My childhood experience was not a happy one. My parents were very determined to give me a meaningful life ahead but from my childhood no one affirmed me about my identity as a man. My mom used to dress me up in female clothings when I was very small. From that very early age I was very confused regarding my identity. I grew up playing with other kids in my neighborhood but my growth as a child was not that happy and flourishing like other kids. I was bullied by my neighborhood friends and classmates in school. These experiences locked me up in a cage of confusion, inferiority, Sadness, lonliness, depression, etc. All my friendships were superficial. I never had a close and genuine friend in my childhood. My childish young heart was longing for real friendships, love and acceptance but I never found it the way I wanted among my friends.

Oneday one friend of mine invited me to a church. I went to a church for the first time. As I continued going to church every Sunday I felt that church is the place of escape from every pain and lonliness that I experienced in my life. During the time of worship I experienced the joy, peace and freedom of expression. In one word I experienced God’s presence gushing like a fountain into my weary soul. Continuously I was longing for the presence of God which was satisfying my weary soul.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10)

My Struggle with sexuality
From very young age I was attracted towards men and confused about my identity. These confusion and lonliness led me to look for romantic pleasure with men and I experienced sexual encounters  with men since very young age. I was coming to church but guilt,shame and condemnation were my constant companions. I thought this attraction towards men were natural and God made me this way but this lie and confusion(I never thought it to be a lie that time) led me to many unhealthy choices and sexual encounters but at the end of the tunnel depression, hurt, lonliness, pain, betrayal, etc. were waiting for me. I was desperate to become free from this lifestyle that I was living. Finally I opened up myself to my pastors and was seeking help from them. They were people who told me the truth from the word of God that homosexuality is a sin, God did not made me this way, and there is hope for me in jesus.

I experienced a liberation in my life as I shared my hidden struggles with my pastors and they continuously helped me to come out of this lifestyle by loving me, praying for me, involving me with church activities, counseling, etc.

My Satisfaction in the LOVE of JESUS
As I said earlier, I was longing for real friendships, love and acceptance among my friends the way I wanted but I never experienced that deep satisfaction of love inside the deepest core of my heart in this world.
The longing in my heart for love was satisfied by a true relationship with Jesus. Spending time daily in his presence satisfies me completely. I am deeply convicted by the truth that his love and his presence is far better than anything in this world.
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I found true and meaningful friendships in the family of God that I never found in this world.
Now I no more struggle the way I used to do earlier. Now Jesus is the Lord of my life. Jesus has given me freedom of choice which I never had earlier. Jesus helps me everyday to choose his love over the temptations that comes.

Amit Ghosh

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them. (John 7:37-38)

The Beginning

My name is Michael Edward Ukus. I am writing the story of my life to prove that God exists dan that He is always there in my life.

I'm the second child of three siblings. We lived with our parents in Manado. After enrolling to a Christian university in Manado to study theology, we found that that our parents were in the process of getting a divorce. Unexpectedly we received a letter from the court asking us to attend the divorce trial. Honestly as their children we were very heartbroken by this news. My dad left us and my mom had to work really hard to provide for us. It broke our heart to see how hard she had to work to the point of getting sick and even fainting because of fatigue. This really destroyed me personally and I couldn't continue my study because of it. I thought there was no point studying theology if my parents were getting a divorce. In the end I no longer had any desire to study and stopped doing Christian activities at my campus. That's when the Enemy took an advantage.

I started to run a gay bar and a transgender club in Itaewon and it was successful. I became famous for conducting disco and host clubs. There were 70 gay people in my club and I opened a transgender club in Japan making a lot of money. I was a gay godfather in Korea and I led 200 homosexuals. At this moment I was a Christian loving God. My passion for God didn’t stop in my heart.I entered a seminary but I was still a homosexual and was not aware that it’s a sin. I burned with the passion to be an evangelist to help homosexuals.

After the Seoul Olympic in 1988, the government in Korea determined Itaewon as an area of crime and started closing up all the clubs because the sons of big politicians did drugs in Itaewon. The four clubs I had were out of business and my apartment was under attachment. So finally I fled to Japan. I ran the club with transgenders in that place as a Christian.

Some day in the evening, an angel of the death started choking my neck and I felt like dying. I had the chance to have a counseling with Yonggi Cho, the Pastor of Yoido Sunbokeum Church, who was visiting Tokyo. He told me to be a pastor and to put everything behind. And for this reason, I knew it was God’s calling. So I entered a theological school and cleaned up the all the clubs. 

I met Pastor Hirano Koo E Chi there. I heard of Calvary Chapel Church in the US from him. He opened the Bible and taught me that the homosexuality is a sin, and He said that we cannot come the kingdom of God unless it is clear of our life. By then I realized that the homosexuality is not inborn and I started exploring only the truth of the Bible to get out of the sinful habit. 

