Episode Transcript
From the Mormon Priesthood to Trans Advocate Dad (Part One)
Antifascist Dad Podcast — Episode 19
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Blair Hodges
Additional voice: Utah State Official
[00:00:06] Matthew Remski: Hello, everyone. My name is Matthew, and this is the Antifascist Dad Podcast. This is episode 19, “From the Mormon Priesthood to Trans Advocate Dad,” with my good friend Blair Hodges as my guest.
For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I’m on YouTube and TikTok as @antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get immediate access to every Part Two of each main-feed Part One episode.
Also in the show notes, there’s a link to pre-order the book this podcast is inspired by and supporting. It’s called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. I’m told pre-orders help with visibility, so please consider that—and thank you, as always, for your support.
[00:00:59] Utah State Official: All right, we’ll go to Blair Hodges.
[00:01:02] Blair Hodges: Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Blair Hodges. I’m a resident of Salt Lake City, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak.
I used to believe about trans people the way that a lot of you probably do. But by listening to actual trans people and spending years in the research, my mind and my heart changed.
But in the event this bill passes, I do want to make a promise. We will never stop fighting for our trans youth, including my own child who is trans. We will never stop fighting. We will drag ourselves through any fire you light. We will organize, litigate, educate, and vote until the devastating walls you’re building come down.
We will bring the best data, tell the real stories, and insist that every child deserves safety, dignity, and freedom to grow into themselves. In short, we believe in liberty.
And I promise we will remember who among you chose compassion over cruelty. We will remember the few who listened and learned and protected the vulnerable. And we will remember who used their power to make life harder for children already carrying more than most adults ever will.
We will remember because healthy democracy depends on it, and justice depends on accountability. We are never going away. Your laws can never stop trans people from existing. I promise you that. And the best of you will come to regret any harm you inflict by passing a bill such as this.
To my trans loved ones: I love you. Thank you. I stand with you.
[00:02:25] Matthew Remski: That’s Blair Hodges, my guest this week. He was speaking at a public comment session to the Utah legislature in opposition to recent bills that—unfortunately—were passed by the Republican-majority House to limit gender-affirming care.
One of the odd things about this job is that I’ve gained a number of really, really good friends I’ve never actually met in person over the last six years, because of the pandemic and now fascism. Blair is in Salt Lake City, and I won’t be crossing the border anytime soon with a podcast with a name like this.
But Blair has become a really good friend. And how can I describe him? He’s gentle, and he’s passionate as an advocate for gender equality and trans inclusion—and for thinking about family life and care in fluid and feminist terms.
That’s the standard political stuff we’d agree on anyway. But where I really feel his uniqueness lies—at least to me—is wrapped up in his having grown up in, grown out from, but also not giving up on the Mormon faith community. He grew up in a church that believed and taught all the old things about men and women and discipline and devotion that we’re familiar with.
He went to Brigham Young University, and he worked there too—where you can have a solid anthropology of religion class in one department, but in the next building over they’re dog-whistling creation theory as legitimate biology.
Growing up through that milieu means that I think Blair came to his views through honest internal struggle, and I think our interview bears that out. But I also think he keeps good faith with where he comes from, and with the folks evolving out of the more conservative elements of their birth religions. In a hyper-polarized world, being able to walk that line of criticism without disdain, disavowal, or smugness is a real skill.
In our conversation, we’ll be talking about his advocacy for trans inclusion, and how he arrived there—a journey that began in earnest with his own trans kid.
Now, in the book I’ve got coming out in a couple of months, I have a section describing my own belated cis-guy consideration of trans existence. My eyes were opened not only to another amazing variation of life, but also to my own gendered expectations and armor. But I’ll save that story for Part Two, and I’ll let Blair take the lead in Part One.
Blair Hodges works in nonprofit communications, and he moonlights as an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his partner and two kids. He has an excellent podcast called Relationshapes, and I’ll link to that in the show notes.
