The occasional updates to the online General Handbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often routine and cover relatively mundane policies, practices and procedures within the worldwide denomination of 17.2 million members.
Not this week.
The new guidelines for local community leaders and their treatment of transgender people have sparked a storm of outrage among LGBTQ members and their allies, perhaps not seen since the highly controversial – and now-debunked – exclusion policy against same-sex couples in November 2015.
For example, the new rules state that members who have undergone any form of gender reassignment surgery—surgical, medical, or social—cannot be recommended for the temple, work with children, serve as teachers in their ward, or hold gender-specific roles, such as leading the Relief Society.
In most youth camps, they are not allowed to stay overnight. And they are encouraged to use individual toilets in community centers or to station a “trusted person” outside to prevent others from entering a toilet that corresponds to their personal gender identity.
Religious scholar Taylor Petrey, editor-in-chief of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism, and Michael Soto, a transgender and queer person who grew up in the church and is now president of Equality Arizona, will discuss these new policies and their potential impact on members.
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