Identity Crisis: Transgender or Transformed?

We tackle the culture war this hour. Is it possible to go from transgender to transformed? Indeed it is, but only with the help of a loving, patient, and almighty God. We first meet Laura Perry, who lived as a man for nine years. In part two, we meet the mother of a son who decided he was a woman.

Is the church ready for this dilemma? Here is today's programming. And so I began to remember all the fantasies I had as a child of feeling like a boy. I said, that's the problem here. That's why I'm never happy because I was supposed to be the man in the relationship. And I hear about this transgender identity. And so I went to a support group meeting and I was amazed that all of a sudden to hear all these people telling me how wonderful this is and how brave I am for coming out. They said, in a couple of years, no one's ever even going to know you were a female. I just wanted to be a man and completely forget that I had ever been born female.

I really wanted to erase the existence of Laura. I began to transition. I began to take the hormones. And at first it was the greatest thing ever.

I was just on cloud nine. I started to begin to grow facial hair and began to grow a beard and sideburns and my voice began to get lower. Even the body shape began to change a little bit.

In 2009, I had my name legally changed. And welcome to the program. And you can tell with that little introduction, we're going in a totally different direction for the hour. It's, quite frankly, a sensitive topic.

It might not even be totally appropriate for small children, but that's your decision. I'm going to be talking for the first part of Understanding the Times radio this week with Laura Perry. Some of you may know Laura. Some of you may have read her book or seen her on various YouTube presentations and other venues that she's been on.

She has an incredible story, story of victory. So I want to welcome to the program for the first time, Laura Perry. Laura, welcome to Understanding the Times. Thank you so much for having me on.

Laura, we don't have a lot of time, but I want to get in as much of your story as possible. And I'm just going to ask you some real direct questions and you take your time answering them and trying to get the audience here up to speed on just what it's like to find that, in your case anyway, you felt you were not really the gender you were born, which we know is a lie from the pit of hell. You started questioning and realizing something was wrong in your life all the way back in 2007. It was not in vogue back then. In other words, the whole transgender phenomenon hadn't really hit in 2007. So what are you thinking?

Right. And at first, I had never even heard the word transgender. I had seen on some of the daytime talk shows, as a kid, I had seen people dressing as the opposite gender. But I didn't even know that people attempted transition. When I started feeling this way, I was so desperate to become a man, I looked up and Google girl becoming a boy, just to see if anything came up.

I was actually shocked when I saw all kinds of other people that were feeling the same way. You were going to live about nine years as a transgender. I'm going to have you talk about it, but you were going to go through a few surgeries anyway.

And you shocked me because you said that some who go through this process and some who actually make a full transgender experience can have up to 30 surgeries. Thankfully, that wasn't your case. Still, you had parts of your body reconstructed, which is mind blowing to hear that folks go through that. Let's go back to you as a kid because something happened.

What do you think it was? Well, there were several things in childhood that may have contributed. And I think a lot of it is that the enemy just took the perceptions from my mother. And I want to be careful because I don't blame my mother at all.

And I don't want to bring any kind of dishonor to her. But I think early in life, I was much closer to my dad. My mom had had two miscarriages between my brother and I. I know part of it was her grieving those boys. She was much closer to my brother. They were closer in personality.

I felt much closer to my dad. And a lot of times my mom, she was exhausted from it. She was exhausted from all her working at the church. She was on this performance treadmill for God. She's told this in her own story.

So she was exhausted a lot. And a lot of times it was like, just go away, leave me alone, get off me, go play by yourself. But I internalize that as rejection and mom doesn't love me. I began to act more like my brother because I thought, well, mom likes boys more than girls. I'm going to be more like my brother. And then the more I acted like a boy, the more other girls began to reject me and the more I felt like I didn't fit in with them. So then I would act even more like a boy.

And I just didn't know how to fix it. You are going to find a transgender support group and you're going to start to hear how wonderful this new life could be if you could just be one of these transgender people. Tell me just a little bit about the support group. The first time I was there, they had me share just a little bit of who I was. And I didn't see any of these connections or anything that had happened in childhood, any of these lives. I really just believed it's who I was. And within five minutes, they're like, Oh, you are definitely transgender. You know, I was concerned that I thought, well, I'm never going to look like a man. And they said, Oh, don't worry about it. In a year or so of taking hormones, no one's ever going to know you were a girl. That's what I've been wanting to hear all my life. And I was like, Oh, that's it.

And I just bought it hook, line and sinker. So none of those people talked about the struggle. There had to be a struggle when you start taking hormones, you start having surgeries.

There's got to be a struggle involved. They never talked about that. What was interesting is they talk about a fairy tale like you're going to be happily ever after. My partner and I were going to the support group meetings for about the first year.

And after the first year, we noticed a trend. We're leaving the meetings more depressed than when we get there. Because everybody was so depressed all the time. They're talking about how miserable their lives are. And yet they're talking about how happy they are because of transition. But yet they're talking about how miserable their lives are.

And it's like nobody was making the connection that this lifestyle is not going to lead to happiness. In 2009, you changed your name to Jake. You had chest reconstruction, etc. I'm not going to go into details here.

