Masculinizing Mormon Patriarchs: A. Dean Byrd and Reparative Therapy with Latter-day Saint Men

Abstract

This article analyzes how A. Dean Byrd, an assistant commissioner of LDS Social Services, advanced reparative therapy for Latter-day Saint (LDS) men at the turn of the twenty-first century. Byrd argued that Mormon men’s “unwanted same-sex attractions” stemmed from deficient gender identities that could be “repaired” by cultivating traditional masculinity. Rather than originating these ideas, he synthesized gender-essentialist themes from LDS pastoral discourse into a systematic therapeutic program grounded in the doctrine of eternal gender. Reading Byrd’s writings along the grain, this article shows how his model masculinized Mormon patriarchs while rendering women less visible as therapeutic subjects, framing conversion therapy in LDS contexts as a gendered project aimed at restoring male ecclesiastical authority. Byrd’s collaborations with Catholic and evangelical therapists through organizations such as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality further reveal reparative therapy as a shared gender ideology that united conservative Mormons with a broader family values coalition amid a moral panic over homosexuality. Yet Byrd’s distinctly Mormon cosmology exposed the limits of conservative Christian ecumenism. Situating Byrd at the intersection of LDS soteriology, gender, and the religious right, this article illuminates how one Mormon therapist participated in and unsettled the networks shaping late twentieth-century responses to queer belonging.

I. Introduction

Jeremy had been on edge all day, his stomach in knots, knowing he was about to face a reality he had avoided for too long. He had made an appointment with LDS Social Services, a counseling agency operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to confront a problem that haunted him – his “unwanted same-sex attractions.” ¹ These feelings had left him uneasy for years. Now, he was about to brave what one Mormon leader called an “unholy transgression.” ² The weight of the moment pressed on him, making it almost impossible to gather the courage to attend his first group counseling session. The thought of sitting in a room with other men, all battling the same issue, seemed surreal. Jeremy’s anxiety built throughout the day, manifesting in waves of nausea and restless trips to the bathroom. But no matter how sick he felt, he would not let it stop him. He knew that getting his attractions under control was a necessary step if he ever wanted to reconcile his sexual struggles with the expectations of his faith. “I had to do it,” Jeremy recalled. “I gathered my courage and showed my face at LDS Social Services to participate in my group therapy session.” It felt like the first step in shedding the cloak of personal and spiritual isolation, and perhaps, being fully embraced into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ heteronormative ideal. ³

In the decades following World War II, countless Mormon men like Jeremy wrestled with “unwanted same-sex attractions,” often in profound isolation from their faith community and its teachings on homosexuality. During the 1960s and 1970s, some Brigham Young University students reportedly endured electric aversion therapy, a painful and controversial practice intended to condition negative responses to homosexual desire. ⁴ By the early 1990s, LDS Social Services had adopted a gender-based approach known as reparative therapy, which framed homosexuality as a failure to acquire “proper” masculine or feminine roles. This method emphasized strict adherence to traditional gender norms as the pathway to eliminating same-sex feelings, attractions, and fantasies. A. Dean Byrd, a leading LDS reparative therapist, played a pivotal role in promoting this model, arguing that achieving a conventional masculine identity was essential for Mormon men seeking to overcome “unwanted same-sex attractions.” While gendered interpretations of homosexuality had appeared in LDS manuals and sermons, Byrd consolidated these strands into a coherent therapeutic paradigm explicitly grounded in the church’s cosmology of eternal gender. According to Mormon theology, eternal gender is the belief that a person’s gender is an essential, divinely created aspect of identity that exists before mortal life and continues after death.

As assistant commissioner of LDS Social Services, Byrd theorized that addressing a patient’s “deficient” gender identity could foster heterosexual development in Mormon men. Drawing on Latter-day Saint manuals and pamphlets on homosexuality, Byrd adapted gender-based interventions from Elizabeth Moberly, a British pastoral counselor, and Joseph Nicolosi, a Catholic psychologist in Los Angeles. Reparative therapy, however, was deeply controversial, particularly as the gay rights movement gained momentum in the wake of the AIDS crisis. In response to growing LGBTQ political influence, Byrd forged alliances with evangelical and Catholic therapists, creating a conservative ecumenism that united disparate faith traditions during the culture wars. Within this context, reparative therapy offered Latter-day Saints with “unwanted same-sex attractions” a pathway to reintegration into the Church and positioned socially conservative Mormons as key participants in the fragile – and often symbolic – family values coalition. Through publications in academic journals, opinion pieces, and monographs, Byrd consistently reaffirmed a gender-based approach to “repairing” Mormon patriarchs with “unwanted same-sex attractions.”

Byrd’s approach to reparative therapy reinforced LDS Church teachings on gender. Taylor Petrey argues that Latter-day Saint leaders have long advanced competing views on gender and sexuality, oscillating between gender essentialism – where male and female roles are considered divinely ordained and immutable – and the notion that gender and sexuality are malleable, shaped by social, spiritual, and psychological influences. ⁵ Rather than emphasizing this tension, Byrd’s work underscored Mormon attempts to realize strict gender roles in the mortal realm, a project rooted in the cosmological concept of eternal gender. In the 1990s and 2000s, Byrd offered both theological and psychological rationales for reparative therapy by explicitly linking counseling practices to LDS teachings on eternal gender. His publications confirm Alan Michael Williams’s observation that “the issue of homosexuality for the Church is, at its core, about gender,” revealing how reparative therapy functioned as a counseling method for men to achieve the patriarchal status prescribed by Mormonism’s doctrine of eternal gender. ⁶

Scholars have addressed Byrd’s work in varying levels of depth. Petrey, for instance, notes Byrd’s involvement with LDS Social Services, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and Evergreen International, a nonprofit organization devoted to working with Latter-day Saints with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” Petrey also connects Byrd’s corpus to the concept of sexual malleability. ⁷ A close reading of Byrd’s work, though, reveals that eternal gender was the core cosmological belief for reparative therapy with Mormons. Other scholars have investigated the history of conversion therapy within evangelical, Pentecostal, and Catholic contexts from the 1960s into the early 2000s. ⁸ This scholarship, however, overlooks the distinct influence of Mormon theology on conversion therapy. Importantly, reparative therapy offered an approach to “changing” Mormon men in ways that reified the Latter-day Saint concept of eternal gender, a soteriological belief not shared by evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Catholics. ⁹

