I am a Christian man, and a follower of Jesus Christ. The goal of my life is to glorify God and to enjoy him. The Bible is my rule of life and it guides everything I do and believe. To read more about my faith and beliefs, read our page called – “Our Christian Perspective.” I am married to a wonderful wife. I am a pastor and enjoy my day to day ministry very much. I also feel a strong calling and passion for this online ministry.

I used to struggle with autogynephilia and strong desires to crossdress, along with some accompanying gender dysphoria. I started this website in 2011 in order to help other Christian men who experience the desire to crossdress. I struggled with this issue for most of my life until God gave me great victory over it. Although I still experience temptations every once in a while, and admittedly I have had brief moments of giving in to temptation over the years, overall I have experienced great freedom from crossdressing, autogynephilia, and gender dysphoria. I enjoy my life greatly without indulging autogynephilic desires, and I feel full contentment as a man. This victory did not happen overnight and it took a great deal of work. Even so, I give God all the credit for this, because all of my successes are the result of God working in me.

On this website I have shared many personal details about my struggle in this area, so for now I have chosen to remain anonymous. I decided to go by the name Barnabas, a name which means “son of encouragement” (Acts 4:36). I feel called by God to encourage and comfort other men who are struggling with crossdressing or gender dysphoria. Through my testimony and writings, I have tried to provide hope to men like me and give them the help they need in order to overcome the addiction and find freedom. I want to help men with this struggle find contentment with their bodies and identities as men. I also want to encourage the worldwide Church to respond with truth, love, and compassion to crossdressers and others who struggle with different kinds of gender brokenness or sexual addiction. Additionally, I want to encourage and support the wives of crossdressing men. I am overjoyed that God has provided men and women to join me in pursuing these goals so that now there is a whole team of people in our organization who are counseling others, writing content, and forging new partnerships.

If you would like to contact me, you can comment below. Or if you prefer to email me privately, you can use this Contact Form, and I will email you back.

My Testimony:

Let me share with you the brief outline of my testimony concerning crossdressing. I grew up loving the Lord in a Christian family. As a kid I did plenty of traditionally masculine activities such as playing sports and playing with toy guns. I had friends who were boys and friends who were girls. My childhood was very good and I had healthy relationships with everyone in my family. I dressed up as (or was dressed up as) a girl at least several times during normal childhood playtime and games. One of these episodes is a very clear and pivotal childhood memory, either because it was enjoyable, or perhaps because I felt ashamed, or possibly both at once.

I remember having real dreams as well as daydreams while lying in bed, of people dressing me up as a girl as early as 1st grade. For example, one common dream consisted of girls in my class dressing me up as a girl and putting lipstick on me. Often this was done against my will. I think these fantasies subconsciously expressed my longing to be a girl, thinking that life would be easier and better that way. I felt a lot of pressure at school being a boy, because I was so quiet and gentle compared to the other boys, and I envied the girls, who seemed to better share my temperament. These daydreams did not consume my life, and were only when lying in bed. I also never felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, but rather I experienced cross-gender longing to be a girl while knowing full well I was not a girl.

I played with Barbies a lot early on and enjoyed it immensely. Another pivotal memory is purchasing Barbie clothes at a toy store while on my own. It was a euphoric moment, whether that was because it seemed forbidden or because I felt like it was a very girly activity to actually use my allowance money to purchase something so feminine. Some time later when I more deeply realized that most boys did not play with Barbies, I was ashamed and I hid the fact that I had used to play with them. By elementary school, all of my friends were boys. By the end of elementary school, it still had not occurred to me to question why these thoughts and daydreams about crossdressing occupied my mind.

As is true for many kids, middle school was a rough experience for me, and it did not help that I was very shy. I had very few friends and tons of social anxiety. By the end of middle school I was strongly attracted to girls, but I also found myself overly interested in the clothes they wore along with their makeup and fingernail polish. However, I did not think about intentionally crossdressing until one day in the 8th grade when I was home alone and I decided to put on a dress from the “dress-up” clothes. It was suddenly exciting, yet even then I remember feeling that what I was doing was stupid and abnormal, and I did not want anyone to see me. I must have taken that dress on and off again five times. This event proved to be a formative beginning of the bond between my mind, body, and crossdressing. I didn’t experience it as sexual at the time, but it was a euphoric high feeling.

The biggest period of crossdressing in my life was from the 8th to 9th grade. I would look for opportunities to crossdress as often as I could, and it completely overwhelmed my thoughts. I lived in fear and excitement at the same time. I loved staring at myself in the mirror for as long as possible. Soon after this I also discovered that I could use the internet to feed my addiction. I wanted to look up a website for girls about fashion and clothing, and by accident I ended up at pornographic sites – but I remember not being interested in that. My memory is fuzzy on this, but I think the first couple years of crossdressing did not include any overt sexual arousal or erections, and definitely no masturbation. It was only in late high school that crossdressing and transgender fiction became extremely associated with sexual arousal and masturbation.

