A troubling wave of LGBT ideology has been spreading throughout Texas, with explicit pornographic materials in children’s school libraries, public schools teaching hazardous sexual behaviors and gender confusion to kids, and child abuse cases where parents wish to chemically and physically mutilate their child’s body to appear like the opposite sex.
Now, Dallas-area citizen Janet Boynes, who lived a homosexual and “transgender” lifestyle for 14 years, tells her personal journey and is sounding a wakeup call for the next generation of Texans.
Childhood Trauma
“I was raised in a family of seven kids, four different fathers, which was really difficult for me growing up because I was confused about who I was, my identity,” Janet told Texas Scorecard in an exclusive interview. “I didn’t know who my biological father was, but the father raising me, who fathered three under me, was an alcoholic. He would come home on the weekends and fights would break out at our home all the time.”
“Every time I watched that, I was starting to adopt those same behaviors, because I was watching what my parents were doing,” Janet recalled. “Those early experiences were shaping me at that point. I thought, ‘Oh, okay, so when things don’t go right and you need to deal with a problem, you just go out and beat people up.’ And that’s what I did at school.”
Janet said her mother would beat her and her siblings terribly, and then make them go to church on Sunday, “hoping that would help change something.” But it didn’t. Janet’s brother started cross-dressing, and people thought she was a bad kid, but they didn’t know what was happening behind closed doors.
“My life was starting to spin out of control. People didn’t want me in school; teachers didn’t want me there. Peers didn’t want me around,” she said. “They just didn’t know which Janet was going to show up. Was it the Janet that was going to give away her lunch to a needy person, or was it going to be the vindictive, bad Janet that was gonna cuss everybody out and beat people up? But they didn’t realize the pain I endured at home.”
Furthermore, when Janet was 13, her stepfather raped her.
“I had no one that I could confide in, because my family was dysfunctional. The only person that I realized I could talk to was my eighth-grade English teacher, because one day she kept me after school because I was so bad,” Janet said. “She affirmed me, gave me hope, and honestly gave me a reason to live, because she told me I had a lot of potential. I told her everything, except for the [rape].”
I suffered in silence regarding that from the age of 13 until I was 21. And the shame and the guilt that I had all those years traumatized me, but I made a vow in my heart and an internal declaration that … I’m not going to live like my mom; no man is ever going to hurt me. I’m never going to marry a black man, because I associated black men with rape and abuse, and I will never have kids out of wedlock, because I have more half-brothers and -sisters than you can imagine. I didn’t want that for myself.
“Years later, I found out my stepfather raped another person in my family, which is my sister. And it was hard because when I told my mother at the age of 21, nobody believed me,” Janet said.
Hope?
As Janet was about to enter college, her mother told her she was leaving and moving halfway across the country to Minneapolis. After several years, Janet eventually relocated to join her mother in Minnesota and attend Concordia College, where she “really started to enjoy” her life.
“There was a girl at school at that time that came up to me and invited me to church, and even though I wasn’t really thinking about going to church then, I said yes,” Janet said. “I went, and I gave my heart to Jesus. And it was so great because I was so on fire for God, and I went home and told my family about my newfound faith.”
She also met an “awesome guy,” and they started dating.
“He was Caucasian, ’cause as I said earlier, I wasn’t going to marry a black man. Because at that time, I didn’t get the counseling that I really needed to get past some of the pain that I endured as a child.”
Janet and her fiance.
After three years, they got engaged—but they didn’t make it to the wedding.
“Our [wedding] date was in August 1985. However, three months before that wedding, I called it off because I wound up having a sexual relationship with a girl that I worked with at that time,” Janet said.
Janet added that her brother, who was now living a gay lifestyle, confided in her that he had the virus that “could lead to full-blown AIDS.”
Ashamed and afraid, Janet walked away from Jesus.