Through the process of reading along the grain, this article critically interprets Byrd’s work on reparative therapy. ¹⁰ Reading along the grain provides a method to trace the internal logic of Byrd’s arguments and how they corroborated – and potentially influenced – Latter-day Saint teachings on eternal gender. This approach helps to interrogate the implicit assumptions within his work. Byrd’s writings show how LDS leaders, including therapists like him, judged gender identity to be more significant than sexual malleability when counseling Mormon men with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” By reading along the grain, the following analysis also demonstrates the lasting implications of Byrd’s work for understanding gender, sexuality, and religious doctrine in modern Mormonism. Notably, the discourse over the Latter-day Saint concept of eternal gender continues to shape discussions of LGBTQ personhood, particularly as conversion therapists work to introduce gender normativity to trans and nonbinary youth. ¹¹

Rather than acting as a lone innovator, Byrd emerged as a key popularizer of gender-focused reparative therapy within LDS institutional contexts. He consolidated existing theories of gender identity into a codified therapeutic paradigm, expanded its empirical and institutional reach, and embedded it within church discourse and the religious right. Grounded in the doctrine of eternal gender, Byrd developed counseling programs aimed at reinforcing masculine identity among Mormon men during mortal life. While gender identity has been central to reparative therapy across faith traditions, Byrd uniquely invoked eternal gender to justify interventions for LDS men with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” His efforts not only sought to masculinize Mormon patriarchs but also rendered women less visible as therapeutic subjects, revealing reparative therapy in LDS contexts as a deeply gendered project prioritizing the restoration of male authority over any comparable concern with lesbianism. Recreating the heteropatriarchal order in the face of feminism and gay rights was not solely a Mormon concern; other religious conservatives likewise embraced reparative therapy as a means of preserving masculine, heterosexual dominance in the United States.

II. Reparative Therapy before Byrd

Mormon conceptions of gender were not the only influence on A. Dean Byrd’s approach to reparative therapy. Earlier figures in the ex-gay movement, an informal network of conservative Christian counselors and therapists who promoted conversion therapy, also shaped his ideas and practices. Central to Byrd’s thinking were the writings of Elizabeth Moberly and Joseph Nicolosi, both of whom developed gender-based frameworks for “treating” homosexuality. They argued that “unwanted same-sex attractions” stemmed from unmet emotional needs and disruptions in gender identity development during childhood, proposing interventions that reinforced traditional gender roles as a remedy. These ideas provided the intellectual foundation for Byrd’s Mormon-inflected contributions to reparative therapy. Although Byrd did not invent gender-based explanations for “unwanted same-sex attractions” within Mormonism, he synthesized existing LDS pastoral teachings with prominent ex-gay theories. In short, he produced a therapeutic program that made eternal gender the central clinical and soteriological category. Examining these earlier models reveals that Byrd’s work was not an isolated innovation but an extension of longstanding theories about gender embedded within the ex-gay movement.

Religious-based counseling for queer individuals surged in popularity in the decades following World War II. ¹² Within Mormonism, some of the most frequently cited interventions took place at Brigham Young University, where clinicians experimented with electric aversion therapy – a procedure that delivered shocks to a participant’s arm rather than to the brain – as one possible way to “treat” men’s “unwanted same-sex attractions.” The surviving evidence for these practices is limited. The most detailed account comes from a 1976 dissertation by graduate student Max Ford McBride, who studied seventeen men, fourteen of whom completed the protocol. In the study, McBride had the men view male and female images while connected to a penile plethysmograph. Participants received “discrete shocks” to the bicep when they exhibited arousal to male imagery. McBride concluded that aversive conditioning was “an effective treatment for male homosexuality,” but his project was a research study on comparative stimuli rather than an institutional mandate from BYU administrators. There is little documentation about how widely such methods were used beyond this small cohort. ¹³ Moreover, LDS Social Services manuals from the 1970s did not prescribe aversion therapy as a standard treatment; they instead emphasized pastoral counseling and moral exhortation. ¹⁴ Importantly, McBride’s protocol lacked a comprehensive gendered framework beyond the presentation of male and female imagery during shock administration.

Even though McBride’s research deployed little more than gendered imagery, LDS leaders increasingly framed homosexuality through a lens of disrupted or improperly developed gender roles. In 1973, the Church’s pamphlet Homosexuality warned that gay Saints could not fulfill the divinely ordained roles of husband and father or wife and mother, insisting that “the proper male role needs to be learned and practiced.” ¹⁵ This gender-essentialist logic became a recurring refrain in subsequent LDS publications. The Church’s 1981 manual Homosexuality reiterated that “early memory homosexuality” might stem from confusion about male and female roles; its authors urged leaders to counsel individuals on “appropriate masculine or feminine roles and practices.” ¹⁶ Gender identity formation took center stage four years later in A Parent’s Guide, which taught that from birth “the child’s life is influenced by gender as he or she learns the central role of being a male or female person.” Although these roles were described as “eternally significant,” the manual asserted that learning them should be “a fairly simple task. ¹⁷ Across these texts, the Church advanced an evolving – but increasingly coherent – narrative: homosexuality was a problem of disrupted gender acquisition that required correction not only through repentance or therapy but also through the disciplined performance of idealized masculinity and femininity. These LDS sources show that church leaders had adopted a de facto reparative framework that cast homosexuality as a failure of gender development.

These LDS publications also echoed a broader Christian effort during these years to reinterpret homosexuality through the language of gender. In the late 1960s, the emerging ex-gay movement began experimenting with new formulations of conversion therapy, drawing together psychological theories and conservative theology. Pentecostal minister Kent Philpott, for instance, helped establish this framework in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he fused child development theories, Freudian and Neo-Freudian ideas about psychosexual trauma, and a literalist reading of the Bible to argue that God created all people heterosexual. ¹⁸ In books such as The Third Sex? (1975) and The Gay Theology (1977), Philpott contended that homosexuality resulted from disrupted gender identity formation and that aligning one’s gender identity with one’s birth sex was essential for heterosexual development. ¹⁹ Beginning in the 1980s, British counselor Elizabeth Moberly expanded this gender-centric model, providing a more systematic theological-psychological rationale for conversion therapy. In Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic (1983), Moberly asserted that “unwanted same-sex attractions” arose from damaged same-sex parent–child relationships – and she proposed a form of therapeutic “repair” for these bonds. ²⁰

Moberly relied heavily on psychoanalytic thought while developing her gender-specific approach to reparative therapy, arguing that male homosexuality stemmed from emotional detachment from fathers and that lesbian desire arose from inadequate maternal bonding. This deficit, she claimed, produced a “reparative urge” to meet unmet psychological needs through same-sex relationships. Her therapeutic model therefore called for traditionally masculine male counselors to guide male clients – and conventionally feminine female counselors to guide female clients – in rebuilding normative gender identities. In contrast to earlier psychoanalytic methods that cautioned against same-sex intimacy, Moberly insisted that close, nonsexual same-sex relationships were essential for healthy heterosexual development and recommended strong early bonding with the same-sex parent to prevent later homosexual desires. Moberly’s blend of psychology and theology, coupled with her insistence on rigid gender identity formation, attracted a devoted following in the United States. ²¹ Her American work grew so extensive that she relocated from England to Pennsylvania in 1987, carving out a distinct space of womanly authority within the patriarchal religious right alongside figures such as Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, Beverly LaHaye, and Tammy Faye Bakker. ²² Despite her influence, Moberly never attained the same institutional recognition as her male counterparts in the ex-gay movement.

