Does God Love Trans People? Trans VS Ex-Trans

where is the line of value judgment about what's your intention light as far as our intention of our hearts is more important to God than the fabric we wear on our body but you're intending your present is a male yeah right you're intending I present is the opposite of what God created you [Music] when I went into the transgender lifestyle I couldn't have told you anything from childhood that affected me or made me feel that way but looking back on it now I can see that there were some factors that really led me to think that way very early in life my I had a very difficult relationship with my mom and I don't blame her at all hey but I think a lot of it was she had lost two boys between my brother and I by miscarriage she was still grieving these two little boys and she was very attached to my brother because of it so because of the different treatment I really was jealous of my brother and began to act more like him and but the more that I acted like a boy the more girls begin to reject me and so looking back on it now I think that's where a lot of it started in just this rejection of the female identity and just feeling like I wasn't one of them then I was molested when I was 8 and became very sexualized and began experimenting with my own friends and then being rejected in those friendships obviously after that sexual encounter so when I was 14 I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome and so then I have this female identity that I don't want in the first place in this body that I don't want but then it's causing me nothing but pain and the doctors are telling me I'm not gonna be able to get pregnant and so I just really began to hate being female but I didn't know what to do about it back then nobody had really heard of transgender I hadn't you know so I didn't think there was anything there wasn't any kind of solution and so in high school I was trying to kind of go through the motions and I was trying so hard to find love and in relationships and guys were just treating me like trash you know and I just felt so does Carter than so rejected I was curious if anybody felt like I did because I still had not heard of transgenders but so I started looking it up on Google and I was amazed that there were people out there that felt like I did and so I found a support group and you know I went and talked to them and they're like oh you're definitely transgender and so that's when I really begin to embrace it and believe it and I went down this path for almost nine years I took massive doses of testosterone and my body began to change my voice begin to get lower ever getting that facial hair and you know I was real excited and went and had a double mastectomy in San Francisco but I was really still empty inside and my mom that I had been so angry with for years through some conversations ultimately led me to Christ and I was so excited and I couldn't believe that God saved me because I really had felt like too far gone I thought there's no way that God wants to save me so but I thought I could be a man of God and that's really how I tried to live my life and I was jealous and I was telling my friends about my faith but the Lord began to convict me and finally one night I was picturing myself standing at the judgment seat my mom had been teaching this in her Bible study and I'm like wow and I stand before Christ and he said if you stood before me tonight what name would I call I was like Oh what do you mean you know and he reminded me of John chapter 1 where it says Jesus Christ Himself is the Creator he said you cannot claim to love me and yet reject my creation and in the most loving voice I've ever heard in all my life he said let me tell you who you are and that was the moment that really began to free me you know he has given me everything the enemy stole from me and restored my feminine identity and now it's not an actor this is not me dressing up like I love and I've totally embraced being feminine so my story is that I my grew up in church and a Methodist family and really found God early on really found a relationship with Jesus and knew that I was always gonna keep that in my heart throughout my entire life because it provided me so much peace and I just started transitioning when I was 19 and before that though I really tried very very hard to be feminine I really I went to you know homecoming and prom and everything in dresses makeup hair extensions all of that went to I actually competed in Miss Ohio like it was it was that extent of I'm going to actually try so hard to prove to everybody else to like a competitive level that like I am a woman and and that I'm not masculine because I'd actually didn't want to be seen as masculine anybody that would sense that kind of inner masculinity that I felt deep down they would I didn't want to be made fun of for that I even since I was a kid I I had felt like I was like I would dress up as like Hercules and Batman and run around like that as like you know and and we're like camo and all of that and and it was when I got made fun of for wearing that like once you hit like nine or eight or you know start getting into middle school P it's no longer cute to be a tomboy and so you have to you get praised for wearing pink you get praised as a girl for acting really feminine and so I really pivoted and said you know I'm not gonna wear boys clothes anymore I'm going to try to be a woman I'm going to really seek that external validation from everybody else and that's why I ended up doing Miss Ohio and and when I was 19 I I still I did the same thing I got down on my knees after you know that that pageant that I did and I I felt like for months as much as I prayed that I was either gonna transition or or I thought it would be a greater honor to God to to end my life and really when I called my grandma who is so loving and and is so involved in the church and she said all God cares about is you be a good person and I it was like a weight lifted off my heart that like I could transition and have a relationship with Jesus and maintain that my whole life gender is the gift from God I think we know from the Bible that gender was important to God in the beginning we know that he created us in His image but the very first thing spoken about mankind is that he made them male and female and Jesus actually references us again in the New Testament when they were asking him about marriage and he said have you not heard that from the beginning he made them male and female and there there are aspects of our gender that God has given us to to complement one of one another he intended male and female to come together and to and to complement each other and to really display the the glory of God when man and woman comes together in the Covenant