Veil
“All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”
According to the people who taught this, we don’t remember this part because a veil has been placed over our minds. It stops us from remembering premortal life because we are to be tested and tried and are not to have full knowledge but must learn to exercise faith. There’s also this from Jeremiah in the Bible:
“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”
Once I had a dream where I was standing in a white room, and a man was in front of me. He was flipping a coin, and he looked like Two-Face from Batman but I knew he was God. I said, “What’s the coin for?”
He said, “For you to find out what you are and will be.”
I said, “So you just flip it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Go ahead then,” I said.
So he flipped it. The coin tumbled over and over in the air, then landed. But it didn’t land heads or tails—it landed on its edge and it rolled, rolled, rolled . . . and stopped, still standing on its edge. I stared at it and tried to will it to tip to one side or the other, but it stayed on its edge.
At last, I said, “What does that mean?”
God shrugged. “That happens sometimes. Not often, but sometimes.”
“But what does it mean?” I said.
He motioned to his face. “See my face? It is two but one, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And so are you,” he said.
Vile
“From our premortal life we were directed into a physical body. There is no mismatching of bodies and spirits. Boys are to become men—masculine, manly men—ultimately to become husbands and fathers. No one is predestined to a perverted use of these powers.”
—Apostle Boyd K. Packer, 1976 General Conference, speech entitled “To Young Men Only”
But could someone be foreordained, Boyd? Cuz we don’t really believe in predestination—it’s foreordination. So that’s, like, predestination but with agency. So you can be foreordained but not fulfill your mission because no one made you do whatever you were foreordained to do and then you didn’t do it.
Then again, how does that explain me? Not sure you’re right, Boyd. Not sure foreordination is right either.
Also, there’s this:
“[A]ll things . . . are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.”
Maybe I’m just being difficult, but isn’t the question of predestination academic if you actually believe this, Boyd? If God already knows now what you are going to do, what does it matter whether you are foreordained or predestined to do something? You already did it, even though you didn’t. But you did. Ha ha ha.
I didn’t choose any of this, btw. I lost the coin flip, sooooo . . .
Vi’el
“Very clever how you got in here like that, <name>. What? Surprised that I know your name? I’m a demon, that’s what we do. I also know your true name, so you’d better buy something expensive.”
Vi’el is an imp and a demon who sells the Fel Elemental Rod in World of Warcraft. You need the rod for the quest—without it, you cannot advance. It reminds me of this thing Joseph Smith says in scripture:
“Then the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17 will become a Urim and Thummim to each individual who receives one, whereby things pertaining to a higher order of kingdoms will be made known; And a white stone is given to each of those who come into the celestial kingdom, whereon is a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. The new name is the key word.”
Joseph Smith used divining rods. You know that, right? Divining rods are used to find water or minerals. I like to think that he had to get the rod from Vi’el so he could use it to search for the white stone, and once he had the white stone, he had what he needed to advance to the celestial kingdom, so then he had to go get killed in the jail so he could finish the quest. See? He went to hell and met a demon so he could get to heaven. Two in one on the quest.
In the meantime, he revealed or wrote a book that kicks off with a vision about holding to the iron rod so you can experience the love of God. All things come full circle and are one eternal round, amiright?
You realize all this is Hero Journey stuff, right? There goes Joseph Smith, trying to live out a hero’s journey. Or live and die one. What? Haven’t you read Joseph Campbell? Lol.
Elvi
“But there’s no such word as elvi,” you say. Lol. As if. So now you make the word rules, huh? Every time I turn around, someone has just verbed a noun: “This is how we holiday” or “This is how we football.” I would like to say, “Do this over and over. This is how we group think. This is how we cliche.” Have fun watching commercials now!
Speaking of the word rules, ever thought about who makes the emoji rules on your phone? You know that’s like a whole new language, right? Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and now Elon Musk are the new word-rule makers. Or language makers, I mean. Cuz they’re pictures not words. Of course, are letters pictures or words? What say you? If you combine two emojis to say something, is that a “word” or a “sentence” or just two pictures? Someone is inventing a whole language around you, you use it every day, you could communicate with people in China entirely by emoji, and you can’t even name who’s doing it, can you? Go pick on them and leave me alone.
I got the vaccine, by the way. That means I have the microchips and the government is tracking me, right? Cuz why would they bother using established cell networks and personal devices that the entire world keeps with them at all times? Injecting microchips makes far more sense.