Blair Hodges, welcome to Antifascist Dad. It’s so good to see you.
[00:05:32] Blair Hodges: Yeah, it’s good to see you too, Matthew. Thanks for having me on the show.
[00:05:35] Matthew Remski: So you have become an advocate for your trans child. As the laws in Utah and the MAGA world are becoming more deadly and fascistic, can you give a summary of what’s happening currently—its impacts on trans kids—and how you’re fighting back?
[00:05:50] Blair Hodges: Yeah, sure. Utah is a red state. It hasn’t voted for a Democratic candidate for president, I think, since the ’60s. We have four Republican congressional representatives, two Republican senators, and they’re trying to continue gerrymandering to keep that the case—because there’s a blue dot right in the middle of Utah: Salt Lake City, where I’m located. And it’s a highly progressive place.
So when I think about the place of trans kids in Utah, I have to think about location. We’re in Salt Lake. The school district is very supportive. We have queer kids and queer parents involved in the school community. It’s never been anything unusual for my kids to be around queer folks and trans folks, even here in Utah.
And so the Utah legislature—being Republican, and in a supermajority—has jumped on the bandwagon of anti-trans activism that we’re seeing across the United States in conservative states: bathroom bans, restricting residency, removing access to medical treatments and hormone replacement therapies and puberty blockers for trans kids.
All of that is coming down while we’re here in this blue dot that’s resisting it. So it feels sort of helpless, but also kind of protected—right in Salt Lake City. It’s an unusual context.
Utah is quite Republican, but with a twist. There’s this thing Republicans here like to refer to as “the Utah Way,” which is kind of this holier-than-thou MAGA: we agree with pretty much everything MAGA is doing, but we’re going to do it with a kind smile, wearing a necktie and a white shirt.
[00:07:47] Matthew Remski: We’re going to get to that. But demographically, I’m wondering if the blue dot of Salt Lake City—paradoxically—not only is the seat of the Mormon Church, but it’s also the place where people who are growing out of their Mormon faith, or becoming more progressive within it, congregate because it’s the urban core. Is that fair to say? Is that how that happened?
[00:08:12] Blair Hodges: Yeah. The church’s headquarters is here in Salt Lake City. In fact, my workplace is just down the street from it. And the irony is that Salt Lake is becoming less and less Mormon.
We’re seeing consolidation. Mormon congregations are shrinking. They’re combining congregations and combining stakes—which are kind of like dioceses, I guess—groups of congregations. We’re seeing it shrink big-time in Salt Lake City, while, yes, it’s still the headquarters of the church.
And I think that’s actually a problem for conservative legislators. I’ll give you an example. We have a street downtown called Harvey Milk Boulevard.
[00:08:51] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:08:51] Blair Hodges: And they don’t like that.
[00:08:53] Matthew Remski: They don’t like walking on Harvey Milk Boulevard.
[00:08:54] Blair Hodges: Yeah—no. In fact, there’s legislation happening this year where they’re trying to rename it to Charlie Kirk Boulevard.
[00:09:02] Matthew Remski: Oh, Jesus Christ.
[00:09:04] Blair Hodges: I know. And they’re saying, “Well, you know, Charlie Kirk was killed here.” Well, he wasn’t killed in Salt Lake City. It has nothing to do with Harvey Milk, and nothing to do with anything that’s going on in Salt Lake. It’s a deliberate attempt to shame and intimidate queer people in the state.
There was also legislation last year that banned the display of pride flags in any government facilities. That means not just the downtown courthouse—schools too. Public schools. Teachers were not allowed to display rainbows in their classrooms.
The Salt Lake City mayor got around that by establishing official city flags—the trans flag, the pride flag, a Juneteenth flag—that have the Salt Lake City logo on them. That really angered the legislature.
Governor Spencer Cox tries to act like, “Oh, this is all so silly and so stupid,” but he signs these bills, lets it happen, and acts like he’s better than both sides while accommodating transphobic and queerphobic people.