After the third year, I’ve got a special experience with the holy spirit during a class at the school on July 4th 1991. This experience was like all the evil spirits in me were cast out and I became new person. I was 43 years old at the time.

After coming back to Korea, I pioneered the Seoul Calvary Chapel Church and only focused on seeking the truth of the word of God. Just like the apostle Paul who spent three years dedicated only to the word of God in Arabia after He accepted Jesus. To know more about it, for 12 years I started writing footnotes from the book of Genesis to Revelation. 
 
In Korea as homosexuality became a social issue, Korean Churches started campaigning against it, and I joined in but God gave me a different direction. So I built up an ex-gay movement called “Holy Life” and I started the restoration movement to reach out to homosexuals. Every year I have been doing the movement of human rights for ex-gay people by doing holy festival standing against the queer festival. I have counseled 2,000 gay people, and opened the Bible College for them because only the truth will restore them.   

Homosexuality is a cardinal sin which destroys life. It is the work of Satan to make the people whom God chose fail. So we are not supposed to regard them as an object of criticism, but as sheeps to tend, and to preach the Gospel and to recover them in order to become harvesters in the end time. That is God’s will.

The Bible tells us that, "See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 18:10 NIV) Homosexuality is a sinful habit which can be overcome. But the sin of homosexuality needs forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ because it is a spiritual problem which needs to be dealt with God. And so, they will receive the Spirit of God as a gift.

From a servant of Jesus, Jonah Lee.

Many transgender persons regret what they did to their bodies and souls, and some are pleading that others not repeat their mistake.

Robert Wenman was four years into being a “full-time” transgender woman in Ontario, Canada, when a police officer asked him: “You got all your legal rights by now. Why don’t you just enjoy life as a woman?”

The question left the then-LGBT activist stuttering: Here he was, training a group of law enforcers on transgender rights, yet he couldn’t answer a basic question: Why? Why was he still campaigning, still fighting?

The Canadian healthcare system, after all, had paid for his sex reassignment surgery and 10-day postoperative stay. The court changed his birth records from Robert John to Rebecca Jean. He had a secure job at the Canada Post with full access to female facilities, and his family accepted him. Wenman was the textbook case of a successful transgender woman—so why, he wondered, did he feel he was constantly battling something?

For days, Wenman stewed on the question and thought about all the ways he had blamed “intolerant society” for “the destruction in our souls.” Yet the deeper he searched his heart, the clearer he reached a painful acknowledgment: He had said he was fighting for transgender rights, but he was really fighting an internal battle. “I’ve been trying to fix things on the outside without fixing the inside,” he said.

The idea that anything needs fixing inside a transgender person is anathema to big media. Time calls transgender rights “America’s next civil rights frontier.” The New York Times has, in its own words, “forcefully” advocated a transgender “crusade,” with former Times editor Andrew Rosenthal calling those who question the transgender movement “ignorant, stupid people.” This year, National Geographic joined the crusade, dedicating its first issue to the emerging “gender revolution.”

What’s missing from these stories, however, are the silent laments of individuals who now see their transgender experience as psychological and physical mutilation.

Walt Heyer, a 76-year-old ex-transgender (see "Walt’s story") who speaks publicly about his regret, says he gets regular emails from despairing transgender men and women who found him through his website sexchangeregret.com. Many underwent irreversible surgery and now regret it. They write him horrified and helpless: What do I do now? I feel like dying.

Heyer said every single person who contacts him reveals some kind of traumatic background and psychological scars. Their heartbreaking stories align with Heyer’s own personal experience that “transgenderism is an umbrella term for a group of mental disorders that have not yet been treated.” And the consequences are devastating: According to studies, suicide rates are 20 times higher among transgender adults who undergo hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Meanwhile, a 2014 study found that 63 percent of patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria (a condition in which patients feel conflicted about their biological gender) had at least one co-occurring mental disorder, and 33 percent had major depressive disorders.

When a psychiatrist told Robert Wenman he had gender dysphoria and advised him to transition into a woman, every loose piece of his life seemed to lock into place: “Oh yeah! Of course that’s it: I’m really a woman in a man’s body!”

Wenman had always been a shy, lonely child who shimmied on his mother’s stockings, girdles, and dresses in the private darkness of his bedroom closet. The more he cross-dressed, the more that addiction “grew and grew, feeding a monster.” As an adult he went through periods of binges and purges: mass-shopping on women’s clothing to parade at home, then tossing the clothes out in shame, and repeating the cycle.

So in 1991 when a transgender expert told him to transition into a woman, Wenman thought that would solve all his problems. He came out to his family, shaved off 50 pounds and his beard, grew out his buzz cut into waist-long tresses, began hormone therapy, and changed his legal documents. Six years later, he flew out to England and underwent sex reassignment surgery, and then returned home to Canada in euphoria: “I could have been dancing in the streets. It was like, mission accomplished.”