Your driver's license then would say mail. But you said to me, but you knew you weren't. So you weren't convinced yet.

I thought I was immediately after the surgery. It was actually a few weeks later. I had been a little bit depressed and I really couldn't quite put my finger on it. But I went back to work and my boss that was a lesbian, she was very pro LGBT. I mean, she'd helped me plan the trip.

She thought this was wonderful. After I'd been back at work a few weeks, she kind of got in my face one day and she said, Look, I don't know what's wrong with you. But you're moping around here. You're depressed. You're not working as hard. You're unmotivated. And I don't know what's wrong with you.

But I want the old Jake back. I was so stunned. I was like, Wait, what do you mean? I just blew her off.

But I went home that night and I couldn't get it out of my head. And I thought what is she seeing in me that I'm not seeing in myself because I thought I was really happy. And I finally had to admit that even though I liked the physical results, my surgery hadn't made me a man. Just going to comment here. You certainly looked like one.

I've seen the pictures. My hunch is you fooled everyone, did you not, with the way you looked and the fact that you were passing yourself off as a male. People accepted that, did they not?

Yeah. In fact, later I had a new job where I was only known as male and nobody knew I was transgender. And I thought that was my ticket to freedom. I thought all the dysphoria would finally go away once nobody knew. But I realized that the battle was internal.

It didn't have to do with anybody else. Talk to me a little bit about the internal battle. You made a transition. That itself had to be traumatic. The surgeries, you even had some internal organs removed.

Am I right? All the female organs removed, yeah. This has to be psychologically traumatic. Now you say being a female is traumatic. Okay, I get that when you have your mindset. But then to have the shocking things done to your body, that had to be traumatic.

Yeah, and it was extremely maddening because it was like trying to run a race, but the goal line keeps moving. There's always this perceived happiness. You get there and then it's like, this still didn't fix it. Well, maybe the next thing will.

Well, maybe the next thing, the next thing. And I always thought another year of hormones, another surgery. But I eventually came to realize that no matter what I did to my body, the struggle was internal. I couldn't put my finger on it. I didn't know how to explain it.

I knew that this was deeper than just the outer shell of the body. What it promised to be freedom eventually became my prison cell. Because I thought I would find freedom in living completely what I called stealth. In other words, nobody knew that I was transgender.

But then all of a sudden, you have to reinvent your life all the time. You know, I'd be telling a story about childhood. And it's like, wait, I couldn't have been in Girl Scouts. I had to have been in Boy Scouts. I couldn't have played softball. I had to play baseball. I was caught in lies all the time. And I remember at one point, I was caught in a really big lie to my boss.

She'd become a very good friend. We worked closely together. And I thought I'm lying to somebody that I really care about. It began to drive me crazy.

I just want to play a quick clip here. It's Walt Heyer. Walt is quite well known as transgender who became a female and he realized that was impossible. He made a terrible mistake.

He's also a believer. I lived eight years as a female named Laura Jensen after undergoing gender reassignment surgery in April of 1983. I started as a four year old kid in 1944. So I'm bringing into this conversation today 74 years of firsthand experience in some way, either living it or trying to deal with it or trying to recover from it. It's important, I think, to understand that everything that we've heard today is damaging to children. I was damaged by this and I have some very strong points of view. So I hope that, don't take exception to them, they come out of pain. They come out of real life experience. I'm not trying to be hurtful to anybody, but I think that I have a website called sexchangeregret.com and we get letters from either the parents or the transgenders themselves asking for help. After they've lived the life like I did for 5, 6, 15, 18, 20, all the way up to 30 years and they're saying, Walt, can you help me detransition?

This was the biggest mistake of my life. I think it's important for us to realize that there is actually nothing good about affirming a young boy 4 years old like my grandma did me. The moment you affirm a child like my grandma did, putting me in a purple chiffon dress and telling me how cute I was, how wonderful I look, at the very same moment that you're affirming that young person, you're telling them there's something wrong with them, that you're not right. That is child abuse.

We need to begin calling it what it is. It's not affirming a child, it's causing them to be depressed and anxious about who they are. And then we go on to inject hormone blockers into them and begin altering their body. Can we begin to understand today from these discussions how destructive this is to the psyche?

It's no wonder they end up with separation anxiety and bipolar disorder, dissociative disorders, schizophrenia and many other disorders that they want you to ignore. You're listening to Understanding the Times Radio. I'm Jan Markell and I'm talking to Laura Perry who also realized, this is after her surgeries, that she had made the biggest mistake of her life as well. As a book, you can find the book at her website, transgender2transformed.com, transgender2transformed.com and that's the title of the book, Transgender 2 Transformed by Laura Perry and I've read it and I've heard her story in other places as well. Laura, let's make a turn here because you were going to make a turn and I think it started that your mother asked you to make a website for her.

She became a Bible study teacher and you were going to make a website for her Bible study. Talk to me about that and how that was a turning point. It's one of the most beautiful parts of the whole story I think because it was like the most unlikely scenario. I was so angry with my mom and by this time in my life I'd held on to bitterness for so long. I was irrationally angry with her and she didn't deserve all the hatred I had but I had just built it in my heart for so many years.

