There Is No Way to Be Born Wrong

Why Gender Ideology Fails the Soul

I watch today’s Detrans Awareness Day on Capitol Hill with a mix of hope and heartbreak. Hope, because voices long silenced are finally being heard. Heartbreak, because these stories—stories of medical harm, of shattered identities, of desperate attempts to outrun pain—are all too familiar.

Soren Aldaco, a detransitioner speaking on the panel, says something that lingers in my mind:

“There is no way to be born wrong.”

The weight of that statement is enormous. It is the very foundation of spiritual formation. And yet, we live in a time when an entire belief system insists otherwise.

I have watched self-hatred work its way through a life. I know what it looks like. I know what it does.

Fifteen years ago, my husband was drowning in active alcoholism. It had already stripped away so much—his own sense of self, his ability to be present, his capacity to love freely. He was a dismissive father and stepfather, a man caught in a cycle of running from pain. But I also watched him claw his way back. I saw him crawl, inch by inch, toward something real. Not an escape. Not an illusion. But something true. I watched him go from avoidance to presence, from resistance to surrender, from dismissal to gentle invitation.

His healing came not from erasing himself but from integrating the parts he had tried so hard to deny. It came from listening to his life, his soul, the voice that had been speaking all along beneath the noise of his pain.

And now I am watching my daughter, who in her perceived failings, is trying to erase herself through gender ideology.

I am grief-stricken.

And I am angry.

Because I know what it is to run from the Self. I know what it is to mistake escape for transformation. And I know that the ideology promising her freedom is only offering a more insidious form of bondage.

Gender Ideology and the Fracturing of the Self

I am gender-critical.

I say this openly, without hedging, because my work as a Spiritual Director compels me to. My work is to guide people toward wholeness—to help them listen deeply, to recognize the movements of the Self, to notice what is stirring in their dreams, their longings, their pain. And gender ideology stands in direct opposition to this work.

It tells people they were born wrong. It tells them the voice of discomfort is not a call to deeper integration but a demand for destruction. It tells them that healing is only possible through medical intervention, that the body must be cut, altered, denied in order to be true.

But this is not individuation. This is not the slow, sacred process of becoming whole.

Carl Jung wrote that individuation is the process of becoming who we already are. It is not a rejection of the self but an integration of all its parts—the light, the shadow, the contradictions, the wounds. It is the work of making conscious what has been unconscious, not silencing or severing it.

And yet, gender ideology confuses the persona—the outer mask we develop to navigate the world—with the deep self. It mistakes the longing for transformation for the need to erase.

The irony is that those caught in this ideology believe they are listening to their authentic selves. But they are only listening to a fragment. They are taking a single feeling, a single experience, and building an entire identity around it—one that demands permanent, irreversible change.

And I cannot stand by and pretend that is healing.

From One Ideology to Another: The Horseshoe of Entrapment

I recognize the pattern. Because I have lived it.

I was raised in an evangelical home, steeped in the culture of Liberty University. The rigidity of that world—the control, the suppression of thought, the demand for conformity—was suffocating. It was a theology of erasure in its own way.

So I ran. I ran into the arms of Unitarian Universalism, into progressive faith spaces that promised freedom and self-exploration. And for a while, I believed I had escaped.

But then I looked around in my early 40s and realized I had ended up in the exact same place.

The language had changed, but the structure was identical. The demand for ideological purity, the insistence on a single truth, the excommunication of those who questioned—it was all the same.

This is the horseshoe theory in action. Start at one extreme, take the long way around, and find yourself right back where you began.

The only way out is not to swing to another pole but to step off the horseshoe entirely. To walk a different path. One that leads away from ideology and into something deeper. Something personal. Something real.

For me, that path has been Jungian-oriented Spiritual Direction. It is the work of disentangling. Of reclaiming a personal, individual truth. A truth informed not by external dictates but by faith, by dreams, by the slow unfolding of the Self in relationship with the divine.

And so I say this now, with clarity and conviction:

There is no scientific basis for gender ideology.
There is no theological basis for gender ideology.
There is no spiritual formation theory that supports gender ideology.

It is, in every way, a distortion of what it means to Become.

My Commitment Moving Forward

I will not be silent.

I know the cost of speaking. I know the risks.

But I also know that my silence costs more.

I am here to companion people toward wholeness, not fragmentation. I am here to tell the truth, not to placate. I am here to say, with the full weight of my work and my calling behind me, that you were never born wrong.

You were never meant to cut yourself apart to be whole.

And I will not stop saying it.