The person who made reparative therapy widely known throughout the religious right was Joseph Nicolosi, a Catholic clinical psychologist whose influence grew rapidly during the 1980s as his Los Angeles-based Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic attracted a substantial clientele that included Catholic priests and nuns. ²³ In his clinical practice, Nicolosi blended psychology with religious moral teaching, insisting that psychological difficulties could only be understood within an individual’s spiritual and moral framework. At a time when Catholic leaders condemned homosexual behavior but promoted pastoral compassion through programs like Courage, Nicolosi emerged as a conservative authority on homosexuality. ²⁴ His prominence solidified with the publication of Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality in 1991, which positioned him as a central figure in the religious right’s campaign to reassert gender normativity. Reworking Moberly’s earlier formulations, Nicolosi framed male homosexuality as the product of dysfunctional family dynamics – particularly overinvolved mothers and psychologically absent fathers who failed to model traditional masculinity. Reparative therapy, he argued, could “strengthen” masculine identification and thereby “change” “unwanted same-sex attractions,” while fathers who proactively embodied and taught conventional masculinity could help prevent homosexuality in boys. ²⁵

Nicolosi sharpened earlier psychoanalytic theories into an overtly gendered program that cast the restoration of traditional masculinity as the cornerstone of overcoming “unwanted same-sex attractions.” He argued that ineffective fathers and broader economic shifts, including the decline of hands-on masculine labor, had weakened men’s virility and disrupted the father-son bond he saw as essential to healthy male development. Without close paternal modeling of masculine behavior, he warned, boys risked adopting what he called the “good little boy” mentality: a personality marked by compliance, emotional sensitivity, and passivity that stifled masculinity and, in his view, increased the likelihood of “unwanted same-sex attractions.” ²⁶ To remedy this condition, Nicolosi combined psychoanalysis with behavioral conditioning to actively cultivate traditional masculinity in his male clients. He encouraged men to engage in activities – especially competitive sports – that provided clear markers of success and created opportunities for homosocial bonding, physical competence, and the performance of masculine confidence. ²⁷ He also emphasized the need for clients to confront and express repressed anger, reframing it not as a destructive force but as a vital pathway to the “true” heterosexual self. ²⁸

Nicolosi’s approach gained traction across the many faith traditions within the religious right. The ecumenical union of reparative therapists, however, confirms Neil J. Young’s emphasis on symbolic alignment – Mormons, evangelicals, and Catholics rallying around gender-conforming therapies as a shared project – and reveals how Mormon doctrines such as eternal gender limited the depth and durability of that cooperation. ²⁹ In this fractured landscape, reparative therapy became one of the ideas bridging these groups. But Byrd entered this environment by adapting reparative therapy’s framework to Mormonism’s cosmology of eternal gender. His career illustrates the tension between symbolic alliances and institutional limits. While integrating Mormonism into the ex-gay movement’s gender ideology, Byrd’s explicitly LDS doctrine of eternal gender could never fully resonate with evangelicals or Catholics. His significance, then, lies in fusing broader currents from the ex-gay movement into a systematic clinical program for Latter-day Saint men.

III. Byrd, Mormonism, and Reparative Therapy

In 1993, while reminiscing on his work with men who experienced “unwanted same-sex attractions,” A. Dean Byrd observed that many of his patients came to understand their homosexuality as a longing to affirm their masculinity. Once these men felt a “solid” sense of masculinity, he explained, therapy could be “successful.” ³⁰ Byrd’s career, in which he produced over 100 publications, intertwined Latter-day Saint beliefs about eternal gender with psychological methods aimed at “healing” “unwanted same-sex attractions.” Essential for this process was reinforcing each patient’s traditional gender identity.

Born in Florence, South Carolina, in 1948, Albert Dean Byrd traced his religious convictions to the rich and varied spiritual influences of his childhood. The youngest of thirteen children, he grew up in a home shaped by two contrasting traditions: Buddhism and Southern Baptist Christianity. From his mother, Moody Imouri Jung, he inherited a distinctly Buddhist perspective on sorrow, seeing sadness not as something to avoid but as purposeful, a necessary emotion that could help one confront life’s inevitable losses with clarity and humility. From his father, George Otto Byrd, he absorbed a different set of convictions: that certain truths are discovered rather than constructed, that they originate from the Divine, and that human agreement or disagreement cannot alter reality. Chief among these truths was grace – its quiet power, its ability to “take us the last mile of the way,” and its central role in a life oriented toward God. Byrd later reflected that this early reverence for grace made him “vulnerable to the gospel” when he learned about the Latter-day Saints. Encountering the teachings of Mormonism, he embraced them “without exception or reservation,” recognizing Joseph Smith’s revelations as the same kind of discovered truths he had been taught to trust. From that moment forward, Byrd understood the “truths of the gospel” as permeating every aspect of his life. ³¹

Byrd’s path to becoming Mormonism’s leading advocate of reparative therapy began with his training at Brigham Young University and the clinical experiences that shaped his early career. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970, completed a master’s the following year, and finished his dissertation on Mormon parents of “normal and emotionally disturbed children” in 1978. ³² After receiving his doctorate, Byrd launched a career devoted to integrating psychological counseling with Latter-day Saint conceptions of health and well-being. He worked in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, where he increasingly confronted the challenge of supporting men struggling with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” He reflected on these experiences, writing the following:

For reasons not clear to me, a substantial minority of my patients were men who were unhappy with their homosexuality attractions. About half of these men were married, had children, and complained of unwanted homosexual attractions in their lives. They professed love for their wives and families, had considered becoming involved sexually with other men, but had decided they wanted help in diminishing homosexual attraction and increasing their heterosexual potential. The other half of these men were single, in their mid-thirties, and equally as unhappy with their homosexual struggles. They had lived the “lifestyle” and found little joy. ³³