The only reason we were in contact at all was because my partner kept pushing me to stay in contact with them because he'd lost his parents at a very young age. So we had minimal contact but she had become a Bible study teacher and I didn't know until later that her becoming a Bible study teacher was part of, when I came out as transgender, it really broke her. And she went from this very legalistic, and she will tell you in her own testimony, kind of a self-described Pharisee, into becoming somebody that was truly humbled and really surrendered to the Holy Spirit. So she had been changing and I hadn't noticed it yet but when she asked me to make this website I really was just doing it for the money but I had this brilliant idea one day to summarize each lesson and I didn't know the power of the Word of God. All I knew of God's Word was the rules and these stories so as I began to read the lessons all of a sudden I began to see something I'd never seen in the Bible before.

It wasn't just God's rules. All of a sudden I began to see the heart and the character of God and I began to see that God was loving and faithful and trustworthy and it just began to change my heart. And my mom and I spent several months after that, I would call and ask her a question once in a while and I went from never calling her or calling her very rarely to calling her every single day and I just couldn't wait to hear more about the Bible. And then eventually I said, Mom what's happened to me?

I'm 180 degrees from where I was six months ago. And she said, Well I've been praying that God would draw you back like a magnet. And I said, Wow, that's what God has done.

I knew even then that I had made a complete turnaround. I had never really wanted God. I had never been really into church.

I had never wanted to read my Bible. I mean I knew that I was a completely different person. I wasn't saved yet but I mean just my desires were changing and I could feel that the Lord was drawing me. But were you still thinking to yourself, I can never be a woman? Yeah, at that time definitely. I mean it was so painful.

And God had used several things to remind me of the truth the whole time. My mom refused to call me Jake. She refused to use the male pronouns and all that and it used to make me so mad. I would say, Mom you've got to give into this. This is who I am. You've got to get over it. I'm never going to change.

And just yell and scream at her but she wouldn't give in. It was like this tethered reality to me. God never let me forget who I was. So He had kept pursuing me. I went home and I repented that night and I began to give my heart to the Lord. And over the next couple of days, it took me a couple of days to trust the Lord that He would save me. I'd had so much sin in my life.

There was times in high school I was praying to Satan asking Satan to keep people from coming to know Jesus. I had a really hard time believing that God would save me but He proved to me that He would through this incredible encounter. As I gave my heart so fully to the Lord, I was radically changed and all my desires began to change. My scripture and hymns from childhood came flooding back to me. I knew I was changed but I thought I was going to be a man of God. I didn't realize that God was going to come after this identity but He was gentle and patient. But as He began to convict me, it was like, well God I recognize this wasn't your will but I don't know what to do about it now.

I'm kind of stuck this way. As I began to keep going down this road and I began to pursue God more, I kept being more and more convicted. Finally, one night I thought, maybe Jesus will return because my dad was always talking to me about prophecy, about the rapture and stuff.

And I was getting excited. I thought, maybe the Lord will come back any day and then I will just get out of this. I called my mom around that time and I said, Mom, what are you studying in Bible study? And she said, well I've been studying on the judgment seat of Christ. And I was like, whoa, wait a minute. So all of a sudden the reality that Jesus could return any day and I will stand before Him, those two realities just collided.

And I went home and threw myself on the floor, I mean just sobbing before the Lord. And I said, God, what do you want from me? You can have my life. And I named everything in my life I could think of. Like, you can have it all. What do you want?

What do I need to do? I am not ready to stand before you. And the Lord simply asked me a question. He said, if you stood before me tonight, what name would I call? And I was so thrown off by that. I was like, wait, we've already discussed this, Lord.

There's nothing I can do about this. He reminded me of John chapter 1 where it says, Jesus Christ Himself is the Creator. He said, you cannot claim to love me and yet reject my creation. And I think you envisioned Him as sort of leaning down, kneeling down and saying to you, do you trust me? And could you?

Yeah. What He said at that moment, He said, let me tell you who you are. And that's what began to free me. And I realized there was such freedom in that. And realizing that the Creator of all the universe knew who I was, that I was created with a plan and a purpose. And I wasn't just here as a result of biology, that I was here for His purposes and that He still knew who I was. For a couple of months, I still didn't know what to do. And so I was like, OK, Lord, I'm willing to leave it all. I just don't know how.

How do I fix this? And I was still trying to fix myself. And I finally saw myself in this deep, dark pit I couldn't get out of. And the Lord brought to mind sort of my life first. Matthew chapter 16, verses 24 through 26, where it says, If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it. For what is it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet forfeit his own soul?

Or what shall he give in exchange for his soul? And that's when I saw myself in this deep, dark pit. And I could see the light at the top, but I had no way out. And it was like, Lord, I have nothing. Here is my broken. I remember almost this visual, like scooping up my life and going, Here, Lord, here is this broken mess I've made in my life.

If you can fix it, it's yours. And I had a clear vision of Jesus getting down on one knee. He reached his hand down into the pit and he said, Do you trust me? He didn't tell me how to fix my life. He didn't give me all these steps.

