Help for Christians Who
Wish They Were the Opposite Sex
Or Even
Want a Sex Change Operation
Before moving on to more perplexing quandaries, I think it appropriate to first address the development of mild yearnings.
If the two sexes are different, yet equally blessed, and if it is human nature for the grass in the other field to always seem greener, it is inevitable that almost everyone will covet at least one or two advantages perceived as belonging to the opposite sex.
Parents often strongly desire their next child to be a particular gender, and yet with there being only about a fifty percent chance of their wishes coming true, many are doomed to crushing disappointment. Add to this mix the heart-wrenching reality that children have an inbuilt yearning to please their parents. Stir into this fact the that the sexual wounding (sex abuse) of both boys and girls is appallingly common, and that most victims gain the mistaken impression that they could have avoided their devastating ordeal had they been the opposite sex. Add to this that it always seems the other kid gets a bigger slice of the birthday cake, and it is no wonder that both men and women find themselves wishing they were the opposite sex. Often the wish is only half-hearted; sometimes it turns to envy or feeling sorry for oneself; but passions can sometimes grow to the extent of seeking a sex change. And being a devoted Christian does not make one immune to these pressures.
If you are so distraught by your gender as to consider a sex change operation, you have clearly been subjected to something very distressing. Your parents or siblings might have failed to nurture you with the respect and tenderness God wanted, someone might have broken God’s laws and his heart by sexually interfering with you, or perhaps you suffered some medical catastrophe. Regardless of the specific reason, gender frustrations are a consequence of living in a sin-marred world where God’s will is currently not done on earth as it is in heaven. The anguish caused by our ancestors and contemporaries acting contrary to divine love and wisdom ways does not mean we are justified in pointing the finger at the God whose laws they broke, but neither does it mean God is coldly indifferent to your plight. On the contrary, he is tenderly compassionate and perhaps even enraged that you suffer this way.
We might rail at God and rage at people and external forces that have shaped us, but, regardless of our past, the most powerful force shaping our future is usually ourselves. So much of who we are today – feelings, likes, dislikes, and so on – has been programmed by years of what psychologists call conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. We have done far, far more to concrete into our lives our passions, cravings and reactions than most of us dare realize. In the words of the old slice of wisdom, “Sow a thought, and you reap an act; sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character . . .”
We powerfully shape our sexuality according to how we indulge ourselves with porn, fantasies and masturbation. An unfortunate experience (such as being molested as a child by a member of the same sex) might nudge us in a particular direction, but what might have initially had a minor effect on our sexual orientation can turn major if we choose to regularly pair sexual stimulation (such as masturbation) with same-sex fantasy. Similarly, we can be the innocent victims of something that causes us to wish we were the opposite sex, but in the years following, it is we who fuel or extinguish our frustration, according to whether we choose to engage in daydreams, wishful thinking, resentment or envy.
Further down, I will share a sample of the wide range of people’s experiences in wishing they were the opposite sex. Most likely, you will be able to identify with some experiences, some will fascinate you and some will be so different to your own that they will puzzle or even annoy you. For the moment, however, I need to lay a foundation so that each of us may value our gender.
When the Almighty Lord reveals his heart concerning one of his most spectacular achievements – creation – we find that he had been delighted with each aspect of his work, declaring over and over “. . . it was good . . . it was good . . . it was good . . .” until suddenly he declared “It is not good . . .”
Here’s a Scripture I find very insightful:
God is neither male nor female, but in whatever respect one gender excels, in that respect that gender better reflects the nature of God. For example, the typically greater male physical strength – significantly more important in pre-mechanical eras than now – means that in their ability to offer the security of physical protection, men in biblical times portrayed slightly better that aspect of God. On the other hand, if women tend to be a little less callous than men, in this respect they are that bit more like God. In their ability to nourish and comfort, women typically better portray that side of God’s nature.
There is nothing inferior about being a man, nor about being a woman. The Creator loves and empowers both genders equally and makes no distinction when it comes to dignity, value, importance and so on. Many sexual stereotypes are troublesome strait jackets that are not from God.
In Real Christians Grieve I explain that having an iron grip on one’s emotions is not only not an intrinsically masculine quality, it is undesirable and not authentically Christian. In a link to that page, I cite in excess of 120 different Scriptures that refer to men crying.
Proverbs 31 reveals the biblical ideal of wife as a highly capable person with a skilled business head.
