved in my own transition, and the plural marriages to which I've compared both. Being gay and being trans are not the same, but they still occupy the same boat, at least because cis-heteronormatives perceive both as similarly threatening. If homology is in the eye of the beholder, Mormonism is right there in the boat too, even as it dresses itself in the shirts and ties of a normalcy so exaggerated it becomes excessive, even as it insists on its ordinariness so extremely that it's practically camp.23But I would rather not end on the terms of Christian colonialism. There are yet other boats we can share.When I first wondered if the way I feel trans is anything like the way Ida Hunt felt polygamous, I was not considering our mutual oppression at the hands of a cis-heteromonogamous America. I was not dwelling on our shared exclusion from the mainstream of the Church we had been raised to love. I was not thinking about the Christian conservatives who lump gay marriage and plural marriage in the same to I did end up thinking about all of I thinking about any of that I thought about how we both and our Ida Hunt was raised by monogamous and I was raised by cisgender Ida Hunt was in a monogamous relationship, and I was a cis Ida Hunt had over her and I had over Ida Hunt had reason to be and I had reason to be in a sense, we felt Not Not trans in her book that (and, one might many people in imagined as the of desire by an and that more often than not, desire is this desire is This, she the of being least how she it, and how I do too. to be a she something that upon me, like a of The is and she it in the second become the of very often a into a of this The of is by and much the same way that the of to be a be upon me like a a a in the like a still around me, like something I had always known and only not someone the one could say they to the or to could also say they from to to then, is the boat we could In a world that the Saints and the queer are to the still of the or to the that gender is than at both a of of of understanding in to something thought I that in twenty-first-century trans that trans is known as In one sense, this the way in which the from a But in another sense, this the way in which itself people the of their and baptism by the and of and are of both and not at The of The will of The of and all of the In a world that for we can to it to both and That is the boat we could we share it even Latter-day Saints will stop trying to the while they're still will stop trying to themselves to a that still as a trans I understand it. I understand how it is to things about that don't yet 2015 exclusion policy ended in the children of parents in a same-sex have been able to baptism if their parents the Church a to the that on how can in the Church. The from children and their in to only the and their of that to their on about the supposed to of about the supposed of plural on policy in is hard to egg It is hard to stop Being I know that all too all too well the of and how the is between who want to be and who to enough as one trans to of the I seemed to be. Maybe it doesn't me that for the it's hard too.