By the late 1980s, Byrd believed the AIDS crisis had “emerged as a significant public health problem.” Under these circumstances, he witnessed the profound emotional toll of navigating religious conviction, sexual desire, and fear of a deadly virus, a reality that propelled his commitment to counseling men with same-sex desires. “It was during this time,” he wrote, “I had an epiphany myself: I first realized that with virtually every man to whom I had provided psychological care, his success seemed associated with some kind of spiritual experience—a kind of a discovery about his true nature.” ³⁴ By the early 1990s, he was assistant commissioner for LDS Social Services and held clinical faculty appointments at BYU and the University of Utah. ³⁵

Like conversion therapists from other faith traditions, Byrd concluded that psychological care alone was insufficient to “change” these men. True progress emerged when Mormon men actualized the teachings of eternal gender. For Byrd, these spiritual – and gendered – breakthroughs were not just moments of personal insight but revelations that aligned with timeless truths to offer peace to patients where secular psychological solutions had failed. Men, previously trapped by their “unwanted same-sex attractions,” found comfort and purpose by adopting a traditional gender identity. Byrd’s work as a therapist, he believed, had to focus on behavioral change – and it must integrate faith-based interventions to buttress traditional gendered identities. These insights showed Byrd that there was “real potential to combine psychological and spiritual care” to guide individuals with “unwanted same-sex attractions” toward achieving Mormon teachings on eternal gender. ³⁶

This section unfolds in two parts. First, it explores why reparative therapy resonated so deeply with many Latter-day Saints, tracing its appeal to the Church’s teachings on eternal gender and the divine order of male and female roles. Then, it turns to Byrd’s writings, examining how Mormon-informed reparative therapy promised men with “unwanted same-sex attractions” a way to align their lives with a sacred mandate: to embody eternal gender as part of God’s plan.

A. Mormonism, Gender, and Sexuality at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

In the first half of the 1990s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued formal statements about homosexuality, eternal gender, and the traditional family. This included the First Presidency’s message for people with “unwanted same-sex attractions” to seek counsel within the church, a statement in the Ensign about “same-gender attractions,” and The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Each statement situated reparative therapy as the best method for Mormons with “unwanted same-sex attractions” to live in line with teachings on eternal gender. Drawing on the Mormon belief in Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, these statements increased reparative therapy’s appeal to Latter-day Saints. Since A. Dean Byrd’s writings on counseling Saints with “unwanted same-sex attractions” included references to church leaders’ claims about eternal gender, same-gender attractions, and the family, they are crucial context for conducting a close reading of his work.

Gender has long occupied a central place in Latter-day Saint cosmology. In the 1840s, Joseph Smith taught that maleness and femaleness are essential, immutable characteristics extending from the premortal to the postmortal realms. His 1843 revelations on celestial marriage also asserted that men and women must be sealed together eternally to achieve exaltation, establishing a framework in which gender became integral to salvation. ³⁷ Under Brigham Young, these ideas were codified into a system that emphasized gender complementarity: men presided through priesthood authority while women fulfilled divine roles as wives and mothers. In the early twentieth century, church leaders continued to affirm gender as an eternal attribute, even as the LDS Church sought greater acceptance in American society by promoting the monogamous family and maintaining rigid gender divisions in religious and social life. ³⁸ Yet this celebration of women as wives and mothers was paired with restrictions on their ecclesiastical authority and political agency. In the 1970s and 1980s, fearing that feminism would destabilize gender complementarity, these limits became exemplified by the church’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. ³⁹

The Latter-day Saints belief in Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother further ingrains the importance of a gendered binary for Mormons. Unlike other Christians, Saints have a cosmological model for masculinity and femininity. Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, in essence, model the traditional gender roles that Mormons should exhibit in their own lives. In Latter-day Saint thought, Heavenly Father is regarded as the literal Father of all human spirits and the supreme being of the universe. He is seen as a personal and loving God who has a deep concern for the eternal progression of His children. Furthermore, Heavenly Father possesses a glorified, exalted physical body, one of flesh and bone. Gender is a core part of Heavenly Father’s identity, and as Sara M. Patterson states, “the emphasis is on the maleness of Heavenly Father.” ⁴⁰ Heavenly Mother, on the other hand, is understood as the divine partner of Heavenly Father, and together, they are believed to be the parents of all human spirits. Heavenly Mother’s role in the creation of spirits and her nurturing influence on humanity highlight the sacredness of traditional gender roles, affirming that gender is an eternal principle for the LDS faithful. This deep-rooted belief in eternal gender within the divine framework of Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother provided fertile ground for reparative therapy’s appeal to Mormons by reinforcing the church’s emphasis on eternal gender as essential for spiritual progression. ⁴¹

Mormonism’s cosmological explanation of eternal gender largely ignored homosexuality for the first century of the church’s existence. Starting in the late 1950s, however, Saint leadership focused on homosexuality as a sin. ⁴² As the sexual revolution took shape, LDS leadership escalated its statements about the perceived immorality of homosexuality. ⁴³ In 1969, President Spencer W. Kimball proclaimed that homosexuality was a serious sin “equal to or greater than that of fornication or adultery.” In The Miracle of Forgiveness, Kimball not only threatened excommunication for “the unrepentant practicing homosexual” but he also issued several other sexual warnings, declaring that masturbation could lead to homosexuality and that homosexuality might progress to bestiality. ⁴⁴ For Kimball, there was no compromise on same-sex desires. “If all the people in the world were to accept homosexuality,” he said in 1971, “the practice would still be a deep dark sin.” ⁴⁵ These statements reflected LDS concerns about homosexuality as a societal problem. ⁴⁶ In the 1970s and 1980s, though, LDS elites modified their rhetoric to focus on homosexuality as a conflict for eternal gender. ⁴⁷ This modification of LDS rhetoric provided an opening for reparative therapy to become a prominent practice with Mormon men.

