BILLY BURLEIGH
“No matter how many surgeries I had, every time I looked in the mirror, I saw a man staring back at me.”
I had many difficulties as a child. In addition to being unusually skinny, I had a speech impediment and learning difficulties. In fact, I didn’t learn how to read until about the fifth grade. I was very uncoordinated and lacked athletic skills, which caused me to be teased by classmates and friends. When I was in the first grade, I remember having the recurring thought that God had made a mistake. I would pray before going to bed, “God, please make me a girl before I wake up.” To make matters worse, when I was in the sixth grade, I was sexually molested. Scared and ashamed, I hated my private parts and wished they were gone!
I continued to struggle secretly, feeling like I was actually a girl throughout childhood. An expert at stuffing my emotions, I managed to avoid dealing with my confusion until I fell in love with a young lady in college. Overwhelmed by feelings of love, I knew I had to deal with these confusing feelings of dysphoria. My sister helped me find a sexuality therapist, and I also started using the university’s resources to research transgenderism. Though I desired to be a “normal man,” the messages I received were overwhelming: The only way to overcome my dysphoria was to change my body to conform to my inner identity. Still hopeful that I could live as a man, I married my college sweetheart and continued to seek therapy. But after five or six years of agony—and a failed marriage—I told my therapist that I wanted to identify as a woman. Struggling with depression, I was willing to try anything, and she affirmed my decision.
I changed my name from Billy to Billie and began taking a testosterone blocker and estrogen. Three years later, I had my first surgery—a penile inversion, an Adam’s apple shave, and a brow shave. Afterwards, the doctor and nurses had difficulty stopping the bleeding from my new “vagina.” They packed my artificial vagina with gauze and put a sandbag on my lower abdomen in an effort to stop the bleeding. But it would not stop, and they had to administer a blood transfusion and plasma. Over time, I jumped through all the hoops and did everything I was supposed to do to try to change my sex. I had cosmetic surgeries to look more like a woman, but no matter how many surgeries I had, every time I looked in the mirror, I saw a man staring back at me.
Ironically, I had married a second time prior to these surgeries. Though my wife and I both identified as heterosexual, we presented as a lesbian couple after my surgery. We loved each other deeply, but our marriage couldn’t withstand the stress, and she eventually divorced me seven years later. I realized I had more problems than ever before. Changing my body had not resolved my internal conflict and had not made me happy. Instead, I was left with countless scars, two broken marriages, and drained financial resources. Depression began to set back in, and once again, I was searching for answers. So, I moved back to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to gain the support of my family. Desperate for change, I also cried out to God. The day I made the decision to surrender my life and my problems to Jesus, I actually heard him say, “Now, I have some clay to work with.”
Slowly but surely, as I began to seek the things of God, circumstances in my life began to change radically. I returned to church and began spending time in Bible study and prayer. The more I learned about spiritual warfare and biblical identity, the clearer my mind became. It was as if someone had turned on a light bulb. As I read the books Reclaiming Surrendered Ground: Protecting Your Family from Spiritual Attacks by Jim Logan and Victory Over the Darkness and The Bondage Breaker by Neil T. Anderson, I had epiphany after epiphany. Within a year, at age 38, I began making choices to go back to identifying as a man. The entire process took about two or three years, and during that time, I changed all my documents and returned to my original identity as Billy.
I am now 54 years old. My thoughts are clear, and I am free of the mental turmoil I had as a kid and growing up. I am happily married to a woman. We have two beautiful stepdaughters and best of all, I have peace of mind. With the benefit of age and experience, I now realize the procedures I underwent as a young man failed me in several areas. First, none of my mental health counselors ever told me that all people have a continuing need for acceptance, significance, and security. As a child, I thought that, by ‘being a girl,’ my psychological needs would be fulfilled. But that was wrong. Second, the mental health professionals simply assumed that the only way I could be mentally healthy was to convince myself that I should have been, and therefore was, a woman. But that was also wrong. The many surgical procedures and drugs they encouraged left me worse off than when I began. Third, I had a number of childhood issues that the mental health professionals failed to uncover and adequately address. Had those issues (a speech impediment, a learning disability, and childhood sexual abuse) been dealt with properly, I may have never gone down the expensive and painful road on which I traveled.
I have great compassion for children and teenagers who feel this same inner incongruence. They look to their parents and healthcare professionals for guidance. Even as an adult, I relied on the mental health counseling I received while deciding whether to change my presentation from male to female. But in my experience, the mental health profession is so quick to promote identifying as the opposite sex that surgical procedures and drugs are promoted as the only real solution for those struggling. My mental health professionals led me to make a horrible mistake. This experience has led me to question whether most mental health professionals have adequate training to make the right recommendations for still-developing children and teenagers.