Resisting Sin

6 February 2010 by kathleen.

I wrote earlier about walking the edge of sexual stimulation and sin: reading the Ann Landers and Dear Abby columns because in that section of the paper there regularly appeared lingerie ads, including ads for girdles (which at the time I found particularly exciting). So, yes, I would read Ann Landers for the advice, but I would also sneak a peek at the ads on the adjacent pages.

Around age 12 it slowly began to dawn on me that an erection was sinful. So if thinking about something made my penis swell and feel real good, then thinking about that thing must be sinful. So I made up stories about whether an erect penis really feels good, or whether it really itches and I wish it would stop. The stories allowed me to focus on the negative — resisting sin — instead of acknowledging the positive feelings that were within me.

For the purposes of this essay it isn’t important whether or not what I did was sinful. What is important is that I was perceiving my behavior to be evil or deviant; I didn’t see that my behavior arose from a fundamental difference in my essential nature. The conventional belief, I think, is that, however we do our transgender thing, we do it for sexual pleasure, period. Because the pleasure so derived does not arise from hetero-sex, there must be something wrong with it; the deviance of the pleasure we get makes the pleasure itself — and us — bad. Thus, I thought I was “bad”, and that to be good I had to resist being bad.

I wanted to be a good boy; thinking of my behavior as bad enabled me to objectify and distance myself from whatever I wanted but didn’t think I should have. The reality was that at age 15 wanting to wear women’s clothes arose from my essence and not from evil behavior or even temptation to evil behavior. But instead of recognizing that, I put the desires “out there” away from me by saying the behavior was bad.

Looking back now, in my 60’s — looking back from a place of loving myself — I am confident that my interest in women’s clothes was an expression of my nature. That my interest coincided with my sexual pleasure was not coincidental, but neither was it fundamental. My interest remains fixed on the feminine even though the intensity of the sex drive has diminished. I assert, furthermore, that the interest arises from my essence, from the nature of my being: transsexual. I didn’t understand that, couldn’t comprehend it, refused to face it when I was in my teens. And so, while I thought I was resisting sin, I was in fact resisting my nature and avoiding my essence.

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