The First Lie: “I Was Born This Way”
Photos courtesy of Patti Height
After being rescued from the darkness of abuse and sexual confusion into a vibrant relationship with Jesus, Patti Height founded Out of Egypt Ministries to help churches reach the LGBT+ community with the Gospel. In Part 1 of this three-part series, she traces the roots of her gender confusion in early childhood.
Unfortunately, my story is not uncommon with many who identify as gay or trans. One out of three women are violated—physically, sexually, and emotionally. We have to minister to people’s hearts instead of their identities and understand their behavior is coming from a heart issue. And now a lot of our young girls are being abused [on] social media by predators.
At a young age, Patti Height endured sexual abuse and gender confusion that led to self-injury and drug addiction by the time she was 13 years old. Through Out of Egypt Ministries, she now helps churches reach the LGBT+ community with the Gospel.
For me, it started with a lie. Genesis 1:27 says, So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. This is a simple truth, and yet it’s becoming a difficult truth for our culture to believe. We are created beings. We were created for God’s glory—Isaiah 40 tells us that. But what happens when we don’t believe this simple truth? Well, when we don’t believe the Truth, we create our own truth. But creating your own truth is nothing but a lie. You might feel like you can, but it's simply impossible. And my lie was, “I was born this way.”
I don’t have a lot of memories of childhood, but one thing I do remember is that I thought I was a boy. Not just like, Oh, I’m a boy because my neighborhood has boys, and I do the same things as them, so I must be a boy. But [with] every thought that went through my mind, I felt like I was psyching it through the mind of a boy. Once I understood language enough to understand I wasn’t a boy, my best friend Johnny was being called “he” and “him” even though there wasn’t such a thing as preferred pronouns back then. I recognized that Johnny was “he/him” and that I was “she/her”; he was son, and I was daughter.
I became very confused by that. I didn’t understand, so I started talking to my parents about it. They saw and heard and recognized that I was struggling. I got called “Tomboy” and such. And so, there wasn’t much for my parents to do with that. When I was 8 years old, my mom took me to the doctor and said, “My daughter thinks she’s a boy. What do we do?” [That was] 1974, so doctors weren’t being forced to affirm gender transition like they are now. The doctor said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. She’ll grow out of it and make a fine wife someday.”
A 6-year-old Patti with her neighborhood friend, Brian. “I thought I was a boy. Not … Oh, I’m a boy because my neighborhood has boys, and I do the same things as them, so I must be a boy. But every thought that went through my mind … I was psyching it through the mind of a boy.”
More than 85% of kids who do have gender confusion when they make their way through puberty no longer have that struggle, but that wasn’t my story. It followed me. It made me very, very angry. I had very deep anger issues at a very young age. I didn’t want to be stuck in this girl's body—I felt like I was being gypped. I didn’t understand, I was too little, and I didn’t have the cognitive ability to understand what I was experiencing.
I was also angry and confused because of what I saw relationally between my parents in the house. Please know, this is not me throwing my parents under the bus—this is just my story, what I experienced, and how it affected me. I constantly heard my father belittling my mother and putting her down, saying, “You’re worthless. You’re stupid. You’re crazy,” over and over. Sometimes he would say it with anger, and sometimes he would say it with a laugh, thinking it was funny. I didn’t know what to do with that. How is a little child supposed to understand what is happening with that? Was Mom worthless, stupid, and crazy? Or was my dad mean, angry, and a liar? What does a child do with that? Those are two really horrible choices to try and pick from. Who do I lean more toward? Mom or Dad? And what do I do with all this?
So with that, I didn’t want to be like my mom, the one who was supposed to show me what it was to be a woman. I wanted to be the opposite of her because, just in case what Dad was saying was real, I didn’t want to be like I was being told she was. I wanted to be strong and protected. So, I detached from her and her womanhood and attached to all things masculine—which wasn’t a stretch for me. Obviously, I didn’t understand this at the time; I wasn’t 6, 7, 8 years old thinking, You know what, I bet you there’s some crazy misconceptions going on here. I better figure this out. No, I just thought that I’d been born a boy and there had somehow been some horrendous mistake made with my body. But that’s what lies do. They hide in the darkness and manifest themselves in other ways, even in behavioral ways.
At age 8, Patti wanted to be just like her older brother, Larry (right). She would eventually be greatly impacted by his faith as a new believer before he died. “I can’t wait to see him in heaven!” Patti exclaimed.
To make matters even worse—and even more confusing and dark—I was being sexually violated for a number of years. Our minds, whether it’s a 5-year-old mind or a 55-year-old mind, are always trying to figure things out. My little girl mind was thinking, Huh. This must only happen to little girls, and if I could just somehow become a boy, maybe this would stop. There was never a thought for me of, How can I become a woman someday? It was more like, How can I become a man—sure does seem safer. My girl body needed protection, and I thought that I could protect myself by becoming a boy, which wasn’t a stretch for me because I already did all the boy things.
I had this love-hate relationship with my body. I loved the fact that I had an athletic body and that I could do anything and everything I wanted to athletically that all the boys did. I was actually the first girl in all of western New York who was allowed to play in different boy sports. I thought, OK, well I can do all this, but yet I hate my body for what’s happening to it. But also, It’s a girl's body and girls are bad, and so I don’t want to be that. Do you know how confusing that is for a little child?
Patti founded Out of Egypt Ministries in 2012 as a speaking platform to help others find the same truth, peace and healing she found in Jesus Christ. “Nobody had told me about Jesus. I had no idea there was a God who loved me, a God who laid down His own life for mine—my true life, not my re-created life.”
I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, so I didn’t know how to turn to the Lord for help. I didn’t know how to cry out to God, so I always took matters into my own hands, always trying to figure things out on my own. It’s so exhausting. But when you do that, it fuels up pride because some of those things I did, I did to protect me. It was a false sense of protection, but it worked; so I’m like, Well, this works. Looking like a guy sure does work, so I’m going to build that part of my identity up. I didn’t know the truth, so I made my own.
The truth was, I was in deep pain and didn’t know how to relieve it. The only way that I knew to manage the pain was through self-injury, drugs, and alcohol. I began to self-injure at 5 years old. My mom didn’t know what to do with it. My self-injury was so bad that I did it a lot of times at night in my bedroom, in bed, and there was so much blood that came from me from doing this that my mom would have to keep buying new sheets all the time.
Not knowing how to deal with her pain, 5-year-old Patti began to self-injure. “I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, so I didn’t know how to turn to the Lord for help,” she explained.
My parents didn’t know what to do or how to deal with this. They were ill-equipped because they didn’t know Jesus, either. I was so alone in all my pain. I needed pain relief, but I didn’t know how because physical pain always demands a response—covering it. When we have pain in the spiritual and in the emotional, it demands a response. When we have emotional pain, if we don’t have Jesus—even sometimes if we do—the first thing we do is cover it, build walls around our heart. Pain always demands a response.
By the time I was 13, I liked girls and wanted to date them. By the time I was 15, I was a full-blown drug addict. I longed for relief; yet there was none because I was trying to find it in my own strength. Nobody had told me about Jesus. Nobody. I had no idea there was a God who loved me, a God who laid down His own life for mine—my true life, not my re-created life.
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Look soon for Part 2, as Patti describes how she fell deeply into the lesbian lifestyle and was eventually redeemed by Jesus Christ.
Click link to learn more about Out of Egypt Ministries
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