Haley Furst, a Canadian woman who spent five or six years identifying as a transgender man and embracing far-left politics and atheism, says a single Bible passage read to her by a coworker set off what she calls a «radical perspective change» that eventually led her back to Christianity.
In an interview, Furst described a years-long period in which she «believed in anarchal communism» and held what she characterized as the furthest left-leaning political positions, including support for abortion up until the point of birth. She said she has since come to embrace «biblical values and everything that entails.»
Furst said the turning point came when a coworker read her Romans 8:38-39, which declares that neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, nor the present nor the future, nor any powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in creation «will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.» She went home and wrestled with the passage, then prayed alone in her bedroom, doubtful that Jesus would still want her. She describes what followed as a «slow heart work» and a «slow and steady journey» of relationship with Jesus.
Her account includes significant medical details. Furst said she was born female but presented as male for five or six years and took male hormones so she could appear as a man. She also underwent what she described as one transitional surgery, a hysterectomy in which her uterus and one of her ovaries were removed.
Furst grew up in Alberta, Canada, which she described as the most right-wing and conservative-leaning province in the country. She attended a Christian home and a private Christian school through middle school, and she said the move to a Canadian public high school produced a «culture shock.» Gender liberation and sexual liberation, she said, were huge topics of conversation at the time, including in Gay Straight Alliance clubs within schools.
She contrasted her earlier education, where such subjects were either not discussed or handled from what she called a healthy and age-appropriate standpoint, with a public school environment where the topics came up in almost every class and in conversations between adult teachers and underage students.
That experience now shapes her views on how sexual identity is discussed with children. Furst said she is «very critical» of adults who share details about their sexual identity with minors, arguing that early exposure to such conversations slowly manipulated her into struggling with an identity she says she never had before. She said the volume of talk with children about sexual identity is far greater than in past years and happens at younger ages than necessary.
She framed the issue as a challenge for parents trying to keep their children innocent in a world that tells them the safest thing is for them to know about sexual matters from a very young age. Furst said specific details about same-sex sexual actions are not age-appropriate for a 13- or 14-year-old, and she argued that such conversations do not belong between a teacher and a student. Those discussions, she said, should be reserved for families to decide how to approach them and when they are most appropriate.
Furst's story arrives amid broader public debate over how schools handle gender identity and when parents should be informed. She presents her own experience as evidence that early and intensive classroom discussion of sexual identity can be damaging, and she now speaks from the perspective of a woman who says she has left that period of her life behind.