My crossdressing continued in secret and was reinforced through my online activity until I had a spiritual awakening where I rededicated my life to Christ in the early years of high school. I began to read the Bible regularly, and I became more involved with Christian friends. I discovered new meaning and purpose in life. I had joy in serving God. I also became suddenly convicted about the sinful nature of crossdressing, along with all the deception and sneaking around that had accompanied it. Looking back, I know this was the Holy Spirit working in me. During this time I discovered Deuteronomy 22:5, but with or without that passage, I knew without a doubt that my crossdressing was not only displeasing to God but was also a harmful addiction. It’s interesting that the conviction came mostly as a result of my new intimacy with the Lord, rather than anyone telling me that I had done something wrong. I repented to God and stopped the activity altogether for two-three years. It was out of my mind, just something odd from my past.

Those years were some of the best of my life. I felt so free. I grew immensely in my relationship with God, and God used me in the lives of other people. However, at one point desire to crossdress, and more so the desire to fantasize through online fiction, came back into the picture. When it did, it was not so all-consuming, but it did become a regular struggle. My normal pattern looked like this: I would fail, but then I would immediately feel guilty and so I would confess and repent. I would hate what I had done, and so I would make a new commitment never to give in again.

Although failures were only once a month, and they were brief episodes looking at stuff online, the addiction slowly escalated. With each occurrence, the sin took longer lengths of time and involved more risks. I remember incidents where I would spend upwards of six hours online looking at websites about crossdressing or reading crossdressing fiction. Such activities would always be accompanied by masturbation. To read more about my addiction to fiction, read this post – My Addiction to Crossdressing Fiction.

Things changed drastically in late high school when I and some male Christian friends all told each other our deepest secrets and the sins we struggled with. At first, it was terrifying to tell them, but they were amazing listeners and responded with compassion. They did not make me feel any shame, and showed me great respect. We became accountability partners and that brought a lot of new healing and support. Just bringing my sins out into the open gave me more power over them.

For the next few years and into college, I continued to experience temptation. I regularly got help from accountability partners and confessed any time I failed. I had some significant periods of victory over my addiction during those years. During this time I began researching what experts had to say about the topic of crossdressing, transvestic fetishism, and transsexuals (only much later did I learn about the term autogynephilia). The more I learned, the better I began to understand myself. It was also during this time that I felt God calling me into ministry as a pastor. God’s healing of my heart in this area of cross-gender longing, and in the area of overcoming sexual addiction had already begun.

Throughout the early years, I told more and more people my story, one at a time, and I am grateful that these difficult conversations always had good results. One of the people I told was a counselor who was very compassionate and a good listener. At the same time, he did not know much about crossdressing, and so he helped me with general techniques to work on how to overcome addiction. It was helpful for a season. I appreciated that he was a Christian who did not take the perspective that crossdressing was part of who I am and something that I should embrace.

Getting married helped me in my struggle, but I soon realized that I would have to continue to live with temptations related to crossdressing. I told my wife about my crossdressing history during our first year of marriage and she responded very well. However, now that I have spent years counseling others, I now believe it is wrong to refrain from sharing about such a huge sexual and identity issue with the woman you plan on asking to marry you. Similarly, it would be strange and wrong to hide an alcohol addiction from your fiancée until after you were already married. The conversation with my wife was difficult but full of love and grace. We already had a marriage built on Christ and with solid trust in each other. That was the beginning of many conversations so that she might understand me better. From the first, I told her to never let me crossdress, ever, period.

Over the years in college and later on in marriage, I experienced greater victory over temptations, and much more contentment as a man. Reading and learning more about autogynephilia and understanding myself better played a huge role in finding greater freedom. I developed new strategies for learning contentment, for integration of my personality, and for overcoming sexual temptation. Finding other people online who had my same experiences, and who were fellow Christians, was also transformative and healing.

When I started this ministry in 2011, that brought even greater breakthroughs. When I began to spend time helping other people, it made it even easier to resist temptation myself. I started to realize just how much God had already delivered me from this struggle, and how much I appreciated my life as a man. Praise the Lord Jesus for this deliverance!

My wife knows about this website, she is supportive of this ministry, and she prays for and encourages me regularly. My wife and I continue to have a very committed marriage today. She is grateful that I have worked through this issue in detail with accountability partners and that I get regular help from them.

Today, I enjoy both my regular work as a pastor as well as this online ministry. As I minister to others, I have found that my history of addiction and my experience of God’s grace help me to have mercy and compassion for other people who struggle with addiction or other kinds of sin, especially those who are burdened with same-sex attraction or pornography addiction, or other unwanted sexual desires.

If you want to comment or discuss my story, or share about yourself, you can make a comment below. I would love to read your story too. Thank you for visiting this website. I praise the Lord Jesus for what he has done in my life. I hope that you also can experience growth, freedom, and healing in your own journey. Join this community and our discussions, and consider joining one of our support groups.