(This is part two of one woman’s story which I have agreed to publish anonymously for reasons which were evident in part one – The Dark Side of Transgender )
This is a stunning and hard story to read – how much harder to write and to have lived. It’s a story of abuse and self harm that could be repeated many thousands of times in our society – but in a dark world we give thanks for the Light).
I sat down in front of my computer many times this week wondering what to write for my next instalment. Every word I wrote down looked strange and off, and I wondered why.
I realise that, for my story to be effective, it needs to speak from real experience. I can quote statistics and clinical studies all I want, but that’s something you can look up yourself. It isn’t powerful unless you’re hearing something from my own experience, something unique that no thinkpiece by a psychologist could ever emulate.
My body has not been my own for a very long time. At nine, I was sexually assaulted. At eleven, I began mutilating my own body. At thirteen, I was abused. At fourteen, I was bullied. At seventeen, I had risky sex with men I didn’t know, simply so they would have an incentive to treat me like a human being.
There is definitely a correlation between sexual abuse and gender dysphoria. It isn’t a topic many trans people wish to talk about, but I have cried with, held and reassured enough girls to know that this is our common experience. Their experiences are not my story to tell, but I hope to God that some day they will be brave, they will stand up, that their abusers will answer for their crimes.
I can only tell you what I know, what I experienced, what made me this way.
I was a strange kid, but nobody would ever call me masculine. I had girly interests, I loved being dressed up for church in the morning, having my hair curled and being fussed over. I played with dolls of all kinds, and no one ever had to persuade me to wear a skirt to school. I was shocked and horrified when I visited my male relatives of the same age and saw them playing with toy guns. I asked my mum why it was fun to pretend to hurt each other.
It all changed when I was assaulted. I say “sexual assault,” because the word “rape” is not one I am comfortable to use. It may well have been, but it’s such a grave word I hardly ever use it. Either way, I was nine years old.
After the event, I resented the way my body betrayed me. The way I saw it, and the way I had been told, what happened to me was what happened between adult men and women. So who can blame me for not wanting to turn into an adult woman, when I thought that this was what women had to endure all the time?
I started having fights with my family about the clothes I wore. I refused to wear a bra, because doing so would acknowledge that the problem of my two x chromosomes was still there. Instead I wore oversized jumpers that hid any suggestion of my body other than shapelessness. There were bruises all over my neck, so I wore scarves. I started biting my arms as a form of self harm, and at eleven years old I finally started to cut my wrists, not long after I got my period. That was just another reminder of my inescapable biology, of my body feeling like a death row prison instead of a home.
Being abused again at thirteen was just the final nail in the coffin for me. I knew I needed to make this womanhood go away, to leave my body forever.
I continued feeling this way for a very long time, so when I discovered the notion of being transgender – who could resist? I didn’t have to be a girl, or indeed a woman, I could be…
And that was my stumbling block. I didn’t want to be a girl or a woman, but I also didn’t want to be a boy or a man either. I was repulsed by male genitalia and sex characteristics, hated beards and body hair and the smell of boy’s toilets and going bald.
I often wished I was like a eunuch – permanently transfixed in a state of perpetual boyhood, but with nothing physically to indicate my sex. There are currently no doctors in the UK who will perform a surgery to make someone sexless. And though I once viewed that as a horrible sign of medicine’s discrimination against the trans community, I now weep in thanks that I have not been allowed to determine my future before I could legally drink.
It was telling my story in feminist circles that made me finally come to the realisation that the problem was not me – it was my abusers, the people who had taken my childhood away from me and then made me resent the idea of becoming a woman. I now know that the very essence of womanhood is beautiful – femininity, fertility and the gift of carrying life and loving intensely are just a few of the gifts I have been given if I choose to use them. It was a slow move, but I finally began to appreciate my body, to take care of it, to tell myself every day that it was beautiful and my past scars did not define my future.
I cancelled my consultation with the gender clinic a few months after I turned sixteen. I stopped self harming a few months before I turned eighteen. And since then, I have simply been at peace with the body I have been given.
I am not yet a mother, but I am so glad I can be in future if I want to. I do not yet have a partner, but I am so thankful that I have become so at peace with my body that I can eventually have one. I am so glad that, while abuse and sexual immorality may have taken my childhood, they have not taken my future.
And now, my body is still not my own – and I realise it doesn’t have to be. I belong to Christ.
Thanks again to David for allowing me a platform on his blog. I appreciated reading the comments on the post and would encourage you to share your thoughts on this topic if you want to. Particularly I’d appreciate if you wanted to leave your questions, which I will answer in a future post. Thanks so much.
Thanks XX so much for this – I salute your courage and bravery in telling your story…
I love this song…..Hurt…..Christ alone can heal your hurt.
