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Mormon Stories Podcast

773: Laurie Lee Hall - Standing in my truth, Walking in my faith Pt. 4

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.65.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2017

⏱️ 116 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In these episodes of Mormon Stories, we interview former LDS Stake President and LDS Chief Architect Laurie Lee Hall. Laurie Lee’s story is fascinating on many levels:

  • Laurie Lee worked for 20 years as Chief Architect for the LDS Church and as Director of Design and/or Construction for around 40 LDS temples.
  • She served as Stake President of the Tooele Utah Valley View Stake in Tooele, Utah for 8 years.
  • While she remembers identifying internally as a woman from a very young age, she began to experience intense pressure to transition to female while serving as an LDS Stake President. This ultimately led to her being released as stake president after 8 years of service.
  • About two months ago Laurie Lee was excommunicated stemming from her decision to transition gender presentation while living in her home ward/stake.
  • Laurie Lee and her spouse have been married 32 years this month and are the parents of five children and 11 grandchildren.
  • Laurie Lee remains a believer in many of the core tenets of Mormonism (e.g., Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, the atonement), and reads the Book of Mormon daily.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners.

0:09.0

To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking the Donate button on the top right side of the page.

0:21.0

All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you.

0:30.0

Thanks for your support.

0:32.0

And we're back for part four of our interview with Laurie Lee Hall. And we're now at the point. It's been an epic interview so far.

0:54.0

And we're thankful for everyone who's joining us on Facebook live. We still want to encourage you to put up your comments and questions there. It says we've had over 7,000 views so far and 63,000 people reach. So that's not a bad reach.

1:09.0

And we're grateful for everyone who still tuning in over 130 people are still tuned in. And now it's time to talk about when things came to a head. So Laurie Lee, you're still a few months away from being released to stick president.

1:23.0

And what can you share about how that sort of concluded?

1:31.0

There are details concerning that conclusion that I'm not comfortable sharing, but ultimately general authorities at all of the highest levels came became aware of my personal identification as a transgender person.

1:52.0

Not through your coming out. Not through other means.

1:57.0

Yeah, through other means that I'm not going to get into.

2:01.0

And that began a series of interviews that I'm not going to share a great deal of detail regarding, but it did place at risk my service in the church, as well as my employment in the church at that time.

2:17.0

And that was determined that the right and quite frankly, from my perspective, as well, the merciful thing to do would be to extend me an honorable release. And I appreciated that it was handled in a very appropriate manner.

2:35.0

I had served more than eight years and was allowed to depart without any guilt or shame imposed.

2:46.0

I would keep sharing or did you want to be released?

2:48.0

I would have been willing to keep serving, but the release came as a great relief to me because of the duress I was under at that point.

2:57.0

So the fact that it was concluded that it was appropriate to extend the release at that time.

3:04.0

I felt very comfortable with that and the way that it was handled was very positive in its outward expression, which, which I think was a benefit of lessing to the congregation generally.

3:15.0

What was the duress?

3:17.0

I mean, you felt good with Heavenly Father. You were starting to be able to be authentic. You had self-accepted.

3:24.0

You would come out to your wife and kids. What was the duress I've continued to serve?

3:28.0

It stemmed around how difficult it was at that time to be processing the social dysphoria as I was coming out to individuals and the difficulty that that continued to create at home and in other relationships.

...

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