Once homosexuality was recast as a threat to eternal gender, church leaders moved to articulate pastoral responses consistent with this theological framing. In 1991, Mormon efforts to “heal” Latter-day Saint men through reparative therapy received the church’s backing when the First Presidency specifically addressed “unwanted same-sex attractions.” In a letter, the First Presidency encouraged individuals with “unwanted same-sex attractions” – and their families – to seek counsel from their branch, stake, or district presidents. While still labeling “homosexual and lesbian behavior” as “sinful,” the letter urged church leaders to approach those struggling with love and understanding. ⁴⁸ In his own writings from the early 1990s, Byrd stressed the importance for a patient to form a close, collaborative relationship with a bishop or stake president, noting that he had “never worked successfully with an LDS man who has homosexual struggles” without such a partnership. ⁴⁹ With its statement in 1991, the First Presidency lent ecclesiastical legitimacy to gender-based counseling for “unwanted same-sex attractions,” encouraging more Latter-day Saints to view reparative therapy as a sanctioned option within the church’s pastoral repertoire.

Four years later, the church issued The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which Megan Stanton calls “a flashpoint for the Saints.” ⁵⁰ Known today simply as “the Proclamation,” it argued for a clear division between male and female roles within the family. It continues to teach that men are primarily responsible for providing for their families, whereas women are largely responsible for nurturing children. The Proclamation also highlights how gender is part of one’s identity. On this point, the crucial Mormon document states that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” ⁵¹ Since its publication, the Proclamation has played a critical role in debates over gender within Mormonism, not only on issues related to family but also in how Latter-day Saint leaders have discussed “unwanted same-sex attractions.” The Proclamation, according to Patterson, “held up gender as the most salient aspect of individual identity.” ⁵²

Finally, in 1995, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, published “Same-Gender Attraction” in the Ensign, an official church publication. In it, Oaks relied on the concept of eternal gender to support the use of reparative therapy on LGBTQ Saints. He claimed that the Creator instilled attraction between men and women “to draw husband and wife together in the family setting…for the accomplishment of his purposes, including the raising of children.” He also pointed to numerous gospel doctrines, such as Doctrine and Covenants 20:18, to highlight the Mormon belief that God created human male and female and to declare that “[w]hat we call gender was an essential characteristic of our existence prior to our birth.” To satisfy the dictates of eternal gender, Oaks emphasized the importance of eternal marriage as the divine and prescribed goal for “every child of God, in this life or in the life to come.” ⁵³ Oaks’s mention of eternal marriage “in this life or in the life to come” reminded Saints with “unwanted same-sex attractions” that they could be rewarded in the afterlife if they did not succumb to homosexual behavior while in the earthly realm. Reparative therapy offered one way, Oaks suggested, to diminish the attraction that would deny exaltation in the post-mortal world.

Byrd’s approach to reparative therapy was deeply rooted in Latter-day Saint teachings on eternal gender. These doctrines emphasize divinely ordained roles for men and women and the eternal partnership of Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. Within this framework, traditional gender norms are presented as essential to spiritual progression. The belief that individuals are destined to become divine parents reinforces the importance of fulfilling these roles. Coupled with social pressures to marry and raise a family, Alan Michael Williams argues, the doctrines of eternal gender and divine parenthood place significant weight on LDS members grappling with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” ⁵⁴ Reparative therapy aligned with these religious expectations. Consequently, Mormon-based reparative therapists perceived no conflict in their efforts to reshape men’s gender identity. Rather, they viewed reparative therapy as a means for Latter-day Saints to realize eternal gender in mortality, a process believed to continue into the Celestial Kingdom. By masculinizing Mormon patriarchs, reparative therapists like Byrd sought to help men with same-sex attractions embody their eternal gender and achieve exaltation. At the same time, Byrd occupied a position from which he could interpret and subtly shape LDS teachings on gender and sexuality. As a senior figure in LDS Social Services, he helped supply leaders with therapeutic language that cast eternal gender as the doctrinal solution to the “problem” of homosexuality.

B. Byrd, Gender, and Reparative Therapy

Byrd was influential not for inventing reparative therapy, but for consolidating and popularizing gender-based approaches to homosexuality among Latter-day Saint men. Through his publications – especially journal articles and monographs – Byrd reframed earlier manuals, sermons, and theories on “unwanted same-sex attraction” into a religiously infused psychological counseling program designed to reinforce patriarchal authority. ⁵⁵ Unlike other models of hegemonic masculinity that emphasize sexual conquest as a marker of masculinity, though, the Latter-day Saint ideal of manhood has centered on monogamy, early marriage, and prolific procreation. For Mormon men experiencing “unwanted same-sex attractions,” these norms have been unattainable because they cannot fulfill the expectation of presiding over a wife, children, and household. Byrd’s work advanced the belief that gender identity could be “changed” in mortality through psychological intervention and spiritual guidance, offering these men hope of becoming Mormon patriarchs. Building on decades of LDS emphasis on “proper” gender roles as a remedy for same-sex desires, Byrd repackaged these ideas in clinical language and disseminated them across ecclesiastical and ex-gay movement networks.

In 1993, Byrd offered one of his first overviews of reparative therapy in an interview conducted with the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists. In this interview, Byrd presented reparative therapy in rather simple terms. Echoing Elizabeth Moberly and Joseph Nicolosi, Byrd shared his opinion that homosexuality was rooted in a maladaptive gendered response to unmet psychological needs. Byrd argued that “unwanted same-sex attractions” emerged when boys experienced early emotional disconnection from their fathers. In explaining the psychosexual theories of reparative therapy, he presented a broad theory of homosexual development that had cultural appeal in the wake of second-wave feminism and the ongoing fight for LGBTQ rights. ⁵⁶

Byrd, in this interview, also talked about the gendered dimensions of reparative therapy. Much of this part of the conversation centered on father-son relationships, a crucial component to reparative therapy’s focus on masculine development. A solution to a seemingly exploding queer population, Byrd said, could be found in fathers taking a more active role in the home. Byrd’s suggestion that men reclaim their patriarchal place in the home reflected a growing message in the religious right. As Caroline Kline notes, a significant outcome of the history of Mormon gender in the last third of the twentieth century “may be the increase of male participation in the home.” ⁵⁷ Byrd’s suggestion that fathers assume an active role in domestic affairs – while leaving women in charge of homemaking – had cultural and religious resonance to Latter-day Saints. From nearly the beginning of his time as a reparative therapist, Byrd could appeal to Mormon beliefs about active fathers as a necessary part of a Latter-day Saint household. By contending that fathers needed to be participants in domestic affairs, Byrd became a pivotal figure in not only the therapeutic fight to stave off “unwanted same-sex attractions” but also for upholding Mormonism’s cosmological promise of eternal gender.