He just asked if I trusted him. He was asking me to just walk away from everything. And that's all I did. I walked away from the identity, my job, my partner.

Everything I had known for almost nine years. You said to me that kind of a turning point in the transgender movement was likely the 2015 Supreme Court decision that allowed same-sex marriage to be declared as certainly the new law of the land. And there was kind of a ripple effect that happened at that time. I think you would agree with me. Yeah, it seemed to open the floodgates.

Yes, that's the term I was looking for. Yeah, and I didn't even realize it. We were used to it being so taboo and very in the shadows. Nobody talked about being transgender.

And then when I started hearing it on the radio all the time, it was really weird. And I'm like, Why is everybody talking about this? And I was really angry about it, actually, because I felt like it was going to expose me.

When nobody was talking about transgender, nobody suspected that I might be transgender. I didn't want all the activism and all the attention. And your mother's Bible study group was going to play an important role, too. And I think this part of the story is interesting because it shows the love of Christians and how much they cared about you. And I think they even raised $1600 so you could have a whole new feminine wardrobe. Am I right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think sometimes in the church, we forget what true love looks like. They didn't come down and affirm me as Jake and say, Oh, it's just wonderful and God loves you just the way you are. Which, of course, God loves us.

But they use that to say you can stay in sin and live however you want. But these women prayed for me and they sought the Lord on my behalf. And then when I came home, they embraced me with so much love. And they accepted me as a woman.

I mean, the first time I showed up in Bible study, I did not look very feminine. But they just embraced me as one of the women and they weren't uncomfortable around me and they didn't shy away from me. They were so happy for me and rejoiced with me. And yeah, they raised $1600 to buy me a new wardrobe. And they've actually given me thousands since then.

I mean, they have been huge supporters of my ministry for the last four years. And Laura will come speak to your church or group. You just have to reach out to her through her website, transgender2transform.com. I promise you, she's an inspiration. And not only that, but she looks like a lovely woman now. And I think that was another thing that I was impressed with, Laura, because I saw you as the supposed man that you wanted to be, saw the pictures of you, beard and all. And you're a very attractive woman now. I mean, it's quite a transformation. Yeah, it's been such a miracle.

I almost laugh now. I remember how hard it was. I couldn't even conceive of being a girl again.

I cried hysterically the first time I went shopping for female clothes. But as the Lord has healed me, I've now embraced femininity so much. I truly love being a woman. I'm beginning to understand His creation of woman and how woman is different than man, but good.

I never saw woman as good. All right, there might be one, there might be a hundred, I don't know. There could be a thousand out there listening right now who are saying, this is me, Laura is me.

I feel exactly the way she felt. The confusion, in other words, or maybe they've already transitioned and they just don't know what to do. And you've given them about 25 minutes here of your story.

How would you talk to them? Well, I just want anyone out there that's struggling to know that there is hope in Jesus. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead can overcome any feeling that we have, any desires that we have if we will submit them and surrender them to Him.

And He's peeled the layers of the onion back. There was a moment after I went to the Bible study that the lie kind of broke off me, but it took several years for this identity to really be healed. And I'm still healing in some ways. We do for a lifetime as the Lord molds us and shapes us.

But no matter what you've been through, no matter what you've done, no matter how far you've run, no matter what you've done to your body, give your life to Jesus and let Him tell you who you are. You had embraced a lie. For that matter, much of humanity embraces a lie. It doesn't have to be the transgender lie.

It can be one of a million other lies. And I think you probably were turned over to that reprobate mind. This is now years ago.

This is in the early days. And you broke free from that reprobate mind. And you have a glorious testimony.

It's sort of a story that if anybody can be set free, reading your story, I now believe anybody truly can be set free. They really can. Amen. I want to give them that encouragement. One of the things that healed me, there were several things. Psalm 107-20 is my other lie first. He sent His Word and healed them and delivered them from their destruction.

The Word of God is what healed me, memorizing a lot of Scripture. And then discipleship. If you're a girl struggling, you don't actually need godly women that don't struggle with this to help you embrace femininity. Same with men. So girls need girls. Men need men. But I also want to give a quick encouragement to parents. Go ahead.

Take your time. God was answering their prayers all along the way. There are so many things. I look back. I was having constant dreams. I dreamed way more back then than I do now. Dreams about missing the rapture sometimes. Or dreams about waking up a girl and I hadn't actually transitioned. And then I would freak out. But there were so many ways God was answering prayers for years. And my parents didn't know it for probably seven of the nine years.

They didn't know that God was even answering their prayers. Be encouraged. Keep praying. We've got a couple minutes left. Anything else you want to insert here before we close the session?

I just want to encourage everyone too. There's lots of resources out there. Sometimes they are hard to find. We know that social media, Google, they are hiding a lot of this information.

But you can find it. There's information on my website. You can also go to firststone.org. Walt Heyer in the clip you heard mentioned sex change regret is another good source. We also have a documentary coming out in October from the American Family Association called In His Image. And I think it's going to be amazing. It's got a lot of different people in it with different perspectives. Stephen Black, the director of First Stone here, myself, and many others.