#FreeEdwardSnowden
What do you think is the plural of Elvis? It’s not Elvises, I can tell you that much. “Many people are named Elvis, but there is only one Elvis,” you say. Really? What’s your favorite? Fat Elvis or skinny Elvis? Drugged Elvis or clean Elvis? Black Elvis or white Elvis? Look, don’t even start to argue that—he sang black music, and btw, have you ever been to Vegas? We have Google nowadays. Go ahead. Google “black Elvis.” I’ll wait.
And how about Soldier Elvis and Civilian Elvis? There are just sooooo many Elvi in one person.
Speaking of word play and black and white and two in ones, I read Huckleberry Finn in fourth grade. That part on Huck teaching Jim about Solomon the wise just kills. I mean, there goes Jim pointing out that it doesn’t make any sense to divide the baby. Maybe if the baby were two in one, though, it might make sense? Of course, when God showed me that He was Two-Face, it never occurred to me to divide him. I don’t think we’d get two gods if we did.
Let’s play word games with Huck, though. Who was his best friend? Why, Tom Sawyer, of course. If you take the last name “Sawyer” and elide right over the “a,” you have Swyer, and now, you got me. Or my syndrome, anyway. Remember, we have Google. Go on, I’ll wait.
And you’re right, let’s not define ourselves by our syndromes or orientations or race or gender or Pioneer heritage or any other manner of -ites. But man, Tom Sawyer. In Church, they teach us to liken the scriptures to ourselves. They say, even, that we should swap in our own names for the characters. Let’s pretend that Mark Twain wrote scripture. So, like, just take this passage and put ole Swyer me in it for kicks:
“MONDAY morning found [Swyer boy] miserable. Monday morning always found him so—because it began another week’s slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious.
“[Swyer boy] lay thinking. Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was sick; then he could stay home from school. Here was a vague possibility.”
Wanna know how else we can apply it? Let’s take those first two sentences. I can substitute every single day in there. “[Thursday] morning found [Swyer boy] miserable. [Thursday] morning always found him so—because it began another week’s slow suffering.” Ha ha! Think of that! Every day begets a new week’s slow suffering! Time is elastic and mostly determined by one’s frame of reference.
Evil
You really must read The Picture of Dorian Gray. So much going on in it, all these dualities—the pursuit of the hedonist life, the selling of the soul to the devil, the suicides and murders and the picture faithfully capturing the true horror of Dorian’s soul. The dichotomy of Man/Woman. I probably shouldn’t say too much more until you’ve read it.
Oscar Wilde. Did you know he toured America in promotion of his Aesthetic Movement? He met with Church leaders in Salt Lake City and saw Church buildings and architecture, and then, he said some mean things about their buildings and polygamy. So George Q. Cannon called upon God to wipe gay people out:
“How can this be stopped?
“Not while those who have knowledge of these filthy crimes exist. The only way, according to all that I can understand as the word of God, is for the Lord to wipe them out, that there will be none left to perpetuate the knowledge of these dreadful practices among the children of men.
“And God will do it, as sure as He has spoken by the mouths of His prophets.”
When people ask me what I am, I tell them intersex, leaning male, and gay. Bad news for me, I guess. My ovaries didn’t work—they were fibrous tissues full of cancer and were taken out. I have XY chromosomes. Burn me up in a fire and identify me by DNA, and I’m male. When the coin landed how it did, it apparently gave me a non-celestial body, according to Joseph Fielding Smith:
“In both of these kingdoms [i.e., the terrestrial and telestial] there will be changes in the bodies and limitations. They will not have the power of increase, neither the power or nature to live as husbands and wives, for this will be denied them and they cannot increase. Those who receive the exaltation in the celestial kingdom will have the ‘continuation of the seeds forever.’ They will live in the family relationship. In the terrestrial and in the telestial kingdoms there will be no marriage. Those who enter there will remain ‘separately and singly’ forever. Some of the functions in the celestial body will not appear in the terrestrial body, neither in the telestial body, and the power of procreation will be removed. I take it that men and women will, in these kingdoms, be just what the so-called Christian world expects us all to be—neither man nor woman, merely immortal beings having received the resurrection.”