In his own scholarship, Byrd featured qualitative analyses of interviews that he conducted with his patients. These interviews with Mormon men highlighted the internal struggles these men had with satisfying conventional understandings of masculinity, and they spotlighted the perceived hope that reparative therapy could bring them on their search to become Mormon patriarchs. In a journal article in BYU’s Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy, Byrd documented his patients’ dual worries about insufficient masculinity and “unwanted same-sex attractions.” Caleb, for example, told researchers how he believed “the Second Coming of Christ was just around the corner.” Since the End of Days was nigh, Caleb feared that if he did not control his same-sex desires, his wife and family would be given to someone else in the afterlife. Caleb’s interview underscored how reparative therapy attracted Mormon men at various stages of life to its practice. Achieving the dictates of eternal gender had escaped Caleb, a married Mormon man. Caleb, who had children with his wife, had to wrestle with the Latter-day Saint belief in eternal marriage. If he could no longer control his sexual urges for other men, then he would not be able to live out eternity with his wife and children. He would also fail to enact eternal gender. Heavenly marriage was something that Caleb had to contemplate as a reason to pursue reparative therapy. Reinforcing his traditional masculinity was the surest way, he thought, to remain a patriarch for eternity. ⁵⁸

Byrd’s research revealed pressures facing other Mormon men with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” Isaac, for instance, was overwhelmed by fears he would forever remain single. When he called LDS Social Services, the counselor asked him about his future. Isaac replied that he hoped to get married and have a family. He sought reassurance about the prospects for both earthly and heavenly marriage. The counselor suggested that Isaac could overcome his “unwanted same-sex attractions” by undergoing reparative therapy. Hearing about this gender-based therapy gave Joseph immense hope. It was like a godsend, he recalled. “I remember getting off the phone and I’d never been so excited in my life. He made me feel like it was something I could deal with.” ⁵⁹ This glimmer of hope – that he could one day be a real man by having a family – made Joseph believe that reparative therapy might work for him. For Isaac, reparative therapy offered a path for full integration into Mormonism. Part of being integrated fully into his faith involved heavenly marriage. Before marriage could happen, though, Isaac had to undergo reparative therapy to achieve the kind of masculinity required of him to be an effective Mormon patriarch.

Byrd’s patients also linked “unwanted same-sex attractions” to their strained relationships with Heavenly Father. Byrd noted that these men often felt guilt and worthlessness, intensified by the belief that God did not burden others with similar desires. This sense of injustice bred anger, further destabilizing their masculine identities and deepening spiritual conflict. To address this, Byrd emphasized cultivating an understanding of Heavenly Father’s masculinity, arguing that spiritual practices – such as patriarchal blessings, prayer, and renewed divine connection – could enable religious, gendered, and sexual transformation. For some, simply envisioning Heavenly Father as loving and accepting provided the emotional fulfillment they had previously sought through sex with men. ⁶⁰

Integrating psychological counseling with religious understandings of Heavenly Father was central to Mormon-based reparative therapy. Byrd’s patients often linked changes in their earthly relationships with men to an evolving view of Heavenly Father – and many reported feeling more control over “unwanted same-sex attractions” as they embraced Him as a masculine figure. Hope for “change” increased when spiritual growth was paired with guidance on masculine development. These interventions fostered nonsexual male relationships – considered critical for therapy’s success – which created supportive, homosocial communities that Byrd and other therapists viewed as essential. Patients described newfound confidence as masculine identity extended into other areas of life: for some, heterosexual marriage seemed attainable; for others, remaining faithful to their wives and families appeared more likely. By envisioning Heavenly Father as innately masculine, Mormon men could embody the traditional manliness expected within Latter-day Saint teachings. Byrd contended that restoring this sense of masculinity was key to combating “unwanted same-sex attractions.” ⁶¹

Byrd’s analysis linked patients’ views of Heavenly Father to their perceptions of earthly fathers. Men who could not see Heavenly Father as loving and supportive often struggled to view their fathers that way, supporting feelings of patriarchal neglect. The absence of positive male role models contributed to these men’s difficulties with masculine development. Testimonials about paternal failure frequently echoed concepts introduced in therapy, suggesting that participants like Caleb and Isaac had internalized the reparative framework. Across interviews, inadequate fatherly attention emerged as a recurring theme, leading Byrd to conclude that his patients initially lacked the masculinity required to fulfill the Latter-day Saint ideal of eternal gender. ⁶²

Byrd’s interviews with male patients reveal the methodological limits of his scholarship. As therapist and researcher, Byrd exercised considerable control over participant selection and data interpretation, creating conditions that favored confirmation of his central premise: that spiritual transformation and masculine development were inseparable. His case studies also conspicuously omit racial identity, implicitly framing normative masculinity through the experiences of white Mormon men while leaving the perspectives of Latter-day Saint men of color unexplored. ⁶³ Equally striking is the lack of detailed attention to women in Byrd’s published work. This reflects not an archival gap as much as a theological and cultural logic in which homosexuality was construed primarily as a crisis of failed masculinity and a threat to patriarchal authority. Within a church preoccupied with feminism’s perceived erosion of “proper roles,” lesbianism was not addressed in the same way that male homosexuality was. Byrd’s corpus thus reproduced a structural marginalization of women, imagining homosexuality much more extensively through male bodies and souls. In effect, Byrd presented a singular image of success: a white Mormon man who, upon affirming his masculine identity, achieved spiritual redemption and eradicated same-sex desire. This flattening of experience – constructing an archetypal Latter-day Saint man struggling with homosexuality – mirrored the demographic realities of the United States’ Intermountain West while underscoring profound methodological flaws.

Despite these limitations, Byrd’s conviction in reparative therapy’s emphasis on masculine identity and spiritual transformation only grew, prompting him to share his views among Latter-day Saints. In 1999, he published an article titled “When a Loved One Struggles with Same-Sex Attractions” in the Ensign. Publishing in an official periodical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints signified that Byrd’s message met the doctrinal standards and editorial guidelines set by church leaders. It also granted Byrd credibility and a broad audience of church members who regularly turn to the magazine for faith-based instruction. In the article, he presented a perspective on “unwanted same-sex attractions” that closely aligned with Latter-day Saint doctrine and pastoral counseling approaches. He emphasized the importance of adhering to prophetic guidance, as articulated by leaders like President Gordon B. Hinckley, and of striving to understand homosexuality within a spiritual and doctrinal framework. Key for this framework was the belief that doctrinal truths, including the eternal nature of gender, provide a moral compass in addressing complex issues. By underscoring the Atonement of Jesus Christ as sufficient for all mortal struggles, Byrd located the challenge of “unwanted same-sex attractions” firmly within the realm of faith, healing, and moral agency. ⁶⁴