Walt Heyer is in it as well. Okay. So does your mother still have her Bible study going on since that was such a life changer for you? She does. And those women have been a huge support to me and to her.

And they've just been amazing. You can find those Bible studies online at ComeGrowWithMeOnline.com. ComeGrowWithMeOnline.com.

Yes. And I'm going to promote Laura's book one more time, Laura Perry. You can find the book Transgender to Transformed at TransgenderToTransform.com.

I know we're giving you lots of websites, folks. Rae Comfort says this about the book. This book offers a living hope and healing for those struggling to find their true identity and encouragement for families who love them.

Rae Comfort, front cover testimonial on Laura's book. Laura, I personally want to thank you for being an encouragement to my audience, for that matter to me, because I saw only by way of picture. I didn't know you.

Still really, I've never met you, but I've met you kind of online and the transition that you've made, I think. It's stunning. It really is. It's quite a testimony.

All glory to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I honestly didn't think it was possible. I'm just as stunned at what he's done in me. Yeah, I can understand how you would be having seen the pictures of you as a man. And I believe you were supposedly married, not officially, but married to a man who was living as a woman, right? Right.

Your story doesn't get a whole lot more bizarre. Yeah. Therefore, all that more victorious here in the end. Amen. Yeah. In fact, you mentioned at the beginning of the program, it's a victorious story.

The Lord reminded me after I came home that my name means victorious spirit. Really? Yep. Wonderful. Laura Perry, we will stay in touch. I want to thank you for sharing this very good news today. And folks, coming up in the second half of my program, I'm going to talk to a mother who has a teenage son who came out and said, Mom, I'm a girl.

What does a mother like that do? Judy was married to a pastor in a Christian home. We're going to share her story after I take a real short time out. So don't go away. I'm coming right back.

I'm coming right back. So isn't it time you started to understand God's plan for the end of the age? We are carrying Dr. Ron Rhodes' book, 40 Days Through Revelation, uncovering the mystery of the end times. The Bible says, Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book. That being the book of Revelation, no one puts things into easier terms to understand than Dr. Ron Rhodes. If you have been confused or intimidated by the book of Revelation, you will love this easy to understand and practical presentation of its empowering truths.

The Bible is clear about the things to come, and Ron Rhodes is one gifted communicator of this vital information. Find the book in our online store at olivetreeviews.org. That's olivetreeviews.org. Or, you can find it in Central Time at 763-559-4444. That's 763-559-4444. It will also be in our year-end print magazine.

Sign up online. If your kids are in public schools, this is in their curriculum. You better wake up and look at what is being taught in your schools because it is being propagated not only in their sex education, but in a lot of other ways as well.

Christian schools, too. We know you lead busy lives and can't always be by a radio. Catch Understanding the Times radio on our website 24-7 at olivetreeviews.org. That's olivetreeviews.org. Just go to Complete Archives or watch the program at his channel or on our YouTube channel if you miss a program on air. You can also download the mobile app from oneplace.com and have a fresh program every Saturday morning. Now, here's Jan Markell and her guest continuing on the theme of today's program.

Welcome back. I'm going to continue on with yet a little different for Understanding the Times radio this particular week, but we try to look at all the issues of the day, including some of the cultural issues. Let me just quickly say how active we are on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, very active on YouTube. You might want to watch the programming on our YouTube channel. You can watch it on his channel, lightsource.com, and various portions of our website if you're a visual person. If you write to us, tell us how you listen, would you?

It sort of helps us in the office here if I know what station or just how you might be listening electronically. We're now in the air for almost 20 years to the day. I'm joined now by a mom, Judy Glennie. She sent me her book. The book is titled Mom, I'm a Girl. I started getting into it, and then I met Judy by telephone.

I was totally amazed at what she went through. Judy, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, Jan, for having me. And I know you listen on KPDQ out there in the Portland area. You live in Portland. I'm in Minneapolis. We aren't in very safe cities, Judy.

No, we're actually in Vancouver, which is across the river from Portland, but yes, we're seeing so much of this going on. Let me just get my audience acquainted a little bit with Scott, and I'm just going to ask you some questions, and I'm going to be fairly quiet because, again, I've not experienced anything like you nor Laura. Scott first talked about some gender confusion about age 12 or so, and this is back in 2000 when the transgender craze, it hadn't hit like it has here again now in the last five years or so. So talk to me about what happened about age 12 and the progression there. About that age, he just started mentioning some confusion, some questioning about who he was and about him being a boy and so forth, and he just mentioned that I think I should have been a girl. At that point, the transgenderism, as you mentioned, was not even out there.

It was there, but not certainly in the media and exposed as it is today. He expressed it as I thought a normal preteen would growing into those years thinking about his gender, his sexuality, and just who he was and that sort of thing. It wasn't a blatant statement at that time that I could see.

It was just a questioning at that point. About age 15, it sounds like he came out and just said, I'm tired of pretending I should have been a girl. It was about maybe 15 or 16 that, yes, he said, I'm tired of living the lie.

