Here's a funny idea: Boyd K. Packer was gay. (NSFW-ish)

I often prefer to imagine Packer this way for the giggles, and for those with an inclination toward exploring the matter, I think it's healthy to contextualize this without falling prey to the conjecture.

Some of the best reactionary publications of the LDS Church surface during and just after the scholarly normalization of philosophical and scientific work on intersexuality in the 50s and 60s.

Just like Darwin, Huxley, and Wallace did to disrupt Victorian thought on how life came to be by demonstrating the inescapable validity of evolution, so too, did work attributed to Money and Ehrhardt (and John and Joan Hampson to some degree) demonstrate the inescapable validity of a relativized 'gender' separate and apart from biological 'sex'.[1]

What we ended up with was a tsunami of work from philosophers and scientists laying legitimate claim to a divergence—forever—from Victorian era thinking on sex.

In other words, there was a tremendous disruption in the way we think about (i) our sexual physiology, (ii) our gender identification, and (iii) how we experience sexual attraction.

This detachment from gender-essentialism sent proverbial earthquakes throughout conservative America and beyond that still echo to this day. Preachers throughout America united in reacting and rejecting the very idea that this could ever be the case—Mormonism was just a tiny piece of it.

Ultimately, conservative America felt the weight of very real justifications for sexual divergence that didn't stem from temptation, succumbing to sin, or some other irrelevant character attribution.

The only ways that they knew how to react were to simply reject that those justifications could usurp religious authority on the matter.

And look how well that's working for them.


Notes:

[1] This early work was performed through a gender-essentialist hermeneutic, as these psychiatrists considered biologically intersex babies 'medical emergencies' that required immediate genital mutilation to conform to conservative social norms. (Fausto-Sterling) Later work in this area corrected for this, and many specialists require that the patient grow into an identity before broaching the topic of surgery. Many patients decide never to have surgery.


References:

Tremain, On The Government of Disability (2001) ISNA.org

/r/exmormon Thread