Transformed Through Christ and the LDS Gospel: Kyle Merkley’s Journey Through Gender Dysphoria, Marriage, and Faith

Kyle Merkley’s story is one of the more remarkable modern Latter-day Saint testimonies about gender, marriage, agency, and the power of Jesus Christ. His story is different from Joshua Johanson’s because Kyle’s central struggle was not same-sex attraction. Kyle describes experiencing severe gender dysphoria, beginning when he was only around ten or eleven years old. He felt internally that he should have been female, struggled to understand those feelings for years, and eventually came to identify what he was experiencing as transgender or gender dysphoria. Yet after years of pain, confusion, research, prayer, and very real opportunities to take his life in an entirely different direction, Kyle chose to remain male, remain married to his wife Amy, remain faithful to his covenants, and place the unanswered parts of his life in the hands of Jesus Christ.

Kyle grew up in an active Latter-day Saint family and describes his childhood home with enormous affection. His parents were deeply involved in the Church, his family served others, and he knew that he was loved. Outwardly, people apparently viewed him as something close to the ideal child, while inwardly he was suffering from feelings that almost nobody around him knew existed. He did not even know the term gender dysphoria as a child, and he says he did not encounter the term transgender until much later. His earliest understanding was simply that something felt terribly wrong and that he could not explain it.

Those feelings did not lead Kyle away from God as a young man. Quite the opposite: he prayed, fasted, read the scriptures, and desperately searched for help from Jesus Christ. Moroni 10:32 became particularly important to him because it invited him to “come unto Christ” and trust in His grace. At first Kyle believed that if he simply became faithful enough, Christ would completely remove the feelings. That did not happen, and his eventual testimony became more mature and, in many ways, more demanding. Christ did not simply erase every difficult sensation; Kyle instead had to determine what he was going to do with those feelings and what would ultimately govern his life.

Kyle eventually served a mission, attended BYU, and immersed himself in research trying to understand gender dysphoria. He says he read thousands of pages on the subject, including psychological and biological research, because he desperately wanted to understand what was happening to him. At the same time, he loved the Church and had developed a testimony of the gospel during his mission. He had personally watched the gospel transform other people, yet he could not understand how his own gender dysphoria fit into everything he believed about God, eternal identity, and the purpose of his life.

Eventually that conflict brought Kyle into one of the darkest periods of his life. He seriously considered leaving the Church, disappearing from his family, transitioning, and beginning an entirely different life. He also describes reaching periods of severe depression and suicidal thinking. In that desperation, Kyle says he finally got onto his knees and begged Heavenly Father to give him some kind of lifeline and show him what he was supposed to do. Shortly afterward, circumstances in his life began changing, and one of the most important changes was Amy.

Kyle and Amy had known each other through classes at BYU, and their relationship developed during a time when Kyle had almost completely lost his sense of personal worth. Amy saw qualities in him that he could no longer see in himself. She found him intelligent, talented, kind, gentle, and attractive, while Kyle was still struggling internally with the belief that something about him was fundamentally wrong. Their relationship became one of the first sources of hope Kyle had experienced in years.

“She asked me out when I didn’t have the self-confidence to ask anyone out. She liked me when I couldn’t find the strength to like myself. And eventually, she loved me when all I felt inside was self-loathing. When we started dating she brought happiness back into my life. Every time I was around her, I felt so right—a rightness I’d been searching for my whole life.”

Watch Kyle and Amy discuss their relationship:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=1884s

Kyle went even further, explaining that Amy made the gender dysphoria itself recede into the background and brought light back into a life that had become emotionally bleak. FAIR’s later interview with the couple preserved the same description, explaining how Amy’s presence began what Kyle regarded as a healing process within his broken spirit.

As Kyle and Amy became serious about marriage, however, Kyle knew that he could not enter that marriage without telling Amy what he had been experiencing. He eventually wrote her a letter explaining his gender dysphoria and other struggles and gave her the opportunity to leave. Amy understood immediately that this was not a minor issue and that marrying Kyle could mean entering a life containing challenges she had never anticipated. Instead of allowing fear or the expectations of the world to make the decision for her, Amy went to the temple seeking direction from Heavenly Father.