I know I am a girl, and I am going to live like a girl. So this is when he actually started making some overtures. He started putting on, oh, he didn't wear a lot of dresses, but he did wear some. He bought girl clothes and that sort of thing.

He started putting on a little bit of makeup, started his hair growing longer and wearing it more in a woman's fashion. So he started making these overtures into that area of his life, and that's when we started getting very concerned about this whole thing, of which we had absolutely no idea what this was all about. It was something that was totally out of our periphery.

We really had no knowledge of what this was, and so we were very ignorant. Should we go along with this? Is this something that is natural?

Is it physical? Is it psychological? We had no idea where this was heading. Did you think it's perhaps a passing phase, he'll grow out of this? The way he was approaching it, we knew that he was taking it very seriously. We kind of figured that we better find out something about this, knowing Scott, when he gets into something, he doesn't go halfway.

He goes all the way. We knew that he was definitely delving into something that we had no idea what was going to come of it. Well, you said to him that you're not going to condone this, so this must have been a blow to him. Yes, it was.

It truly was. It caused a rift in our family, because we knew that obviously this was not God's plan for him. We knew that he was a male through and through, and that what he was trying to do was obviously something that is very confusing to him, but he had bought into this whole idea somehow that if he felt he was a girl, then he convinced himself he knew that he was a girl, and we knew that this was just not the truth. So it very definitely caused a schism in our relationship. You said to him, we will call you Scott. You're our son, we love you like our son, and we cannot condone your actions.

In other words, acting like a woman. This is not who you are, and you refuse to buy him women's clothing. Then you told me about that time, he became very deceitful. Eventually he was going to leave home here. Talk to us a little bit more about when you said to him, we're not going to accept this.

We know you're a boy, you can act like a woman, but we know who you are. How does he react? He was belligerent. He was angered, but he didn't display a lot of his anger. It was more of the tone of what he said.

His body language. There was one point later on that he really lashed out, but in the beginning he would just be quiet. He would shut himself up in his room, he wouldn't talk. Like I said, became very disturbing to us in that we thought we had lost him in the sense that we lost communication with him, we lost relationship with him, because he just could not accept the fact that we did not go along with what he was doing. And to him, and this is a big point that most people in this situation do, they acquaint your condoning their actions with your love. And we constantly told him, regardless of what you do, we will always love you. And we made that very clear. But in his mind, because we didn't go along with what he was doing, we didn't love him. So I'm sure that that played into a lot of what he was going through as well. I want to play another real quick clip here of Walt Heyer. Walt, again, as I said in the first half of the program, was a transgender, and obviously he made a reversal of all of that.

He's quite an excellent spokesman. Why do we abuse them with hormone blockers and cut their bodies apart as a way to affect treatment? It's insane, actually. It doesn't make any sense.

If we're just to pause and take a sober breath, it's insanity. It's painful to get these e-mails from people whose lives have been totally torn apart. Men, like myself, who was married, had two children, had a career. I was an executive for American Honda Motor Company. One of those therapists who was an advocate for gender change surgery told me that what happened to you as a child wearing that purple dress, the only way to solve that is to have cross-gender hormones and undergo reassignment surgery.

That's the solution. Well, I trusted his expertise because Dr. Walker had actually written the original international standards of care for treatment of gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria. I'm here because he was wrong. I'm here because those standards of care have morphed into what they're using today.

They haven't changed much. Yeah, they've gone through revision after revision, but the basic idea is that when somebody comes in, they can self-diagnose their gender dysphoria. We are manufacturing transgender kids. We are manufacturing their depression, their anxiety, and it's turned into a huge industry that people are profiting from after kids' lives are completely torn apart. The most vulnerable people in our society and adults are tearing their lives apart. It's really beyond my understanding why we're even having this discussion because it shouldn't be happening. I don't believe any doctor who injects a young person with hormone blockers should have a license to do so. I would prefer that they not have that ability. And I hope that people begin to realize this and begin to speak up about it.

There is absolutely nothing good about affirming somebody in a cross-gender identity because it destroys their life. If you're listening to Understanding the Times Radio, I'm Jan Markell. I have on the line Judy Glennie. She sent me her book, Mom, I'm a Girl. You can get the book and learn more at Judy's website, judyglennie.com. That's spelled G-L-E-N-N-E-Y, judyglennie.com. Find the book there.

I think it's only $10, and that includes shipping. It's excellent. If this is in your life, and the book I referred to the first half of the program, also excellent if this issue is in your life. Judy, now I know Scott was going to eventually, and we're not quite there in the story yet, he was going to leave, get a job, and start saving his money to get the surgery done in Thailand. Did he have any hormone shots before all of that?

Well, that's another interesting story. We had no idea of what this was all about. We didn't even know the direction that he was going, the steps he was taking. At this point, he was 17. Unbeknownst to us, he had started taking hormones.

How he got these through a doctor, I am not sure, but kids do have their ways of getting this if they are truly persistent in this. So yes, he hadn't taken the shots, but he was on hormones, which, again, if any woman knows, those hormones can be very powerful and really affect your emotions, which was part of why he had these wide emotional swings and lashed out at us. Eventually, my understanding is he was going to have to leave home.

