User:GirlInside
"GirlInside" joined AVEN in October 2007. He was told about it by a friend, who in turn heard about it from another friend. (As the username implies, when he was on AVEN, he considered himself a woman in a man's body. As the quotes imply, he no longer identifies as female.)
He is best known for his website: Boy On The Outside, Girl On The Inside, a very informative site about transgender topics with a special emphasis on the topic of being transgender and not changing one's body. He created it after searching for transgender information and finding almost nothing about the many transgendered people who choose not to "transition" (change their bodies through hormones and surgery). For many reasons, he chose to keep his male body and go through life presenting as male long before joining AVEN.
In 2010, "GirlInside" became a practicing Roman Catholic. He was baptized as a child, but he and his mother were out of the Church for many years until their return. When asked why he became Catholic, he says, "I saw all the moral relativism in the world and knew there had to be a better way." He is currently learning all about the Catholic faith and has added a page to his site for transgender Catholics. (Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church does not see transgender people as any more inherently sinful than anyone else; while sex reassignment surgery is a sin because it is mutilation, people with transgender feelings just have a difficult cross to bear and need to be celibate, just like people with homosexual feelings. Some Catholics believe that it is a mental illness that needs to be cured, but this is not official teaching.) After noticing that most sites for transgender Christians cater to Protestants by focusing on the Bible (and fairly liberal interpretations at that), he added this section.
In 2011, "GirlInside" officially declared on his blog that she is "moving on" from her site to "other things." In other words, his transgender internet identity is no longer in use, except to keep the site up for historical purposes and to correspond with anyone who e-mails him about it. He will no longer be posting on AVEN.
Furthermore, that same year, he abandoned the transgender philosophy as a result of his "relationship with God," as he describes. As he explained, "No one forced this decision on me; it was made out of my own God-given free will. I know some people will think I've been turned into some kind of zombie by the Catholic Church, or that they threatened to burn me at the stake, or something stupid like that. There are devout Catholics who identify as the opposite gender; it's just that I'm no longer one of them."
When asked what made him change his mind, he said, "God was patient with me; it took six months for me to understand that manmade definitions of gender are not valid. God gently reminded me that He made me male, and that to go against this was just part of the moral relativism I joined the Church to escape. While it isn't a sin to be that way--something is only a sin if it's an act of free will--I feel that it's still sinful in that it disagrees with the plan of the God who made us male and female." This helped him eventually reach a point where he no longer wanted womanhood for its own sake, but only "to be a stay-at-home mom with lots of kids who stick around even after they grow up. Of course, that's not part of God's will for me, which is why He led me to adopt guinea pigs a year before I converted." He dislikes the label "ex-transgender," because "it implies that there aren't stumbling blocks, things that tempt me toward that way of thinking, which I'm so much happier as a result of leaving. We're all sin addicts. People might ask, 'Weren't you born that way,' and I say, 'Yes, but there are two things: First, I was born again when I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, and second, being born with a predisposition toward something doesn't make it right.'" He added, "I am so much happier as a Christian than I ever was as an atheist."
If you're interested in being as liberated through Christianity as "GirlInside" has been, watch this documentary about an atheist who became a Christian because of the evidence: The Case for Christ
