Coming out

When I was 7 I knew when I grew up I wanted to work with computers or be a pastor. Now that I am grown up I work with computers and will be one of Gods representatives to the LGBT community, particularly the transgender community.

My new name is Christine Spencer. I grew up Christopher Spencer.

While I had such clarity on what I wanted to be when I grew up I also had a secret. Many of my earliest memories are of me cross dressing and thinking I was a girl. I couldn't reconcile that with my body and I thought it was wrong. I knew girls do some things and boys do others. So despite these feelings and despite all the times I snuck on my mothers earrings (clip ons), or wore my sisters or mothers clothes...I told no one. I wanted to be good and I thought I was bad. It was a form of self loathing that only in the last few years have I begun to get over. In coming out now, I have made a choice. I have chosen to stop hating myself and with that choice comes the recognition that many people from family to friends to strangers will hate me for it.

As a child, I often dreamed I was a girl. I loved many girl things and many boy things. I often hid that I loved the girl things like playing paper dolls with my sister and watching girl shows like My Little Pony, Care Bears, and Strawberry Shortcake.

I could never quite reconcile it within myself and honestly I didn't want to. I wanted it to go away.

By high school I knew I liked girls. I thought surely this meant I was a boy but liking girls didn't really change my inner self, I still felt I was feeling more like a girl. I did boy activities but I wasn't fitting in. A large part of my childhood is lost to me now because I was not enjoying it.

When my puberty hit, I started to have breasts. Possibly that was because I was gaining weight fast but it could be something more. In any case, I have had breasts since. This was a source of both great comfort and great pain.

I remember once at scout camp where I was working on a life guarding merit badge and some little kid maybe 8 years old asked their father why I had breasts. It was devastating. He said what I thought, what I wondered, what haunted me.

Even today, I wonder if under the physical male shell there isn't more going on. It's probably nothing. I am probably in just a regular mans body but I am not like other men. I am also not fully like women.

Being trans is best understood if you think of a sliding scale with different points on the line. Some men are all men...Some women are all women...but in between we have a wide variety of people with different tastes and visions of themselves which they express in their clothing choices, in their mannerisms, and in their relationships. None of us are exactly alike.

Most people identify very closely to the lines that match their bodies but many are in between and some, like me, cross over to the other side. It's neither wrong or right, it just is. You are how your mind sees you to yourself and after a lifetime of trying to change it and believe I am not on the other side of the line...I accepted I was and I accepted that it just is.

I think I prayed more prayers than stars in the sky asking to have it changed. God never answered me until I felt him call me Christine and later when he woke me up to start They Know Not...which has not received the attention it has deserved.

All that praying with no answers...but I didn't lose faith because God has been good to me. He has blessed me by answering other prayers, saving my life (on more than one occasion), and giving me my wife and children. Many lessons also have been learned over my life because of him.

Today, I am able and called to come out boldly because of his love and his enduring grace. I can do it with my heart clean having rejected and grown out of much of my sin nature by his guidance without fear that I am letting him down. Without fear that I am lying to myself. Without fear that I am slandering his name.

My God is good. There are none like him. He created the heavens and the Earth and all things in them. His power and vision are unmatched.

It's a mighty small box painted around God if people think he can't create people like me. Clearly he does because I am a witness to it and so are millions of other believers. Our experiences are different, our walks on paths less traveled but our destinations are the same.

I'm out. I'm me. I'm going to reach people that are lost. If you have a problem with that, you are not standing against me...but against God who stands behind me. Leading me from behind much like a driver in a car steers the wheels of the car.

I take the Bible very seriously. I still believe the Earth and all creation are young. I don't believe our story stopped with the early church. I don't believe that the Bible is the end only the guidebook from which we can learn about God. We are his messengers. His people.

He entrusted us with sharing his love in every generation across all time and to all people. My job is to share it with others like me. Standing against someone in Gods name does not bring them closer to God. It does not change them in a positive way. Degrading them does not uphold How precious and wonderfully made they are to God.

Doing these things does not lift up God, it pulls God from their grasp. They get lost and abandoned. This has devastating consequences which are well detailed in study after study.

That is not how God works. It's fruits are layed bare for those with eyes to see. It is because of this that I must come out and pick up my cross.

I am Christine Spencer, trans-woman, follower of Christ, servant to all.

Love and grace to all who read these words. I pray you can understand.

Homosexuality is a threat?

Gregg Everhart tells us that homosexuality is a threat.
http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20101123/LETTERS/101129948/-1/news?p=all&tc=pgall

I question the two main points he makes because he fails to see the forest through the trees.  Let's look at his points one at a time:

It is medically unhealthy, life threatening, it is nonsensible, and unnatural (They cannot reproduce). The statistics prove much higher percentages of child molestation, diseases (AIDS, venereal, etc), mental illness and suicide than heterosexual.

This is a chicken or egg situation.  He is saying that LGBT people are more messed up than heterosexual people.  Which he claims is borne out statistically.  He is in fact, correct.  The problem is, he doesn't think it through to the next step, why?  In essence he just says "You can't be LGBT because you will be sick so we won't allow it."  That ignores the *FACT* that there are people that are and always have been LGBT.  So what to do with us?  Kill us?  Is that his Christian response, it's been done before.


I want to make an assertion.  I assert that LGBT people are the same as everyone else.  THE SAME.  Statistics can be used to deceive and that is just what Gregg is doing.  It's a slight of hand trick.  


The failure is in not asking the question, WHY?  THE why question gets to the sin.  It can help us uncover the truth. 