“I went to the temple and I got a really strong impression that it was my choice. I could stay with Kyle if I wanted, or not, I could leave. And both of those choices would be acceptable to my Heavenly Father.”

Watch Amy describe her experience in the temple:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=2059s

Amy says she also received an impression that remaining with Kyle would sometimes be extremely difficult and would involve genuine anguish, but she felt that choosing that path could also bring blessings greater than she could imagine. She chose Kyle. Kyle chose Amy. Together they entered marriage knowing far more about the difficulties ahead than most newlyweds could possibly imagine.

That is where this story becomes especially important, because marriage did not magically remove Kyle’s gender dysphoria. According to the couple, the reprieve eventually ended and the feelings returned strongly after they were married. Their testimony therefore cannot honestly be reduced to the claim that Kyle married a woman and was suddenly “cured.” He says plainly that gender dysphoria continued to be painful and that there were still very difficult days. The transformation was not that every internal feeling disappeared. The transformation was in what Kyle ultimately decided would have authority over his life.

Kyle and Amy began working through those difficulties as husband and wife. They prayed, sought the Holy Ghost, worked with professionals, reconsidered assumptions about traditional personality traits and household roles, and tried to distinguish eternal gospel principles from cultural stereotypes. Kyle openly acknowledges that they have had to find ways of living with his gender dysphoria rather than pretending it does not exist. Yet through all of those adjustments, one boundary became increasingly clear: their marriage and their covenants mattered more than building Kyle’s life around his dysphoria.

Kyle makes that priority unmistakable when discussing Amy. He says she is not merely somewhat more important to him than his gender dysphoria; in his words, gender dysphoria is not even a close second.

“She is the most important thing in my life. Gender dysphoria is not even close to a distant second. It’s just—she matters most.”

Watch Kyle explain why Amy comes first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=3134s

Kyle then offers an extraordinary hypothetical about eternity. He says that if he reached the celestial kingdom and Heavenly Father somehow told him that his situation was ambiguous and offered him a choice between becoming female or remaining male and remaining with Amy, he would choose Amy.

“Would you rather be female or would you rather be male and stay with Amy? I would always choose to be male because she’s the most important thing in my life.”

Watch Kyle make that declaration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=3161s

For Christians who believe that feelings should not automatically become commandments, Kyle’s testimony is enormously significant. Modern culture very often approaches identity from the opposite direction: discover the strongest feeling within yourself, define yourself according to it, and then restructure your external life until it conforms to that internal identity. Kyle’s experience demonstrates that another path exists. He does not deny the reality of what he feels. He does not claim that gender dysphoria is imaginary. He does not pretend that following Christ made every difficult emotion vanish. What he says is that he still possesses agency over what he does with those feelings.

Kyle knew transition was available to him. He had researched it extensively. He had seriously considered it. By his own account, however, transitioning almost certainly would have destroyed the marriage he treasured. When confronted with those competing paths, he decided his marriage was worth more.

“I could have transitioned. I probably would have ended my marriage almost certainly, especially if I’d done it in a selfish way. It wouldn’t have gone well. And instead, I decided this marriage was more important and that it was about us, not about me in my case.”

Watch Kyle explain that choice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=3433s

That statement runs directly against an increasingly individualistic understanding of fulfillment. Kyle did not conclude that personal authenticity required his spouse to reorganize her entire life around whatever he felt internally. He increasingly understood marriage as an “us,” not simply a “me.” Earlier in the interview, he describes learning through counseling and through his relationship with Amy that obsessing exclusively over his own suffering could actually become selfish, because Amy was also a human being with needs, fears, hopes, and sacrifices of her own. He says he needed to remember to think about Amy rather than treating his gender dysphoria as the only hardship that mattered.

That does not mean Kyle believes suffering itself is virtuous or that people experiencing gender dysphoria should be mocked, rejected, or treated without compassion. His interview communicates nearly the opposite. He knows how crushing shame can become because he lived through it. He knows how dangerous isolation can become. His story provides no justification for Christians behaving cruelly toward transgender people. Instead, it presents an explicitly Christian alternative in which compassion does not require surrendering every other principle, and acknowledging a feeling does not mean declaring that feeling sovereign over marriage, covenants, biological sex, family, or discipleship.

