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 transgender website Boy On The Outside, Girl On The Inside, which no longer exists.
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." (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 seen as a sin because it is considered mutilation, people with transgender feelings just have a difficult cross to bear and are told that they need to be celibate, just like people with homosexual feelings are told. Some Catholics believe that it is a mental illness that needs to be cured, but this is not official teaching.)
In 2011, "GirlInside" officially declared on his blog (which no longer exists) that he is "moving on" from his 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 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. 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."
In 2013, he said, "Thanks to the grace of God, I no longer have any desire to be female. Even if He offered me a complete transformation into a woman, I would not want it. I'm still called to celibacy, but for different reasons." Near the end of 2013, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, after "a long time praying about it," he deleted his website. "I no longer believe any of my own words. Actually, they aren't really my words. I was a completely different person before my conversion. The Bible says I'm a 'new creature' and 'the old things are passed away' (2 Corinthians 5:17)."
If you're interested in the idea of being as liberated through Christianity as "GirlInside" has been, go to any Catholic Church and ask about their RCIA program.