Look, I hate to bring up the predestination thing again, but I think it’s clear that my future has already happened. Gender is an eternal characteristic and my gender(s) mean(s) I will not be reproducing in this life nor, apparently, in the life to come. And since no less an authority than Boyd has confirmed there is no mismatching of bodies and spirits, this is it for me.
One trouble I have is how to be a manly man like my genetics and Boyd say to be when I’m not supposed to do any transition. I think we can all agree I was not very valiant in the preexistence . . . I mean, if I believe “whether by mine own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same.”
We don’t believe in original sin, but am I the walking counterargument?
Live
Probably not long. I cannot get myself to do anything. I am something of a WoW master, but aside from online cred, it gets you nothing.
I had a teacher once who said there is only one decision to make in life: live or die. And the Book of Mormon talks like that too: Lehi tells his sons they can choose eternal life or eternal death.
But really, if you are living, you are also dead, and if you are dead, you are only so because of life. Even spiritually, everyone says we’re all dead except through Jesus (or maybe Allah or whatever your god flavor is).
And you really have no choice in either. Get born and you are dead. Die and you get resurrected or something, depending on whom you believe (correct use of whom, btw . . . yay, me!). My bad. Per the veil teaching, we chose to come here but don’t remember.
Does it really matter if I live to be 85 as opposed to 17? My parents will have a very sad funeral, but blink your eyes in a cosmic sense, and they will be dead too, along with everyone in my generation. If my brain is faulty, who cares if I cut to the healing part quicker? Be happy for me! Sorry it hurts, though. That sucks. But duality! Sad and happy all in one!
There is a risk, of course. That is, I get to the pearly gates, and Two-Face says, “You should have been a [insert correct gender here], and if you had just made yourself that and hung on for a few years, I wouldn’t have to burn you in hell.” But Two-Face made me two in one, so I think I can take the risk. Never take counsel of your fears, after all.
Levi
This is the genetic revolution. We mapped the human genome and we will spend the next hundred years figuring out what that means. I mean the royal “we.” I won’t be around.
Back in the 1950s, James Watson couldn’t figure out the structure of DNA. One night, he had a dream in which two strings were twisted together and ended with a snake’s head at the end opposite to the other head. Some accounts also say he saw a two-sided spiraling staircase. Do you see? DNA is a double helix. The core of our creation is a bound duality.
Then, there’s this:
“The intended meaning of gender in ‘The Family: A Proclamation to the World’ is biological sex at birth.”
Dallin wrote that. Pretty sure he did it because transgender people were agreeing with the Proclamation and saying that their gender identity didn’t match their biological sex. Dallin is a former lawyer and Utah Supreme Court justice. He likes to be very precise and remove doubts, and when the leaders want to get clear, they get him involved.
Also, the Church believes that the apostles of each dispensation will judge the people who lived then. So me and Dallin are bound to meet. He’s a good lawyer, precise and smart, and unyielding in his viewpoints. So I think I am going to need a good Advocate, one who argues at a higher bar. I am hoping He defends me while also using me as evidence. Maybe, we will get to debate what biological means. Will Dallin accept genetic evidence? Or will he rely on only anatomical evidence? Will we get to break down biological’s etymology? Will we eventually get to ontology? Wonder who will win. I am always up for a good debate.
The name Levi is Hebrew. At least according to the Internet—I did not verify this with a real Hebrew scholar. It means “joined together in harmony.” Well, it means a lot of things, but that one is my favorite.
Christians believe that a man shall leave father and mother to join with a woman “and they shall be one flesh.” Why is it hard to believe that, in combining, their result might yield one flesh that is two? Why is it hard to believe when you stare right at the evidence? Why is it hard to believe the structure of DNA? The way nuclei are fused? The way life and death are two sides of the same coin? Thomas was blessed for believing when he saw.
Look on me. See who I am. Behold the two in one. I am alive but dead. Soon, I will be dead but alive. I may be sent to hell, I was already sent to hell, I may touch heaven. I am male, I am female, I am neither, I am both. I am tormented, I am at peace. I am Levi.
Born in Virginia and raised in Texas, Gordon Laws now lives in a small town just south of Boston. He has worked for twenty-one years in the education content industry. He is husband to Lauren Elliott, father of four children, and author of My People and a handful of nonfiction books for young readers. He has also served extensively in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; for many years, he was the Sunday School teacher of several of the Martin children, including Levi Martin, who died by suicide December 18, 2022.