So now they’re putting up a bill this year that will require—this is what it is—cities can have one official city flag. So they’re trying to do anything they can to send the message: you’re not welcome here; we are the predominant voice of this state; we are the real Utah. But again: the Utah Way. A lot of times they’re going to do it with a smile and with a “we love you.”
[00:10:36] Matthew Remski: I was just going to say: Cox sounds like he’s a master of the Utah Way. If what he’s doing is saying, “Well, I’m kind of above all the flag stuff… here I go—I’m going to sign this bill.”
[00:10:45] Blair Hodges: Okay—exactly. And one other thing about Cox: he started this initiative called “Disagree Better,” and this was his big—
[00:10:51] Matthew Remski: Yeah, yeah—meaning “protest less,” right?
[00:10:54] Blair Hodges: Yeah. Exactly. He tried to generate this hashtag. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this campaign. And the idea really is: agree with me better. That’s what it boils down to, man.
[00:11:07] Matthew Remski: Okay, this might be getting a little too armchair-psych, but do you think there’s something about Mormon culture that’s just really good at this? And what is that?
[00:11:24] Blair Hodges: Mormon PR has a long history. We’re a missionizing church. I grew up a member of the LDS Church.
During the presidency of Gordon B. Hinckley, he really emphasized friendliness and openness and connection with the world. This is when the Olympics came to Salt Lake City. This is when Hinckley, the president of the church, appeared on Larry King. He was very media-charismatic and got it.
That’s the Mormonism I grew up with: this outward-facing “let’s be the neighbors of the world” Mormonism. “Let our light so shine before the world so they can see our good works,” and then they’ll be gathered and appealed to by our goodness—and that’s how we’ll bring people into the faith.
So yeah: the PR efforts. The Book of Mormon musical obviously nails it with the missionaries being so smiley and chipper, this Mormony bounciness and happiness.
And Romney couldn’t quite pull it off because he’s so damn robotic—but he tried.
[00:12:18] Matthew Remski: Yeah. And compared to the rest of who he’s up against, he kind of gets a little bit of it.
[00:12:24] Blair Hodges: Sure. It’s a little Ned Flanders-y.
[00:12:26] Matthew Remski: A little bit, yeah.
I think this will come up later, but one of the ironies of getting to understand this through my relationship with you is that there’s something genuine about the impulse to be the neighbor of the world. There’s something real about that friendliness that I see in progressive Mormons I know—and especially in you.
You have this affect of being comfortable reaching out to others. And I wonder if you were able to grasp some goodness out of what was otherwise a deceptive communication technique.
[00:13:15] Blair Hodges: One hundred percent. My Mormon mission really transformed my outlook on the world.
Growing up in Utah, in a predominantly white community, I knew a couple Black kids at school because we were near Hill Air Force Base, but I didn’t have any close Black friends, and I didn’t have a lot of close friends who were not Mormon.
Then I’m sent off at nineteen into the world to bring this message out there. And I was sent to the amazing location of Wisconsin. My friends are going to Japan and Argentina and Nigeria—and I’m like, “Oh, Wisconsin, okay.”
But they threw me right into inner-city Milwaukee for my very first area. Suddenly, me and my companion—we’re always in pairs—we’re the only white people we’re seeing for weeks at a time.
[00:14:05] Matthew Remski: Wow.
[00:14:05] Blair Hodges: What a shift. I had to reckon with: wait a minute—our church didn’t allow Black men to hold the priesthood. Any man could hold the priesthood of Mormonism if he lived worthily—except Black people—until 1978.
I didn’t have to think much about that until suddenly I’m surrounded by Black folks—many of whom are aware of that history—and they’re saying, “What’s the deal with that?” And I was given no preparation to respond. So I’m suddenly burst out of my bubble.