While Byrd strengthened his standing among Latter-day Saints through these publications, he also began forging professional alliances that positioned him within the ecumenical world of reparative therapy. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Byrd developed a working relationship with Joseph Nicolosi. Byrd joined the NARTH, which Nicolosi co-founded in 1991, at a moment when the organization was becoming a clearinghouse for therapists from diverse religious backgrounds seeking scientific and theological justification for sexual orientation change efforts. ⁶⁵ The religious right’s apparent ecumenism often operated through symbolic affinities rather than sustained institutional cooperation. Byrd’s early participation in NARTH both confirms and complicates this thesis: his appeal lay in his ability to translate gender-based therapeutic assumptions into Mormonism, yet his theological commitments – especially the Latter-day Saint doctrine of eternal gender – set him apart from his Catholic and evangelical colleagues. For many NARTH members, reconstituting traditional gender identity was the primary therapeutic aim; for Byrd, gender carried additional salvific and cosmological weight. Thus, while reparative therapy functioned within a shared language of gender for NARTH’s ecumenical coalition, Byrd’s own framing revealed the limits of that coalition’s theological unity.

Byrd and Nicolosi, however, built on these shared gender-centered principles by collaborating on several research articles. Their most ambitious effort – a meta-analysis of 146 studies, only fourteen of which met their inclusion criteria – drew on research conducted between 1969 and 1982, almost all of it framed around behavioral interventions aimed at redirecting “unwanted same-sex attractions.” ⁶⁶ They further surveyed 882 individuals dissatisfied with their sexual desires, reporting that only 35.1 percent continued to identify as predominantly or exclusively homosexual after counseling. Byrd and Nicolosi interpreted these findings as evidence that gender-focused therapeutic interventions could help clients “reconnect” with normative gender roles, which they regarded as essential to psychological health. ⁶⁷ Yet these co-authored publications also exposed the uneven nature of the ex-gay movement’s ecumenism. Byrd’s insistence that reparative therapy must align with Mormonism’s cosmological concept of immutable, eternal gender not only made his model especially resonant within Latter-day Saint communities but may also have limited his influence among non-LDS practitioners who viewed Mormon theology as heterodox.

This collaboration laid the groundwork for Byrd’s later monographs, in which he refined reparative therapy into a distinctly Latter-day Saint model oriented around the Church’s teachings on eternal gender. Whereas his co-authored journal articles with Nicolosi presented a broadly applicable, ostensibly secularized form of reparative therapy, Byrd’s books made explicit the theological assumptions that undergirded his clinical work. In them, he argued that healing “unwanted same-sex attractions” required restoring the divine, binary gender identity bestowed in the premortal realm – an idea without parallel in Catholic or evangelical thought. This shift revealed the possibilities and limits of ecumenical alliances. Byrd’s LDS-inflected model resonated with Mormon readers and helped institutionalize reparative therapy within Latter-day Saint communities. These monographs had an explicitly Mormon cosmology that restricted their utility – and perhaps even their legitimacy – among Catholic and evangelical practitioners. Byrd’s writings thus illuminate how a shared commitment to gender conformity could unify conservative religious groups symbolically while nevertheless reinforcing doctrinal boundaries that limited sustained collaboration.

Nowhere were the limits of these ecumenical alliances more apparent than in Byrd’s theological writing. Byrd abandoned the ecumenically flexible language of earlier collaborations and instead centered Mormon doctrines of eternal gender as the foundation of reparative therapy. In Homosexuality and the Church of Jesus Christ (2003), for instance, Byrd outlined a theological view of reparative therapy that centered Mormonism’s teachings on eternal gender. In this book, Byrd presented gender as a divine characteristic bestowed by Heavenly Father, arguing that “male and female are not simply physical designations, but spiritual designations.” ⁶⁸ He noted that deviations from eternal gender disrupted social and spiritual norms, and he suggested that counseling could help people achieve a traditional gender identity. For Byrd, there were numerous areas of scientific thought and biblical teachings that proved this. He contended, for instance, that recent studies in biology had perverted religious teachings. For one, the LDS Church had “refute[d] the idea that homosexual orientation is genetically determined.” ⁶⁹ Even if a “gay gene” existed, the Mormon therapist speculated, this would not make acting on same-sex desires moral. In fact, he strongly declared that homosexuality would remain a “weakness that the afflicted individuals were expected to deal with, not succumb to,” if there was some kind of genetic predisposition for homosexuality. ⁷⁰ Such religious-based refutations helped Byrd deem homosexuality as “sinful and unnatural.” ⁷¹ By deviating from God’s plan for gender, Byrd proclaimed, men and women who pursued their same-sex desires betrayed the church’s teachings.

Throughout Homosexuality and the Church of Jesus Christ, Byrd underscored the importance of realizing eternal gender. Along these lines, he asserted that succumbing to non-normative gendered behavior was contrary to eternal gender. The problem, according to Byrd, was that “the homosexual lifestyle,” ostensibly full of self-indulgent hedonism, tempted Mormons from their true gendered selves. ⁷² Human fallibility, in other words, was at fault for disrupting Latter-day Saint gender complementarity. This, in turn, led to what reparative therapists like Byrd have called “gender confusion.” ⁷³ “What God created was not just two different sorts of physical characteristics to give to humans,” according to Byrd, “but two different sorts of spiritual characteristics. Thwarting these spiritual characteristics is thwarting God’s design for man.” ⁷⁴ To reestablish eternal gender, Byrd ensured readers that if humans could distort their gendered selves, reparative therapists could correct non-normative gender identities through counseling and faith-based interventions. What was “broken” could be “repaired” by reifying traditional gender roles in ways that socially and culturally reproduced eternal gender.

Byrd’s emphasis on eternal gender was clear throughout Homosexuality and the Church of Jesus Christ. Rather than using the term reparative therapy, though, Byrd discussed “gender affirmative therapy” in this book. ⁷⁵ In a chapter titled “Homosexuality Orientation and Change,” he underlined gender as the key identity category for eliminating “unwanted same-sex attractions.” He stated the gender affirmative therapy was “the process of helping individuals understand their gender development…with individuals who are not comfortable with their homosexual feelings and wish to make changes in their lives.” Gender identity, in Byrd’s words, “determined sexual orientation.” ⁷⁶ By deploying the term gender affirmative therapy, Byrd not only signaled a strategic rebranding of what was traditionally known as reparative therapy but underlined the role that eternal gender played in eliminating “unwanted same-sex attractions.” By shifting the emphasis from “repairing” homosexuality to affirming normative gender roles, Byrd attempted to recast the approach in more contemporary language and potentially distance it from the growing public and professional condemnation of conversion therapy. Although he introduced a different term to the debate over the efficacy of conversion therapy, the underlying rationale – linking “unwanted same-sex attractions” to purported deficits in gender development – remained consistent with the core tenets of reparative therapy.

