Testimony

My Christian Faith

I am attempting something here that has never worked out before, writing a “short” testimony. This version derives from a comment I once made somewhere, that garnered no response but that seemed to me to be a step in the right direction for getting this written. Since then I sometimes edit it for clarity or to add footnotes. I have also redacted a thing or two so as not to identify former churches (unless a reader happened to belong to one of them at the same time I did). If you don’t know what this kind of testimony entails, or if you do, read on.

I emerged into life outside the womb after surviving, with my mother, a life and death struggle just to get out. I was postterm, my mother was a small and not terribly healthy woman, and my head was too large to pass through the birth canal. Forceps were employed. My growth and development thereafter were problematic, and the problems have persisted in one form or another throughout life.

That was in 1950, and my parents were both WWII veterans, five years afterward. My father had been an Army Air Corps fighter pilot and my mother a Navy WAVE administrative assistant. They were raised in what we would now call strong “conservative” Christian traditions and yes, they were Republicans. I would describe them as having been fundamentalists, although I should say that I tend to regard that term in a positive, historical light, while acknowledging the serious problems that can come with it.

I was thus brought up in the church, being what some might have called back then a “legacy Christian”, born into the church. My first memories of church date to somewhere around 4 years old and are of my parents trying out different churches, especially independent Bible churches “that still taught the truth” as my father would say. I understand now that they were coping with the influence of modernism — as in the “Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy”. Look it up if you aren’t familiar with it.

In the meantime, I had a big problem. Several big ones, really, but one especially big one where the church was concerned. I was and am transsexual. For that reason my testimony is unusual, even for a testimony¹. Outwardly I appeared to be a normal boy, although I didn’t quite act like one, much to my parents’ frustration, and inwardly things were physiologically askew. I had brain damage from the forceps birth² as well as an endocrine disorder, accompanied by other issues that were hereditary. I have detailed that in two other articles, The Meaning of Trans and Puberty Blockers.

My parents noticed that I had problems, but they waited to see if they would go away. None of this even began to be diagnosed until I after I turned 18, started college, and was able to seek my own medical care through the campus counseling and health centers. That led to my father telling me, at 19 years old, what happened at my birth.

I became aware of my gender identity situation at a very early age (I didn’t have words for it at the time) — too early to be sure of when it was — and I quickly learned that I could never talk about it with anyone. I eventually came to understand that "my kind" was hated by the church, not to mention society, though I was raised in the church. Doctors and pharma, on the other hand, were worshiped by much of the church like gods³, and people couldn’t believe that prescription drugs could be a cause of transgenderism or transsexualism (whatever these might have been called back then).

Thankfully, one of my childhood churches, though having very serious doctrinal problems, promoted skepticism of doctors, taught about pharmakēia in scripture⁴, and promoted healthy eating and living. They were, however, of no help regarding transsexualism or anything LGBT.

In my earlier years I had an intuitive understanding of my problem that I couldn’t have explained, but I knew that I had to hide what was going on with me — it felt to me like a matter of life and death that I do so.

My father returned to the Air Force as a reserve officer⁵ when I was four, and we moved regularly to new assignments, usually lasting about two years each. I received some Christian teaching at home, and some in Sunday school, which I remember attending from first grade through sixth. It wasn’t evangelical, I don’t remember the subject of baptism coming up, and if anything was said about sharing the gospel or receiving Jesus as our savior, it wasn’t heavily emphasized. This was very different from my later adult experiences with evangelical churches, which continue today.

I do remember third grade Sunday school at a Presbyterian church — evidently not a modernist one — where we had catechism and memorized Bible verses, and I received my own personalized King James Bible for my successful memory work. I wore the pages out of that thing as an adult. I know that the gospel was in the catechism, even though I don’t remember what was said about it.

My father eventually succumbed to modernist thinking, after taking modernist Bible-related classes on the side while studying for his master’s degree in meteorology while in the Air Force. By the time I was 12 or so, he had stopped attending church and had adopted his own personal version of Christianity that he remained with until his death. His view of churches was not good, and I was influenced by that. Shortly before his death, however, when I was 32, he encouraged me to return to them anyway, and I eventually did, twice, at ages 40 and at 64.