I’m also meeting people from different religious backgrounds: Muslims for the first time, Baptists, non-denominational folks, Lutherans, Catholics. And I’m trying to connect with them. Yes, I’m trying to convert them, but I was the type of person who thought: if I’m going to convert them, I ought to try to understand what they’re saying first.
[00:14:55] Matthew Remski: Oh—big mistake. Big mistake, Blair.
[00:14:57] Blair Hodges: Yeah. So I got interested in religious studies. I made a goal to attend as many different congregations as I could.
[00:15:03] Matthew Remski: Oh, boy.
[00:15:04] Blair Hodges: Yeah. My experience was really expansive that way, and it wasn’t typical. I don’t think a lot of missionaries necessarily come out of it with that approach. But for me, connecting with other people—I was just innately curious.
And I think the best times on my mission were when I met with people and didn’t convert them, but it was like: “Oh, wow—they really… I didn’t think about it like that before,” or “I didn’t know people could have these really cool spiritual experiences outside of Mormonism. Okay—this is really interesting.”
[00:15:36] Matthew Remski: That’s so incredible, Blair. And I think it fits into a larger tradition of people who are trained to be missionaries—and that becomes what radicalizes them. I’m thinking of Jesuits sent over to convert First Nations people who drop their robes and become members of Indigenous communities. There’s a long history of that: the very thing a church wants to do becoming the seed of its own deconstruction. Then that becomes louder and louder.
[00:16:12] Blair Hodges: Yeah. I certainly experienced that.
My own Mormonism deeply informs my connection to advocating for the marginalized and aligning myself that way.
You mentioned I have a trans kid. We knew they were queer ever since they were little. They came out accidentally—maybe around third grade—when they had a secret they wanted to tell us. My wife and I were like, “Ooh—what is it?” “I have a crush.” And we’re like, “Oh, wow.” And the crush was on a girl; my kid was assigned female at birth. And we were like, “Oh—our kid’s queer.”
And they didn’t know they were coming out at all, because we’ve raised them in a house where that would never be an issue. So we felt like: okay, good.
And we were still participating in the church at this time, so they were still hearing anti-queer messaging at church—they were still getting a sense of that. But at home it wasn’t that way.
From my Mormon history, we grew up as a persecuted minority religion. The church was established back east; it grew; it exploded in numbers; it increasingly rubbed neighbors the wrong way. Mormons voted as a block. There were political issues, polygamy, controversy. Mormons ended up getting kicked out of Illinois—out of a city they built that was rivaling Chicago in population, and probably would have been a Chicago if the Mormons had stayed there instead of coming to Salt Lake City.
So I grew up with these stories: look what happens to minorities in a United States that doesn’t protect minority rights. That was core to my upbringing: we need to protect minority rights as Mormons, because look what it did to us.
And you still saw some of that: Utah, for being a Republican state, passed laws to protect immigrants and be more supportive of immigrant people—until recently, as the political winds have shifted.
So I grew up with this sense of caring about the marginalized. And it wasn’t a huge shift, in some ways, to align myself with marginalized people—because I grew up in a minority religion. Even though I was in the majority where I lived, I experienced Mormonism as a minority religion on my mission. I was like: oh—we are really little.
[00:18:40] Matthew Remski: That’s incredible. Another sleeping piece of ideology that woke up for you—and then turns around against the power structure of the church.
Specifically with regard to sex and gender, what were you brought up to believe?
[00:18:59] Blair Hodges: At a really crucial time in my life, the church released a document called The Family: A Proclamation to the World. It’s a prophetic document—kind of like scripture—where the leading hierarchy of the church, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency, who are considered prophets within Mormonism, release this document declaring the doctrine of the family.
I was in high school when it came out—gearing up to go on a mission—and it also came out during the time my father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and was dying.
A key teaching of Mormonism is that families can be together forever—the family as an eternally existing thing.
Mormons are taught we had a premortal existence: we lived as spirit children of a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. But we don’t talk about her very often. We have one song that mentions her, but she’s there—don’t talk about her.
