Layla Taylor Came Out as Bisexual. Here’s What Her Story Reveals About Queer Women in High-Control Religion.

And why we hope the next generation won’t have to wait as long

On June 29, 2026 — the last day of Pride Month — Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Layla Taylor sat down on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast and said something she’d been carrying for most of her life.

“I’m gay and I’m bi and date women and men.”

She was 25 years old. She had converted to Mormonism at 16, married, had two children, divorced, and navigated a very public relationship — all before she was able to say out loud what she’d known, as she put it, “since I was little.”

“I would just kind of underplay it for a long period of my life,” she told Shetty. “I just feel like I’m finally in the era that I’m over not being truly myself, and I’m over not showing every part of Layla to the world. I’m very proud to be bi, and I’m very proud now to be out.”

We want to honor that courage. We also want to use this moment — clinically and honestly — to name what her story illuminates about the experience of queer women inside high-control religious systems. Because Layla’s story is not unusual. It is, in fact, heartbreakingly common. And the structures that made it so hard to tell are still in place for millions of women right now.

The Numbers: Queer People Are in Every Community, Including Yours

Before we talk about what happens to queer identity inside high-control religion, let’s establish something clearly: queer people are not rare. They are not concentrated in progressive coastal cities. They are in every community, every congregation, every family.

According to Gallup (2025), 9% of U.S. adults — nearly 1 in 10 — identify as LGBTQ+. Bisexuality is the single most common identity, making up 58.6% of the LGBTQ+ population, or about 5.3% of all U.S. adults. Among adults under 30, more than 1 in 5 (23%) identify as LGBTQ+. Women identify as LGBTQ+ at higher rates than men, driven primarily by bisexual identification.

Now consider: a BYU survey of over 7,000 students — more than 98% of whom are church members — found that over 13% marked their sexual orientation as something other than “strictly heterosexual.” A 2017 study of LGBTQ Mormon and ex-Mormon adults found that 89.2% likely met criteria for PTSD related to their religious experiences.

These numbers are not about a fringe group. They are about the people sitting in the pews, teaching the Sunday school classes, raising children in high-control religious communities right now — quietly, painfully carrying something they’ve been taught makes them broken.

Layla Taylor is one of them. She is also, because of the platform she has, one of the rare ones who got to say it out loud.

What Is Benevolent Sexism — And How Does It Trap Queer Women Specifically?

To understand why women like Layla spend decades underplaying their sexuality, we have to understand the specific form that misogyny takes in religious systems. It’s not always hostile. Often, it’s warm.

Benevolent sexism is a term from social psychology (Glick & Fiske, 1996) that describes positive-seeming but ultimately limiting beliefs about women: that they are pure, nurturing, in need of protection, and most fulfilled when caring for others. In religious contexts, this looks like elevating women as sacred — placing them on a pedestal as wives, mothers, and moral centers of the home. It feels like respect. It functions as a cage.

For queer women, benevolent sexism is particularly insidious, because the role it prescribes — devoted wife, mother, moral caretaker — is incompatible with the full truth of who they are. The system offers love, belonging, and spiritual purpose, but only to a version of them that doesn’t fully exist. The price of belonging is a self that fits.

“Benevolent sexism in high-control religion tells women: we cherish you. We protect you. You are sacred. What it doesn’t say is the rest: we cherish the version of you that stays in your lane, stays modest, stays married to a man, and stays quiet about anything that doesn’t fit. The love is real. The conditions are also real.”

This is part of what we explored in our post on Religious Trauma Syndrome in women — how high-control religion uses purity culture, rigid gender roles, and shame to constrain women’s sexuality and sense of self long before they’re old enough to fully understand what’s happening.

Sex and Gender Control: The Spoke Nobody Talks About

In our earlier post on the Religious Power and Control Wheel, we named Sex and Gender Control as one of eight tactics high-control religious systems use to maintain authority over members. For women — and especially queer women — this spoke often does more damage than any other.

In LDS and many other high-control religious cultures, women’s sexuality is:

• Defined in terms of its relationship to men — specifically to a husband, specifically within a temple marriage
• Tied directly to spiritual worth — purity culture frames sexual compliance as righteousness and sexual deviation as sin
• Surveilled — through confession, accountability structures, modesty standards, and community norms that make private experience very public
• Narrated for them from childhood — girls are taught their desires, their futures, and their bodies belong to a specific story

For a bisexual or queer woman in this system, her actual desire is not just unsanctioned. It’s invisible. The system has no category for her. The approved story — good Mormon girl, temple marriage, eternal family — is written entirely without her. So she does the only thing available: she underplays it. She marries a man. She performs the role. She tells herself it might just be a phase.