My mother had been having issues with churches as well, and at age 12 I remember us “church shopping” together, visiting various nearby churches, but not finding anything that satisfied her. We encountered one church, however, through the radio, with which my mother gradually became involved. It was very gradual — requiring years before we actually attended a church service — the details seem not important — but it did lead to my mother and I studying the Bible intensively, together. To be clear, however, this church was one of those described in Walter Martin’s The Kingdom of the Cults at that time. It was heterodox, to say it politely. It was my mother’s church until she died.

After I turned 21 I left that church for 19 years — not anything unusual for someone that age in the 1970’s⁶ — returning for 8, leaving again for 3 1/2, trying to return again, this time to an evangelical church with help from friends, but soon coming face-to-face with anti-LGBT rhetoric coming from the pulpit, and leaving again for another 12 years before finally returning to stay. God dragged me back twice through direct interventions in which I gave my life to Jesus, even more emphatically the second time. But God is like that. The "church", not so much. I had to learn, finally, that "the church" is not God.

My first eight-year return began with my mother’s church, the one I had left at 21. I went there on a personal mission following the first “intervention”, to test whether its teachings were true. Some of them had changed, but most had largely remained intact. I was finally baptized there, something that wasn’t possible when I was with them previously. I didn’t know why that was at the time (when I was 18-21), but I came to realize, from recalling our conversations, that it was because the earlier pastors thought I was gay. Close but no cigar for them. I am asexual, as I explain elsewhere. But for whatever reason, now I could be a member and I even joined the church choir, directed by a friend of mine from the earlier days. I wasn’t a singer, but I took lessons and wound up in the tenor section after learning basic vocal technique. (Alto, nowadays.)

During my time there as an adult I read the Bible all the way through seven times, at about two times per year, where I had only read it a single time before, at age 19. The teachings of that church proved to have many, many biblical problems, and I was preparing to depart to I knew not where. But then the church began to acknowledge those same problems, and I decided to hang around for a while longer to see what would happen.

What happened was that the church splintered into factions that favored the older teachings. A remnant remained, holding to the newer teachings, which were essentially evangelical, but I decided to move on to another church that had similarities but that already held to the orthodox evangelical traditions and wasn’t just learning about them. Most of my friends were doing the same, going either to evangelical churches or to the splinter groups. There was no reason to stay, and I had a connection through one friend to another particular church.

The new (for me) church was a good one, and I have no direct complaints against them to this day.⁷ I again joined the choir, and I took my first evangelism class there. There was no place there for transsexuals, however, and my problems with that were forever becoming worse as I continued to hide everything inside. Finally one day it all exploded in my head, and I took the 3 1/2 year break from church, followed by the tentative and short-lived return to the church with the LGBT-condemning pastor mentioned above.

There is a lot that I am leaving out because it involves the privacy of other people.⁸ All I can say is that the left-out part was not anything unusual for closeted transsexuals, and that it served as the trigger for the “explosion”. I had had my fill of Christian churches and the Bible and I went, the very next week, to a local ultra-liberal, ultra-modernist, everything-affirming, proudly heretical, bring-your-own-god “church”, joined their choir after two weeks, and joined the church a short while later. That lasted 12 years, a record by far.

During four of those 12 years I transitioned, male-to-female, with surgery, at 53-57 years old and with full informed consent (unlike what it going on today), and my life became considerably more livable. It was a compromise, and I knew that well. In a better world, a better solution would have been available if even necessary, but I only had this world to work with.

I did not somehow "become a woman; rather I am whatever it is that I am and I stopped hiding that. It's something different, but very much "not male" -- I never knew the adult male behaviors myself, and never particularly cared for them in men. I was and am physically weak, being deficient in both “male” and “female” steroid hormones. There were women’s behavioral things I would need to know, and I worked with a consultant to learn them. For the most part, however, I had already learned from my mother. It was automatic.

