Gender and Family Life

    50 years ago the discussions at the family dinner table we different from the ones we have today. The Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal and the King of Rock and Roll dies. Today, if we even have dinner table discussions the prominent topics are the pandemic, the president and gender. 

    This week we read and discussed the different aspects of gender and how that can affect family life being negatively or positively. With the creation of new genders, the very definition of the family is being changed and molded to fit more in our diverse society. 50 years ago, there was no doubt that a family was a man and his wife with a few children. That was the model that everyone thought when thinking about what a family is. Today that model has become very weak as more and more families are looking very different. 

    As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints we believe in the more traditional approach at the family. The 50 years ago model of the family, which has come under fire in recent years as the world has changed so much from this idea. We believe that our gender is something determined even before we are born and is essential to our eternal identities. Although we might feel differently in this life be it from same-sex attraction to identifying more as the opposite gender God loves us and wants us to understand that we can still achieve all that He has planned for use with these feelings. 

    So now, what is the worlds view on the family in its relation to gender? Let's begin with gender itself. 50 years ago you could ask anyone how many genders there are and I'd say almost everyone would say two, man and woman. I remember a video of Bill Nye the Science Guy explaining in an earlier video this exact idea I have just mentioned and there isn't anything more than that. In the same video it shows him years later explaining that gender is a spectrum and not two options. So how did we get from two genders to, according to some sources, more than 80 genders?