LaVern Vivio, a Christian radio host based in Nashville, has offered a compelling personal tale about her own struggle with gender identity, and the insights she offers are at once humanizing and terrifying.
Vivio recalls wondering throughout her childhood whether God had made a mistake, getting her mixed up with “John Mark,” the name her parents had chosen if she had been born a boy. With her height and larger frame, proclivity toward more stereotypically male activities, and her rarely feeling pretty or feminine, she often found herself wishing she had been born a boy.
“As I watch and listen to the coverage of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and the many stories of gender identification concerns, I wonder what life would have been like for me if I were growing up now rather than in the 60s and 70s,” she writes.
“I was having trouble finding comfort in what God made me to be,” she continues. “But that was part of the journey He had for me. It’s a journey I am thankful was accompanied by parents, peers and mentors (who) taught me God does not make mistakes.”
She then offers a litany of scenarios in which vulnerable adolescents and young adults such as she once was could be be shunted down a path that ends at being convinced transgenderism is the answer to their struggles.
“What if I had been raised that the choices for me sexually were vast and practically limitless?” she asks. “What if, in my adolescence, my deep loneliness, a girl had kissed me and I liked it?”
She further argues that the current culture has created an atmosphere where hurting, lonely or confused people, especially youth, are more apt to be ensnared by these deceptions.
“My concern is for what we are doing to ourselves as we seek to continue down a road that tries to recreate our lives into what we want them to be rather than what God created us to be. The road we are paving for our children is so confusing and hard and it doesn’t have to be.”
As a triumphant testimony to the healing and restoring power of God, she closes with her coming to peace about who God made her to be: a woman who may not fit into many of society’s stereotypes for females, but a complete woman nonetheless, “fully and completely comfortable with who and what God made me to be.”
“I still detest dressing like a woman. I hate dresses and frills,” she writes. “I love working with my hands till they are rough and worn. I’m proud my hands look like hands that work, not like a man but like a woman. A woman that may be a bit rough around the edges but make no mistake, still 100 percent woman. The woman God made me to be. Perfect but flawed. And praying without ceasing for those still on the journey to find peace and understanding of their own flawed perfection and the perfect plan God has for them.”
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