This week, Holy Week in Christendom, there are bright lights in the cultural darkness. But first a story of darkness.
Many Americans, particularly evangelical Protestants, may be familiar with John Ortberg, a pastor well-known for his Bible study series once used in churches around the country. Fewer Americans are aware of his deeply troubled adult children: his son John III (Johnny) admitted to being sexually attracted to children, and one of his daughters identifies as a man. This dark story is about her.
Her birth name was Mallory Ortberg. She is a 38-year-old writer and editor who concluded in 2017, when she was 31 years old, that she is a man. In 2018, she announced, “It turns out I’m trans!” Soon after, she changed her name to Daniel, began doping testosterone, and had her breasts sliced off, all in the service of authenticity.
Her spiritual darkness deepened, and in 2019, she entered into a legal but ontologically fraudulent marriage to “Grace” Lavery, a man who pretends to be a woman. Lavery—birth name Joseph—is an associate professor of English at University of California Berkeley. He is exactly the kind of person who has no business teaching young people.
But Mallory/Danny and Joseph/Grace were still catapulting deeper into the moral abyss.
One year after they faux-married, Joseph/Grace met a woman—an actual woman—named Lily. In a 2024 profile of Mallory/Danny and Joseph/Grace in The Cut, writer Choire Sicha describes the romance:
Lily was teaching art history at Michigan State and — by her account — “reading Killing Eve fan fiction and masturbating.” They fell for each other.
So, what would a post-modern couple with no sexual boundaries do in such a situation? What does a couple who have rejected the idea that humans have a design and purpose integral to which is how their sexed bodies should be used respond to yet another polymorphous sexual appetite?
Indulge.
In the erotic dystopian darkness boomers welcomed into America, libertine indulgence in appetite is the linchpin, the sine qua non, of authenticity and fulfillment. Mallory/Danny and Joseph/Grace invited Lily into their home and bed.
Next, they decided to bring a child into this morass of wickedness. Now the throuple has a toddler boy who will be raised to see evil as good.
These three are influencers. Through their professions and their life choices they corrode and confuse. A generation of children and adolescents have been exposed to the sexual propaganda of leftists in whom there is no truth. Lawmakers, teachers, mental health “professionals,” physicians, celebrities, and church leaders have fed children lies and created chaos.
But God redeems, reclaims, restores.
There is a young woman—a Catholic wife and mother of two—who was as lost as Mallory Ortberg, until God called her back from the darkness. That young woman is Daisy Strongin. Here is Daisy’s story in her words:
10 years ago today, I came out as a transgender boy named Ollie. Freshly 17 and excited to start my new life, I thought I had finally figured out why I was so distressed.
For some odd reason that is still unclear to me, I absolutely loved looking like a boy, and I really did feel like my internal self was reflected on the outside for the first time. Turns out, all of it was a lie. Even though doctors and mental health professionals told me and my parents that absolutely I need to do this for my well-being, it was all a deep, powerful lie.
I sat there in the outpatient clinic, after spending 6 days there for being suicidal, feeling vindicated that my parents were being told to just trust the process. “They wouldn’t dare go against the professionals, right? Will they deny science and medicine to go on ignoring my true gender identity? They just don’t know me. Only I know myself,” I thought.
I can only imagine how baffled and increasingly hopeless my parents must have felt. I didn’t have enough empathy for them to stop. I continued. Rapidly. 3 years later my breast tissue would be getting scooped out of my chest, and my nipples cut off, reduced in size and sewn back on.
I don’t know why God let me cause so much damage to myself. The journey that I started seems pointless now. Like there really was no great valuable lesson to be learned from it. No silver lining. I just am left with a disconcertingly deep voice and zippertits that can’t feed my children.
Why? Why is this satanic ideology still holding on? It’s so obvious to us detransitioners. You cannot change your sex, and one should never try to. Can we please move on from this nonsense, so that I can too?
Thanks to the Trump administration, there is hope that the United States is moving on from this nonsense. He has issued multiple executive orders recognizing the reality of sex-based differences and enforcing sex-based rights.
Even the British government is beginning to gather up its lost marbles. On April 16, 2025, the Supreme Court released its decision on a dispute related to England’s Equality Act:
[S]ex has its biological meaning throughout this legislation: “woman” always and only means a biological female of any age. … It follows that a biological male of any age cannot fall within this definition; and “woman” does not mean or sometimes mean or include a male of any age.
This follows just four months after The UK’s National Health Service’s decision to put in place an indefinite ban on the “sale and supply” of puberty blocking drugs for children under eighteen.
Because Americans have allowed the absurd “trans” superstition to become systemically embedded in our institutions—including our government-subsidized schools—there is much more nonsense-eradication to be done.
For the good of individual lives—especially the lives of children—and for the good of society, we must move on from the “trans” non-sense. The battle to redeem culture requires knowledge, wisdom, sacrifice, and above all, courage.