Adolescence is a crazy stage in life. It’s when immature teens act bizarrely to impress their peers, when hormones kick in, and awkward, changing bodies seem strange to their owners. Boys and girls look at themselves in the mirror and question their identity.
It’s a confusing time.
Just ask Denise Shick — who as a young girl roleplayed as boy in the privacy of her bedroom. Her traumatic relationship with her dad — who wanted to be a woman — led her to that, and made her contemplate suicide. Meeting her kind, wonderful husband, Mark, in high school was a heaven-send.
Now 59, Denise is a mother and a minister. Yet she can’t help wondering how her days of adolescent confusion might have ended in today’s world.
Tragically, she thinks.
“If I was a child today, the school would help me transition,” she told The Epoch Times. “What a mistake that would have been.”
“If I was in school today, and I went to my teacher with those thoughts, how many times would I be told, ‘Oh honey, you’re really transgender’?” she said, adding that ”between 88—97 percent of these children outgrow that gender confusion." “But here we are, society’s saying, ‘Here, take this drug. Let’s sign you up for a double mastectomy.’”
She has made her life’s work dismantling harmful ideologies that target the young.
Denise’s own experience began one lovely summer day in 1972 when her dad sat her down on the porch (while her mom was at work) and told her he wanted to be a woman. She was 9. She recalled thinking at the time: “Why is he telling me this, his daughter, just a kid, understanding as he’s telling me that he had been sexually molested?” He disclosed how he guilted Denise’s mom into buying him women’s underclothing. “There were so many adult details that he gave me,” she added. “I was just left feeling the loss of a dad. I didn’t feel like I had a dad any longer because he wanted to become this woman.”
Denise entered puberty. Her body developed, while her father’s maladies deepened, as did the rift between them.
“The stares, the looks that he would give me — you wouldn’t understand unless you'd seen it — like it went right through you,“ she said. ”I didn’t feel comfortable in my body, developing. I didn’t feel comfortable in being a girl around my dad. It came to the point where I would take my makeup, or dresses, anything that was feminine, to school and change there or put my makeup on at school.”
She soon found her clothes and bathing suit in places around the house, in the attic, in his truck. She heard a sound while in the bathroom and saw his eye through a peephole he'd made. “It made me feel sick inside. It made me feel like he was sucking my joy of accepting myself and my femininity,” she said. “It was a real fight for my own sanity at this point. By the time I was in ninth grade, I considered suicide.”
Then there was sexual abuse.
She described him chasing her around the house, pushing her down, and groping her developing body as though he wished it were his own. One time, he slapped her face so hard her glasses flew off and broke. Denise found herself in a place of darkness and fog, indulging in alcohol abuse, and imagining what it would like to be a boy.
“If God made a mistake and dad should have been a girl, how did I know that I wasn’t supposed to be a boy?” she pondered. “To take that into my imagination for two years: of what I would look like, my mannerisms ... in my bedroom, I would play out how I would walk, what I would do for career, and, of course, I would marry a girl.”
Those days of self-distortion finally evaporated in high school, when Denise met Mark. “I'd just kind of sworn boys off. I wasn’t interested. But I agreed to meet him,” she said. “He didn’t appear to be one of those that would look at your body or try to get you in bed, in a sense. He wanted to get to know who I was as a person, and that was the first time I experienced that.”
They fell in love, but haunting their relationship was a question; Mark saw the distance between Denise and her dad. He finally confronted her and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. So she told him.
“I figured he‘d run for the hills. But instead, Mark looked at me and he said, ’Okay,’” she said. “There was just a calmness around him. We returned — shortly after this time of sharing — to my home and Mark walked in the house. My dad was there. And he just started talking to him like he always had.
“It amazed me how I can tell him all this garbage and it didn’t stop him from being, in a sense, a friend at the level that he could.”
By their wedding day, Denise hoped the past was now past. It wasn’t. Holding out his arm to walk her down the aisle, her dad said, “It should be me in that gown.” “Inside, I was just screaming. I was devastated,“ said Denise. ”Why is he telling me this on my wedding day, almost as if an attempt to ruin it?!”
Sadly, the chasm between Denise and her dad never mended, but grew further apart; years later, he announced he was leaving to live the life he always wanted — the life of becoming “Becky.” “When he turned around ... I could see the changes that he had made,” she said. “He was trying to look like his mother.”
She added, “I just told him, then I am saying goodbye to my dad, because I don’t know this person. And you are telling me you no longer want to be my dad. My heart grew very angry and very cold toward him.”
A woman of faith, Denise’s heart sought a place of forgiveness, what amounted to a spiritual battle. But, sorting through the abuse, confusion, pain, and hate — she wanted to bury their relationship — it took time. When her dad grew ill with esophageal cancer, she went to him, but he was already comatose.
She sympathizes, knowing he'd been abused and bullied as a boy. His older brothers dressed him in his sister’s clothes and stuffed him in a closet and did other mean things, she said.
“The old saying, ‘Hurt people hurt people,’ I have found all too common to be true,” she said. “Through the the tornado that seemed to come through his life, one event after another, and understanding the trauma and how that impacts the psychological well-being of any child, you can find peace in the end.”
Today, Denise wants to break the cycle of abuse by clearing away an obfuscation of truth — nobody knows how swayable young minds are like someone who’s come through. Children know not what’s best, nor how they best fit into society.
Proper framing starts in the family.
Now, deconstruction of the family structure has become an aim, she said, which will lead to a world where “the government would become more like the parent.”
With so many Western interests sympathizing with communistic ideologies, postmodernism, or identity politics, the traditional family unit is under assault. China’s “Cultural Revolution” pitted children against parents, husbands against wives, encouraging them to report on each other, thus fracturing the very fabric of society.
Today’s identity politics are strikingly similar, replacing parents with government.
“We’re already seeing schools that do not notify when a child is identifying as something with LGBTQ,” Denise added. “Not being responsible to let the parents know what’s happening with their child.
“Today, we have parents that are taking care of a home, providing the food, but once [the children] go to school, they’re the government’s.”
