I have to admit that I was surprised by what you said recently. I never expected to hear it from someone so close to me. But now that I have heard it from you, I feel I need to respond.
I expect that you won’t want to hear what I have to say, but I challenge you to listen anyway. After all, if you’re afraid to let your viewpoint be questioned, that may be a sign that it needs some serious scrutiny.
You will no doubt hear from a lot of people who’ll agree with your decision, congratulate you on it, tell you they support it, tell you they’re happy for you, etc. Frankly, doing so doesn’t require anything of them. It certainly doesn’t call for any courage on their part.
Many people have lenient stances toward “transgenderism” when it happens to affect someone close to them, especially their own child. Such positions are well-intentioned, but ultimately they’re emotionally-based and badly misinformed.
Any informed person who really cares about you will take on the difficult and thankless task of telling you the truth, rather than saying what you want to hear. They will not refer to you, in any way, as having your “preferred” gender; they will not call you by your “new” name; and they will not agree with or support your decision in any way. As much as you’ll want to believe otherwise, they will be right.
It’s typical for people who seek “sex changes” to truly believe that their sex can actually be changed, because that’s what they’ve been led to believe. But there is ultimately no reason to believe this other than the desire to believe it. The hard reality is that the entire concept of “sex change” is founded on pretense and impossibility.
First of all, DNA doesn’t lie. No matter what you do, every strand of DNA in your body will proclaim, for all of your life, that your sex is the one you were physically born with. A “sex change” wouldn’t change that. What it would do is artificially alter your external appearance. It would involve the removal of healthy, functional body parts and the forming of fake ones that would not, and could never, function like real ones.
Those who “transition” set themselves up for serious health risks, because things have been done to them that their bodies are not designed to take. They also have a very high rate of regret and a very high suicide rate. That’s because the radical and irreversible step of altering their bodies ultimately doesn’t solve anything for them.
This leads me to a point that I want to make clear: The easy way to deal with a challenging issue is generally not the right way.
Having a major, body-altering operation doesn’t sound like something easy. And yet it is very much the coward’s way of dealing with the kind of issue that affects you.
That’s because the alternative — the right and courageous thing to do — is so much more difficult. People will go to incredible lengths to avoid it. Few people will encourage you to pursue it; in fact, few will even acknowledge that it exists as an option. Those who would profit from your bodily alteration certainly wouldn’t want you to seek it. And other professionals that you might place your trust in will most likely refuse to direct you to it or assist you in it.
But there is only one right response to a “gender identity” issue such as you face: to deal with it in the mind, where the issue really lies, rather than in the body, which is not where the problem is at all.
There is no more difficult war that a person can fight than the war against their own misguided feelings and desires. That is, ultimately, the same war that all of us have to fight. And it is the most crucial war that any of us will ever fight in our lives.
It’s not a fight that anyone can engage in casually or half-heartedly. It’s also not one that can ultimately be won without help from our Creator. But he would not ask us to be in this fight if it couldn’t be won.
It’s highly unfortunate that this fight was not started much earlier in your life, long before you got to the point that you’re at now. But it’s not too late yet. You still have the chance to discover who you’re really meant to be, and to leave behind what you’ve been falsely led to think you should be.
My prayer is that your desire to “change your sex” will increasingly look and feel to you like a burning house — something you need to get out of any way you can, and the faster the better. After all, that’s exactly what it is, whether you acknowledge it or not.
You have been given a choice. You can pay attention now to what’s said by those who know and care enough to tell you the truth; or you can realize it for yourself after it’s too late.