He moved to Portland, you said, where he lived in a place where kids on the street were living in some sort of a home in Portland. He got a job and began saving his money for the complete transgender surgery that he was going to get in Thailand. That fell apart, and why don't you take it from there? Once he knew that he did not have the opportunity to get the money that he needed for this surgery, his world just came crashing down. He wanted this so very much. At this point, this is what his life's goal was, was to live as a woman.

Everything was wrapped up in that scenario. So when he knew that he did not have the ways and the means, he had come to us to ask for the money, and obviously, we did not give him the money, and we said that we never would. He started saving every single penny that he could garner toward this surgery. This is when he really felt that he could not live anymore. He felt his world fell apart, it came crashing down around him, and he always told us that if he could not live as a woman, he would not live at all, and that's when he took his life.

And how did that happen? He borrowed our truck. We have an old 1969 white Suburban, and a Suburban is a van, a big van that is open in the back. He had come home one day and asked my husband if he could borrow the truck to move some items that he had gotten in Portland, and he was moving to another location. And Gary didn't think too much about it. He said, sure. Scott sounded very upbeat. He asked it in a very normal tone. He came in and he talked with Gary very kindly, and Gary didn't seem to see anything wrong with that, so he gave him the keys.

We found out later that he rented some helium tanks in Portland, put them in the back of the truck, and simply laid down, inhaled the helium, and went peacefully to heaven. I want to emphasize that he was raised in a Christian home, and my listeners are predominantly Christians listening on Christian radio. They may have someone in their family who's struggling exactly as Scott did. You said something interesting to me because you had an agent for your book, Mom, I'm a Girl, and your agent said about the book that the church isn't ready for this, which to me is a stunning statement, because if the church isn't going to get ready for reality, then the church might as well close their doors because they need to start dealing with issues like this. To me, that was a very, very sad statement because there could be a thousand parents listening, even kids listening right now, who are going through exactly what Scott went through. What do you say to them?

I would say, wake up. This is happening everywhere. Your kids, your Christian kids, do not have a hedge of protection around them in the sense that this is not going to affect them, and this is something that I have been trying to get across to a lot of our Christian parents, that just because your kids are raised in a Christian home does not mean that they are not going to be affected by the media, by their peers.

This is blatant. As Walter said, this is going on, and it is prevalent. The enemy is attacking, particularly our Christian kids. I would say, be aware of what your kids are doing.

Don't put your heads in the sand and say, it's not going to come to my house, because it will. Your kids are being affected in so many different ways, and particularly in schools. If your kids are in public schools, this is in their curriculum. You better wake up and look at what is being taught in your schools, because it is being propagated, not only in their sex education, but in a lot of other ways as well.

Christian schools, too. Your kids are affected by, obviously, the media. They hear things. This can be a fad among kids, and they're very prone to what is going on with other kids, and they're willing to try a lot of these things, and this is going to be something that is going to be really strongly influenced in their lives at this point. You said to me a couple of things that we're studying, that the American psychiatric world keeps changing positions on this, and that kids no longer know what to think. What did you mean when you say kids no longer know what to think?

Essentially, like I mentioned, the school systems are putting into play, and this goes along with some of the pediatric physicians that Walter mentioned. This is something that is pushed on kids to explore who they really are. It is no longer a sense that you are a boy just because you have certain anatomical equipment for a boy or like a girl. It is more of something that you are to explore, that you may be a boy or you may be a girl.

It is no longer the facts of sex. So kids are in this confused area as to really what gender and sex is all about, and this can lead to very, very stunning repercussions, as Walter pointed out. You said some of this exploration even begins as early as kindergarten.

Yes. In the curriculum in kindergarten, they are actually introduced to ways of expressing gender, which may be, just like Walter said, putting on a dress, a boy putting on a dress. That's a way of expressing gender. By the third grade, they are introduced to gender identity and that they may choose their own gender. By the fourth and fifth grades, they learn about the relativity of gender roles and why it's a social construct, not necessarily inherent as who they are, male or female. It goes on from there. The interesting thing is that now, particularly a physician or a professional that includes physicians, therapists, counselors, they are not allowed to practice conversion therapy to anyone under 18.

That is correct. You're listening to Understanding the Times Radio, Jan Markell. I'm talking to Judy Glennie. She's from the West Coast. Got acquainted with her book, Mom, I'm a Girl, when her son Scott came and announced that. A little bit before he became a teenager.

Certainly by the time he was in his mid-teens, he was pretty convinced in how he went on to act that out and take some drastic measures. You can learn more at her website, judyglennie.com. Judyglennie.com, last name G-L-E-N-N-E-Y. The book is there as well.

You can just order simply through the website. Judy, we talked about some other things here. Let's just spend a few minutes talking about it because obviously a couple of things. Laura Perry in the first half of the program acknowledged that 2015 was a huge turning point for aberration when the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage to be the law of the land. It's like it opened Pandora's box, and you would agree with that, I think. Absolutely. The insurance companies also were allowed to cover transitional surgeries, which was another open door.