Why more child molesters?  Question:  What percentage of the child molesters are openly LGBT?  I would assert that it is very very few.  The vast majority live a life pretending to be something they aren't and so when they inevitably need to express their intimate needs they use a child.  


Children are the logical choice for someone so out of touch with who they are.  Their innocence and easy to gain trust mean that the person can seek that need for human companionship and love without exposing their horrible LGBT self.  Thus they commit an unspeakable crime that makes them UTTERLY deserving of hell because they failed to get the love and companionship that they needed in a healthy and mutually consenting relationship with another adult.


When LGBT activists press for equal rights what they are saying is "We want the freedom to have HEALTHY mutually consenting relationships with other adults and to be treated as equal under the law."  These people are not the people that Gregg rightfully has problems with but rather they are the healthy ones yet the healthy ones get attacked by Gregg...not the sick ones.


Why are the sick ones sick?  Because of people like Gregg that make them hate themselves because they BELIEVE that homosexuality is a threat...and they hate themselves for it.


Increased prevalence of venereal diseases?  Again, a symptom not the problem.  The problem is that more people in the LGBT community are doing self destructive behavior.  I am talking about prostitution, drugs, and cruising.  Again you absolutely have to ask the WHY question.


The answers here vary a bit.  Prostitution is more common because we frequently have employment discrimination and can't find gainful employment...because people like Gregg don't like us and either fire us or make sure to complain to our employers.


Drugs, because of that self hatred and need to escape the reality of who they are and the life they live.


Cruising, because they have been told and believe that they aren't worthy of a mutually exclusive and beneficial relationship.


None of these things are good but EVERY ONE OF THEM has a root cause that points back to the DESTRUCTIVE message that their lives are wrong as perpetrated by Gregg.


Suicide?  Come on.  If they buy the message, they act out in horrible ways or they turn it in on themselves.  


Being true to who we are is a brave and courageous thing.  We have been marginalized and attacked all through history because we are different.  We march to the tune of a different drummer than people like you Gregg but if you fail to see the harm you are doing and your implicit shame in this it is you that will answer to God for it.  Your crimes against his people are great and you have not repented of your sin.


Please Gregg, stop.  Ask the why questions and employ some empathy.  You are not under attack.  Your families are not under attack.  We desperately need a better way, Gregg.  We need your help.


We need to have the institution of marriage.  We need to have that ideal of what we *SHOULD* be living like.  A structure that lifts up and glorifies God because MARRIAGE teaches people agape love.  Self sacrificial love.  LGBT people do have that in many cases but the structure of marriage will cement that for so many more.  


We need acceptance and not rebuke.  We need mutual respect and understanding.  


Gregg, a recent study by an online dating site shows that LGBT people are looking for other LGBT people for relationships.  Gregg, no one is looking for you or your families to become LGBT, we would rather be just friends.

It is a direct threat to our traditional family structure that God designed and our forefathers honored and instituted in our laws. Read Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-32. 

So Gregg, do you know what is being said in these verses?  They are about two different things.  One is a cleanliness issue. Anal sex is dirty and dangerous and yes it is more likely to transmit diseases.  That is the Leviticus verse.  It's a safety issue that God wanted to help people be safer.  It's still true today, but like eating pig and shell fish, we have better sanitation practices that mitigate most of the risks given stable monogamous relationships.


There are a few other versus in Leviticus that have been related to LGBT people when actually they are about the practices of other religions...which is exactly what you see talked about in Romans.  You just have to look a right before the verses you mention.


I make no excuse for drug use, uncommitted sexual relationships, worshiping idols, or pedophiles...they are sick.  Every one of them but they are no worse or better than anyone else.  We all have sins we have shamefully committed.  


What we have as Christians though is an eternal God who loves us.  He loved us so much that he gave us his son as a sacrifice for our inequities so that we might have eternal life with him.  That is both a gift and a responsibility.  It requires us only to ask Jesus who stands at the door waiting to welcome us and to love abundantly both God and all people.


Gregg, I am not a threat to you but I am transsexual.  I would be happy for you to be in Gods kingdom with me.  However, just as you think I am in gross violation of Gods law and at risk of Hell I believe you are the one at risk of Hell.  I care for you too much Gregg to allow you to go to Hell without a word spoken.  Repent of the false doctrine that God condemns people to hell because of who they are rather than the EVIL and WICKED things they do.


Gregg, what you and so many Christians mean for good is being used by the deceiver to achieve great wickedness.  Our faith is litterally under attack because of the perceived hypocrisy of it. 


While God created man and woman his absence from restoring our human genes is causing a slow and constant degradation in our DNA.  Generational curses are passed from parents to children with new breakdowns occurring at a genetic level with every new generation.  


We know for a fact that some people have genetic structures of both sexes.  Do you deny their existence was Gods doing?  We know for a fact that some people feel a disconnect, as I do, with the gender we were born in.  We know for a fact that some people feel an innate attraction to people of their own gender.  Do you deny us because of what you can not see or know?  Is the collective testimony of millions of people not sufficient?  The strong biological indicators?  


Cancer attacks from the inside out usually hiding beneath the surface...just a minor mutation.  You don't deny it but years ago no one knew.  Killed from the inside unknown killer.  


The politically correctness being shown by people is because we are FAR MORE AFRAID of judging wrong than of failing to judge.  You should be too.


While we may not know why God is allowing this, it is happening and because you can NOT justify MURDERING us before God you have no choice but to live with us.  


Even if you will not be my friend, can we avoid being enemies?  Can you give me the respect I deserve because I am a creation of our loving father just like you are?


-Christine