Representative Mormon opinion re transgender people?

[Marcus]

Over on the MD board, Smac has offered this opinion:

...Gender Dysphoria is, AFAICS, the only mental illness that foments a delusion in the individual which the rest of society is, somehow, expected to acknowledge and accommodate as valid...

Sigh. So many opinions, stated as fact. This is Smac's shortcoming in most conversations, so I usually just ignore his thoughtlessness, but this time it is hitting home, given the recent and unfortunate departure of some of our regulars. I don't speak to any Mormons about topics like this these days, so my question is as I stated in the title, is this an opinion representative of Mormons?

[Dr. Sunstoned]

Judging from the results of the latest election, I would say Smac's opinion is highly representative of a large percentage of active Mormons.

[Gadianton]

A delusion such as, apologists aren't Mormons? Smac doesn't expect society to drop the term "Mormon" on a dime and accept his membership within the Church of Jesus Christ?

I'm sure most Mormons would see it his way on gender, but that's because they don't know their own doctrine. In Mormonism, gender is eternal. Because the physical body is temporal, at once it's proven that gender has nothing to do with the physical body. Case closed.

From here, more than one view is possible, but most Mormons believe something like, that they existed as an "intelligence" for an eternity up to the point they were created or born to their heavenly parents as spirits, and then later born into the physical world. Mormons also believe that all matter is filled with intelligences. Since gender is eternal, each one of those intelligences has gender. Can a Mormon apologist look at a rock and determine the gender of the intelligences that inhabit it?

Gender, in Mormonism, is fundamentally internal to a degree unrivaled by any other worldview, and there are multiple places to introduce gender dysphoria as the intelligence moves into the physical world as a human. Consider the encounter between Jesus and Legion. Two thousand evil spirits inhabited a single man. Are you going to tell me that all 2,000 strictly adhered to a rule that forbade any female evil spirits from being in there? If so, will you insist that all 2,000 of the pigs the spirts went into were also male? Or that a human-form spirit controlling an animal of either sex is more logical than a human-form spirit controlling the body of a human of the opposite sex?

It is clear from the established doctrines of possessions that the gender of the spirit does not need to match the gender of the body the spirit inhabits. But that should already be obvious if genderless things like trees and rocks are inhabited by intelligences that do have gender. 99.9% of the work debunking the apologist view is already done by this point. The only recourse for the apologist, is to insist that God would never mismatch gender to sex at some point in the process that results in a human getting born on earth. They may believe that, but there is nothing in the scriptures to back this up. And with all the weird and terrible things God does allow, don't even try to say that it's common sense that it would never happen.

[Moksha]

I doubt Mormons would support offensive or mean positions on sensitive topics unless it was a tenet of their religion. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Brethren have been unable to unleash their hatred on communists, so they transferred their white-hot hatred to homosexuals. Now that they have taken blowback from the general public on that hatred, they have narrowed their ire to transsexuals. Smac sees it as his duty to echo this position of the Brethren.

[drumdude]

The more progressive Mormons in my ward left over exactly sentiments like that.

The church has been losing their best and brightest to keep the loud and dumbest.

[Moksha]

I doubt Mormons would support offensive or mean positions on sensitive topics unless it was a tenet of their religion. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Brethren have been unable to unleash their hatred on communists, so they transferred their white-hot hatred to homosexuals. Now that they have taken blowback from the general public on that hatred, they have narrowed their ire to transsexuals. Smac sees it as his duty to echo this position of the Brethren.

I think Nehor and Calm recognize Smac as a benighted curmudgeon.

[Physics Guy]

I think Nehor and Calm recognize Smac as a benighted curmudgeon.

A charitable view that these charitable people probably do indeed hold.

[Marcus]

I doubt Mormons would support offensive or mean positions on sensitive topics unless it was a tenet of their religion...

God told me to be a bigot? I have no choice, then. (actually, guys who tell me they speak for god told me to be a bigot, and since i've decided those humans know what a god thinks, I will be a bigot, because thinking for myself means I might disagree with what these bigots guys tell me their bigoted god says... This is getting worse and worse. Help.)

[PseudoPaul]

Probably those posts represent the views of a majority of active members, sadly. But there are plenty of members who would disagree and are less likely to fall into the age old trap of demonizing minorities - a trap that the church as a whole has fallen into over and over and over again.

[Doctor Steuss]

Smac also compared transgender people, who are phenotypically passing as their preferred gender, to people who commit rape.

His attempted intellectualizing of his depraved hatred is vile.