Melody did not exactly want a sex change – just a whole body change. Melody suffered from Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a serious body image problem that drives some people to suicide. I’ve shared her experience elsewhere but I find myself needing to quote a considerable portion of it here because what Melody learned through bitter experience that turned to joy, applies with equal force to gender issues.
She writes:
What I saw when I looked in the mirror was akin to a horrendous Halloween mask. I could literally watch myself “morph” into a hideous creature right before my eyes. How had I reached this point?
When I was little, my mother had never told me I was pretty, but instead allowed my siblings to make fun of me and cruelly tease me about my looks, as kids can be prone to do. I was a very sensitive child, and I would cry in my heart. More dangerous than the teasing, however, is that I believed every word they said.
As I grew older, I felt still more ugly. It even made me cry on my wedding day. I learned to smile for the world, so that no one would know how I really felt about myself. I never shared my “secret” (that I hated everything about me) with anyone. Not even my husband knew, until well into our marriage.
If anyone complimented me, I instantly disbelieved it and never let it live for even a moment. I felt they either pitied me for how I looked, or were outright liars, or had really poor taste!
I blamed everything on my looks. If someone didn’t like me, it was because they thought I was ugly. If someone got a promotion over me, it was because of how ugly I was. And so on.
Circumstances came to a head in my early thirties. I became more depressed than ever before. Thoughts came saying I was too ugly to deserve to live. The more I opened my heart to these thoughts, the stronger they became. The more I believed them, the more they “fed” me their lies. They became almost like friends, because they understood my life-long battle with my outward appearance.
My self-hatred grew.
It was often agony for me to be out in public, not only because of my deep depression, but because I thought I looked so hideous that I would scare people if they had to look at me. For my husband’s sake I would force myself to go out with him once a week, but despite my best intentions, we sometimes had to turn around and go back home because it was just too much for me.
I had known Jesus from the age of four. I knew he loved me – even in my (imagined) ugliness. But deep down, I harbored anger at God for making me so ugly, when with all his power he could have made me pretty.
I loved every verse in the Bible, except Romans 9:20, “ . . . Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “ Those words were exactly what I would rail against God. I said he made a mistake, and didn’t know what he was doing. I told him that he loved those that are pretty more than he loved me.
He didn’t answer me a word, for he is always right, and deep down I knew it. Nevertheless, I stubbornly held on to my pain and anger. Until one day . . .
In the pain of another deep depression, I stopped sidestepping that scripture and fully surrendered to the Lord. I no longer wanted to believe I had found a part of the Bible that was somehow incorrect. I was finally at a point where I would rather accept the way I looked, than carry anger toward the Lord anymore.
I still felt horrendously disfigured, non-human, ugly, monstrous. Nevertheless, I was at last willing to tell the Lord that if this is the way he made me, then I know he is all-wise, and that he does not make any mistakes, and he always chooses what is ultimately best for those who love him.
To my delight, once I gave it all to the Lord, my inner healing began. Almost immediately, he gave me the grace to love myself and accept myself, for the very first time that I could remember. In those early days after my surrender, it was God who was fighting for me, but he began teaching me how to fight for myself. After about two weeks, I was able to join the Lord in defending myself. I had never fought for myself before, only against myself. I could never fully stand before because I had been at war with myself. Now I was whole! Now, instead of seeing myself or my body as my enemy, I could unite with myself and with the Lord to fight those things that were attacking me.
I found that I could begin to look in a mirror and not cry or be disgusted. That was the first step. The enemy had lost this battle but he didn’t want to give up easily.
The Lord taught me that I had the power to stop following negative trains of thought. Just because they entered into my mind, I did not have to “join in” with their negative, demoralizing, self-critical messages. He revealed that I had the choice to not let minor things become major issues for me. We all have the choice to let minor things just waft over us, instead of letting them upset us. I do not have to act like a victim. I have the power to choose. It is up to me whether I major on a “bad hair day” or whether I refuse not to so focus on the minor as to let my mind turn it into something big.
But beyond stopping destructive thought patterns, we need to replace them with positive, truthful, self-validating and honoring messages.
The Lord showed me that unrealistic expectations of perfection would always end in sorrow. He said that to break free from misery I must be willing to let go of my infatuation with perfection. Nothing this side of heaven is perfect. In fact, he revealed that there is beauty in imperfection. Much in nature – clouds, cliffs, streams and so on – are beautiful precisely because of their imperfection and uniqueness. I needed to embrace that concept and apply it to myself.