of marriage it's it's a picture of the gospel of man being reconciled to God and I think it's such a beautiful thing but because of the fall and because of the curse there's also a lot of tension between male female but I think it really is a beautiful gift from God I definitely think that gender is a gift from God I I do though know that there are people that for a lot of reasons fall outside of the understanding that we have in Western medicine of male and female and and there are people that are born intersex and have chromosomes that are not just XX or XY and it's not even just a small anomaly it's it's almost 2% of the population like the population of Russia being born with either ambiguous genitalia or being born with you know one ovary and one testi internally and and a lot of variations in in sex and biology that we often don't recognize when we take and just looking at like the male and female that is talked about in the Bible and those people do exist and I know that God wouldn't create those people or leave that imprint on their body if that wasn't something that was a value to to show the expansiveness that is created and and I would never say that there's anything wrong or needed to be corrected by those people and with my experience being transgender is something that has given me such a wider perspective of compassion for people that there's so much more than their body and it's interesting with with intersex we actually have a guy on our staff that's intersex you know and he as never identified as anything other than male biologists are even saying now that even though there are intersex people it is still there's a corruption in the the X X or the X Y but there are still only male or female there's no third gender just because one has like you give an example of one testi in one ovary or something that's been corrupted in the body but there's still no third or fourth or fifth there's no other gender something has gone wrong because we live in a fallen world this world was cursed by sin there's cancer there's all kinds of horrible things there's birth defects that go wrong with the body but that doesn't mean God didn't create us male or female were made in His image but we're actually born in adam's image I would never put the narrative on someone's heart that is based in fear and shame that you're born intersex or you're born transgender because of sin or because of fallenness or a brokenness within you because that only separates people further from God and and causes more pain than it does bringing people closer gender is more about identity than biology it's interesting I was actually thinking about this the other day and I felt like the Lord asked me a question he said where does identity come from and so I started thinking about identity really comes from the owner for example let's say my mother takes a little baby to a store and he finds a full body costume like a Winnie the Pooh costume with the head and the feet and everything and so she can't see the child you know and if there's a bunch of other kids in the store it may take her a long time to find her child even though she knows what her child looks like and even if she finally finds them you know the mother is not gonna leave that child in a costume forever because she loves the face that she identifies with she knows that phase it's it's God that created us it's him that gave us the identity and that relationship is so much more profound when we identify the way that he created us for me this really was about you know if I recreate myself if I give myself my own identity I'm glorifying myself but if we align ourselves with the way God created us now we're glorifying God and that's really what this life is all about glorifying God that's what we were created for so our ultimate purpose we were created to glorify God but we do you know part of how we do that I think is in aligning with how God created us we as humans place more value on the body then God does and if we need to change if we need to in order to mean why even transitioned is because I wanted to show up more fully and completely as my internal sense of self and the way that we are in this Western society is that we place value judgments on what masculinity looks like and what femininity femininity looks like and I felt called to show more this internal sense of masculinity and I feel called to do something as simple as have less less flesh on my chest or to simply on a weekly basis just take one injection of like this much testosterone and it happens to just grow facial hair and that's the way that I best communicate to everyone else that my internal sense of self is masculine i resonate in my spirit with that gender transformation can be a liberating experience I think anything in life can be liberating when it's something that we really desire this certainly was for me at first it really helped me escape the pain like I said earlier I when I started transition I was absolutely convinced that's who I was I believed I had to do this there was so much pain there attached to being female and it was very liberating and when people started to call me refer to me as a man I it was everything I ever wanted I felt so free but I think anything in life is liberating for a season but then eventually when reality sets in like we talked about earlier and you realize that this is not everything is promised to be you know and I realized that I really couldn't be a man and over time I found myself becoming a slave to that identity and I felt like I had to keep it up all the time and I'm beginning to be afraid sometimes that people found out and I was always wondering if people knew the truth you know or did they believe me and so it became a bit of a prison so after a while even though I still liked the identity at the time but it was also it wasn't as freeing as I thought it would be it definitely is the reason why people seek it out is because they're seeking liberation from from how they feel I feel most aligned looking like this moving through the world like this I actually use a picture when I talk sometimes of the picture of Jake on a tombstone not because I died physically but because I died to everything that I wanted I did not want to be a girl I didn't think there was anything I could do about it I I cried and sobbed and there was so much pain when I came home but I finally got to the place this is ultimately what changed it for me because I've heard you talking about how you died to pray it away yeah but what it ultimately came down to is I am willing to follow Christ no matter what I said lord if this kills me if I go through the rest of my life suffering feeling this way feelings still out of place in my body I'm willing to follow Jesus I'm so willing to take on pain in order to be more