Mortal embodiment and gender

From "Embodied cognition and the content of our minds" Latter-day Saint Philosopher, 30 Jun 2019

When the Proclamation on the Family states that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose,” most Latter-day Saints (rightly) take this to mean that gender is more than a social construct or personal preference — it reflects something essential about our natures as sons and daughters of God. Further, embodied cognition hints that the lived experiences of being male and female are rooted not merely in different social norms and constructs, but also in differences in embodied experience and what those entail in the social world. 

When we strip away historically situated social norms and conventions (many of which may be important), most of what we know and experience about gender is somehow related to our physiology. If we take embodied cognition seriously, it might be that mortality is an important step towards more fully realizing gender — as in, making real or bringing to fruition what was before more of an expectation, anticipation, or foreordination. It may be that physical embodiment is a way of becoming gendered. And as such, at birth, we are stepping into, realizing, or taking up our eternal identity as sons and daughters of God. 

Some Latter-day Saints have argued that gender dysphoria may be due to a mismatch of spirit and physical gender; it is possible (they argue) that a “female spirit” to be trapped in a “male body”, or vice versa. This legitimizes gender dysphoria by treating it as a signal that a person’s biological sex is a defect that does not match their eternal gender identity. We have observed this idea spread and take root among some corners of Latter-day Saint thought, as a way of legitimizing the idea of gender transition and transgender identity — it is seen as a way of changing one’s physical sex to match the gender of their spirit. 

Embodied cognition may bring some clarity on that issue. What does it mean, we might wonder, for a man to say he “feels like a woman”? Prior to alterations done to his body, does he have any idea what it feels like when his breasts began to firm up, what it was like to have that first period (especially when it came on unexpectedly in class one afternoon), what it felt like to worry about whether or not he was pregnant the morning after, what it means to feel vulnerable in the presence of sexually aggressive males? All of these are physiological experiences, or psychological / social experiences that have roots in physiological differences. What would a pre-embodied spirit know (or correctly anticipate) of physical embodiment, such that it can later conclude that its gendered experience is “wrong”? 

The primary takeaway — which is wholly uncontroversial from a doctrinal point of view — is that, as male and female, our world of experience is shaped in part by the physiological possibilities and constraints of our gendered bodies, and the social and societal norms which arise from those differences. Gender is an essential component of our eternal identity at least in part because it is intrinsic in the experience of mortal (and resurrected) embodiment. Our entrance into this world as male and female is full of divine purpose, and not mere happenstance. Furthermore, physiological embodiment gives vast new dimensions to gender that were certainly not available to premortal spirits (at least, not fully).