Something I wished I had known when I was leaving Mormonism—the pain that came from the apologetics of Mormon academics, progressives and liberal thinkers hurt the very most. Felt like a betrayal and intensely hypocritical. It still does, but you learn to cope.

Because for a lot of us, we come from families or communities who never understood us anyway, and we found a new family in Mormon folks who saw the world like we did. That is, up until we could no longer apply our seemingly shared ethics to the church.

We live our lives in so many shared spaces—being Dem voters in a red state for instance. Or LGBTQ advocates in homophobic towns. Or show up for women’s rights in local marches. And it feels so much less lonely.
But when Gen Conf rolls around you’re forced to remember the truth.

Which is that you’re even more alone because you also gave up the church. And you get it, folks have their reasons, but it still confuses and reminds you that they support an institution that actively abuses and rejects people and promotes shame.

So when they share the Holland memes or the twitter threads on sympathy for J Smith being poor, or whatever. God almighty it hurts.

But I think this conf in particular hurt because you saw all those tweets predicting the church was going to ordain women.

Did they not believe us when we told our stories of excommunication? Of being hounded by our local leaders? Of being charged with apostasy?

Do they not see how women are lead along with tiny crumbs but never, ever a feast?