Haley Furst, who grew up in Alberta, Canada, says she spent about five or six years identifying as a transgender man before detransitioning and returning to the Christian faith she was raised in.
Furst told Fox News Digital that she once held firmly leftist political views, including support for anarchal communism, and identified as an atheist during that period of her life. “I believed in anarchal communism, I was an atheist for a moment of my life, and I really believed in whatever the furthest left-leaning political stance one could possibly take, [even from] abortion all the way up until the point of giving birth,” she said.
“I really just had a radical perspective change where now… I believe in biblical values and everything that entails and what that looks like,” she continued.
Furst described growing up in Alberta, which she called “the most right-wing” and “conservative leaning” province in Canada, and attending a private Christian school through the end of middle school. She said entering a Canadian public high school afterward brought on a “culture shock,” pointing to widespread discussion of gender and sexual liberation, including Gay-Straight Alliance clubs.
“It was very interesting going from a school where none of those things were discussed… into a public school [where] these conversations are had with adult teachers and underage students,” she said.
Transition and Detransition
Furst said that period of exposure preceded years in which she identified as a transgender man. “I was born a female… but for five or six years I presented as a male [and] took male hormones so that I could appear as a man. I had one transitional surgery and that looked [like] a hysterectomy, where they took my uterus and one of my ovaries,” she said.
She credits a coworker who read her Romans 8:38 with sparking a return to her Christian faith. The passage reads, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“I had gone home and continued to wrestle with that and by myself alone in my bedroom I said…I’m just going to pray and see what happens, and I highly doubt that Jesus would still want me, but I’m going to do that anyway,” Furst said. “It was a slow heart work, but now I get to come as the woman that I am today, because it was [a] slow and steady journey of [my] relationship with Jesus.”
Views on Talking to Minors About Sexual Identity
Furst said her experience has left her “very critical” of adults who discuss sexual identity with children, saying such conversations at a young age had, in her view, contributed to her own confusion.
“As someone who had an early childhood where those conversations were very healthy and they were age-appropriate to then going into my teenage years where, at my public Canadian high school it was so talked about in such in-depth detail, you can very much see how that’s actually damaging,” she said.
She added that she believes families, not schools, should decide when and how to discuss such topics with children. “If someone wants to be asking specific details about same-sex sexual actions, I don’t think that is age-appropriate for a 13-year-old, 14-year-old. And I also really don’t think that that conversation is meant to be had teacher to student. I think that should be reserved for families to decide how they want to approach those conversations and when it’s most appropriate for those to be had,” Furst said.
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