I think the Church can do both, if it accomodates (and embraces) those such as Joanna who self-identify as Mormons while not abandoning and denying the core doctrines that make Mormonism so distinctive.
I know it will never happen, but I like to imagine.
Which is, after all, a subtle yet clear if oblique admission that Joanna Brooks has, indeed, abandoned and denied "the core doctrines that make Mormonism distinctive."
If she hadn't abandoned a fair portion of them, the question of the Church "accommodating" here would never need be raised at all, would they? To ask the question is to answer it.
Oh, but I forgot, Joanna Brooks is a scholar. She has an advanced degree. She's
smart (American literature, African-American literature, Native American literature, and women’s studies. This woman is very likely a
classic model of the contemporary PC academy and every salient aspect of its intellectual degradation. Yet another Saint is "overcome of the world" and throws up their hands under the mocking, pointing fingers of the Great and Spacious Building. Sad). She must be smart because she has an advanced degree, which makes her smart and makes her smarter than people without an advanced formal degree, who are dumb because they don't have an advanced degree unlike smart (and hip, enlightened, "progressive") people like Joanna Brooks.
Therefore...
she must be right, she must be listened to, and all "chapel" Mormons must defer to her (because they're dumb, uneducated, and don't have formal, advanced degrees in trendy disciplines (if one could call them that) like woman's studies) as the hoi polloi before the Platonic guardians.
All bow to the arm of flesh; all bend the knee to the golden calf of the "studies" departments of our once noble universities.