LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Laura Smalts, a 40-year-old newlywed with long, wavy brunette hair, beams when she talks about her husband of seven months.
But Smalts’ brow furrows and she looks down when recounting the years she spent as “Jake,” her transgender alter ego. Jake sported a beard after testosterone injections and a masculine-looking chest after a double mastectomy.
Smalts now counts herself among the growing number of “detransitioners” who disavow their former transgender identities. She and another detransitioner testified on Nov. 30 in district court in Little Rock, Ark., to support the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act.
Outcomes
Signed into law in April 2021, the Arkansas SAFE Act was the first ban of its kind in the nation; it inspired more than a dozen other states to consider or approve similar bills.But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Arkansas, alleging that the act is unconstitutional. The ACLU wants Judge James Moody Jr. to overturn it.
Smalts and the other detransitioner who testified have several things in common. Both began gender-transition procedures in their mid-to-late 20s, well beyond their adolescent years. Both reverted to identifying as their birth sex. Both are now married to a spouse of the opposite sex.
Neither lived in Arkansas nor had procedures done there, yet their stories provided Moody a glimpse into the future that might await young people who use the methods that the SAFE Act would prohibit.
‘It Seemed to Be the Answer’
A native of Oklahoma, Smalts, then known by her maiden name, Laura Perry, pictured herself as male for much of her childhood. She envied the close relationship that one of her brothers had with her mother. She was a tomboy. She felt like a misfit around other girls. She felt “cursed” as a female.She felt victimized and powerless in bad relationships with men. So she decided she wanted to become a man. In 2007, she typed the words “girl becoming boy” into a Google online search. “I was just curious if anybody else felt like that,” Smalts said.
She didn’t know the word, “transgender” existed. She found a support group for transgender people and started going to meetings.
Before long, she was obsessing over the notion of becoming a powerful male.
“That idea became so pervasive, it was all I could think about,” she said.
She had cut her hair short, was wearing masculine-looking clothing and established a long-term relationship with another transgender person: a biological male who presented as a female.
From the support group and internet research, Smalts learned that she would need a letter from a therapist that would authorize her to get cross-sex hormones. After three one-hour counseling sessions, Smalts got the letter declaring she suffered from what was then called “gender identity disorder.”
The letter unlocked the door to testosterone treatments. Smalts remembers how great she felt as those treatments began.
‘I Was Living a Lie’
She revealed her new identity to more and more people. They were hailing her new transgender self as “heroic,” Smalts said.That felt good. In fact, the initial effects of social acceptance were intoxicating. She felt imbued with determination “to do whatever I could do to ‘become male,’” Smalts testified, using her fingers to draw quotation marks in the air around the last two words.
Then came a second crucial letter, authorizing her to get chest surgery.
After constantly wearing painful chest binders to conceal her feminine curves, it was a relief to have her breasts surgically removed in 2009, she said.
A couple years later, despite taking testosterone, Smalts’ menstrual periods resumed. After living as a male, “then all of a sudden having a period again, it was just devastating,” Smalts said.
That problem prompted Smalts to have her uterus and ovaries removed; she had that surgery about a decade ago.
“It wasn’t really solving anything. It wasn’t really making me a man,” she said. But after investing so much emotionally, financially and socially into the transition, Smalts had difficulty admitting her continuing internal struggle to anyone.
“I wanted everyone to believe that I was happy and this was wonderful,” she said.But Smalts couldn’t deny the reality that confronted her: “It began to haunt me because I knew that I was still biologically female ... I began to feel like I was living a lie.”
Smalts had to tell big lies and little lies to almost every person she met while she was known as “Jake,” and wore prosthetic genitalia. The new obsession became fear of “not passing” as male.
No Way Out
Smalts wondered: Would surgically adding male genitalia, help her to feel “fully male?”After researching what that surgery entailed, Smalts said she was “horrified.” There were lots of risks of complications, including urinary problems and “potential loss of all sexual feeling,” Smalts said.
Smalts could see that, even if she sacrificed part of her arm muscle so a surgeon could use it to fashion a phallus, “this still isn’t real.”
“Jake” felt trapped in “this mental hell that nobody knew about,” Smalts said. “Everyone around me affirmed me as male, and my life was broken.”
Smalts, who had pre-existing health problems, experienced new issues as a result of her transgender journey.
Testosterone had thickened Smalts’ blood; her doctor warned about the risk of stroke. Her heart would pound wildly just from walking across the room. She suffered chronic back pain from long-term use of chest binders. The discomfort persists to this day.
The problems felt overwhelming and insurmountable. Suicidal thoughts crept in.
Transgender to Transformed
After much soul-searching, Smalts said she “came to Christ,” and God began to draw her out of the transgender lifestyle. She realized she had been running away and trying to re-create herself, but “what I needed was healing.”Eventually, Smalts said she learned to “let go of all the lies that I believed and embrace who I was.”
She stopped taking testosterone in 2016, after about nine years of masquerading as a male.
All of the friends “Jake” once had are now gone. That’s partly because Smalts wants no reminder of her former transgender life. It’s also partly because her transgender friends haven’t responded to her attempts to contact them.
‘Multiple Complications’
After Smalts testified, Clifton “Billy” Burleigh Jr., 56, shared his harrowing experience: surgically transitioning twice, undergoing at least eight procedures and suffering multiple complications.Now a retired aerospace engineer, Burleigh grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Like Smalts, Burleigh reported feeling more in tune with the opposite gender since early childhood.
“I had this thought, that God made a mistake ... I believed I was a girl, but I wasn’t a girl,” Burleigh said.
“I believed the messaging that was given to me, that this was how I would find my happiness and peace,” Burleigh said.
Burleigh started taking estrogen, progesterone and a testosterone blocker. He signed up for surgeries.Battle Raged for Years
Complications followed, including bleeding that wouldn’t stop; eventually the artificial vaginal opening closed up, Burleigh said.Burleigh, like Smalts, finally realized that one’s birth sex cannot be altered; no amount of medical procedures would change that.
“I actually had the same problems ... and a whole lot more problems after I transitioned to female,” Burleigh said.
He went through procedures to reverse his “transition,” including having a new phallus made from abdominal fat. But complications struck again, and that procedure had to be undone.
“It’s pretty scarred up right now but it’s much better than the way it was,” Burleigh said.
Five years ago, Burleigh was “presenting as male,” but was tempted to return to femaleness. Self-destructive thoughts plagued him: “You’re a freak. You’re an abomination. What good are you as a husband? You can’t perform.”
He went through another round of feminizing facial surgeries—cheek implants, a brow shave and a jaw shave—and then finally said to himself, “Billy, what are you doing? This is crazy. This is ridiculous.”
Burleigh said he worked through his mental problems but regularly must have his hormones artificially balanced. Because his testes were removed, Burleigh’s natural sex hormones are gone.
Happy to have “a beautiful wife” and two stepdaughters, Burleigh declared: “I’m free, I’m done with the battle.”
