If Only Everyone Understood the Tug and Pull

It’s so easy for people (mostly modern day Christians) to simplify a struggle–this struggle especially. It’s easy to say you would never find yourself dressing up like a woman when you never feel the urge to do so. It’s still something that doesn’t always register with me. I still like to separate myself from those times because I want the two to be separate. But, they aren’t separate. She spills over into my every day. We all know the struggle of fighting against it. And we all know the terrible crossroads it brings us to: if we continue to fight, the pressure will only make us worse people to everyone around us; if we give in, we have no idea where our stopping point will be.

There are times I wish this same struggle plagued everyone. How many people could remain fully male when part of them is female? Could anybody live out this struggle and remain clean? Wouldn’t it wear them down to a raw place, where their irritation would spread to everyone around them? I know this is what happened to me before deciding to give V some room. I went on for years fighting, trusting that God could deliver me if I just stayed away from it long enough. I remember I decided one day I wouldn’t do it anymore. And for nine months straight I didn’t. I was convinced it was gone… And then, out of nowhere, it returned just as strong as before, as if I had only stopped for a day or two. I know the struggle of trying to carry this cross. And to continue to do so, to continue to wake up everyday to a fight, is guaranteed to put me in an early grave. Nobody can live under a constant battle.

So, when Christians so flippantly dismiss someone’s struggle with a simple patch, such as, “If you truly love God you will live your life in the spirit and not in the flesh–you will carry your cross,” it makes me wish they had the same struggle. I am a Christian man. I love Jesus dearly. And there was a time I saw any struggle with the LGBT community as simple sin with a simple cure: Jesus. But it isn’t so easy. If I could stop, I would. If I could just be a man, I would.

Even as I live in the skin of V from time to time, when I put her away and take the reins again, I am left with this lingering thing. A man is staring back at me in the mirror, and –for the most part– I’m happy with who I see. But I still think about that woman and how it felt while in her skin. While in the middle of the urge, it’s the only place I want to be. If I could only find a genie to give me a wish in that moment, I would wish for the ability to switch between genders at will. Such a strange and confusing place for the mind to go.

I’m sure many of you know this same feeling. And I’m sure many of you, just like me, deal with a split desire to never leave the skin of the woman again. At times I wonder if I would qualify as transgender. I don’t hate the body that I’m in, but if I were to wake up tomorrow as V, I don’t imagine I would miss the man all that much. Of course this is just an imagination, because the reality is far different. To really embrace V for life, I would have to change the lives of everyone else around me. My little girls forced to trade in their father; my wife forced to lose her husband; my brothers forever losing their brother; my mom forever losing her son…

There is so much sacrifice required to live the way we would feel most comfortable. If this were everybody’s struggle, how many could say it was easy?

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