Kyle ultimately describes a process in which he accepts that the pain is real, acknowledges the decisions he has made, and then gives what remains to Jesus Christ.

“I’ve chosen this at least, that I will walk this path with Amy and that we’ll do everything we can to keep our covenants and stay close to God. And if I do that, I feel like Christ can do all the rest. Jesus wins.”

Watch Kyle’s conclusion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=3465s

Those final two words became something of a family motto for Kyle and Amy: Jesus wins. When they did not understand the future, when some theological question remained unresolved, when gender dysphoria became painful, or when they could not determine exactly how something would ultimately fit into God’s eternal plan, they returned to the one thing they believed they did know.

Amy describes that philosophy beautifully:

“We just tell ourselves Jesus wins because we know that through the Atonement all of the ambiguity, all the questions, all the fear, doubt, are overcome.”

Watch Amy explain their motto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&t=3248s

That motto eventually changed the questions Kyle and Amy were asking. Rather than demanding an immediate answer to every question about Kyle’s eternal gender or obsessing over what every future development might mean, they began concentrating on the present: How would Jesus want them to live now? How could they listen to the Holy Ghost now? How could they serve other people now? How could they keep their covenants now?

There is something deeply conservative, and deeply Christian, about that approach. It places responsibility beside compassion, duty beside emotion, marriage beside individuality, and eternal covenants above the constantly changing expectations of culture. It says that a person can acknowledge an extraordinarily powerful internal struggle without allowing that struggle to consume every other identity he possesses. Kyle could experience gender dysphoria while also being a husband, a Latter-day Saint, a covenant keeper, a child of Heavenly Father, and a disciple of Jesus Christ.

FAIR Latter-day Saints later featured Kyle and Amy in an episode appropriately titled “Dealing with gender dysphoria – Finding inner peace through Christ.” The description explains that Kyle and Amy were trying to find peace and congruence within the gospel of Jesus Christ while honestly wrestling with gender identity and dysphoria. FAIR emphasized that they remained together and were sharing their story to help others understand that the gospel provides a path of faith even when difficult feelings remain.

That FAIR interview also makes clear that their goal was never merely to win a political argument. Kyle and Amy wanted other Latter-day Saints experiencing gender dysphoria to know that they were not alone and that there could be a place for them within the gospel. The interview describes their continuing effort to remain faithful to their covenants while seeking compassion, inspired guidance, and understanding from family members and Church leaders.

Kyle Merkley’s testimony therefore deserves to be heard precisely because it refuses the false choice that dominates so much modern discussion. The choices are not simply hatred or affirmation, rejection or transition, cruelty or surrender. Kyle and Amy found another road: acknowledge the struggle, love the person, protect the marriage, seek professional and spiritual help, listen to the Holy Ghost, honor covenants, accept that some questions may remain unanswered, and trust Jesus Christ with what human beings cannot resolve themselves.

Kyle still experiences gender dysphoria. Amy still understands that their marriage has required unusual sacrifices. Their story is not neat, painless, or packaged into a simplistic promise that following Christ immediately makes every difficult feeling disappear. In many ways, that makes their testimony stronger. They chose each other even when the road became difficult, and Kyle chose to remain faithful to a marriage he believed was more important than reorganizing his life around gender dysphoria.

The world told him to look inward for the final answer. Kyle ultimately looked upward.

The world offered identity as the highest authority. Kyle chose covenant.

The world offered an entirely different future. Kyle chose Amy.

And when Kyle and Amy still could not answer every question, they settled on the answer that had carried them through everything else:

Jesus wins.

Watch and Read More

Kyle and Amy Merkley — North Star interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3O88qGN2g&list=PLcQ-4U_rJPaMhDdlQ-mOeiwcJ2Qu0wBtf&index=5

FAIR Latter-day Saints — “Dealing with gender dysphoria: Finding inner peace through Christ”:
https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2015/05/19/riseup-podcast-dealing-with-gender-dysphoria-finding-inner-peace-through-christ