All right. That happened in 2015 as a part of that act? I do believe so. And now we have to ask, what's next? Is pedophilia going to be approved and then celebrated in America? And then we wonder, well, why is America having so many problems? Well, there are consequences to our actions.

Yes, absolutely. And I do think that, again, Walter hit it right on that the enemy is going to attack our children. And this has been proven so many times in so many other countries that if you can get the children, you have pretty much changed the culture. You have changed society.

And the enemy is dead set on destroying our family, as we have known it, changing our values and changing our cultures from what we were actually founded on as Christian values. And you said to me, and let's take a moment here to talk about this. You said to me that women's privacy has been protected up until now. And then the transgender phenomenon hit, and now that is violated in so many ways. All a man has to do now today is to claim that he identifies as a woman and he has the right to enter the women's bathroom. He has the right to enter dressing rooms, shower rooms, and we can get into women's sports as well.

But even just as recently as seven, eight, nine years ago, this was unthinkable. And now it's the new normal, and that is a man entering a dressing room, a little girl, in the room next to him. That's why I think that parents should be particularly aware of what is happening and protection, essentially, of their girls. That their girls are no longer protected from these violators that are easy prey.

And it is so easy to just say, I identify as a woman, I have every right to enter this woman's place of dressing or bathroom or whatever. And then women's sports, of course, has also been seriously affected. Now we've got men who are competing side by side with women. I would think women's sports is nearly ruined.

Am I right or wrong there? Oh, absolutely. This sets back Title IX way back. And it just breaks my heart as a former competing athlete that we have worked so hard to gain equal ground with competition for practice fields and for events and for pay and all of these sort of things. And we had made great strides with Title IX.

And this literally just wipes it out. And there are women now that are deprived of scholarships. They're deprived of international competition because now these men are actually competing as women.

And in so many of these sports, they actually have, obviously, the physiological advantage. I think, Judy, knowing you a little bit, I do, and certainly through your book and in some private conversations with you, this didn't shake your faith. But let's just suppose that we have, as I said to Laura, first part of the programming, let's say we have either a thousand parents of young people like Scott listening or we have a thousand Scotts or Loras listening to the programming today.

What do you tell them? There is always hope. Our God is a loving God. Our God is a God of redemption. And I would say, keep on your knees, keep praying, don't give up. God has a plan for these folks.

And just like Laura, I have talked with other people that have come out of the transgender community and they say that God did a work in their heart. And there is hope. So don't give up, keep praying, trusting God that he has a plan for your life and he has a plan for their life as well. So I would say keep on keeping on and don't give up your faith. God hasn't forgotten you. God hears your prayers and he will answer. Are you in touch with other parents that are going through similar things as you did? Yes, I do get some emails from time to time with folks that are going through this and I keep encouraging them with the same thing, that God is working. It may take more time than what we would like to see, but he is working and there is always hope as long as they're alive. Oh my goodness, God still has a plan for their life. Don't give up.

Through conversations, we keep encouraging through Scripture that God is there. Well folks, you can learn more at Judy's website. Again, it's JudyGlennie.com You can find the book there, Mom, I'm a Girl. We've got a minute or two left, Judy. If you want to sum up, you've done a wonderful job already.

I'm still giving you another minute if you'd like anything else as a parting word to my audience. I would just say that be aware. Keep on the alert. The Bible admonishes us to be wise. We can't stick our heads in the sand about this. It is only going to become more prevalent, so wake up, look at your children, be protective of your children, and keep them in the Word. And by all means, keep praying and keep trusting God that he will work through any situation. And I think your husband is pastor of the Portland Bible Church, am I right?

I know you're renting, and I think they've closed you down due to COVID. Am I right, Portland Bible Church? Yes.

And they could find that online if they wanted to look into that? Yes, portlandbiblechurch.com, and we have our services there, and I invite them to take a peek. It's Pastor Gary Glennie, right?

Pastor Gary Glennie, yes. Judy, thank you for being bold enough to come on air, but also to write the book. It's a very moving story, and I know Scott was obviously tormented, he had to have been. You're right, he is set free now, and you'll see him again, I think, fairly soon, the way things are going in this world. That is our hope, and that was what got me through this, is that I know I will be reunited with him, and God is a God of mercy, he's a God of love, and I praise him for that.

Well, folks, I think this has been kind of an emotional hour, perhaps one of the tougher hours I've done here on radio. We have an identity crisis in the Western world, but if you believe what God's Word says about you, if you believe that's true, your identity is rooted in something that can't be changed and can't go away. Finding your identity in Christ means you do a better job believing that what God says about you is truer than what anyone else says, including yourself, for that matter.

God knew you before he formed you, he knew you before the beginning of time, and that kind of identity should be a comfort to a lot of people. I want to thank you for listening, and we will talk to you again next week. We get our mail when you write to Olive Tree Ministries and Jan Markell, Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311. That's Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311.

You can call us central time at 763-559-4444, 763-559-4444. All gifts are tax-deductible. Remember, God has not forgotten you. He has engraved you in the palm of his hand. Nothing happens that catches him by surprise, and everything is falling into place.