Because I often felt as if just being me – wasn’t “enough,” I began to tell myself, “I am enough, just the way I am. God loves and accepts me just the way I am, so I will do likewise.”
The Lord sometimes dropped whole sentences into my heart, such as, “I am more than how I look.” As commonplace as that may sound, I had never in my life thought like this. Previously, I would have dismissed such thoughts – and had I done so now, I could have lost my healing – but now I was keen to grab such thoughts like a starving child grasping for crumbs. I chose to believe positive thoughts and savor them, repeating them over and over to myself.
As I continued to heal, I also found that the Lord would bring back kind words/compliments from others from my past. I used to immediately dismiss such things, but now it was like I was hearing them for the first time and was able to allow them into my heart and it also helped to heal that wound within me.
Slowly, as I walked in faith and in the victory that I had won, I began to see myself through different eyes. I began to tell myself that most of all I wanted to be beautiful in the Lord’s eyes. 1 Samuel 16:7 says that God looks not on our outward appearance, but on our hearts.
I purposed in my heart not to base my opinion of myself on what people may say or think (whether good or bad), but on those things that really matter in this life. It will not end up mattering at all what we looked like physically during our stay on earth, but it matters what we have allowed God to do in our hearts. I want to set my mind on things above, not be disappointed for all eternity by letting myself be sidetracked by earthly things (Colossians 3:2).
The Lord has brought me to a place where my greatest desire is that if anyone sees beauty in me, it is because of the beauty of the Lord within. Isaiah 53:2 says that Jesus did not have physical beauty that we should be attracted to him, but his attraction is the beauty of the Lord upon him and his godly nature.
Repeatedly, the Bible says that we are to love others as we love ourselves. I had always thought it would be prideful to love myself – and was taught that in church – but the Lord showed me that while we are not to love ourselves in a selfish or prideful way, we are allowed, and even commanded, to love ourselves. To not love as God loves is to put ourselves at odds with God. We cannot claim to be godly unless we love others (ourselves included) as God loves.
That means we must love every part of ourselves, and not reject parts we deem not acceptable. We must want and strive for the best for ourselves; to embrace and accept ourselves, even our imperfections. We should cooperate with Christ in changing those character traits that need to be changed and accept the rest of us. When we can have mercy toward ourselves, it is easy to extend it toward others, and when we can love ourselves, it is easier to love others as God loves and sees them.
Ephesians 6:11-16 – about putting on the armor of God – has taught me much, not only about thoughts affecting my attitude toward my body, but for life in general. God has shown me that I need to hold every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and to make sure it is the Truth and/or in the spirit of Truth (2 Corinthians 10:5).
Holy Spirit has helped me totally reverse how I view life, and myself and other people. He continues to alert me to wrong thought patterns, causing me to challenge their validity. If a thought is erroneous in nature, or not edifying, he shows me the better way to think. A good scripture for this is Philippians 4:8, where we are challenged to think on things that build us up – things that are true, pure, praiseworthy, and so on.
The Lord has been speaking to me lately about covetousness and being content with what I have, down to the tiniest of things. He is leading me to a more pure way of thinking; inspiring me to dwell in thankfulness for where the Lord has placed me, in all areas of my life. To do anything else borders on covetousness and ungratefulness to the Lord, as he always chooses what is ultimately best for me at any given time.
Philippians 4:11,12 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. (Emphasis mine)
So, needless to say, I repented and determined by his grace, not to compare myself to anyone – as he had already showed me the dangers of doing this.
2 Corinthians 10:12 . . . When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.
Through Christ, I have maintained my healing for over two years, now. I have resolved to always be vigilant to not allow the lies and distortions of truth by the enemy to take over my mind and heart anymore. The wounded part of me that allowed the growth of a negative attitude toward my body needs to continue to heal, and the last thing I need is to sabotage the healing by re-infecting the wound with contaminated thoughts.
My Story – Grantley Morris
In my case, a significant part of wishing I were the opposite gender is that I am strongly heterosexual and so very drawn to women but have felt cut off from their acceptance and companionship.
For much of my life, I have seen women as warmer, and men as more aloof, less articulate, more disconnected from their emotions and pressured by society to be less real. Consequently, my observations lead me to conclude that men are more likely to be loners and hence more lonely and isolated – something that I have seen as my sad lot in life. I can even point to examples in the animal world where the females form groups but the males are loners who interact only to mate or fight other males.
