Not on my own

On occasion I find that I am challenged as to how I can maintain my Christian Faith, while also identifying as transgender, well, I will admit that over the years I have had quite a struggle with this one. I know that for many people the two simply do not seem compatible and I fully expect that people will continue to be challenge me on this, and I do not have a problem with that.

I believe in a God who is transformational, a God who heals, a God who cares passionately for each and every one of us, a God who knows my name, and has chosen me as his adopted child, A God who is developing and molding me into a closer likeness to himself; now why would he care what I wear?   But of course it is much more complicated than that!

We often confuse what we hear from the pulpit, or indeed read in our newspapers and pick up from society with what is actually in scripture, there is only one verse (Deuteronomy 22:5) in the whole of the Bible that appears to concern crossdressing, but it is very specifically about crossdressing, even if the Rabbinic writings suggest that it is primarily concerned with either religious practise and / or military service, however there is a popular view that having a divergent gender identity is unchristian.

We see the outworking of that attitude in the USA at the moment as more and more laws are being put through legislatures under the guise of religious freedom, that are in fact attacking transgender people, preventing them from going about their daily lives with the protection of law.

For most of my life I bought into the popular idea that crossdressing, transvestism, and transgender were more or less the same thing and all equally evil! So when I became a Christian I very much saw my Crossdressing as something that I needed to be cured of.   I struggled and I prayed, I struggled and endured, and I continued to pray; yet this thing was not taken away from me, maybe like Paul I had to endure this "thorn in my flesh", but God had cured me in other ways so why not this?

I know God wants the best for me, because he told me so. he has plans for me, and those plans are good! I have written elsewhere on this Blog about my own personal journey from cross dresser to Trans Woman, but not so much the part that my faith played in first preventing it, and then in facilitating it.

It was after a series of intensive prayer meetings with a couple of ladies that I came to the conclusion that God loves me, forgives me and wants to heal me.  These two good ladies came to the same conclusion, they just expected God to heal me in a different way, the way I had previously been expecting and the way my prayers had been anticipating. God wanted me to live a full, loving and homogeneous life, free of the gender confusion that I was enduring, I had been expecting God to heal me by making me a normal Cisgendered man,instead he choose that I should become the woman he had always meant me to be. I was born into an imperfect world, and that led to me being born this way, just like any other congenital condition, it was not God's plan that I was born this way, but he does want me to be whole, and healed, I had to embrace who and what I am, and live the life I had been given to the full.

It is only through God's healing power that I am where I am now, it is only through the knowledge of his unconditional love that I have been able to engage in this process of transition.   I wonder how much, and how often we limit God's healing when we try to impose on him how we think he should heal us?