From KATU TV in Portland, OR
A transsexual Mormon wants the LDS church to accept her new life and allow her to worship as a woman, but how will the church receive that controversial request?

That's what Leahnora Isaak is wondering as she prepares to submit a formal request to the church in the next few weeks.

For most of her life, Leahnora went by the name Bob. She was born without male genitalia, but received testosterone treatments growing up. She was married and raised a family in Ohio.

But Leahnora says she has always been a cross dresser. She got divorced, moved to Oregon and decided to live life as a woman.

Her local stake president has been supportive, even meeting with fellow church members to help with her transition. Leahnora is now hoping that church leaders in Salt Lake City will recognize her as a woman as well.

The rest of this story can be found at KATU.com. This is from the Beaverton, OR area.

She wants to be viewed as a woman by the church & plans to send a letter to SLC asking her gender be changed in her church records. She said she's willing to give up the priesthood in order to be accepted as a woman by the church and worship with the women of the church.

Good luck with that. Why doesn't she just find an accepting faith like the Episcopalians?

haha, no. The official church handbook says if you go through with gender reassignment surgery you are basically banned from doing a lot of church related things (including taking the sacrament, if memory serves). The bishop is supposed to 'strongly advise' against GRS or hormone therapy, and then punish you if you go through with it. the church's official position is that god doesn't make mistakes about what sex you are supposed to be. I hope she has enough emotional support to make it through the rejection that will follow her request.

It's nice that her Stake President is supporting her.

If she was born without male genitalia and given hormone treatments, she was obviously born intersex and her parents made the wrong guess about her gender. There is no indication she has has any gender reassignment surgery @skeptifem. Maybe the bishop should have "strongly advised" her parents against giving her hormone therapy as a child. She just started dressing and presenting herself as a female. In the article she refers to herself as transgender, but I think that is a term that people understand better than intersex.

Can hermaphrodites hold the priesthood?

Until Salt Lake has spoken, there's no story. Just because her stake pres is supportive it doesn't make it "doctrine" it just means that he, himself, is a good guy.

It will be interesting to hear what the home office has to say, especially since the handbook is already quite clear on the matter.

Call me a cynic, but I have a feeling the "God" of her church won't be very supportive of her actions. The poor Stake Pres will probably have to deliver bad news and an appointment to an excommunication trial.

An acquaintance of mine was born intersexed. The parents picked female because at that time it was easier to cut off bits than add some. Later he realized he was male and had corrections made. The TSCC told him he could never marry in the temple or take out his endowments.. That's how it works.

I think timing is everything on this one.

If the court has ruled that this person is a female, and all legal records have been changed to reflect that (driver's license, birth cert, Social Security card, etc.) BEFORE the person applies to join the church, then she IS a female, fait accompli, and as I understand it, the church has to accept her as such.

If all this stuff isn't yet accomplished, then they can turn her down. That's the way I've heard it, and I have been friends with a number of trannies - none of them are interested in being mormons, however.

I hope I don't sound ignorant asking this question, but here goes. If "Bob" was born without a penis or any male sex organs (testicles), how did they determine he was a boy in the first place? I mean, why would they have not thought he was a girl? Unless, he/she was born without a vagina, too. And if that was the case, then this is really unusual.

Had he been born androgynous, I could completely understand that his parents would make a choice as to which sex to raise him, but without both sex organs, what made them believe that Bob was a boy?

It's not an ignorant question... It's certainly not a question with an obvious answer.

For a long, when these cases came up, they would tell the parents to raise their child to be either a boy or a girl, depending on certain factors, in almost all cases, based on physical appearance. Usually, things leaned towards girl, if they don't have the proper male genitalia, it's easier to "make" them, at least physically into a girl. But, for whatever reason they went "male" in this case.

There have been a few famous cases where this has happened. Where a child was "forced" into a gender rather than seeing what they were naturally. This usually ended badly for the child, in many cases with their suicide.

Now, most in the medical community will tell the parents to raise the child somewhat androgynously. Let them grow up and see what gender they naturally choose themselves and make the decisions regarding operations at that time. This has a higher success rate, but still has it's complications (how do you live as an androgynous child? it can be very confusing and raises difficult questions)

Cases like these also help to point out that gender and sexual preferences are NOT learned. Attempting to force a gender or sexual preference on a child is disastrous. These kids were raised from birth as a certain gender and if it didn't match what was in their heads, it caused confusion, depression, anxiety and if not recognized and helped, often with suicide.

These things are built in, from birth. Sex and gender is a very complex topic. Even here, there is a difference between gay and female. So, say they had let "Bob" grow up and choose. There's a chance that he may have wanted to be physically male, but have a sexual preference towards men, in other words, he may have wanted to be a gay man. Some people might wonder why he didn't choose to be a female, well because that's not how he was put together.

So, the answer to your question is, it's complicated, and we don't know based on this information why they chose "boy" but they probably shouldn't have, except for some social situations (like, which bathroom do I use on a consistent basis, etc)

This is a huge event ushering in the demise of the Morg cult.

Leahnora will go to church and be promptly discriminated against and shamefully excommunicated by the Luciferians.

This will prompt a lawsuit that the cult it seems has been begging for and they are either going to have to lay all their cards on the table or radically alter their doctrine.

Either way they lose.

Fucking Idiots.

I love it.