“I Was Gay, She Was Trans” was the title of a June 2024 episode of The Michael Knowles Show that has garnered 6,300 comments. Knowles, a Catholic commentator at The Daily Wire, called the life experience of Nicholas and Lex Renick “one of the wildest stories I’ve ever heard.”
Now both in their late twenties, the couple were “married” as husband and husband in Las Vegas in 2020. Nicholas came out as a homosexual in high school. Lex, a female, began identifying as a male and calling herself Austin in middle school. She began hormone treatments at age 18 and got a double mastectomy two years into their “marriage.”
But the Renicks had completely renounced the LGBT lifestyle and returned to their God-given identities by the time they were interviewed by Knowles. They not only had a six-month-old daughter, but Lex was also pregnant with a second daughter.
Lex Renick appeared on The Lila Rose Show in January in a two-hour episode called “From Testosterone to Three Under Three: Lex’s Journey of Gender & Sexuality.” She gave birth to the couple’s first son on Feb. 7.
Based in Tennessee, the Renicks are today committed Christians who use their Revive Traveling Ministry to share their personal stories and encourage LGBT people to redirect their lives toward authentic Christianity. Lex has 168,000 followers on Instagram and 89,000 followers on Facebook.
She has lamented in recent social media posts that her “top surgery” robbed her of the ability to breastfeed her children, whose birth she considers a miracle and a testament to God’s mercy. She did not menstruate for the seven years she was on testosterone but conceived her first child within three months of getting off the male hormone.
“Please seek healing before surgery. Because one day you may long to nourish a child with a body that no longer can,” Lex wrote on Facebook on Feb. 11. While her body is still producing some breast milk, it cannot be expressed due to the removal of both breasts.
“I live forgiven. I live redeemed,” she wrote. “But I also live with the reminder that some decisions leave permanent marks. And I pray with tears in my eyes today to save someone else tomorrow.”
Lex recounted to Rose, a leading pro-life activist, how as a young child she attended a Christian church five days a week with her family in Southern California. Both of her parents were involved in church ministry, but at home, “behind closed doors,” there was alcoholism and adultery. She rarely saw her father after her parents divorced.
Lex was sexually abused by both men and women beginning at age five. She said the childhood trauma resulted in addiction to pornography and later contributed to her transgenderism, drug addiction, and prostitution. She regularly cut herself and had three suicide attempts by the time she reached 18.
Renick told Rose she enlisted in the military as a chaplain assistant as soon as she graduated, becoming “the first-ever openly serving transgender religious affairs specialist in the entire United States Army.” She was honorably discharged after three years.
Nic and Lex attended high school together in Big Bear Lake, California, but didn’t speak to each other, aside from a brief conversation. Nic moved to Hawaii after high school, living as a gay man and getting entangled in the New Age movement.
The pair reconnected at a coffee shop back in Big Bear Lake in 2019. Lex was “living stealth,” still calling herself Austin and presenting as a male.
They got “married” six months later — after Lex clarified she was in fact a woman. Lex was on a waiting list to get “bottom surgery” at the time. That procedure would have attempted to replace her female genitals with faux male genitals and made having children impossible.
A few months after Lex’s mastectomy, she and Nic were staying at a hotel in Indiana for Nic’s work-related training. They were professing Christians, but Lex had recently begun questioning her transgender-related life decisions.
While Nic was away at work, Lex found herself face down on the hotel room floor, tearfully imploring God to reveal if she had made her male identity a false idol. The answer was yes. She and Nic soon discerned it was God’s will for them to live as husband and wife as nature intended. Lex returned to using her given first name.
Nic, who has a Lutheran background, told Knowles he was a “lone wolf” in high school who became attracted to other boys because it seemed to be expected of him since he enjoyed being involved in theater. He said he regrets not realizing “you can have a desire without acting on it and … you don’t have to have shame for feeling those desires. I really wish somebody told me that when I was younger.”
In a 2025 interview with Fox News, Lex similarly called for greater support for vulnerable youth to help them resist pressure to join the LGBT community, which can offer a sense of belonging despite the deeply disordered reality.
“I just wish that I had someone to lovingly come alongside me and say, ‘Hey, it’s OK if you’re a tomboy,’” she said, instead of pushing confused girls to identify as lesbian or transgender. “But now we live in a world where there are no tomboys anymore.”
Lex reiterated the point while speaking with Rose in January. “The world was selling me, like, if you get on these hormones, if you get this surgery, if you do these things, you’ll feel empowered. You’ll feel better. You’ll feel comfortable. And it was a Band-Aid.”
Tremendous progress has been made over the past year toward reversing the rapid-onset insanity of the transgender movement.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” stated an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day back in office. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
More recent developments include a $2 million medical malpractice award in a lawsuit filed by a female “detransitioner” whose breasts were removed at age 16. Legal risk is now prompting hospitals and physicians to move away from so-called “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors.
Yet there remains a need for Christian role models who can use their first-hand experience to positively influence young people besieged by a popular culture that normalizes sexual deviancy. That’s where the testimony of Nic and Lex Renick, who are shooting for even more kids in the future, can help.
“My husband and I are living, breathing, walking testimonies that what the world gives is so much less compared to the fullness of what you can have in Christ,” Lex told Woman Alive magazine in 2024.
Robert Jenkins lives in Sacramento, California, and is a frequent contributor to LifeSiteNews.com.