[00:20:07] Matthew Remski: But she’s real. She’s there.
[00:20:08] Blair Hodges: She’s real. One hundred percent.
[00:20:08] Matthew Remski: What’s she called?
[00:20:11] Blair Hodges: Doesn’t have a name.
[00:20:12] Matthew Remski: Oh, seriously?
[00:20:13] Blair Hodges: “Heavenly Mother.”
[00:20:14] Matthew Remski: She’s so important, actually, she can’t say her name precisely.
[00:20:19] Blair Hodges: Yep. God wants to protect her from—look, people take God’s name in vain all the time. We don’t want that to happen to Mom. People to be like, “Oh, Heavenly Mother… what the heavenly—oh, my Heavenly Mother.” We don’t want people blaspheming like that.
So we have this structure, and I’m laying the groundwork for Mormonism’s foundational transphobia, queerphobia, homophobia. It’s rooted in these beliefs.
If there’s a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother who literally procreate and have spirit children, and those spirit children are born into a mortal earthly existence to learn, grow, progress, and become like their heavenly parents—then Jesus Christ’s role is to bear the weight of sin, purify, sanctify the children of God, and bring them back home, because we’re separated by mortality and sin.
And if that’s the case, then our families on Earth are sealed: joined by the authority of the church in a way that can’t be broken by death. Death isn’t the end. I’m thinking about this as my dad is dying. It’s a tragedy, but my family has been assured we’ll be together again. And the church is emphasizing these teachings.
I have the Family Proclamation here. I’ll read a little part. It says: “All human beings—male and female”—so we’re already restricting it to the binary—“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.”
[00:21:57] Matthew Remski: Oh, wow. The Judith Butler alarm just went right off. “Gender is an essential”—they even put “essential.”
[00:22:03] Blair Hodges: Yes—essential. And notice they said “gender,” and now the church is saying, “No, actually, we meant sex. We didn’t want to say the S word.”
It’s funny because some trans Mormons would say: sure, gender is an essential characteristic in premortal life. “I was a girl,” or “I was female,” and then I was born here and my body doesn’t match my spirit—that’s the problem. So they’d say: yes, gender is essential.
Church leaders would say: not so fast—we meant sex. Whatever you’re assigned at birth, that’s what you always were and always will be.
Why does that matter, Matthew? Because as it says, each child of God has a divine nature and destiny—to do what? To do the same thing God has done before them.
I didn’t really know this element until high school. They don’t talk about it every week at church. It’s something I learned as a teenager in seminary and later as a missionary.
Our purpose in life is to literally become like gods and goddesses: find a partner, marry, have children, die, resurrect, and continue to have families in the afterlife.
That’s a problem if you’re queer. Why? Because you can’t sexually procreate. If sexual procreation in the eternities is the same as sexual procreation on Earth—some kind of spiritual sperm and spiritual ova or whatever—we don’t get into the weeds because we’re skittish and puritanical about sex, but that’s the idea.
So Mormonism, because of this, is a fundamentally hetero-cis-supremacist theology at this point.
Now, there are other ways Mormons could have done this. There are other theological paths Joseph Smith, the founder, put out there that the church could have leaned into. There are other scriptural accounts Mormonism could have leaned into. But Mormonism coalesced around broader culture’s views about sex, gender, homosexuality, heterosexuality—then used scripture to patch together this current doctrine that’s foundationally transphobic and homophobic and queerphobic.
[00:24:08] Matthew Remski: Let me tie this back into the white shirts and neckties, and how someone like Mitt Romney comes off as a paragon of hetero-cis wholesomeness.
Christian visions of marriage and the nuclear family have always supported property-rights regimes, and they often protect inheritance and transfers of wealth.
Is there something about the historical formation of this form of Mormonism—so focused on the nuclear family—that takes that concern about family wealth into a fully American regime?
[00:25:04] Blair Hodges: Yeah. Early Mormonism was actually quite communistic. Socialism was inherent to Joseph Smith’s project—
[00:25:11] Matthew Remski: God damn it.