Byrd emphasized the Latter-day Saint belief in eternal gender in other publications. In Setting the Record Straight: Mormons & Homosexuality (2008), he suggested that “homosexual attractions may be more related to gender (a sense of maleness or masculinity) than to sexuality itself.” Later, in the edited volume Psychology’s War on Religion (2009), Byrd criticized professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association for opposing conversion therapy and he reaffirmed the centrality of eternal gender in Mormon doctrine. In “Psychology’s Assault on Religion: A Case for Mormonism,” he highlighted the gender-based claims of the Proclamation to underscore the political significance of the traditional family within his faith. Byrd cited the Proclamation’s assertion that gender “is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose” as a core tenet of Latter-day Saint cosmology. ⁷⁷ These late-career publications positioned eternal gender as a foundation for Mormon-inflected reparative therapy and framed conflicts over conversion therapy not merely as internal disputes but as evidence of a national war against religious authority and the heterosexual family. By portraying professional opposition as part of a cultural assault on religion, Byrd could align his arguments with Catholic and evangelical conservatives who warned that acceptance of homosexuality threatened the moral fabric of the nation. For Byrd, homosexuality threatened not only individual exaltation and LDS family structures but also the country’s morality, placing Mormon concerns within the religious right’s narrative of cultural decline.

IV. Conclusion

When Byrd published “When a Loved One Struggles with Same-Sex Attractions” in the Ensign in 1999, he shared a story. He recounted how Brother Brown felt a wave of devastation when his youngest son, Brian, revealed his struggles with “unwanted same-sex attractions.” As a faithful Latter-day Saint father, Brown took a moment to recall central teachings of the restored gospel – that families are eternal; that gender is an essential characteristic of premortal, mortal, and eternal identity; that each person is a cherished child of God; and that Christ offers healing love to all. Brown followed a gentle spiritual prompting to embrace his son. In that moment, their physical closeness reflected not only a father’s tenderness but also Mormonism’s vision of divine love. Held firmly in his father’s arms, Brian felt earthly and heavenly affection, support that resonated with doctrines he had learned about eternal gender and divine parentage. In this sacred instant, Mormon belief and paternal compassion merged, providing the reassurance Brian needed at a critical juncture in his life. ⁷⁸

Byrd’s contributions to reparative therapy within the Latter-day Saint context were less about inventing a new “cure” for Brian than about systematizing a gender-based approach present in LDS doctrinal discourse. Byrd built upon the foundational ideas of Elizabeth Moberly and Joseph Nicolosi, both of whom framed “unwanted same-sex attractions” as a psychological issue that could be “repaired” through strengthening one’s traditional gender identity. Byrd expanded on Moberly and Nicolosi’s ideas, however, by incorporating LDS doctrines into reparative therapy. He asserted that “unwanted same-sex attractions” could dissipate if individuals aligned themselves with eternal gender, as prescribed by Mormon cosmology. In the 1990s and 2000s, Byrd played a critical role in shaping LDS approaches to “treating” “unwanted same-sex attractions.” He focused on reinforcing gender identity as a “solution” to homosexuality. By reifying the Latter-day Saint concept of eternal gender through reparative therapy, Byrd professed that non-normative gender identities and sexualities represented a form of religious deviance that needed to be “changed” through counseling.

Byrd’s work influenced LDS therapeutic practices and contributed to the landscape of sexual and gender politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In practice, the relationship between doctrine and therapy was reciprocal. Byrd not only applied the Church’s teachings on eternal gender to clinical practice but – through his positions in LDS Social Services, his articles in church publications, and his monographs – helped reframe and operationalize those teachings for pastoral use. As the LGBTQ rights movement gained momentum in the last third of the twentieth century, Byrd forged alliances with therapists of other faiths. In organizations like the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a conservative ecumenical front resisted the political advances of LGBTQ activists. Byrd could meet and work with psychologists like Nicolosi at NARTH’s annual meeting. In such settings, reparative therapists assembled as a multifaith group of political conservatives. This coalition, built around the preservation of traditional gender roles and patriarchal family values, became a force in the culture wars. Byrd’s contributions to reparative therapy, including a stint as NARTH’s president in 2009, positioned Latter-day Saints as indispensable players in the religious right’s fight against LGBTQ rights.

As the ex-gay movement faltered and conversion therapy lost its foothold in American public life, though, the church has been forced to confront its own entanglement with these therapeutic models, prompting a gradual reevaluation of its support for reparative therapy. In 2019, church leaders issued a formal statement indicating that it would not oppose a legislative effort in Utah to ban conversion therapy for minors. The church’s shift away from supporting reparative therapy has been seen as a positive step by many LGBTQ Mormons. In the past, reparative therapy offered hope to those who had internalized LDS teachings on eternal gender. Now, LGBTQ Latter-day Saints who have no desire to “change” find promise in the possibility that the church may, in time, accept them for who they are.

Although Utah banned conversion therapy for minors in 2023, debates over gender and sexuality remain fiercely contested in states with large Mormon populations. Byrd’s work sustains the logic behind gender-based interventions aimed at “correcting” nonconformity, offering religious and political conservatives a framework to resist growing acceptance of gender and sexual diversity. The core principles of reparative therapy have expanded beyond targeting lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth to include trans and nonbinary minors – individuals that, as UCLA’s Williams Institute notes, remain at high risk of undergoing conversion therapy. ⁷⁹

Understanding Byrd’s influence is essential to grasp the enduring opposition to LGBTQ equality within Mormonism. His story also illustrates the strength and fragility of conservative Christian ecumenism: on one hand, his gender-centric model enabled Mormons to join Catholic and evangelical allies in a shared therapeutic and political project, reinforcing a family values coalition against not only LGBTQ rights but also feminism. On the other hand, the uniquely LDS doctrine of eternal gender that underpinned Byrd’s publications would have rendered him theologically suspect to many non-Mormons, confirming insights that the religious right’s unity has been hampered by its doctrinal diversity. In the end, his life’s work captures the paradox of a movement seeking unity through a political theology of gender.