Mell Fraze’s childhood home was one in which the Bible sat on the bookshelf beside the Dao De Jing, the Pearl of Great Price, and a myriad of philosophy books. Raised by a scientologist mom and a universalist dad who attended a “new agey Christian church,” she was instilled with the ideology that everyone has a different path in life, and it’s the individual’s job to ask the questions and do the research to find which path works for them. Mell was an apt audience. As a neurodivergent individual, her brain is wired to ask questions. Now as a mother of six kids (ages four to 16) with her seventh due in August, she likewise encourages her children to explore how when something’s not working, to consider what might fit better instead.
For Mell, the LDS church entered her orbit in 2007, when she chose to get baptized one month after she married Cliff, who was born and raised in the church in Modesto, CA. 15 years her senior, Cliff was raised at a time when church culture didn’t understand what to make of his family. His three siblings had several Cerebral Palsy and uninformed members often wondered “what sin of the parents brought this upon them.” Cliff was raised with traditional church beliefs, but his family was largely marginalized by their congregation. Mell’s peers asked how she could go from her free-thought upbringing to being Mormon, but Mell said nothing about her inherent belief system actually changed—she just learned a new vocabulary to identify her beliefs. She says, “I finally found the one Christian denomination I could feel comfortable in, that didn’t raise the hackles on my neck and wasn’t teaching something in opposition to my lived experiences.” Their union set the stage for raising their own kids.
The Fraze children are given room to grow and explore in their Sacramento home, where Mell has home schooled them since 2015. Every member of the Fraze household of eight is neurodivergent, with all of them having ADHD and several identifying on the autism spectrum. Mell and her husband Cliff found their children’s various needs, which are often also in opposition to each other, were not all able to be met in traditional school, so they’ve brought the laboratory home. This has resulted in their most significant time with peers taking place at church, which has also proven difficult for many of the children who identify on the neurodivergent and LGBTQIA. While the youngest two find Primary fun, church has proven a challenge for some of the older kids.
Evie, 16, (they/them) identifies as nonbinary, asexual, and panromantic and is not interested in dating and marriage. Liam (15) also does not currently wish to pursue dating. Frequent lessons about temple marriage have repelled them as it’s not something they see in their future. When leaders respond with phrases like, “When you grow up, you’ll feel it,” it further offsets the two and makes them feel misunderstood. As the Fraze’s 10-year-old son’s neurodivergent needs are also not able to be met in the church environment and Mell says “I’m unable to clone myself and be in every classroom where my kids need me,” Mell has found it difficult to make church work. For the past year, while Cliff shows up and fulfills his calling in the Sunday School presidency, Mell stays home with the kids who are most comfortable there. Home has also become the most comfortable place for Mell to feel authentic. She says, “I cannot show up on the defensive all the time, because then I’m not getting anything from church. And my child’s mental health is more important than their body being at church.” A big believer in autonomy and agency, Mell believes in letting her children choose whether attending church or serving missions and the like is what’s best for them. She let her kids choose whether getting baptized at age eight was the right choice for them, and some delayed that until they felt more ready.
The bishop in the Fraze’s ward had served as a high councilman prior where he was tasked with collecting helpful church resources for LGBTQIA families. At the time, he turned to the Frazes for resources, and they engaged in several hours of conversation. While Mell says her bishop has tried to be an ally, and some of the youth leaders are “great people who really try to show love and respect,” others don’t have a frame of reference for how to support kids who don’t fit the norms.
In the summer of 2022, with her bishop’s permission, Mell joined Evie on the stand during a fast and testimony meeting to share how the youth theme statements could be worded to be more inclusive of all gender identities. Evie had expressed to their parents a couple years prior how they felt different in regard to their assigned gender, and a felt a more gender-neutral identity fit them best. Mell supports her oldest in this, while also loving the “Gender is essential” phrase in the Family Proclamation that so many instead use to weaponize against people like Evie. Mell says she sees this idea of gender being essential, combined with Moses 3:7, to mean that everything is created in the spirit form first. “When we speak of bodies being perfected in the resurrection,” she asks, “doesn’t it make more sense that who you are as a spiritual being that your body would be changed to match your spirit, and not the other way around? In the resurrection, we don’t believe everyone’s going to be six feet tall, skinny, and blonde. We understand there will still be a diversity in perfected bodies. So why, when someone who experiences gender dysphoria and feels their body doesn’t fit their spiritual being, why would the spirit change to match the body instead of the other way around?”