[00:25:12] Blair Hodges: Seriously—yeah. Everything we’re talking about is postwar.
[00:25:18] Matthew Remski: Yep.
[00:25:18] Blair Hodges: Prewar, it was “the law of consecration.” Everybody gathered together. They deeded all their things to the church. It became collective property, which was assigned out by lots according to need. People would increase on that and contribute back to the church. It would sustain widows, eliminate poverty, all of that.
When Mormonism was kicked out of Nauvoo, Illinois and came to Salt Lake—then not part of America—ironically, we were illegal immigrants, undocumented, whatever.
Then you see a shift as the church had to develop a rapprochement with the U.S. government. The government—and the Republican Party, which was then more like the Democrats, keep in mind—was built on the twin relics of slavery and polygamy. They were going to abolish those two things. So they came after the church.
The church had to make accommodations to fit into America so as not to be destroyed. The government was jailing Mormon leaders, seizing property, basically demolishing the church. So the church made a strategic transition to embrace and adopt capitalistic ideas to survive that attempted purge.
[00:26:40] Matthew Remski: That’s incredible.
[00:26:41] Blair Hodges: And that’s when the nuclear-family stuff we see crop up in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s really takes hold. Mormonism had become Republican enough that civil religion married with Mormon theology of the family to make today’s individualized family unit the core of God’s plan—rather than a collective of families sealed to each other and to the community, which would be exalted and raised up to God.
Now we have a very Protestant, individualized salvation model focused on the cis-hetero nuclear family.
[00:27:16] Matthew Remski: The thing I hate most about people’s claims on tradition is how easy it is to skip over: an entire religion can reform itself in relationship to the needs of capitalism within—what—twenty years?
[00:27:37] Blair Hodges: Not only capitalism, but white supremacy. Because Mormons at the time were literally thought of as not white. It’s funny, because now they’re so lily-white and predominantly white.
Think of the Irish. Think of other minority Catholics, Jews. White skin, sure—lighter skin—but what matters is whether you’re perceived as white.
Mormons were cast as not white, not American: a polygamous Mohammedan religion raising a nation of literal idiots—disabled, ungovernable—and “you’re not white.”
And Mormons were like: hell yeah, we’re white. We want to be white. Get us in the white game. Please believe we’re white.
We were going to out-white the whitest of the whites. We’re out-whiting, like, Conan O’Brien.
That’s where we wound up because we wanted in. We saw where the power was; we saw where the oppression was. Instead of aligning with other marginalized people and saying, “We need to solve that problem,” we said, “How can we get in on that? Let’s get in on that.”
[00:28:47] Matthew Remski: Okay. So I understand this heteronormative, cis-supremacist theology emerging and strengthening in the postwar era. You’ve explained that really well.
Some of that had to break apart for you to end up in a family where your kid doesn’t even know they’re coming out to you when they describe their crush. So what started to break this apart for you? What did you have to learn about your own gendered experience?
[00:29:26] Blair Hodges: I could say “always,” but as I got older—
My dad died when I was fifteen; I turned sixteen. I had an adolescence without a father figure in the home: a single mom who went back to school, then back to work, and got remarried—kind of had her own new life because she married so young. So my family—five kids—we were all kind of fending for ourselves.
I didn’t have a typical Mormon home from that point on. I went from a stay-at-home mom and a dad who was protector and provider to a single mom. I had a little job, my own little car, my own little life. I started living a different kind of Mormon life.
Mormon boys are brought up through the priesthood. We’re ordained at twelve, then we advance—deacon, teacher, priest, elder. All worthy boys. And as of 1978—remember, before that it was all boys except Black boys—now it’s all boys.
So I went through the ranks preparing for an LDS mission: deacon, teacher, priest, elder—going on a mission at nineteen, an “elder” at nineteen. We joke about that as Mormons: “We’re the elders—we’re nineteen.”