of what God wants me to be but never once has that looked like a calling to face what would be something like D transitioning and but why not yeah God hasn't called me in that way and I've no saying is by my in I mean in his word you know he says that for a man to dress like a woman or for a woman to dress as a man it's an abomination to the Lord and it doesn't say that that person is God never says it's someone he created I just I mean even something like that like clothing we put a value judgment ah that's woman's clothing or that's men's clothing and and it's our human perception that but if God did it that God like a like a fashion designer God made like this fabric and that said this fabric a dress this shape is woman's clothing and then this like put so much value judgment on the shape of a of cloth that if you were to wear this other shape of cloth based on the value judgment we put out gender then you're gonna experience eternal damnation and it's I think it's what's culture yeah it's what's culturally accepted as male or female but for example you know so God knows the essence and the intention of and takes into context society it takes into context the intention of the person wearing it and takes all these things into consideration right but if a man wears a dress for example that that's maybe a little more obvious because in in our culture women wear pants but they still look different but if Y in where is that right have we moved into a place where it is acceptable for women to wear pants is that not glorifying God if they don't always wear a dress and where is the line of value judgment and how about what's your intention right far away our intention of our hearts is more important to God than the fabric we wear on our clothes right you're intending your present is a male yeah right you're intended I present is the opposite of what God created you I'm intending to present in the way that feels most in alignment with my internal essence and it just happens to without any value judgment of negative or positive or any or fear or judgment or anything like that it just happens to resonate more with masculinity but our truth cannot be based on feelings like even things that God has spoken to me if they don't line up with the word the word is always we go back to your it's our only source of truth there's been so much love in what you said and I've resonated so deeply with it and I love talking about Christ and there hasn't been anything that you've said that's made me feel like that's the next right step in the way for me to serve God and I haven't heard anything that anyone up until this point is said that would make me feel like that's gonna glorify God more and I'm so open and cured like I'm your I'm your most unlike your ideal audience for this message and because I have such a willingness and and I just have to trust the internal compass and the kind of like hey me and you God like what do you want me to do next and it's to have conversations like this and it's to continue to be loving and kind and serve and it's continue to be open and curious and loving to to hear her and have compassionate communication with people that are in faith with God just as I am that's what I'm calling to what I've been called to do and and I love Jesus just as much as you do and I just I have a lot of appreciation for you thank you you know I have a lot of appreciation for you to coming here thank you for being willing to come and talk about this and I hear the passion and the love you have for other people no I just to me we just have to align ourselves by the Word of God Jesus said if you love me will obey my commands most importantly I think is the gospel of Jesus Christ I mean we know that he came in and God was made flesh he dwelt among us he was crucified on the cross he was dead and buried and raised a new life but see we want to stop there what we think oh great look what Jesus did for me and that's kind of only half the gospel you know we know that himself because we could never earn enough favor with God for our own external works we we could not work our way to God but God Himself entered his own creation he came he crucified himself on a cross on a tree that he made you know if you think about the wood came from a tree that he made himself allowed him to be nailed to it it was dead and buried and raised to new life but we often want to stop there and we think you know it's great what Jesus did for me now I'll go on and live my own merit you know however I want but Paul says what shall we say then shall we continue in sin so that grace or the grace may increase may it never be how shall we that died to sin live any longer in it or do you not know that all of us that were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death therefore we have been buried with him through baptism so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father we too shall also walk in newness of life for if we have been United with him in the likeness of his death certainly we shall be in the likeness of his resurrection knowing this that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be done away with so that we would no longer be slaves to sin and so that's kind of the rest of the gospel that we so often don't hear is that Christ calls us to completely die to self to be willing to abandon it at all and so that's when I expect to what I said in the very beginning when Christ asked me I was down in this deep dark pit I couldn't get out of it and it's not because I hated being transgender I realized it would never be real but I did not want to be a girl I was reading his word day in and day out and consumed by the Word of God because I knew it was the truth His Word is alive and he said his word will never pass away so as the conviction came on me stronger and stronger because of the faith that was being built by the Word of God that's when I saw myself in the dark pit I couldn't get out of I knew he was my only way out and I walked away from it all by faith in Christ that he would one day set me free but even if he didn't even if I struggled with those feelings the rest of my life you was enough to follow Christ [Music]

Channel: Anchored North

Views: 686,149

Rating: 4.8664966 out of 5

Keywords: anchored north, transgender and christian, lgbt and christian, honest discourse, middle ground, jubilee, jubilee media, transgender, gender dysphoria, trans rights, LGBT, LGBTQ, equal rights, gender transition, transgenderism, christianity and sexuality, transgenderdate, ashton colby, laura perry, transgender rights, gay and religious, transgender woman, transgender man, transgender to transformed, christian testimonies, detransition, ex transgender with regret, evangelism

Id: _nMMoWwDbbg

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020