That is exactly what Layla Taylor described. And it’s not weakness. It’s the only rational response to a system with no room for the truth.

The Power and Control Wheel — which we apply to high-control religion in an earlier post — names sex and gender control explicitly as one of the primary mechanisms through which religious systems maintain authority. When a woman’s sexuality is defined, surveilled, and narrated for her from childhood, coming out isn’t just a personal act. It’s a structural one.

Fawning: The Survival Response Nobody Names

When we talk about trauma responses, most people know fight, flight, and freeze. Fewer people know the fourth: fawn.

Fawning — sometimes called the “please and appease” response — is what happens when a person’s nervous system learns that the safest way to stay safe is to become whatever the people around them need. To agree. To minimize. To make themselves smaller, more acceptable, less threatening. To anticipate what’s wanted and deliver it before it’s even asked.

Fawning is not a choice. It is a survival adaptation — one that develops when the cost of authenticity is too high, and the body learns to prioritize belonging over honesty.

In high-control religious systems, fawning is not just permitted. It is rewarded. It is called humility, submission, faithfulness, and devotion. The woman who disappears herself most completely into the approved role gets the most love, the most belonging, the most spiritual affirmation. Her fawning is invisible because the system calls it virtue.

For queer women specifically, fawning often means something very particular: performing heterosexuality. Marrying. Producing children. Performing desire you don’t feel, and suppressing desire you do. Layla Taylor spent years “constantly living my life for other people” — her words. That is fawning. That is a trauma response wearing the costume of devotion.

“Fawning isn’t dishonesty. It’s a nervous system that learned the price of honesty was too high. When the cost of being yourself is your community, your family, your spiritual worth, and your eternal salvation — hiding isn’t a moral failure. It’s the most rational thing in the world.”

In our post on the Drama Triangle in high-control religions, we explore how members are assigned the roles of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor — and how queer women in these systems are often placed in the Victim role not because they are passive, but because the system has structured their options so narrowly that fawning and appeasing are the only paths to safety.

The BITE Model, Thought Control, and Sexual Identity

In our post on the BITE Model, we described how high-control groups regulate Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion. Every one of these domains applies directly to queer identity in religious systems.

• Behavioral control: dress standards, dating norms, rules about physical affection — all organized around heterosexual, cisgender frameworks
• Information control: no positive queer representation, no language for bisexual experience, no models for what a full queer life could look like — Layla literally said she grew up without queer representation around her
• Thought control: same-sex attraction reframed as temptation, spiritual weakness, or sin to be overcome — the now-discredited practice of “conversion” work in many religious communities is thought control made explicit
• Emotional control: shame as the primary mechanism — the feelings themselves become evidence of brokenness, so they get suppressed, managed, prayed away, or simply underplayed for decades

What this means, clinically, is that a queer woman who grew up in a high-control religious system didn’t just fail to come out. She was actively prevented from developing the internal infrastructure — the self-concept, the language, the emotional permission, the sense of worth — that coming out requires. The system didn’t just suppress her sexuality. It suppressed her capacity to know herself.

The BITE Model — which we break down in full in an earlier post — helps explain why sexual identity is so often the last thing queer women in these systems come to, even when the feelings were present from childhood. Every domain of BITE control works against the development of a queer self.

The Continuum of Influence and Where Layla’s Story Sits

Not every high-control religious experience looks the same, and it’s worth naming that. Researchers sometimes describe religious influence on a continuum — from healthy community at one end, through progressively more controlling dynamics, to fully coercive cult-like systems at the other. Where a person’s experience falls on that continuum affects the intensity of the impact on identity, sexuality, and mental health — but it doesn’t change the basic architecture of what happens when sexual identity has no sanctioned place in the story.

Even at the less coercive end of the continuum — even in communities that would not describe themselves as high-control — purity culture, rigid gender roles, and the centering of heterosexual temple marriage as the only approved path create the same conditions for queer women: invisibility, suppression, and the slow, quiet erosion of authentic selfhood.

Layla Taylor describes an experience that sits somewhere in the middle of that continuum. She converted as a teenager, internalized the framework, built a life around it, and spent years unable to name something she’d known about herself since childhood. That is not a failure of character or courage. That is what happens when a system is built without space for you.

We Are Proud of Her. We Hope the Next Generation Won’t Have to Wait.

Layla Taylor said it simply: “We’re only on this earth for however long we are here and I’ll be damned if I’m not able to be fully who I am.”