Lost in the Wilderness
“When I wrote my first book, “Called Out,” I sat there and thought about if I was afraid of what my marriage would become because of all the trauma I endured in my past,” Janet said. “And I really believe that subconsciously, I could have just been reckless, but maybe not. My fiancé and I didn’t spend a lot of time together ’cause he was always on the road, and I believe that I was looking for something to fill the emptiness and the void, and this woman filled that during that time.”
Janet began living a lesbian lifestyle and cross-dressing as a man.
“Sin is fun for a season, and for the first three to five years, I enjoyed what I was doing,” she said. “But it came to a place where I was unhappy. Things weren’t working for me. I was starting to do things that just didn’t make sense to me. I was starting to do more drugs and drink and go from relationship to relationship, and nothing was filling that emptiness. My life was literally spinning out of control.”
In 1989, when she realized she was going down the wrong path, Janet decided to put herself into treatment. She has been clean from the drugs ever since. Though she still hadn’t dealt with her childhood trauma, she said, “The Lord was starting to deal with my heart.”
Coming Back
“As my mindset was starting to change, I wanted the relationship with God that I had before, but I didn’t know how to get back to where I was with Him, and I was afraid to go to church,” Janet said.
Eventually, she decided to go—and God began healing her whole life.
“It was the most amazing thing, because a lot of times, we think that the church isn’t there to help. I mean, this was back in October 1998—they didn’t know how to help a lesbian who looked just like a man, you know, walking in there not knowing left or right, not understanding the Bible anymore,” Janet said. “I was just totally lost.”
She went to a small women’s Bible study group and told them she was living a homosexual lifestyle. “But if they helped me, I would serve the Lord.”
“And these ladies literally took me under their wing,” said Janet. “They didn’t look at me and say, ‘Well, you look like a man, so you need to put on a dress or you need to look differently.’ Their love just permeated, and what they gave me I could never have gotten from anybody else. It was almost like the love of God drew me to repentance. Their love for me made me want to not go back to my old community and ways, because God was giving me a new community.”
And one of the [women’s group] leaders came to me months later and said, “Janet, we’ve been praying for you, and my husband and I and our three kids would love for you to come live with us.” So, at the age of 40, I sold my home and moved in with this Christian family. And that’s where the change and restoration really happened. That’s where I started to understand family and how a man should treat a woman; they just demonstrated that for me during that time. And I know it was the Lord.
Janet and her host family.
A New Life
As Janet was healing, she received a call that her brother—still living a homosexual lifestyle—was not.
“My family called and said my brother was rushed to the hospital, and he went into full-blown AIDS,” she said. “In 1999, I lost him.”
“What I’ve come to realize and what I really want people to know is that sin will take you farther than you want to go and keep you longer than you want to stay,” Janet said. “I never anticipated that I would live a homosexual life for 14 years. I never thought about that. I just thought it was one and done. You know, I would get together with this girl, but … my sin kept me out there.”
“I can never—and none of us can ever—get back the years I’ve lost. But we do serve a God who can redeem the time. And I know it was the love of God that drew me back to Him; I knew God placed the right people strategically in the right place to help me. The only thing I had to do was say yes. And I said yes at every turn, and that’s why I believe I’m where I’m at today.”
In 2006, after a period of her own restoration, Janet began a ministry to help those with similar pains and struggles.
“I wanted to be the person like the women in my church were to me. They helped bring my search to an end; they took me under their wing. They never dumbed down the Gospel; they just loved and cared for me, and they put me in a place where I was fulfilled and in a position to win,” she said. “I wanted to do that for other people. The church I experienced wasn’t a stained glass or steeple or building, but it was us, the body of Christ. God used those people, and because of their unconditional love, I was able to come to a revelation of who Jesus Christ is.”
I want to help people get to a place where their dependency isn’t on Janet Boynes Ministries—I’m not their Savior—but their dependency is on Jesus Christ. We know that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, and whatever is not bearing fruit, He prunes away so we can be healthy and produce much fruit. I’m a vessel like everybody else, and He places me in people’s lives to help them with the process like those women did for me.
Janet with one of the ladies who helped her back to church.