That arc is core to Mormon boyhood and manhood: being a protector, a provider, and a religious leader in the home. You’ll see Mormon men cry at church frequently as they bear testimony. There’s an interesting Mormon masculinity: not necessarily hardcore muscular Christianity, but a softer masculinity—with definite gender roles.
The Family Proclamation declares men are to provide and protect and women are to nurture—God-ordained roles. Even as a full-on believer, I was like: it doesn’t fit me. I feel nurturing. I want to snuggle a kid. I thought it’d be cool to be a stay-at-home parent.
And my wife was also not mainstream. We got married at twenty-four—which for Mormons was old. Most of my friends were married by then. We didn’t have our first child until we were thirty, which was also unusual. We were on a different trajectory. It fit within Mormonism, but it wasn’t the main approach.
What started cracking the facade more was the state getting involved in an initiative to make same-sex marriage illegal. And what I later found out was: the Family Proclamation itself was created because the church wanted to get involved in the Hawaii same-sex marriage case.
[00:32:22] Matthew Remski: Oh, geez.
[00:32:22] Blair Hodges: Yeah. They didn’t have theology they could point to—“here’s why we believe this”—so they put something together to make a theological argument that this was a religious freedom issue.
[00:32:34] Matthew Remski: You know what’s extraordinary? That initiative in Hawaii was headed up by Tulsi Gabbard’s dad. The Gabbard family approached it as a religious freedom issue too: “We shouldn’t be exposed”—because they were devotees of an ISKCON breakaway group—“we shouldn’t be exposed to queer people.”
[00:33:03] Blair Hodges: Yeah. And if you legalize this, we’ll somehow be obligated to integrate it into our faith. We’ll be forced to marry each other or—
[00:33:11] Matthew Remski: Yes—right.
[00:33:12] Blair Hodges: There’s also a strong Mormon contingent in Hawaii. We have a temple there, a university there—strong strain of Mormons.
But as those court cases were going on, this is when I flirted with libertarianism. I’m new in college, pursuing journalism. I’m like: okay, I’m not Republican anymore. I realized that for many reasons—but also, I’d been raised to think Democrats are the problem. So I’m like: maybe I’m a libertarian.
Because I feel really uncomfortable with the church fighting gay marriage. It’s embarrassing. I don’t like it. I think it’s wrong. So maybe the government should get out of it altogether.
My wife, meanwhile, is working at a university, meeting all kinds of gay friends. Her whole department was gay. And she’s having these big changes: “Wait a minute—I was totally wrong about gay stuff. They should be able to get married,” etc.
[00:34:11] Matthew Remski: Wow.
[00:34:12] Blair Hodges: I’m watching her, we’re having conversations, and both of us arrive at: I think we’re wrong about this. I think the church is wrong about this.
Then there were signs the church itself might be getting that impression over time. Little things that made you think it could change. It had changed in the past: it went from discriminating openly against Black people to bringing them in and granting them all authority and privileges. So we’re like: that’s a pattern; the church could change again.
So even though my wife and I differed from the church on these issues, from that time on we thought the church was on a trajectory to change.
Trans stuff wasn’t even on my radar until, like, 2018. By then I was working for the church at its university, and I met a trans member of the church. I had never knowingly met a trans person. My junk-drawer thoughts were: maybe it’s a mental illness; I should be sympathetic, but it’s a “problem,” right?
I met this person. They told me their story. It stunned me. I was like: this is not what I thought.
I didn’t know what to do. I reached out and met other trans folks. There was an influential person here—a professor in the state. I won’t name them because it’s not safe, but they’re trans, super smart, philosophy. I reached out to her. She sent me some books to read. I started realizing: I’m totally wrong about this.
The stories changed me first. Then I looked at the data and thought: the data backs it all up. Holy crap. This is just another part of human variance. That’s all this is.
