Jerry was cross-dressing with neighborhood girls from the age of three. At that age his father said how much cuter Jerry was as a girl. Jerry kept dressing in his mother’s clothes, and at 17 was badly beaten when his father found out. Jerry told his mother while being cross-dressed, but she never mentioned it again.
He joined the US Navy after highschool, and after 18 months told the base psychiatrist of his yearnings, and was quickly discharged.
He went to college and found a woman to marry. He told her of his cross-dressing before the wedding, and she stayed with him. After college he trained as a pastor, although his attitude to his god was ambivalent. He mixed crossdressing, including going out to malls as femme with his pastoral duties. His femme name was Jennifer Leach, the name his parents had picked when they were hoping for a girl.
All this strained his relationship with his wife and two children. In the late 1980s, they tried a separation. Jennifer found a sympathetic therapist and started taking female hormones, and was accepted to go forward to surgery after lying that she was divorced, that she was living and working fulltime as female and had found a boyfriend.
However Jerry was still reverting to male and living with his family. He felt guilty about what he was doing to his family, and, after paying the surgery fees, was on the verge of shooting himself, when he had a religious experience.
He then sought out Christian counselors and put his transvestity behind him. He joined Crossover in 1988.
Leach runs Reality Resources, founded 1999, the only US Christian organization to advertise therapy that will "heal" transgender people. This is where Focus on the Family and Exodus direct their trans clients. Judy/Josef Kirchner wrote for Reality Resources for a while. Leach denies that there is any genetic aspect to transsexuality or transvestity and attributes them to psychological trauma experienced in early childhood, partly following the books by Elizabeth Moberly.
He claims to have worked with over 1600 transgender persons in the last 25 years. He claims a 100% success rate in ‘curing’ any trans person who continues to work with him for over four years. This requires weekly visits at $85 a time.
*Not the president of the World Affairs Council of America.
- “Jerry Leach”. TransChristians. www.transchristians.org/people/jerry-leach.
- David Kyle Foster. “An Interview With A Former Transsexual and Transvestite”. Mastering Life Newsletter. 12 & 13. 1996. www.masteringlife.org/index.php?view=article&catid=43%3Atransgender-disorders&id=129%3Ainterview-with-a-former-transsexual-and-transvestite&option=com_content&Itemid=29 and also at www.transchristians.org/people/jerry-leach/leach-interview.
- Jerry Leach. Jennifer or Jerry? Reality Resources Publications. www.leaderu.com/stonewall/pages/jerry_l.html. No longer Available.
- Jerry Leach. Flight Toward Woman. Reality Resources Publications (self published booklet, previously titled Cowboys Don’t Cross-dress). 2001.
Most of the above is taken from Leach's interview with David Foster on the Mastering Life site. However I do recommend the TransChristian pages on Leach. They subject his various writings and interviews to a close reading, and find lots of inconsistencies. Note that Leach is very coy about where he was educated. Thus his professional qualifications are not confirmed. He is not qualified as a psychologist. There has been mention in the past of PhD but that claim has disappeared.
I looked into Jerry Leach many years back when I was struggling with my gender disphoria and looking for some kind of cure. Had a few e-mails with him but I realized that what he was doing was stuff I had already tried and failed at. I believe that trans and gay people of all types can repress their feelings but why make your life a miserable emotional battle? Life is to short.
ReplyDeleteI agree that crossdressers and transsexuals are not mutually exclusive and would not care to judge who goes into which box.
I'm glad transchristians.org could help!
ReplyDeleteI noticed the sidebar link is outdated (googlesites). Could you update it?
I am writing you as the web master of www.realityresources.com. I must insist that although your opinions of Jerry Leach are your own, ALL Jerry Leach materials, pictures, testimonials, articles and so on, which appear on your website are copyrighted by Reality Resources (including links) and must be removed from your website.
ReplyDeletePlease respond to me as soon as possible and let me know your intentions.
Thank you for your prompt action.
Stacy Thompson
stacy@stacythompson.com
It would appear that the exact same message has gone out to other website owners, including me that are critical of Jerry. Web archives have been told to delete Reality Resources. I have asked for Jerry's lawyers name and contact information.
ReplyDeleteTranschristians.org received the same notice in January. See http://www.transchristians.org/people/jerry-leach/archives. It's pathetic that Jerry needs to resort to bullying to improve his image. (And bullying that lacks knowledge of copyright laws, at that.) This tells me that his apparent lies (education and everything else I break down on my site) really are lies, not mis-communication. If they were anything but lies, he would clarify rather than censuring.
ReplyDeleteI recently learned Jerry Leach passed away. While we may disagree with the contents of his previous interviews and publications, I find it distasteful to dance on anybody's grave.
ReplyDeleteRe: Dancing on anyone's grave. I find that many
ReplyDeleteof the so called christian healers take a far more
negative view of their own family members ,when we see the author of http://help4families.com/crisis.html
bad mouth her own parent :-(
I am a male to female "Transchristian", perhaps there's a better word for this. I never had a male self-identity in my life.
ReplyDeleteI hope the claim that Jerry has died is untrue! I tried to support Jerry, but i felt we were both on the losing side of this struggle. Some of my writings were on his realityresources site. I deeply resent the cruelty that some people have shown towards Jerry! Jerry does have a good heart and good people are sometimes on the losing side of a struggle. In my mails with him i sensed he was losing the battle in his struggle to play the male role and he seemed to admire me for openly livíng as a woman. I admired him for trying to find a way out of this condition. I feel Jerry made a heroic attempt to find a way out. But the "strategies" just get bogged down or go into some manic state. I told Jerry that i felt in my case i defied God's will before birth and insisted on being born as a male. The parable of the seed sower is not fully explained. God and Christ want us to grow in a fertile earthly existence. He doesn't want his seeds or souls to be endangered. I truly believe that a soul coming to this world can defy God's will and be born not as the sex that God wished! The consequence is transgenderism or hermaphroditism. The proud shall be made humble!
I pray for Jerry Leach!