Having been plagued with loneliness most of my life, a survey that rings heart-wrenchingly true for me is one in which married people were asked to nominate their best friend. Women typically named another woman. Men usually either named their wife or said they did not have a best friend. That’s not good news for a man who is single decade after decade.
Even if you were so desperately lonely for companionship that you were willing to sacrifice all romance, complications arise the moment you seek mere friendship with a member of the opposite sex. They usually fear that the possibility of romance is lurking somewhere and people demand much higher standards of a potential romantic partner than from a casual friend.
“Doomed from Birth” – Helen Hall
My life started to go wrong from the very second I was born – and pronounced a girl. That meant I was a total failure. I would never be able to please my parents because they had wanted a boy. The most fundamental part of me was wrong and unchangeable.
I was supposed to be a boy, someone who could do “boy” things with my father, like going fishing. Not only that, I was supposed grow up and father sons – naturally I’d be expected to have sons – to carry on the family name.
Some fathers go out of their way to make their little girls feel special. I would have settled for feeling wanted! I never knew what it was to have my father pick me up, play with me, cuddle me, take me places, read me a story.
When I was ten my father divorced my mother for a woman who could give him sons.
Whenever my mother told me about the difficult, twenty-four hour labor she went through to have me, I was always left with the impression that what she was really saying was, “I went through all that for you, and you weren’t worth it because you weren’t the son we wanted!”
I remember her “words of wisdom”. “You’ll never be any good with your hands.” “You’ll never be a lawyer – you’re too gullible. “ “You’ll never make it as a veterinarian – you’re too soft-hearted.” “You’re so plain no man will ever want to marry you.” But the thing she harped on most – and kept repeating even into her eighties – was, “If you had been a boy, my marriage wouldn’t have broken up.”
Obviously, being a girl is a bad thing. Girls aren’t worth taking notice of. Girls are a non-event.
When I was a child, the term “self-esteem” wasn’t the flavor of the month. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been. I didn’t have any anyway.
Surely there are few experiences more painful than rejection – especially to a child!
Although biologically a female and dressed in female clothes, by the way I was brought up I may as well have been neuter in gender. I wasn’t taught how to look after my skin, take pride in my appearance or how to be feminine in my behavior. And I was certainly not taught to value myself as a girl/woman. I was not encouraged to play with dolls, or play dressing up or house, like other girls of my era. So I grew up without any domestic skills.
When I was sixteen, I had to go to a city seven hours away by train for a medical examination. As my father lived in that same city, I wrote to him, asking if I could stay with him. Instead, he booked me into the YWCA and told me that if I wished to see him, I would have to make an appointment with his secretary to see him in his office. How that hurt!
But a greater hurt was to come. I swallowed my pride and made that appointment. As soon as I walked through the door of the office I saw my five year old adopted half-brother, sitting on my father’s knee – a privilege I had never had!
Years later, when I was grown up, I wrote to my father, saying I would like to get to know him better. His reply? “I don’t want to be any closer to you than I am now.”
The only people in my life who valued the fact that I was female were men who took a sexual interest in me. And being very lonely I responded to their advances. Since I was fully aware that any sexual contact I permitted was a sin I grew to loathe my body as it continually got me into trouble with God.
I gained the impression throughout my upbringing that my brain was the only worthwhile asset I had. I remember horrifying a counselor when I told her I would be quite happy with myself if I just consisted of my head on a skateboard. That way my body wouldn’t be there to get me into trouble!
It was many years before I was willing to describe myself as a woman. I preferred the non-gender-specific ‘person’. Even bearing children didn’t make me feel feminine.
I have not wanted to be a man, but I find it hard to have close friendships with women, since I am not interested in the typical women’s subjects.
I accept the fact that God chose me to be a woman, but I can’t say I enjoy it.
Narcissistic Mother
A dear friend of mine had a mother (the most influential woman in his life) who cruelly mistreated him, acting as though she had all power. That left him with the impression throughout his most formative years that maybe if he were like her – a woman – he would at last have the dignity he deserves. But dignity and power come not from a gender change. Instead, they come from being freed from the mindset of inferiority and hopelessness this manipulative woman had instilled in him. In Christ, he already had dignity and power and was deeply loved. He simply needed to realize this. Absorbing the truths of How to Change Your Self-Image and the links at the end of that webpage was a significant part of the transformation he needed.