That sense of accomplishment did not last. At 6 feet tall with big, manly hands and a masculine voice, Wenman struggled to “pass” as a woman and dreaded being in public. One stranger’s weird look would provoke days of anguish in Wenman, and kids terrified him— these little ones gaped at him with brazenness. “Rather than feeling liberated, I felt like a criminal. I was getting more and more paranoid.”

Outwardly, Wenman volunteered weekly with the transgender community, marched in LGBT/feminist parades, giggled with fellow trans “sisters” at local bars, and preached that gender is a psychological construct. Inwardly, he was an emotional wreck. His chronic depression began affecting his work performance, and in February 2009, after 28 years of employment, he lost his job. Just as suicide began sounding sweeter than life, Wenman decided to find a church where he realized: “I’ve been warring against my soul. I was transgressing against God, imprisoned by guilt and shame.”

After 17 years living as a woman, Wenman, now 60, has detransitioned back into a man: He clips his white hair short, wears plaid shirts and slacks from the men’s department, and prays for a wife. Since his surgery is irreparable, he wonders if marriage is possible and mourns that he’ll never enjoy the cuddles of his own children.

So when he hears stories of husbands who come out as transgender and leave their families, Wenman grieves: “I want to shake them and scream, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re giving your family up for something that’s not real!’... But I also know how powerful that feeling is because I went through it. It’s almost demonic.” Yet not impossible to overcome, Wenman said, quoting John 8:32: “The truth shall set you free.”

Like most little girls, KathyGrace Duncan formed her earliest image of women through her mother. What she saw was weak, vulnerable, abused. Whenever her father mistreated her mother, her mother would slip into Duncan’s room to cry. As she listened to her mother sob, the little girl thought, “She’s female and I’m female, but I don’t want to be like her.” Duncan’s parents were distant with her, but her father showered attention on her baby brother. She concluded, “I need to be a boy in order to get affection and affirmation.”

As a child Duncan fantasized about taking women like Jaclyn Smith out on dates. Unlike her father, she would rescue women from distress, buy them gifts, make them feel special—all the things she didn’t get and wanted. By 16, Duncan was ready to be that perfect gentleman. She cut her hair short and feathered, wore two shirts to hide her late-bloomer’s chest, and took girls out on dates to parks and fairs. Duncan didn’t tell her dates she was a girl.

At 19, Duncan moved out of her house and transitioned into a man: She legally changed her name to Keith, wore slacks and tie to work, had a mastectomy, dated women. Her testosterone shots deepened her voice, widened her shoulders, and sprouted a full beard on her face. During that process, she professed faith in Christ and became heavily involved in church ministries. Nobody at church knew she was a woman except for an older couple who mentored her.

Then one day, a pastor called her to the prayer room and asked, “Who are you, really?” For the first time, Duncan spoke the truth—“I’m a woman living as a man”—instead of her default “I’m a man who used to be a woman.” To this day, Duncan doesn’t know what prompted her to say those words except that “the Holy Spirit blew in.” All she knew was that if she wanted an intimate relationship with Jesus, she needed to come clean about who God created her to be. Then Duncan said something that again shocked both her and the pastor: “I think the Lord is calling me back to being a woman.”

For the first time in years, she slept blissfully for two days: “It was like this tremendous pressure on my shoulders had been lifted. ... I had been living a fake life for 11 years, constantly tracking back to make sure people didn’t know.”

It took about four tortuous years for Duncan to embrace her womanhood again. In those years she lost her job, fell into depression, and joined the Portland Fellowship, a Christian ministry for people dealing with homosexuality. She threw out all her hormone shots, went shopping with female friends for blouses, and even painted her toenails fire-engine red for her birthday—all giant steps for someone who once loathed every ounce of her femininity.

At first well-meaning people gave her lotions and makeup, expecting her to change instantly, but her heart had first to accept that being a woman was good. On many days Duncan was tired and overwhelmed, but then she would remember Abraham’s faith when he left home to enter a foreign land that God had promised, and she would reshape her prayers: “OK, Lord, have Your way. What do You say? I’ll follow what You say.” Today Duncan accepts invitations to churches and youth camps to share her testimony.

Antoine Bou Ezz, a former transgender woman from Beirut, Lebanon, also says he cannot keep silent. He had a dream job, beautiful clothes, and glamorous parties, yet contemplated suicide until the day a woman told him about Jesus. The next day he went to church and, cut to the heart, begged Jesus to own all of him. Then as he studied the Bible, Bou Ezz realized transgenderism is fundamentally a worship issue: “God created man and woman. He blessed them and told them to go and multiply. He did not create transgenders—it is our choice to undergo surgery.”

This March, Bou Ezz celebrated his third-year anniversary as a Christian man. That’s three years of him telling anyone who would listen: “Jesus saved me. Jesus changed my life. If you want happiness and truth, throw everything at Jesus’ feet.”

Original article is found here