Laura Perry said that God "restored her desire to be a woman" after breaking the "transgender lie" that she had embraced.
"So I took His hand and I walked away from my entire identity, my partner, my job, my financial security...the life that I had built for myself and left it all to follow Christ," she told CBN News.
Her Background
Perry said she used to feel like a boy when she was a child. She effectively adjusted to life and work as a male. A spur-of-the-moment request from her mother to build a Bible study website, on the other hand, launched her on the path to discovering the truth about God and who she was created to be.
"As a little girl, I was full of energy. I was very hyper. I was very athletic," she said. "I had a really hard relationship with my mom. My mom was very quiet, and my mom was much closer to my brother that was the very quiet obedient child, and so I really began to believe that boys were loved more. I think just very early in life I began to believe a lie that I wasn't loved as a girl and everything in life sort of got put through this lens of 'I should have been a boy."
Aside from that, when Perry was eight years old, she was abused by a boy a year her senior. This drastically altered her perception of herself. In middle school, she became interested in pornography, and in high school, she tried to seem more feminine in order to get the attention of boys. As she progressed, she started sleeping around a lot and giving men anything they wanted, and the more she did this, the more she felt like being treated like a total garbage.
"It was after that that I really started to run away from the Lord and I told God that I would never serve him again," she confessed during the interview.
Feeling unfulfilled after more random sexual experiences, she recalls her childhood fantasy of feeling like a guy. She assumed it was the source of her unhappiness since she was meant to be the guy in the relationship.
"So I went to a support group meeting and I was amazed that all of a sudden you hear all these people telling me how wonderful this is and how brave I am for coming out and they said, 'In a couple of years, no one's ever even gonna know you were a female.' I just wanted to be a man and completely forget that never been born female. I really wanted to erase the existence of Laura," she said.
Perry then started to transition following that time. She took hormones which made her feel like she was floating on air. She began to develop a beard as well as facial hair. Her voice became huskier, and her form started to shift.
She formally changed her name in 2009, and later that year, she underwent a chest surgery which included a double mastectomy and a chest reconstruction to appear like a male chest.
"Even though I was really excited about the results and I liked how it looked physically, I realized that my surgery hadn't made me a man," she continued. "I was legally a male and I could look down at my license and my birth certificate and it said, male. I am still the same person just without breasts, and that was devastating to me cause I really had believed that I would become a man."
God provided her a way to escape the deception
Despite not speaking with her parents in years, Perry would phone them on occasion for a birthday or other event.
"One day, my mom asked me to make a website for her Bible study and I didn't have any interest in the Bible but I thought okay, I'll make a website for you," she recalled.
"As I began to read her notes, I was blown away by what I was reading and I thought, I have never seen the Bible like this. I had always thought of the Bible as God's rule book. I'm seeing the character and the heart of God and I began to see a loving and faithful God, not the angry judgmental God that I had always seen before," she shared.
She dialed her mother's number, curious, and asked her to explain some of the things she read from her mom's notes. They began chatting about God every day after that first call.
"Then one day something had happened - some kind of crisis had come up in my life and I'll never forget that day she said, 'Honey you just need to trust the Lord' and I was blown away at that moment," said Perry.
She said she never heard her mother say anything like that before, and that she appeared to be an entirely different person from the one she grew up with. Her mother had been fully changed, and it was at that time that she believed "the Gospel was true" and "that Christ was alive," and that there was a real power at work, because she could see how her mother had been transformed.
She decided to put her faith in Christ. Nonetheless, she thought God would accept her new identity.
"That night I prayed and I asked the Lord into my heart, but I really wanted to be a man of God. I thought this is great, now I can find my identity in Christ but I thought I could still stay as a man because as much as I had realized I couldn't be a man, I could not face being a female. There was so much pain attached because of what all those guys had done, all those lies I had believed all my life. I felt like it was a shameful thing to be a female," she recounted.
"After about a month of crying out to the Lord night after night after night, I had a clear vision of Jesus Christ Himself getting down on one knee. He reached His hand into the pit and said, 'Do you trust Me?' I remember at that moment thinking, if I take His hand, He's asking me to leave everything. But, I knew it was my only way out. I knew I was never going to have peace if I didn't," she said.
Perry's life has steadily turned for the better after her personal encounter with Jesus, with her stolen identity restored.
Laura's story is but one of the many testimonies showing God's power to change lives. For more inspiring accounts about God's power in transforming lives, read the story of Brittni and Alia, former porn actresses who now passionately follow Jesus Christ.
