Laurie Lee Hall’s memoir Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman is a profound, often heartbreaking, and ultimately affirming account of what it means to live at the intersection of deep faith, rigid doctrine, and an inescapable inner truth. It is not merely a transition narrative, nor solely a critique of institutional religion, but a carefully constructed testament to conscience, integrity, and the cost of authenticity when one’s identity collides with an uncompromising belief system.
From her earliest years, Laurie Lee Hall experienced a persistent and unnameable dissonance between her body and her sense of self. Growing up in New England, she understood herself internally as a girl while being perceived and treated as a boy, a contradiction she lacked both the language and the social permission to articulate. Like many transgender people of her generation, she internalized the belief that this dissonance was something to be overcome through discipline, faith, and conformity. Rather than exploring her gender identity, she committed herself to suppressing it, believing that adulthood, structure, and religious devotion would provide resolution. This decision to bury her truth is not portrayed as weakness, but as a rational survival strategy shaped by the cultural and religious realities of her time.