That’s the short story of how I changed my mind—contrary to the church—and ended up leaving my job with the church when it became untenable. I saw the church taking steps backward. My belief that it was progressing on these issues was completely wrong.
[00:36:19] Matthew Remski: Or it’s going to take too long—or it’s going to take so long, in the face of rising fascism that it’s enabling, that we can’t continue.
[00:36:28] Blair Hodges: Exactly.
[00:36:29] Matthew Remski: You say something wonderful about the emotional preparation you had: “I felt like a nurturing person,” and the priesthood arc wasn’t that compelling. That’s amazing, because it’s different from my experience. One thing I had to break through was an embodied mimicry of an ideal masculinity—layers of emotional armoring, the way I presented myself, taking up space, not acknowledging other people’s work.
But it sounds like you had an innate feeling you weren’t fully part of that binary, or you weren’t going to embody your assigned role. And that means when you came across the information, there was a sense of validation.
[00:38:00] Blair Hodges: It felt like that.
Church culture was also hitting up against high school jock culture. I wasn’t a school athlete. There was that masculinity at school. But Mormon masculinity was like: you’re the weenie kid who goes to seminary every day—we had seminary during school every day—who likes the scriptures, who’s spiritual, kind of a little weenie boy.
So the Mormon trajectory to Mormon masculinity also countered broader ideas about masculinity. But jock culture bled into the church too. Most church leaders are the taller guys, the financially successful guys—and the more weenie guys don’t rise to the top there either.
So for me, I had different models of masculinity bumping up against each other at the same time. There wasn’t a coherent path either way, I don’t think.
And again, with my dad’s death, I was kind of on my own to figure stuff out. We didn’t have the internet back then. I wasn’t connecting with online communities. It was just whoever I knew at school—you fit in with your friends.
When I think about it today, Mormonism has possibilities of queering gender that it just won’t lean into.
And the biggest thing is: back then we said the F-word all the time. F-A-G. It was just something we said to each other: “Don’t be a…” We didn’t really think about what it was or what it meant. We kind of knew.
I wasn’t aware I knew any gay people in high school. I didn’t know any openly gay people. But the church was giving me messages that that stuff was bad. So when I’d say that word, or hear it, or feel that bad feeling—“there’s something gross or wrong”—I felt backed up by the church, or amplified by it, rather than a church saying: being that way toward anybody is wrong—let alone toward marginalized people.
Mormonism has all the theological tools and reasons to advocate for marginalized folks. It doesn’t pick them up because it’s already bought into the “gay is bad” mentality. They don’t want to be as mean and ugly about it, per se, but it’s still there.
So they’d say, “Don’t call someone that because it’s mean,” not “Don’t call them that because it’s dehumanizing.”
[00:40:31] Matthew Remski: Yeah—so it’s the Utah Way of being anti-gay.
[00:40:35] Blair Hodges: Yeah.
[00:41:00] Matthew Remski: So that’s it for Part One. Part Two is now up on Patreon. It’ll be unlocked in a few weeks for everyone.
In Part Two, we pick up our conversation on the complexities of Mormon masculinity—which is fascinating, because it includes public vulnerability and weeping while giving testimony. These are traditionally viewed as manifestations of the Spirit, echoes of the charismatic foundation of the church. This isn’t about weakness; it’s a form of devotion.
But there’s also a growing faction within the church moving the opposite way—toward a more punitive, muscular, less emotional form of Christianity.
Blair and I also talk about shifting away from authoritarian parenting toward a focus on children’s rights, as I think we all have to do. We talk about neurodivergence. We talk about how the Mormon eternal-family doctrine can be really problematic when it functions as a system of extended ownership over children—and how Blair began to see his way through that.
He also describes moving from what he calls the privilege of political disengagement into active antifascism.
And why did he stop going to church? He needed to prioritize his trans kid’s life, which eventually had to outweigh his desire to be a hero who changes the institution from within.
That’s all up on Part Two right now.
Until we meet again: take care of each other.
