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Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John DeLin. I'm very excited to have you joining us on this 18th of July 2017.

We're broadcasting to you for those of you joining us live from Salt Lake City, Utah and couldn't be more excited for today's interview with Lori Lee Hall.

Just to give maybe a tiny bit of background before we jump into the story.

I was at a birthday party about a month ago and was celebrating, it was actually my friend Steve Orkart's birthday at Jim DeBoccus' house and had the distinct pleasure of being able to meet Lori Lee for the first time.

And at the time that I met her actually, she was about, she told me she had just been communicated about two weeks previous.

And so, you know, that was sort of sad and traumatic for me because I had experienced excommunication myself and that was touching to me.

But I was also surprised and really intrigued to learn a little bit more about Lori Lee's story.

I'm going to make one quick technical switch. Okay. So, as far as Lori Lee's story goes, she told me that she had served as LDS church chief architect for many, many years, worked 20 years at LDS church headquarters.

And that she had worked on many temples, maybe up to 40 temples during her time as chief architect, which again was really, really interesting to me.

I had never interviewed someone from our stories that was an employee of church headquarters for so long, you know, right down in the central activities of the church.

And then, of course, I was very fascinated to learn that she had served as a state president in her to will a stake after serving his bishop for eight years.

And that that preceded her eventual excommunication and not only was she communicated, she was excommunicated by her former first and second counselor who served under her when she was state president.

And by I'm guessing a stake high council that largely was comprised of people that she had worked with or maybe even called into the stake high council.

So that was a touching and important issue on many levels. Those of you who follow Mormon stories regularly know that we, we have been doing a series all all year long on with with transgender individuals within Mormonism.

Those have been really important and powerful interviews. And, and you know, it's worth mentioning that, uh, Laurie Lee Hall, you know, from the story that she's told me she's always identified internally as female for as long as she can remember. And we're going to talk about that more in depth.

But it has been recent where she has felt the ability or the desire or the freedom or whatever she'll end up describing it to present as a woman. And that is a, that is a transition that has happened over the past year.

So, um, one of the main reasons we wanted to talk about this on Mormon stories is because it's an issue that affects many, many Mormons and post Mormons. And it's also, uh, you know, a topic that we lack, frankly, I, we lack education on.

And so, the more we can understand issues, LGBT issues, transgender issues, I think the healthier and the safer and the happier society we're all going to be. And so that's going to be a topic that we discuss as well today.

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