God will give us all we need for living a truly good life, saving us from the lust and rottenness all around us. 2 Peter 1:3
In a recent issue of a popular woman's magazine, there was an article entitled, "Boys will be Girls." It told about the effects of the feminist movement upon the gender confusion that prevails in our society today.
The International Foundation for Gender Education claims that an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the male population likes to cross-dress.
Testimonials arrive in our office on a regular basis from bewildered men, most of whom are heterosexual, some of whom are married, expressing their pain in wanting to be able to dress like and be women on a part-time basis.
Gender-dysphoria is a much more wide-spread phenomenon than our society is willing to admit. And I believe that the feminist movement has played a large role in the deception. Veronica Vera, a devout feminist and transvestite/transsexual advocate, said in the October Issue of "Bazaar Magazine" that cross-dressing is "the flip side of the feminist movement. The feminist movement was all about needing to share in the male experience, to get out of the bedrooms and into the boardrooms. But, meanwhile, men have suffered from what I call Venus envy. There is a deep need in men to feel soft, to be glamorous, to do housework."
More has gone into the shaping of trans-gender confusion than the feminist movement, but it has played a very significant role in ushering in untold suffering in men and women's lives.
ENVY is the root evil in the trans-gender lifestyle. This envy of the feminine (or masculine, by girls) is deeply entrenched in one's thoughts and emotions by puberty. The normal joys of childhood are stolen by the incessant demands of envy. When a little boy should be praying for a new Tonka truck, he earnestly prays to wake up in the morning as a girl.
Rita Bennett has addressed gender dysphoria: "What causes a man to want to lose his identity? In one example his parents had wanted a girl from birth. Children who are not wanted (or whose gender is strongly rejected) don't have a sense of being. Serious illnesses can also have harmful psychological effects on children. Then, too, he may have felt he never could measure up to what had been modeled as male."
The underlying difficulty (sin) in the trans-gender confusion is envying the role of the opposite sex. It appears that life would have been much more tolerable if only God would have assigned another sexual role. Many extol the notion that they are simply caught in a "third-sex" syndrome. Others profess that they are simply expressing their dominant feminine/masculine side when cross-dressing.
ENVY IS THE BASIC ROOT ISSUE that needs to be directly confronted in unlocking the mystery and confusion for the transvestite and transsexual. A simple (yet profound) exercise is to write out just what one envies about the other sex. The next part of the exercise is to record those things you find so distasteful about your own sex. It is easy to see that envy is the nutrient feeding our inner lust.
Cross-dressing is not just an innocent act. It is the result of deep-seated envy and will never be satisfied with the status-quo of occasional episodes of crossing gender lines in mannerisms and dress.
As one sibling said of her transsexual brother, "I realized that his lifetime struggle had not been to become something or someone, but to destroy something. It seemed to me that Jim was shaking his fist at God, saying, `I hate the way you made me, and see . . . I did something about it.'"
Envy nourishes our lusts and will never be satisfied until we are consumed by fantasies, self-destructive behavior, and excruciating emotional pain.
Ultimately, we lose touch with reality and jeopardize our relationship with God. As one famous transsexual female impersonator said on a recent television talk-show, "Reality and I have parted company a long time ago."
It is helpful to understand that "Blessed (happy, to be envied ) is the man who is patient under trial and stands up under temptation, for when he has stood the test and been approved, he will receive (the victor's) crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him. Let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted from God; for God is incapable of being tempted by (what is) evil and He Himself tempts no one. But every person is tempted when he is drawn away, enticed and baited by his own evil desire (lust, passions). Then the evil desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully matured, brings forth death. Do not be misled, my beloved brethren." James 1:12-16 (Amplified, emphasis mine)
People have expressed it in many ways, but for us who fight against the compulsions to cross-dress, it seems like a war that we cannot win. One such "fighter" said it this way: "I don't feel like I've made any progress at all with this. Since we last talked I have cross-dressed several times. I've given into cross-dressing for so long now that I don't know what I would do without it. Is it really possible for me to ever be normal, with the regular sexual drives? I don't ever remember being normal and I'm really having a problem seeing myself that way. Can God put something in me that has never existed before? If I get rid of this aspect of my life, what will there be to replace it?"
Cross-dressing contains many of the basic elements of an addiction. And any program of recovery will admit that the path to recovery is paved with "relapse." We cannot expect to get over such a powerfully ingrained form of behavior overnight. We have learned to "medicate our pain" through an imaginative entrance into a fantasy world of the other sex, by cross-dressing.
Understanding that relapse is a very real part of the recovery process does not give us license to cross-dress, but does help us better deal with the after-effects of facing up to its consequences. It is progress that we are after, not instant perfection!
Something I devised and have found useful in combating the addictive cycle is recalling the acronym: ADDICT.
Anger, anxiety, awful: When negative emotions flood into us, we are to be alerted that we are being set up for a downward spiral of self-destructive behavior, such as cross-dressing.
Dependence: We depend upon the Lord (and the Body of Christ) for intervention and help to escape the temptation (I Cor 10:13) or we depend upon our own ingenuity, which usually fails.
Demand our own way: We rationalize our thoughts and feelings, blaming others for the way we are. We excuse the behavior, saying such things as "I am a woman in a man's body," or "I cannot live without expressing my feminine self." When we get to this stage in the cycle, it is too late to turn back to rational thinking.
Imaginations: The man creates the woman he would rather be in order to momentarily escape the responsibilities, pressures, demands of his assigned gender role.
Cruising: Going to the dress shop to imagine oneself in the clothing is one such way for gaining sexual arousal. The pornographic book store provides another means of erotic stimulation. There are many more!
The act: Cross-dressing in private or public for the erotic "high."
By Jerry Leach