"Je croyais être un homme", le parcours bouleversant d'une détransition - ON S'Y RETROUVE
God said, ‘If you trust me, I will restore your original identity.’ I lost everything I had built as Franck, but on the other side of obedience I found a joy and peace I never knew existed.
Overview
Janick Christen spent twelve years living as a trans man named Franck after childhood dysphoria, hormone therapy, and surgery at age twenty-four, sharing a decade of happy marriage with Laurence before a religious experience in Canada convinced her to detransition. Enduring divorce, severe psychological crisis, and the slow work of undoing physical and legal changes, she now leads Trans4Freedom to counsel families and individuals while warning that transition carries permanent consequences and that she found lasting peace only in surrendering her identity to God.
Full Video Summary
Janick Christen describes being born female yet feeling, by age four, that she was a boy inside; she prayed for her genitals to change and experienced deepening distress when her body developed at puberty. Raised in a devout but dysfunctional Christian home where she suffered abuse, she nevertheless had a profound spiritual experience at age seven that rooted her faith. After a suicide attempt at sixteen led to psychiatric hospitalization and four years in foster care, she encountered a television program about transsexuality at seventeen and finally had words for her experience. She spent years in therapy, received a gender dysphoria diagnosis, and at twenty-four began testosterone and underwent surgery to live as Franck Samuel, legally erasing her female birth record. She married Laurence four months after meeting her, and for ten years the couple served in Christian ministry, running a hospitality house and praying for the sick. While on a mission trip in Canada, she says God spoke to her during prayer: if she trusted Him, He would restore her to her original identity, though He would not love her less if she stayed as she was. Shattered, she confessed to her spiritual father, who told her she never should have been operated on but that God’s grace covered her marriage; nonetheless, she concluded that repentance meant embracing her female sex, which required divorce. She chose the name Jannick—meaning “God has shown mercy”—stopped hormones, and began removing the physical marks of transition. The detransition brought extreme anguish. She descended into rage, self-harm, heavy drinking, and obsessive suicidal thoughts, while fighting to reclaim her legal identity before Swiss authorities. She says a supernatural encounter at church broke her despair, and step by step she felt her romantic attachment to her ex-wife and her attraction to women lift away. During a flight to Canada she felt an internal barrier break, and for the first time she could enter a women’s clothing store without panic. Eight years later, she leads the ministry Trans4Freedom, supporting others in gender distress. She stresses that medical transition left irreversible damage, that her past attempt to force herself into femininity also failed, and that true peace came only through submitting to what she believes is God’s design.