David
Those who stole your childhood and destroyed your innocence will have to answer to Christ, unless they too find what you have found.
Thank God, no matter what our lives were, we can all take to heart the scripture given to encourage all believers;
Romans Ch.8, v.1 :
There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.
Thank God for your life and witness and bravery.
May God bless you richly.
Thank you so much XX for being courageous enough to speak out.
I was reading just yesterday about the growing tide of children being swept along in the education system’s transgender indoctrination, and the resultant ‘transgender grooming’ taking place in schools (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6401593/Whistleblower-teacher-makes-shocking-claim-autistic.html).
It’s unbelievable that we have a government so unwilling to listen to science, and so easily manipulated by the transgender lobby’s overt bullying and intimidation.
It’s gross negligence on behalf of the government. Jeopardising a generation of children’s longterm health to appease the aggressive demands of the transgender lobby is inexcusable. Especially when the science is clearly against it (eg: https://iftcc.org/resource/iftcc-conference-2018/)
Imagine – a government that is complicit in denying gender dysphoric children access to psychological care, when there is clear evidence of historical sexual abuse and significant mental illness in a high percentage of these children! And when the much quoted suicide rate barely drops – even after gender reassignment! The government WILL be held to account for this negligence.
So few people are willing to speak up for these children – so, thank you for speaking out.
Thank you so much for your bravery and honesty in your writing. I have a teenage daughter I have made comments about transgender without really understanding all about it? For which I received a stern look from her! This generation would appear to have a greater understanding than I believe my generation did. David’s blogs are great in helping but I still struggle as a Christian dad to balance my beliefs – all guidance greatly appreciated.
Such a heartbreaking story! Sharing it had to have been hard but I am confident that telling your story will help others.
Thank you so much for sharing your testimony. Through these words you confess to all that you’re a woman of great strength and victory, and I thank Christ for walking with you in your womanhood and healing.
As a church we need to very quickly learn how to love all those (and be sincere about it), either in the LGTB lifestyle, thinking about it, or no longer identifying with it – BUT ALSO – staying true to God’s word, and confessing that it’s not about God loving you for the way you were born, or who you are or became, but how God Himself see’s you, and who He wants you to be in Him that is the most important thing.
The world may not understand that and hate us for it – as with an increasing number of church goers – but that’s what I believe we as a bible believing church are being called to be.
This blog, and posts such as these last two have been an invaluable resource of late in trying to learn more about this culturally important issue, and how to balance differing points of view while living in a society that can now appear to love shouting more than talking.
Thanks for sharing your story. Christians need to know about gender dysphoria because many of us know little or nothing. Sometimes it seems like a ‘new’ thing – but I guess it was one of those issues nobody spoke about. That always magnifies the pain of those suffering in secret. I only know one person who says she always wanted to be a boy and that was when she was a child over 40 years ago – and of course there was no way she could have expressed that aloud and there was no talk of gender reassignment in our society. She never said to me that she felt she was in the wrong body – she didn’t express it in that way – just that as a child she always wanted to be a boy. She is still a woman and quite happily so. But I have wondered about her – and think that if she was exposed to the Scottish agenda of embedding LGBTQI ‘equality’ into every subject in the curriculum – would a light go on in her head – and say that’s it! I’m in the wrong body!? Children are very impressionable after all. I’m not suggesting this is the case with every person – but just wonder if this person’s history would have taken a different route if her desire to be a boy was validated by the adults around her and she felt she had the choice.
It is obvious now that we need an understanding and language to explore these issues with children so that children and young people don’t need to struggle in secret. But I am concerned about the possibility or even probability of pushing children and young people down this route. I don’t see the sense in majoring on the changing of the body to suit the mind – instead of the idea of exploring the mind being at odds with the body. It does seem so drastic to change the body but I can see how violence can be done to the mind too if a child or young person is treated insensitively or with condemnation. Surely a reasonable, rational measured approach to this whole subject is called for.
So thanks for sharing your story – so that we can have some understanding of what it was like for you to struggle with this issue. I am so happy you got some peace and healing through Christ. Pity so many of us now are being bullied to change our minds about how we see gender. Older people who see gender as simply male or female – are now branded transphobe?! We are so in need of a reasonable conversation.
An example of the way things are heading:
http://kidsrights.org.au/?fbclid=IwAR175uEMdQtAaJVhwq9gSR2sbtk0Xpj87QyZwWd3WDUuCOdNpw0YhPPHCUI
Through Johnny’s posting I have just discovered the iftcc website (I am not sure why I missed it before). It seems to contain a lot of very useful information.
Thanks.
An amazing and heart-rending testimony. Thank you for your courage in sharing it here. If only the liberal elite who are rushing this country in the “race to the bottom of the pit” would listen to accounts like yours, instead of the awful propaganda spewing out from the LGBTQ lobby…