Today, Laura Perry is a happy Christian woman but not so long ago she was living as a transgender man called 'Jake.'
At one time she would have celebrated the news these past weeks of a transgender man giving birth to a baby boy, but after surrendering to Jesus in August last year, she is a very different person with very different views about the transgenderism she once embraced.
Transgender man Trystan Reese, of Portland, Oregon, lived as a female until around 14 years ago when he started transitioning with hormones. But at the time he decided to retain his female reproductive anatomy. In order to have a baby, he stopped taking hormones and gave birth to a healthy baby boy called Leo with his partner Biff Chaplow last month.
Perry herself was a happy transgender man for 10 years, even though she had grown up in a Christian home. She never expected to leave the transgender lifestyle but God swooped in and set her on a different path when her devout Christian mom asked her for help in building her Bible study website, CBN News reports.
As she worked on the website, Perry found herself reading her mom's Bible notes and it awakened a new desire to know God. At the same time, she was unaware that her mom's women's Bible study group had been praying for her for years. When she made the decision to surrender to Jesus, they welcomed her in with open arms.
You might think that changing from Jake back to Laura was an easy decision after coming to know Jesus. But Laura admits it was hard for her to stop living as a man and that she actually didn't want to.
What made her change was nothing but raw obedience to what she knew to be the will of God.
'A lot of people these days tell me, "Well that's good for you, whatever makes you happy," and me leaving that lifestyle had nothing to do with me being happy. It was extremely hard for me to leave it. I did not want to be a girl. I had no desire at the time to be a girl but it was really about surrendering to Christ,' she said.
'I knew it was about dying to self and it wasn't about what I felt or what I wanted. It was about what God wanted and He has redeemed and changed my heart more than I ever could have imagined.'
She was among those who saw the news about the transgender man giving birth to a baby, but she doesn't feel able to celebrate it like she would have done before.
'Having come to Christ and knowing the truth, it's just such a sad thing seeing children that are being exposed to this kind of thing to think it's normal and they're not going to know any different and I just think it's a real tragedy that kids are being exposed to this kind of sin as if it's normal,' she told CBN.
