Originally Posted by
Roberta Marie
Veronica,
What follows is my personal experience in getting from roughly where you are to where I am today, some 30 years later. There is also a lot of my opinion, and yes, there is even some mention of my own religious views. No one has to believe what I do, I don’t expect that. But it has a lot of bearing on how I got to where I am. I don’t know if hearing my story will help you determine yours, so you can take it with a grain of salt or hit delete. I do apologize for the length of my response. Once I get started, . . . .
There is very little sexual connection to crossdressing for me, although that has not always been the case. I started to crossdress when I was between 6 and 9 years old, before I had much of a concept of what sex was all about. It wasn’t until I started going through puberty that crossdressing started to have sexual overtones. But then again, for a teenage boy, what doesn’t have sexual overtones. As I matured into adulthood, the sexual ties to crossdressing gradually weakened, and now there is little connection between the way that I’m dressed and my sexual arousal.
Being raised in a Catholic household, I found out rather quickly that my predilection to wearing girls’ clothes was something that I needed to hide, and I had many of the same guilt feelings that have already been expressed. When I got married, the guilt was exacerbated by hiding it from my wife, and later from my 5 kids. I also hoped that I could hide this from God, although, by that time attending a Presbyterian church, I knew that that was not possible. It wasn’t until I was in my mid 40s that I started to gain some understanding of what it is to be transgendered (in the broad sense), and to accept it as part of who I am. But I still hid it from my wife and kids for fear of losing them.
At some point, after a lot of prayer and research, I came to the conclusion that there was no reason to hide my crossdressing from God. He made me this way, so He already knew about it. So I made a deal with God (or so I thought) that as long as crossdressing did not interfere with my relationship with Him it would be OK. But I soon found that it was interfering, and purged for the umpteenth and last time. After more prayer and study, it came to me that my crossdressing was not really the curse that I had always believed it to be. Rather, it was a gift. God created me this way for a reason, He gave me this gift. What was the sin was what I was, or was not doing with this gift.
I believe that I have been very blessed in my life, showered with gifts, and in response to those blessings I want to do something in return. That something is to serve God’s people (we are all God’s people, even those that believe in some other form of God, or that believe in no God) by using the gifts that He has given to the best of my ability. The sin that I had been committing was not putting on women’s clothes, but in not using this gift to serve others. Being transgendered is not a sin. What we do or don’t do with it can be a sin.
Now my wife and kids know that I’m transgendered. My wife is accepting and supportive. My kids are at various levels of accepting and supportive. And I’m still trying to figure out how best to use this gift.