Cold or Harsh Father
It is very possible to end up hating your own gender because during your formative years life-impacting members of that gender treated you shamefully or starved you of the unconditional love you craved and deserved. Both fear and hate typically spread beyond a rational reason for the emotion. For example, someone terrified as a child by a venomous snake could end up feeling apprehensive not only about harmless snakes but about eels and even large worms. Such involuntary reactions will not disappear merely by telling oneself that it is irrational. Overcoming such feelings is quite a process but it is worth the effort, whereas radical surgery would still leave unhealed the wounds inflicted by previous mistreatment.
“Part of Me Believed I Was the Opposite Sex”
Almost from birth, Jake suffered such severe physical and sexual abuse that his mind shattered into what is sometimes called “multiple personalities.” This is not nearly as weird as you might first think. It is a desperate coping mechanism, seized primarily by unusually intelligent and/or creative children, who have been forced into mentally intolerable situation. This fracture can then continue through adulthood, with the person being quite sane but suffering considerable inner pain until healing is found.
Some of Jake’s “personalities” (I, along with many others, prefer to call them “parts” or “alters”) knew they were male, but a few were convinced they were female. This is partly because some parts of him felt he would have been safer as a girl – less likely to have suffered such severe abuse – but another factor was the specific nature of the abuse he suffered. Often he was derogatorily called a girl while being raped. Additionally, at least once, he was terrifyingly certain that his father was about to chop off his genitals and at least one fractured part of him emerged from the ordeal believing that the chop had actually occurred and that he was emasculated.
Yet another, possibly younger part wrote:
I scared of Daddy. He hates me. He makes me bleed. I don’t want to be a boy. I a girl sometimes because he nice to Lucy and never hurts her. He said she his princess. He likes Carol, too, but I too bad. . . . I want to stab me there. Then no one hurt us. I want chop off my pee pee then daddy like us.
To have suffered such abuse is tragic. To go ahead and have yourself chopped up by a surgeon in a sex change operation would be even more tragic. Abusers don’t deserve such recognition. Fight back, not by wounding your body but by healing your inner wounds.
Of the several different possible reasons for people feeling strongly that they are not the same sex as their body, one reason you should thoroughly check is what Jake suffered from: Dissociative Identity Disorder (popularly known as “multiple personalities”). Tragically, many people stagger through life unhealed because they fail to recognize this cause. It turns out to be something much deeper than sexual identity. For help with this, please read Healing the Inner Child and keep following the main link at the end of each page.
The Bottom Line
You are right to want fulfillment. Your peace, happiness and fulfillment is vitally important not just to you but to your Maker. We all need to be extremely cautious about doing something irreversible, however, because it is tragically easy to become locked in to expecting our yearnings to be met by something that ends up failing to deliver. Supposing a sex change to be the answer can be like the many people who become utterly convinced that if only they had more money they could be happy, when the truth is that many with less money are happier than them, and many with much more money are miserable.
Look beyond the obvious and the superficial: seek God for profound answers.
Related Pages
“I Thought I Was the Opposite Sex!” One of Jake’s personalities shares his story
To God, You Are Special When you doubt your ability to achieve great things for God
Feel Ugly? Could You Have a Distorted Body Image?
Gender in the Bible: God & Women
Is God Male or Female? God’s Gender
Hate Yourself? A page that provides many more valuable links
Not to be sold. © Copyright 2008, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged and it is not used in a webpage. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.net Freely you have received, freely give. For use outside these limits, consult the author.
Christian Help
“I Wish I Were the Opposite Sex”
Sex Change Operation?
Envy the Opposite Sex?
Even if your frustration is not so extreme that you want a sex change operation, this webpage is for you if at times you have envied the opposite sex. And who hasn’t?
Genesis 2:18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
The good Lord was not saying, it is not good for a man to be single (1 Corinthians 7:1 corrects this common misinterpretation). He was saying it is not good for humanity to consist of just one gender. Creation was perfect only when humanity consisted of both males and females. It is good to be male. It is good to be female.
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
This famous Scripture not only shows that women, as much as men, are in the image of God. It also says to me that both male and female were required for God’s image to be complete.
Galatians 3:28 There is neither . . . male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Biblical revelation clearly indicates that this does not mean there are no physical differences between men and women and that it is acceptable to relate sexually with the same gender (proof), but it does mean that both sexes are of equal value and importance to God and that there is no spiritual difference between the sexes. No gender has the slightest spiritual advantage over the other. Each gender is equally blessed.
[Bless & Be Blessed by Facebook] [Daily Quotes] [My Shame]
Christian Help
“I Wish I Were the Opposite Sex”
Sex Change Operation?
Envy the Opposite Sex?