‘I feel like I lost 9 years of my life’: A detrans woman speaks out
After undergoing several years of experimental gender medicalization to look like a man to the outside world and extinguish the inner turmoil she felt about her sex, Laura Beth Perry Smalts wound up with regret.
“I feel like I lost nine years of my life,” Smalts says in The Christian Post's podcast series “Generation Indoctrination: Inside the Transgender Battle.”
Smalts, who has a remarkable story of coming to Christ amid her gender confusion, genuinely believed she was a man born in a woman’s body. “I just needed to fix the body,” she says.
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In her quest to "fix" her body, Smalts took male hormones and had an elective double mastectomy and hysterectomy because, in her mind, she wasn't supposed to be a woman.
“There was all the regret, too, of just the things that I've done to my body — the fact that I didn't have breasts anymore,” Smalts explains. “I ended up getting married and my husband didn't know if I'd ever have breasts again. I was able to get breast surgery about three months ago and get implants, but it's not the same.”
Although a psychiatrist tried to caution her from proceeding down the path of trans medicalization, the doctor ultimately signed off Smalts’ wishes to go forward. Smalts is now deeply troubled by the lack of medical oversight and the ease with which young people are able to obtain opposite-sex hormones and surgeries.
“It's so maddening when I look back. … Where were the doctors willing to say, ‘Hey, wait for a second, this is really not good for your body?’” Smalts asks.
Jeremy Wright, a teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia, which has become the epicenter of parental pushback in the United States, said the best way he can describe what is going on with many youths today who are gender-confused is a “forced social contagion.”
“I see a lot of students who are already vulnerable to it, who’ve got high anxiety, they’re depressed, they might be self-harming,” Wright said in the podcast.
“At that point in their lives, the worst thing you can do is steer them toward something that could cause permanent damage,” he noted. “To me, that is exactly what this does.”
Wright says he sees a lot of teen girls gravitating toward this gender identity movement, wanting to participate in it.
That phenomenon, the social contagion disproportionately affecting young girls, was explored at length in the 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier.
The medical dangers that have been reported have left Emily Curtis, a self-described lifelong liberal who served in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, beside herself with anger.
Curtis believes that on the political Left, there is a tendency to trust the experts, and that has inhibited many whose politics mirror hers from seeing the issue clearly. No one, she adds, is safeguarding children from these experimental drugs and elective and unnecessary operations. When she learned about the body-disfiguring gender surgeries that have been performed on minors, and what hormone blockers do to a child’s developing body, she was appalled.
“Fury, absolute rage, absolute fury,” she recounts, “I don’t have enough words to express rage, outrage, fury that someone would tell a child to have her body cut, surgically mutilated.”
“The mutilation word is harsh, and I don’t want anyone to feel hurt by the word. But a surgeon is mutilating a child for money knowing that that child does not have the ability to consent,” she adds.
Brandon Showalter has a bachelor's degree from Bridgewater College in Virginia and a master's degree from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Listen to Showalter's Generation Indoctrination podcast at The Christian Post and edifi app Send news tips to: [email protected] Follow on Facebook: BrandonMarkShowalter Follow on Twitter: @BrandonMShow
