She lived as 'Jake' for nearly 10 years before realizing it was all a lie
There was no way she was ever going to go back to being a female. She hated the thought of being a woman. Being a man was exactly who she was supposed to be. Or so she thought.
Laura Perry was deep in the transgender lifestyle. She was taking hormones, legally changed her name to Jake, got a double mastectomy and had all her female reproductive organs removed. She was “the happiest” she had ever been in her life — except she wasn’t.
“I have everything I ever wanted … and I was still depressed,” Perry recalled Saturday at a conference called God’s Voice in Oklahoma.
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But she wanted “so badly to erase the existence of Laura.”
Perry began fantasizing about being a boy early in her childhood. She felt unloved by her mother, who was a devoted Christian and very involved in church, and noticed her mother was more loving toward her more quiet and obedient brother.
Her mother, Francine, had lost two boys before giving birth to Perry. So Perry always thought, “Maybe mom wishes one of my brothers was still alive instead of me. I knew they had wanted three kids. If one of my brothers had lived, I probably wouldn’t be here. I used to fantasize … about being my brother.”
The tension in her relationship with her mother continued into her teens.
Also during her childhood, she was molested at age 8 by her friend’s 9-year-old brother. Though it happened once, “it really changed me … I became so sexually addicted.”
She was sexually active as a teen but she found herself getting dumped by all the boys.
“I began to feel jealous because I felt they (boys) had all the power … they were in control,” she recalled, pinpointing another reason she wanted to be a man.
It was at 16 that she became angry with God for making her a girl. She vowed to never serve Him again and ran far from God.
In 2007, Perry, who was addicted to both sex and porn by then, began the process of transitioning. She first had to get a letter from a licensed psychologist in order to receive hormone treatments from her doctor. That was the law then, though the laws continue to change, Perry noted.
She wasn’t interested in receiving counseling. All she wanted was the letter. When the psychologist pointed out that Perry had serious issues with her mom, Perry immediately reacted with anger and said she did not want to talk about it. So the psychologist just ended up handing her the letter.
Thinking back on that moment, Perry wonders, “I’m so sad looking back … she didn’t try to counsel me. Why didn’t she realize that that’s (issues with her mom) where a lot of this was?”
Once she started on hormone treatments, the first couple years of being a man was “absolute bliss.” That’s usually the case for most people at the beginning of their transitioning journey. But “studies don’t ask them 10 years later” how happy they are, Perry noted.
She was in a relationship with another transgender (male to female) person and together they attended LGBT pride events and support group meetings and were “free to be who we are.”
But they stopped going to the pride events because the people “hated” her partner, who was a rare conservative in the LGBT community, and saw him as a “traitor.”
They also stopped attending the support group meetings about a year later because “we were more depressed when we left than when we got there,” she said.
“We thought these people are the most depressed people in the world. We could not see the connection that it was because transgenderism will lead to depression because it’s not real. It is a lie from the pit of Hell. You cannot change your gender. It’s just not biologically possible.”
Two years after her hormone treatments, she got a double mastectomy because she still “wasn’t feeling like a man yet” and felt the surgery would help take care of that.
She returned to work a month later after the surgery but her boss, a lesbian, confronted her, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you but you’re depressed, you’re moping around, you’re not working as hard … I want the old Jake back.”
That comment shocked Perry. She thought she was happy, especially after making all the changes to transition. But “all I had done was change the outside of my body. It didn’t change anything and it was devastating. I wanted it so badly.”
“I remember feeling like Satan had revealed his hand to me and he began to gloat: You fell for this. What are you going to do now?”
She realized that it was all a lie and that she couldn’t really be a man but at the same time, she really didn’t want to be a woman.
Eventually, Perry ended up getting all her reproductive organs removed.
“I thought maybe another surgery, maybe another month of hormones — there was always this elusive freedom out there that I was going to have one day, this elusive happiness out there. But it never came,” she testified.
“Even though I realized it was a lie, I wanted so badly to erase the existence of Laura. I didn’t want to be a girl. I realized I couldn’t be a man but I didn’t want to be a girl so I resolved to just live life somewhere in between. What had promised to be freedom for me had become my prison cell and I was in bondage to this lie I had believed.”
During all this time, her mother had been praying for her with dozens of other women. Though Francine wanted to try to fix the situation herself, she heard God speak and decided to surrender it all to Him.
Her heart toward her daughter softened in the process. Instead of viewing Laura Perry as a rebellious kid, Francine began to see her as “a victim of the enemy.”
Later, Francine hired her daughter to design a website for the women’s Bible study she had been leading. Perry began to listen to all the Bible studies as she built the site and that’s when the Word of God began to penetrate her heart.
Over the next few months, she found herself calling her mom (which she had rarely done) every day and asking her questions about Scripture. One day, she called Francine, crying and telling her something dramatic had happened at work. Her mom’s response shocked her.
“She said, ‘Honey, you just need to trust the Lord.’ That blew me away. I never heard her say that. Usually she says ‘here’s what you need to do.’ … I said ‘what happened to you because you are not the mother I grew up with.’ … She told me how she’d been changed by the Holy Spirit … I saw the transformation in my mother. When I did it was at that moment that I knew the Gospel was true … Christ was alive and there was a transforming power that I had never known,” Perry recalled.
“That night, I gave my heart to Jesus,” she said to amen's from the conference crowd.
She was sincere in her faith and began sharing about Jesus with her co-workers. At the same time, she remained as “Jake.”
“I was saved in 2014 but I wanted to be a man of God,” she said.
She began listening to various Bible teachings on the radio and online. That’s when God began to reveal the “insanity” of transgenderism to her.
When she heard her favorite Christian leader, Everett Piper, say on Talk Radio 1170 people are not made up of their instincts, inclinations, feelings or desires and that they can choose their behavior despite how they feel, she was “cut to the core.”
“I knew it was a choice,” Perry recalled thinking.
“God really began to convict me and I no longer wanted to be transgender. But I tried to convince myself that I was a man. I grasped at straws. I tried to think of everything … I was so desperate, I didn’t want to be a woman. I hated the thought of being a girl because of all those guys in high school who made me feel like it was a dirty, useless, worthless thing to be a female.”
She tried to put off transitioning back to Laura, even making the excuse that Jesus will return soon and take her up to Heaven.
But when her mother told her she had been studying about the judgment seat of Christ and having to give an account for one’s life, that’s when Jesus whispered in Perry’s ear: “If you stood before me tonight, what name would I call?”
“I knew He was not going to call me Jake,” she thought as she felt condemned.
“You cannot claim to love me and yet reject my creation,” she recalled Jesus telling her.
“I thought He was condemning me to Hell but in that moment, in the most loving voice, … He said ‘let me tell you who you are.’ I was already defined. I was out there trying to find who I was. ‘You are already defined.’
“What if I hang on to this identity I want so bad and I end up in Hell, far away from God?”
Fearful, Perry begged God to take her life.
That’s when Jesus got down on one knee and asked her, “Do you trust me?” she testified. She took His hand and said she did.
Though she did not die in the way she intended, she died to her identity as “Jake” in 2016. She sobbed for three days and three nights. Her future was uncertain and she did not know God could or would ever use her.
Perry then showed up at her mom’s Bible study and was overwhelmed by “more love and more joy that I had ever felt in my life” from the women who had been praying for her. They told her that she had given them hope for their own prodigal children.
“My heart was radically transformed in that moment. I knew for the first time … as far as I can remember that I was not meant to be a man,” she testified.
“I cannot explain to you how I had the power to walk out of that lifestyle but it was the power of Jesus Christ.”
