At first, she moved forward and continued her life as a male.
“After the surgery was over, I quickly forgot God. I forgot my prayer,” Laura shared.
Although she forgot the prayers she’d said before the surgery, Laura still struggled internally.
“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 recalled her thinking at the time. “I still am the same person, just without breasts.”
Despite not having much contact with her parents, one day her mom asked her to make a website for her Bible study. “Jake” had no interest in the Bible, but it was a way to make some money; so she agreed. However, as she created the website, she read her mom’s notes on the Bible.
“I was blown away by what I was reading,” Laura described the experience. “I had always thought of the Bible as God’s rule book.”
Reading her mom’s notes made her reconsider the “angry, judgmental God,” and replace these thoughts with ideas that God could be “loving and faithful.”
In fact, Laura became so curious about this loving God that she began having daily phone conversations with her mom about God and the Bible.
One day, Laura was experiencing a crisis and as she talked to her mom about it. According to Laura, her mom told her, “Honey, you need to trust the Lord.”
In that moment, Laura saw that her mother had been transformed by God, and she made a decision to follow Jesus. But she wasn’t ready to follow Jesus as a woman.
“I could not face being a female,” Laura explained the pain from her childhood and the messages she had believed about women being inferior were still rooted in her mind.
Laura shared, “There was so much pain attached…I felt like it was a shameful thing to be a female.”
But she sought the Lord about it. “After about a month of just 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,” Laura explained her vision. “He said ‘Do you trust me?’ And 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. And so I did, I took his hand.”
That’s when this transgender man de-transitioned from “Jake” to Laura.
The response was overwhelming. Laura explained she went to her mom’s Bible study and “They surrounded me with more love and joy and hugs than I’d ever felt from women in my life.”
And Jake, the transgender man de-transitioned to a woman in her heart fully.
Laura explained, “At that moment that I was flooded with love from women, and I felt love as a woman, it was like that transgender lie just broke, and I knew I was not meant to be a man.”
As the transgender man de-transitioned into Laura, she had a hope for others like her: “I think most people have such a wrong perception of God, like I did, and they think that God hates them. God loves you more than you can ever imagine.”
Married to Husband
Today, Laura is a married woman. She was married on May 14th to Perry Smalts, a music minister, in Oklahoma City. She met him at her church, and in her own Facebook post about the event, she wrote, “I can’t believe my dream has come true!”