The Current Crisis in Our Society
Janet, after walking through a long and difficult journey, doesn’t want others—especially youth—to experience the same destructive consequences of an LGBT lifestyle. She has spoken out to warn media and school district officials throughout Texas to stop promoting those behaviors to children in classrooms.
“This is being pushed on kids who are barely wet behind the ears, indoctrinating them about homosexuality and pornography. That is so wrong,” Janet said. “You almost wonder why are we sending our kids to schools if they’re not being educated with English and math.”
Indeed, as Texas Scorecard has chronicled, Texas school officials are also teaching kids as young as 4 about “trans” ideology, the idea that you can turn into whichever biological sex or even creature you feel like.
“Back then, we called it ‘cross-dressing.’ Today, they call it ‘transgender,’” Janet said. “Yet that’s all it is, is a person that cross-dresses. That’s what I did.”
Yet today, more parents are pushing for permanent operations on their children’s bodies, such as in the case of 9-year-old Dallas-area boy James Younger, whose mother told him he was a girl and wanted to force him (against his father’s wishes) to take sterilizing cross-sex hormone drugs and eventually be castrated.
“We are also finding that more children are now starting to commit suicide, and some people are trying to blame Christians for that because we will not support that worldview,” Janet said. “Yet in reality, it’s because our children are confused. And who’s confusing our children? The blame should be partly on the school district.”
“I’m working with a 13-year-old girl right now (her parents reached out to me) and an 11-year-old-girl who’s actually in a relationship with another girl at school,” Janet described. “And you know why? Both these girls that I just talked with are searching for women, to be loved by them, because they’re not getting it at home. They’re not getting it from their moms, and they’ve figured, ‘If I can get in a relationship with this other girl, I will be able to fill that emptiness and that void.’”
“You have situations where one girl is adopted by her grandmother because her mother is not able to take care of her, yet grandma is an alcoholic and leaves the child at home. So, you have an 11-year-old girl who’s watching her friends spend time with their mom on Mother’s Day and go do all the little girly things with their mom, yet she’s lonely and lacking, so she’s looking for it somewhere else. And that’s why a lot of our kids are going to the life of homosexuality. And once they’re sucked in, it’s hard to get out.”
Message for Youth, Parents, and Churches
“These children are dealing with trauma … and we do our best to get them the best help we can get them, so they can heal from whatever they’re dealing with,” Janet began.
“So, what I’m going to say to that child or that person struggling right now is that what they’re teaching you is wrong, and sometimes you won’t know that until you’re older. But God loves you. God’s original plan for you did not include destroying your body or being in a same-sex relationship. … We want to reach kids in time before they get fully out there into the homosexual life. It’s not easy; it’s a process.”
Janet said parents have more power to help than they even know.
“The only ones who can really change this, especially in the schools, is our parents. Parents don’t realize they have more control than they can imagine, because if your child isn’t in school, the district doesn’t get as much funding. If parents will start pulling their children out of public school and force administrators to change the curriculums, I believe they can change everything. But many parents aren’t doing their part; they’re looking for the school to raise their children, when they should be raised at home.”
Janet concluded with a call and encouragement for fellow Christians.
“I think the world is doing a better job of evangelizing us to their ways than we are to the kingdom of God. … Parents send their children to church to hear the Word of God, which is important, but there are so many children who are struggling with their sexuality, and we’ve got to be able to talk about it at church. So many of our children, so many of our parents, and so many of our marriages are suffering in silence,” she said, adding that some of her own family members are still living a homosexual lifestyle.
We’re often so big on behavior modification, but what I and so many people really needed is soul transformation. And I believe that if we talk about it from our pulpits, we’re really going to be able to help more people come out of that lifestyle and give them what they need.
“The enemy is out to steal, kill, and destroy. But the body of Christ—the church—is there for a reason, and that’s to help those who are broken, those who need a doctor,” Janet said. “Jesus is the doctor, and God will work through us to help those children and adults, help them get a better foundation of who Jesus is and the plan that He has for their lives.”
