URNotAlone

My Prayer for 2008

December 30th, 2007 2:12 am MST

Dear URNA Friends,

I've been blessed to be a posting member of this wonderful site for 10 years.  I read every journal entry and every profile.  My heart is blessed by the success stories and saddened by the painful struggles of too many of us.  For all of you struggling with your gender, relationships, finances, health, depression, et all...  May we all find that God is more than enough.  Let us all trust God for all our needs and that we shall  prosper and be in health.  God is real and He loves us.  For those who may find my words and belief confounding, I pray that you will not be offended but rather be curious how someone like you has come to a very comfy place in my life and mind by trusting God.  For those that know God to be real I rejoice with you.  2008 holds great promise of blessing for us all.  May we enter this year with thankful hearts eagerly embracing life and loving all we meet along the way.  God bless all of your darling hearts!  I truely love you all. 

Joannie

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Why we do this continued...

November 24th, 2006 12:00 am MST

Why do we do this?   As do most of us, I recognized the desire to be a girl early in my life.  The countless profiles of people like us posted on internet display a common experience.  The occurrence of the desire to dress and behave as a girl, stealth dressing in mother’s or sister’s clothing, associated guilt, purging, over compensation thru exaggerated male activities, etc.  There is a pattern most of us share to one degree or another.  All of us have struggled against convention more often than not hiding our little secret in shame of critical discovery.  It’s impossible to deny urges compelled from so deep within our being and psyche.  Thus as youngsters we often dressed and later assuaged our guilt discovering physically defined sexual urges through adolescence.  We conformed to convention best as possible dating girls, leading as normal a male life as we could, yet all the while knowing we were not normal and kept our secret hidden.   Most of us married hoping that frequent sexual release with the woman we adored would satiate our deepest desires so that we could lead the normal lives we wanted.  Soon we discovered that sex alone was not the total motivation for us to want a woman and the desire to dress reawakened.  We dressed in our wife’s clothing in private moments.  We masturbated aroused by the image viewed in the mirror.  Though thrilling, our guilt and shame caused us to hide our high heels and other female attire we stealthily acquired.   We made excuses to “work late” or travel for business so we could dress up, explore internet thirsting for knowledge, validation, confirmation, friendship, etc. to fulfill the desire growing within us.  Soon we realized that a real part of us lives in a cage and the older we get the smaller the cage gets.   Soon we met others like us online.  Hugely relieved that we were indeed “not alone”, we were all the more compelled to follow our desire to express the feminine nature earlier “birthed” within us as does a drowning person gasp for air.  Yet still having no satisfactory explanation as to why.   Those of us aware of this desire pre-internet, suffered great shame and guilt thinking we were freaks of nature.  Desperate for validation we diligently observed all and any examples of cross-dressing found in cinema, television, and pornography.  Discovery of such was great relief to know that we were not alone.   Internet broke down barriers and a flood of knowledge and information spilled forth to our great delight and communication among us began to thrive.  But still unanswered questions persisted. Are we gay?  Should this desire be suppressed?  Can we live life and keep this desire secret?  Will it ever go away?  Should we embrace this or flee from it?  Is it sin?   We married, loving our beautiful wives, bore children, and enjoyed conventional life for a season though the desire to dress as a woman was always close below the surface.  We thought we could contain it but found ourselves sneaking away… dressing up in private…  going online late at night.  Making excuses.  Basically living a lie.   Our conscience beat us up and we often purged discarding female clothing we purchased or otherwise acquired…  our precious heels, bras, panties, stockings, skirts, blouses, and dresses…  only to repurchase them months later when the desire to dress once again overpowered us.   Tragic discovery painfully met many of us.  Families and marriages were destroyed.  Many of us were “outed” at work, church, and to friends and family members.  Wives, children, and parents heartbroken. Many of us came forth to wives and family with great difficulty hoping that honesty was best policy.  Some of us were accepted but most of those brave ones faced a new life desolate of support from the one’s they loved most. My story is tragically similar.  There are wonderful exceptions yes.  God bless the ones that came out to friends and family and found acceptance and support!   Yet the questions remain and persist for us and those that love us…  wives, parents, children, friends, and workmates.  It is difficult to explain and even more difficult for our loved ones to understand how a man could want to dress and behave as a woman.  While it is acceptable for a woman to dress in slacks it is socially taboo for a man to don a dress.  For a woman to traverse gender fashion and apparel is celebrated…  for a man to exhibit as female conflicts convention.   There remain two great questions to be answered.  Biology and Spiritually.  God is maker of heaven and earth.  He created us all!  He made us each unique in dna and purposed us each to have life in Him.   Are we some sort of genetic anomaly?  We really don’t know precisely how many males are affected by the desire to crossdress.  It is obvious that the numbers are great perhaps approaching 1% to 10 %.   Irregardless of the number, surely there is a huge and growing community of transgendered folk seeking  acceptance, love, and understanding.  The phenomenon of males preferring to be female, be it part time or full time, cannot be denied nor ignored.   The controversy, societal taboo, personal guilt, etc. is why I am compelled to offer my personal observations in hopes of assuaging the trepidation faced by those of us so affected.  I write from my personal religious perspective as a Christian.  Oddly I find many crossdressers to also be Christians.  Irregardless of your personal religious conviction for sake of this presentation let us assume that there is a God, creator of mankind.  Should you disagree, I would hope that my observations will at least provoke reflection and perhaps helpful dialogue.   I don’t claim to have the ultimate answer as to how and why we are the way we are.  