“Laura, are you trying to be boy!?”

It was this question, asked by her mother, that brought tears to Laura Perry’s eyes.

At the time, she had not yet told her parents that she had decided to transition from female to male. She would later go forward with that process. Yet even after an official name change (to “Jake”), doses of hormones, and an expensive surgery—something wasn’t working.

So it was, through an unlikely road, that Laura began to ponder her identity yet again—not merely in terms of “male” and “female,” but in relation to Jesus Christ and the imago Dei.

I sat down with Laura recently to hear her story.

You can find that interview below.

Before listening, however, I must say something as to why I did this post.

I despise the hyper-partisan environment in which we now live.  In fact, I hate it.  On that note, one lament is that literally every issue seems to have been turned into a “political football” by parts of both the Right and Left.

Make no mistake: this interview is about people over politics.

Like many Christians, I take a fairly traditional stance that gender is not merely a social construct. It has a biological basis, and I have written previously on how we ought to think about such issues in a way that fuses grace and truth (See here for my take on the great bathroom war of 2016).

Still, the thing that moved me about Laura’s story was the human factor.

I heard it as a parent. “How would I respond to my child?” My heart broke for her and others who struggle with questions of identity and gender. The suicide rate alone is testimony to how terrible that struggle is.

Thankfully, however, Laura’s story ends with hope and healing.

In her own words, she came to find her identity in Jesus Christ, and she lives now as woman set apart by his grace.

Listen to the interview below:

(Apologies if the sound quality isn’t perfect; I’m more a writer than a podcaster!)