Female Christian Blogger: I Identified As Male

Now she’s a wife and mom, but growing up, Lindsay Bentley “desperately wanted to be a boy.” 

But with transgender youth like Ryland Whittington and Jazz Jennings making headlines, the Christian blogger decided to speak up.  

I wanted to be a boy.  Desperately wanted to be a boy.  I thought boys had more fun.  I felt like a boy in the way that our society views genders.  I liked blue and green more than pink and purple.  I remember sitting up as high as I could climb in our huge mulberry tree, bow & arrow in hand, trying to kiss my elbow (a neighbor lady had told me that if I could accomplish this, that I would turn into a boy, which was what I wanted in that moment, as a child, more than anything.)

But that’s not all. Later in her post, she detailed having a sexual experience with another girl. 

I hestitate to even add, this but I feel it is so important:  I even had an experience, around age 7, where a friend (girl) of mine experimented together during a sleepover. Looking back, I believe she had been molested and was acting out what had been done to her.  This doesn’t make me transgender.  It doesn’t make me a lesbian.  It made me a child growing up in a broken world.

In this day and age, I probably could have been labled as transgender.  They would cut my hair off short (because, all boys have short hair, right?) I would be given ‘boy’ clothes to wear, blue walls in my room rather than pink, and be told to pretend to have a penis, at least until I could have one surgically added. Had this happened, I can not even imagine how traumatic puberty would have been for me. 

But when she hit puberty, her life shifted, and she’s grateful her parents never decided she was a boy.  

Bentley’s experience seems out of the norm in light of today’s push to encourage children to choose their own gender.  

In Colorado, children are indoctrinated as young as preschool that transitioning genders is more than accepted, but encouraged.  

Despite cultural pressure, though, the American College of Pediatricians declared allowing children to change genders as “child abuse.” 

“Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to ‘gender clinics’ where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs,” according to a report.  

“This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will ‘choose’ a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults,” the report concludes.  

As for Ryland, whose parents decided to raise as a boy, Bentley offered these words:  

It grieves me to think of what Ryland’s parents may be robbing her of by choosing a gender for her at such a young age.  I hope that, if/when she decides that she is a woman, that they will support her in this.  That they won’t force her into their agenda to save face.

I am writing this to offer another perspective.  Because I believe in freedom.  I believe that people should be free to have interests that don’t fit the social norm.  That children should be allowed to be children.  With all of their silly, fantastical play.  They should be allowed to believe that they are a dog, a Superhero, a Mommy, or a rock.

I am so thankful that my parents gave me the freedom to act more boyish than my sisters.  I am thankful that they didn’t freak out, or make any life-altering decisions for me.  I am so thankful that, for a season of my life, I was allowed to act more like a stereotpyical boy than a girl.  I am also thankful that I was allowed to become more feminine later in life, when it felt natural to do so.

I hope that Ryland’s parents will offer her this same freedom.