That sentence is 25 years in the making. It required a marriage, a divorce, two children, several public relationships, and the end of one more before she could say it. It cost her years she cannot get back. It may cost her relationships with castmates she hasn’t yet told.

We celebrate her. Genuinely. And we hold alongside that celebration a grief for what it cost, and a hope — a clinical and personal hope — that the structures making it this hard are named clearly enough, understood thoroughly enough, and challenged consistently enough that the next generation of queer women in high-control religious systems don’t have to wait until their mid-twenties, or their thirties, or their sixties to say what Layla finally said.

There is nothing wrong with who she is. There never was. The same is true for every queer woman still sitting in a pew somewhere in Utah or Arizona or anywhere else, underplaying something she has known about herself since she was little.

What Healing Looks Like for Queer Women Leaving High-Control Religion

If Layla’s story landed somewhere in your chest — if you recognized something in the years of underplaying, the marriage, the performance of a life that didn’t quite fit — this is for you.

Healing from the intersection of queer identity and religious trauma is specific work. It often involves:

• Unlearning the equation between your sexuality and your worth — because the system fused them deliberately, and they need to be separated
• Grieving the years spent fawning — not with self-blame, but with honest acknowledgment that your nervous system did what it needed to do to keep you safe
• Finding language for experiences that the system gave you no language for — bisexuality, queer identity, desire that didn’t fit the approved story
• Rebuilding a relationship with your own body and desire, slowly, in a space that is not organized around surveillance or shame
• Working through the PTSD-level impact that religious systems can have on queer identity — because the research is clear that this isn’t just sadness or confusion, it’s often clinical-level trauma
• Finding or building community that is genuinely affirming — not community contingent on who you are willing to be

At Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation in Gilbert, Arizona, this is some of the most important work we do. We work with queer women navigating religious trauma, sexuality, identity, and the slow, brave process of becoming more fully themselves. We offer EMDR to process the specific memories and belief systems that religious trauma leaves in the body, and IFS to work compassionately with the parts that learned to hide — the parts that fawned, that performed, that underplayed — so they can finally rest.

If Layla’s story is yours — even a version of it — you don’t have to figure it out alone.

For a fuller picture of the framework we use to understand this kind of healing, start with our guide to religion, spirituality, cults, and religious trauma. And for more on what reclaiming identity actually looks like after a high-control system, see our post on reclaiming your identity after a cult.”  Link 1: /religion-spirituality-cults-religious-trauma-defined — anchor: ‘guide to religion, spirituality, cults, and religious trauma’ Link 2: /reclaiming-your-identity-after-a-cult — anchor: ‘reclaiming your identity after a cult’

→ Ready to begin? Reach out to schedule a consultation.

references

• Glick & Fiske (1996) — Ambivalent Sexism Inventory / benevolent sexism
• Karpman (1968) — Drama Triangle, Transactional Analysis Bulletin
• Hassan (1990) — BITE Model (Combating Cult Mind Control)
• Langone (1993) — Five-point cult definition
• Winell (2011) — Religious Trauma Syndrome, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Today
• Johnson & VanVonderen (2005) — Spiritual abuse definition
• Religious Trauma Institute (2019) — Religious/spiritual trauma definition
• Simmons (2017) — LGBTQ+ Mormon PTSD dissertation (89.2% statistic)
• Walker, L.E. (1979) — Cycle of abuse
• Van der Kolk (2014) — The Body Keeps the Score
• Vaughan (1991) — Spirituality definition
• Pargament & Mahoney (2012) — Religion definition
• Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (1993) — Power and Control Wheel
• 2. Statistical Sources
• Gallup (2025) — 9% LGBTQ+ identification, bisexuality most common
• Gallup (2025) — 9.3% 2024 data / Gen Z at 22.7%
• BYU survey data via Wikipedia LGBTQ Mormon page
• Knoll (2016) — LDS membership density / suicide rates
• 3. Developmental & Identity Theory
• Marcia (1966) — Identity Status Model
• Glenn (1990) — Five Basic Developmental Needs
• Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi (2013) — Religion definition
• 4. Media & Journalistic Sources
• E! Online, Out Magazine, People/AOL, PinkNews — Layla Taylor quotes and details
• On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast — primary source
• 5. Undergraduate Research
• Howard (2023), RANGE Journal — LDS/LGBTQ+ religious trauma effects
• 6. Clinical Concept Notes
• Pete Walker (2013) — Fawning as fourth trauma response
• Herman (1992) — Trauma and Recovery