Because her kids school at home, Mell shrugs off the current sound byte rhetoric of “LGBTQIA social contagion.” She says, “My kids aren’t hearing, ‘Oh I heard this and that and want to try it out.’ They’re coming to me saying, ‘I’m different and I don’t know why’.”
While their shared testimony bearing was an important moment for the two to honor this part of Evie’s reality, Mell breaks down as she describes how Evie, on the stand, witnessed how the members’ faces in the room turned from engaged smiles to stone-faced, disapproving looks. That, followed by an uncomfortable talk on the Proclamation shortly after, was the last time they attended. In the one year she has stayed home with Evie and younger children who need her, Mell says only three people from their ward have reached out to try to understand the difficulties her family faces with current church doctrine and policies. Hurtful comments have also been said, including one youth leader who said, “Satan is making kindergartners confused” and a primary teacher who told Mell, “Gays cause problems in society.” As such, Mell tries to speak up as much as she can about the extreme mental health duress and increased suicide rates that occur for kids on the LGBTQIA spectrum.
She says, “I would like to be able to stay in the church and be a voice of allyship and safety, but I’ve been called an apostate by a member of my ward for speaking up against rhetoric that’s harmful. I’ve also been told, ‘Sometimes you need to step away from the church,’ but I hate that alternative. When you point out that your choice is to live as a portion of yourself and feel hurt in the church, or to walk away to be able to live as a whole, authentic human being, the response people are conditioned to give is, ‘Don’t leave the church, try to stay, turn toward the Savior.’ But there’s no room or support to do that. I’ve taken to calling myself Schrodinger’s Mormon. Depending on who you ask, I’m either exactly what people hope members can be, or I’m a terrible apostate who should leave because if you don’t believe, why would you stay?” Mell says it goes back to people not understanding the breadth of the perspective she comes from, and the religion, anthropology, and various philosophies she studied as a youth that examine humans holistically. Mell stays in LDS parenting chat groups online, hoping she might be a light in the dark for someone in need, and hopes to help parents new in their journey. While Evie is considering resigning her church membership, Mell says, “They let me in; they’re going to have to kick me out!” of her membership.
“I already knew I was a divine, spiritual being before joining the church. I’m Christian; my philosophy is humanist and unconnected to any particular religion. I care about the environment, social justice, humanity – the same things I cared about before. I get closest to the Savior from listening to people’s lived experiences, and understanding their truths are just as valid as mine. All of that has prepared me for having queer kids, where other parents in the church might struggle. None of my spiritual identity depends on the church, which I recognize is different from my husband’s experience.” She acknowledges their marriage and co-parenting can be a difficult balance, but says, “He knew who I was before we married. He has no interest in changing me, but often doesn’t know how to deal with others’ responses to me being a fierce, vocal advocate for our children.” Mell, who identifies as queer herself, also recognizes she comes from a place of privilege, being in a perceptively cisgender-heterosexual temple marriage, a person “who happened to get lucky that my person is a cishet man.” She thus chooses to first present herself foremost as an ally in the LGBTIA space.
Of the changes she hopes to see in the church, Mell says, “People make choices all the time that slow the ‘in the Lord’s time’ phrase. They can make choices that speed the ‘in the lord’s time’ to be more inclusive and loving. There are stories of wards out there who have done this. And then there are wards who have sacrificed people because they were too afraid to change, to ask questions, to push boundaries.” This is where Mell hopes to make a difference. “It’s a horrible truth but as a church body, members are choosing to sacrifice their children for the sake of tradition. I absolutely refuse to sacrifice my kids because someone would rather follow tradition than the prophetic example we claim to follow of asking prayerfully and seeking inspiration.”
