One of the things I lately have come to accept is that I don’t have a private life. If any of my personal experiences might help you, and even if it embarrasses me, I no longer have the right to keep it from you. So, okay, here is a big one. I was born transgendered.
Conventional wisdom tells us that infants cannot form memories, but one of my most traumatic memories arose when I was less than a year old. I was toddling naked down a hallway. I still recall the leaves-and-vines wallpaper and the sense of vast space above. My mother and I were heading toward the bathroom to accomplish bath-time when I realized with horror that something major was missing from this body. I stopped walking. It was my oddly mature thoughts at the moment that have stuck in my mind forever.
I thought, “Oh. I must be the other kind this time.” I tried to make that be okay. But I recall as if it were yesterday the devastating sense of loss, and the thought that I couldn’t bear to go through a whole long lifetime as “the other kind.” I was only maybe eleven months old. Already I wanted to give up and start over.
Instead, I grew up as a tomboy. I competed with boys incessantly, proud to outdo them all in school and to climb trees better and physically beat up any boy who challenged me. I realize now that into my teens I was vaguely attracted to girls, and to this day I understand most men better than I understand most women. I still find things that are supposed to interest females to be so boring that I never have had a facial, a manicure, a pedicure, a massage, a makeover, or a day in a spa. I still hate to shop. I cook so poorly that for decades my husband has done most of our cooking.
It was seeing a picture of an eight-year-old girl dressed as a boy, with her hair in a boy-cut, her name changed, and everyone she knew now instructed to treat her as a boy that made me feel that I must speak out. If someone had told me at the age of eight or ten or twelve that I could be a boy, I would have done whatever that would take in a heartbeat! And I would have destroyed my own life.
This notion that transgendered children are mistakes to be fixed is yet one more piece of well-meant folly that comes from our culture’s utter cluelessness about what really is going on. Here are three facts gleaned from the afterlife evidence that will help you put this issue into better perspective:
- We plan the details of each lifetime. In particular, we choose our gender.
- We tend to live a series of lives as the same gender, and to incarnate repeatedly in the same culture, probably because doing that requires less adjustment to new circumstances and lets us better focus on the specific spiritual lessons we build into each lifetime.
- When we make a gender or a cultural switch, we can have trouble with our adjustment. If the switch is of culture, we might find it difficult to fit in at first. We might rebel; the effect can be highly variable. If the switch is of gender, then we might have early feelings that we were born the wrong sex, but I am no longer as sure as I once was that these possible effects include homosexuality. I’ll say more about this in a moment.
What fixed the problem for me was puberty. When the boys’ hormones started to flow, I no longer could beat them physically; and when my own hormones really got going, I started to find my male friends attractive. By the time I was in my latter teens, I fit comfortably into the serious-minded end of the female spectrum. And here I have remained.
Now that I know more about myself, I realize that my being female was essential to the purpose of my life! Here is what I have learned:
- I have nearly always been male. It turns out that my primary guide, Thomas, and I have been comrades down the centuries in trying to right Christianity’s wrongs. I am assuming that when I graduate, I will return to being male, and I have lately been told that I will be back before long to teach again for the Master. Fair enough. But I want no more babyhood surprises!
- I chose to be female in this lifetime so I could better teach what I was coming in to teach. For an old woman to be calling on all of Christendom to begin to follow Jesus is perhaps less offensive than it would be if a man of any age were to say the same thing. At least, that seems to have been my pre-birth theory.
So transgendered children are children who have lived a series of lives as one gender and have chosen the opposite gender for this lifetime. Based upon
my own experience, it seems likely that in each case (a) the new gender was consciously chosen, and (b) it will fully kick in at puberty. So for our culture to begin in childhood to reinforce our children’s gender confusion is not only unhelpful, but it might well be literally destroying some of those children’s lives.
I don’t know how this relates to homosexuality. I used to believe that people who were attracted to members of their own sex also were people who had switched genders for this lifetime, and that still might be right. But now I am beginning to suspect that, like all the other challenges of our lives, being gay may simply be another thing that we choose as part of our plan for spiritual growth in this lifetime. Why should it not be?
There is evidence that many of those who were owners of slaves or Jim Crow racists chose to come back soon thereafter as oppressed black people. Their purpose was to experience and learn from the same hardships they had inflicted on others. Wouldn’t it be delightful if the bigots who oppress homosexuals today will be so remorseful after their deaths that they will choose to be gay themselves the next time around?
The answers to most of our questions will come only when mainstream scientists turn from studying less than five percent of what even they have determined exists, and begin instead an intensive investigation of what actually is going on. Meanwhile, the parents of that eight-year-old girl who is being told now that she can grow to be a man are acting out of deepest love. I don’t blame them! But I only ask that if your own child has any level of gender confusion, you think first before you do anything that could damage or destroy that child’s life-plan. Contact me through this website. Please let me help! If I can help even one confused modern child to grow up to be everything that she or he planned to be, then my whole life will have been worthwhile.
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/55938505@N03/19979257638″>Girls</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>