My puberty had faltered and fizzled for want of adequate hormones, specifically the "sex steroids" dues to an insufficiency in a precursor, leaving me asexual and sterile. I had experienced a built-in form of "puberty blocker", though not as damaging and dangerous as the pharmaceuticals being administered to children today as if a form of child sacrifice. As I have mentioned elsewhere, at puberty the other kids went to dances and out on dates, and I went for long walks by myself. I like walking.⁹

All that said, I have a clear connection with the female side of the human race and always have, something that I thoroughly lack with regard to the male side, and always have. There’s no “fluidity”. I dress accordingly, and I participate in women’s activities. I wasn’t sure about that at first, when I parted company with the “affirming” churches, but I was invited in by the women. I don’t conceal what I am, but I don’t broadcast it either.

How exactly can this work? I don’t know, but God has had a hand in it. The way it works is not perfect, but it is sufficient. I find it ironic, however, that I have felt more welcome in the “liberal” heterodox churches than in the orthodox evangelical ones.

I transitioned for the usual reasons revolving around gender dysphoria, but also because I had learned that my endocrine disorder put me at high risk for cancer — through my own research, not from anything my doctors told me or even were aware of — and I was hoping to avoid cancer. It was the more important consideration. I took too long to transition, however, and had to deal with cancer treatment during transition. It would appear that God had planted the cancer concern in my mind, as something I would listen to if not to Him directly. Think what you will, but I am alive and reasonably well at 74 because of it, and free of pharmaceuticals and “supplements” (pharmaceuticals in disguise).

Seven years after transition and after the second divine “intervention“ I left my transition church and returned to a Christian church, but to a "modern/affirming" one. I joined the choir as usual and I poured myself into supporting that church. They drafted me onto their church board right after I joined at about the six month mark (as usual). It was was a liturgical church, my first and only, and the gospel was to be found in the liturgy and, to some degree, in the choir music. I would later find myself asking over and over “where is the gospel here?”, other than in those two places.

I loved being at that church, but after three years I was led away to a nearby evangelical church that was aligned with my reawakening faith. I am on my third of those now in this stretch, and my sixth choir, but I have only the One God, and I am not leaving Him again, a conviction that was thoroughly tested by witnessing the behavior of the larger evangelical church in 2020 and beyond.

My original health problems—there were several as I mentioned, a type of autism being not the least, from the brain damage—continue to take their predictable toll, and I can't do as much in-person volunteer work now, but I am finding more that I can do online.¹⁰ I actively participate in church life to the extent that I can, although rather on the periphery. I have been a choir member on and off now for over 30 years, however, and still am, livestream and all. I have also in the past taught Sunday school, led an on-campus small group, and I am presently a screens operator for my traditional (i.e. “not contemporary”) service, for the projection screens used during services.

The most unhealthy things I ever did were to hide and to flee. Yet even in all the time away, some 35 years, God remained with me. We are together still.

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Related:

• The Meaning of Trans

• Puberty Blockers

1. The ones I am accustomed to hearing often seem to involve a life of crime, or something like that. I was basically trying to be good growing up, and to get along with people, although I had my bad episodes, and I was often told that I was not trying hard enough, whatever that meant. It was all pretty dull.

2. [Added] The damage could have been direct or indirect. My father told me about my head being misshapen, but there is other neurological damage that may have resulted from asphyxiation.

3. I call this “medical idolatry”. It has not ceased.

4. See my comments on this subject in Comments on Revelation 18:23, but do read the footnotes. The post needs a major rewrite.

5. Quite possibly as an embedded "intelligence” asset. But that’s a story for another day. Or maybe never.

6. I sometimes forget that that church believed Jesus was returning in the 1970’s, and that when He didn’t return on schedule many of us left, rightly I think. Another reason was the refusal to baptize me, which I do mention here, and there were other reasons as well. But there were better ways I could have done things, like finding another church, for example.

7. Although I have since discovered that the particular congregation I joined was somewhat of an exception in an otherwise quite problematic and somewhat heterodox denomination.

8. It also involves my major attempt to “cure myself”. Didn’t work.

9. Although with more help from Pharma, I find that I can’t do much of it any longer.

10. “Online” does seem to be tapering off now. I have someone I mentor, and other in-person activities still, with yet-unfulfilled hopes for starting Discovery Bible Studies.