As I’ve come to learn more about my sexuality and the wider LGBTQ+ experience, the semi-annual General Conferences of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have taken on the occasional uncomfortable overtone.

Mild warning: this post might not be considered suitably orthodox by many. If you are prone to offense or stress when people are critical or opposed to church leaders, you are free to click away. I’m going to say things that aren’t accepted as doctrine.

At these conferences, which happen twice each year in April and October, church leaders address the worldwide membership to give direction and revelation, and to organize the mortal affairs of the church. Among these leaders are the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in total comprising fifteen men, chosen by revelation and called to lifelong service. We come to know these men and their personalities through their talks, and each man often has common themes or ways of speaking that make them memorable.

I don’t remember much of what was said when I was growing up. I tended to get sleepy and doze during the multiple two-hour broadcasts. But as I got older and gained the superpowers of memory, opinion, and staying awake, I was able to join in with my peers who looked forward to so-and-so’s talk which was guaranteed to be powerful and/or funny. Or wonder what would be said by this new person who hasn’t spoken before.

For an LGBTQ+ person, a few of these leaders usually caused apprehension. They were known for saying things that weren’t exactly affirming, and saying them regularly. Over the years as age and mortality comes for all, I think the number of these uncomfortable speakers has diminished. But there’s at least one left, and I have a special relationship to him.

I am named after him: President Dallin H. Oaks.

In recent years, President Oaks has almost always spent his General Conference talk explaining or reminding us about the laws of God, or precisely where the Church stands on an issue. He does this clearly and simply, without the fire and brimstone of televangelists or demagogues. Which fits, since his career before being called to church service was as a judge. His job was to read, interpret, and explain the law, and make decisions about when an action broke said laws.

I really liked this not too long ago. I liked how he was able to speak without resorting to the petty or retaliatory comments so plentiful in online debate. I agreed with the Gospel he was defending, so I agreed with his conclusions.

Today is General Conference, and Elder Oaks just gave his talk. When I heard that he would be next, I cringed a bit because I feared he would once again speak to millions of receptive church members using words and ideas I consider incomplete, and potentially harmful because of that.

The main sticking point for me with his talk was around the church’s current understanding of gender.

The most well-known and important statement the Church has regarding gender comes from the second paragraph of The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which was released in September 1995.

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.

Understandably, people take this to mean that gender is both binary and eternal.

But as I’ve met and learned from transgender people, I see how most of the world seems to misunderstand some fundamental aspects of the whole thing.

Sex is the biological makeup of an organism, specifically related to reproduction, but other things are included as well, like hormones and all the things they effect. As science currently understands it, Sex is determined by a combination of DNA and all the gunk in your body that converts your DNA into you. It truly is more complicated than XX and XY, or what genetalia you do your don’t have. There are a lot of moving parts, and they happen at different stages in your development and throughout your whole life. Sex alone is absolutely not 100% male or female. And that’s scientific fact.

Gender is what you do about your sex. How you feel about it, what you think it means for you and others, and how you want to express it. It’s affected by culture and personality and is entirely individual because everyone has a different mix of biology, environment, and identity. Over the millennia we’ve designed a cultural set of two main categories: masculine and feminine, based on the biological differences between the associated sexes (which themselves are really just categories).

Men are expected to be protectors or fighters, because their biology tends to give them larger muscles. Women are expected to be nurturers because their biology gives them wombs and breastmilk.

It works for most people, and it has worked pretty much forever, so people baked it into their language and culture, and considered the exceptions as either nothing to worry about or dangerous lunatics. And now most people don’t distinguish between the two. “Sex” and “gender” are considered synonyms, when in reality they are two separate aspects of a person: how they’re built, and how they think.

As I learned and finally understood this, when I read that passage from the Family Proclamation, I had some hope, because it says “gender” is an eternal characteristic. I can get behind that statement, since gender is how you respond to the world and yourself, not whether you’re capable of having children.

I can make a pretty strong religious argument that there is no reason why a spirit with masculine-leaning gender cannot be born to a physical and imperfect body with a female-leaning sex. So why wouldn’t that masculine spirit look around himself, at the culture which expects him to behave according to the “feminine” category of genders because his body is female, and feel like something’s wrong?

And if he tries to act differently, or say his body is wrong, people think he’s crazy, because people have only ever known two sexes, two genders. They don’t realize that what they think of as a single sex or gender is a wide category of similar traits and behaviors.

Think of how we decide what color something is. At what point does red become pink or purple? When does white become grey become black? What we call red has so many shades, and yet we group them all together into one category.

That’s gender. That’s sex. Colors of biology, behavior, and identity that until recently we only had two words for. But now we’re starting to see all the beautiful shades.