But offered from a sincere motive in clear conscience and after many years of contemplation…  I figured that for His good purpose, in His infinite wisdom, God chose to make certain males to have a “dual gendered nature”.  Not necessarily for us to prance about in dresses depicting the women we so much desire to emulate but rater to embrace the nature and qualities women innately possess.  To give love to a world starving for unconditional love.   You know how tg girls are often referred to as girls "with something extra"?  In my experience, it could also be that we are also GUYS with "something extra".  That "something extra" being an inordinately sweet and gentle nature that "normal" guys don't have or can't express to the same degree.   The majority of tg girls I've met and corresponded with have been very sweet lovely souls.  My take on it is that for some purpose in Gods plan, He made X% of males this way to have a pronounced sensitivity (tenderness, creativity, talents) and capacity for loving people.  I accept and love who I am in spite of the obvious downside.   Natural born men invigorated and usually dominated by testosterone driven sex drive more often than not will compromise good judgment in favor of good feeling.  Women, desiring affection too often yield to aggressive men only later to be abandon.   This natural pattern tragically results in divorce and devastation for the family.  I truly believe that there is a way to live embracing the transgender gift in such a way as to be a blessing and not a curse.  If God made us this way surely He also provides a way to live in righteous manner.   As males, we're swimming upstream against the tide of pretty women whose gaze is locked to avoid the onslaught of our obvious hormone riddled, often pathetic advances.  The weight of the endless rejection I experienced as a male weighs heavily on me.  In large part, my interest in being a woman is to experience the opposite flow.  It's fun to be the one sought after for a change.  Now that I've been out as a woman and found myself avoiding eye contact with the men, I can relate to women all the much better from experience.    As for me, I’ve struggled for years to be one whole loving person regardless of clothing.  While I once kept my transgender nature hidden deep below the surface, I’ve learned over time to accept the qualities and nature of my female nature to surface and become integrated into my entire persona.  What I once feared has now become to my great delight the passageway to life giving full spectrum expression to the love for others my heart holds.  Love is neither male nor female.   I pray that others similarly affected will find this sweet spot in life so that the suffering of guilt and shame will end.    Addendum 11/22/06 In the beginning Adam was androgynous.  There was no Eve.  After an undisclosed period of time, God caused Adam to fall into a “deep sleep” and He “formed” Eve from Adam.   Adam referred to Eve as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”.  God went on to say “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” God formed Adam from dirt and breathed life into him.  The creation of Eve was entirely different.  She was “made” (different word than used for the forming of man).  Original Hebrew word means “beautifully crafted” from Adam making her uniquely different from the “rough” original creation of man.   I believe that having inherited the original genetic pattern of God’s original man, we also contain the genetic strain of  Eve just as did Adam.  Basically we could all be construed as being androgynous at the basis of our genetic makeup.   Having been “separated” as male and female left a yearning to become whole again…  the desire to be united and become one flesh again…  thus the sexual attraction between male and female.  Male and female desire not simply to be united with the other but rather to be “re-united” into one flesh as in the original Adam.   Now, male and female “miss” the inherent opposite gender elements once present together in the original Adam before God separated Eve from Adam.    So the male desires the female… to be in the female…  he desires to complete, fulfill, and compliment what is physically absent from his life and body as does the female desire the male to be in her.   Man desires his woman to be as beautiful as possible so as to exhibit the traits and qualities that he as male is generally not able to manifest.    Some people are imbued with a unique hyper awareness of genetic gender duality more so than others.  Seems it’s mostly males that are more aware of this.  Perhaps it’s because of the inherent originality of Adam.  The male was created first.  The progenitor.  The Creator.  The provider.   The woman is the receptor of the male seed.   Woman is object of man’s desire.  Man pursues and woman yields.  Women are attractive and men are attracted.  Man falls in love with women he finds attractive…  women are attracted to men with whom they fall in love.  Men and women are uniquely different in motive and operation.  Generally, man is aggressive in seeking his desire and women are passive being the objects of men’s desires. As previously stated, for His good purpose, God chose some males to be inordinately sensitive and aware of what I believe is the inherent genetic androgynous nature of the original human, Adam.  That awareness is what drives the male sexual urge to be in a woman.  Being physically male, yet aware of vestiges of the female nature, “transgender” males desire to express and manifest inherent female qualities.   Apparently there are degrees to which transgender males desire to express as females.  Or are there?  Some transgender males pursue this desire to the extent of surgically altering their physical bodies so as to exhibit as fully female as possible.   Others are content simply to occasionally adorn themselves in women’s clothing and behave as female.   If you are transgender, my best advice is to enjoy the blessing and not be frustrated.  You are uniquely gifted!  Though surely you desire to manifest yourself as female often as possible, I pray that you find peace knowing that you are one whole person regardless of clothing.           

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Heartfelt Thanks

June 2nd, 2006 4:24 pm MDT

Heartfelt thanks to all who have posted such sweet compliments and encouraging comments.  Please forgive me if I've been unable to personally respond to you individually.  Urnotalone is our refuge.  I always feel at home here enjoying viewing and reading about you all.  God bless all of your sweet hearts!  I pray that we all will learn to gracefully accept the gift of being transgender and be one whole person 24/7 regardless of apparel.  Love Always,Joannie

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