In this post, I am going to talk about how crossdressing can easily become idolatry. Of course I do not refer to consciously worshipping crossdressing. I mean idolatry in the sense of putting something else as a god in your life, in the same way that money or power can easily become an idol. I’m not saying that crossdressing is always idolatry by its nature though I do believe it is inherently a narcissistic and self-absorbed activity. But in this post, more basically I just want to explain why and how crossdressing can easily become idolatry for many people.

In this post, I am focusing mostly on crossdressing for the purposes of sexual pleasure, whether due to transvestic fetishism or autogynephilia. This type of crossdressing is very addictive. However, even for those struggling much more with gender dysphoria rather than sexual addiction, the coveting of a new body and identity can become idolatry in the same way. Most of the ideas in this post come from a pastor named Tim Keller. I’ve been reading some of what he has written about idolatry in general and I found it powerful and very interesting.

To start, let me share a few ideas about idolatry is in general terms. There are a couple types of idolatry. We can fall into idolatry by worshiping God in the incorrect way, such as trying to worship him using a golden calf instead of the way he told us to worship him. We can also fall into idolatry by worshiping other gods, or other things, in place of God. And since God demands ALL of our worship, we are still falling in idolatry if we give God 90% of our worship, and something else 10% of our worship. This is the kind of idolatry that crossdressing can fit into. But how do we know if we are worshiping something else besides God? If we don’t bow down to anything else does that mean we don’t worship anything else? No. There are ways we worship besides just bowing down or praying. So here are some ideas about idolatry I’ve gleaned from Keller. Following each point I relate what he said to crossdressing.

1. Idolatry is the inordinate desire for anything. Idolatry can even be the desire for good things. In fact, good things usually end up being idols more often because most of us naturally desire good things. But it becomes idolatry when the desire is inordinate, when we desire that thing out of proportion to how good it is. So it’s idolatry when we desire it more than we should be desiring it. For example, it’s good to desire money because we need it for survival. But if we become consumed with it, full of greed, and obsessed with making as much money as we can, even if we hurt people to do it, we know we have made an idol out of money.

I would argue that crossdressing results from good desires that have spun out of control in confusion. You desire to love and be with a woman. This is a good desire. But you make it such a necessity and idol that you are willing to create a false woman as a substitute when you don’t have the woman you want (or if your wife is not good enough compared to the false woman you can make). You long for this woman so much that you are willing to sin to get “her” just as when someone values money so much that they are willing to steal for it.

2. An idol is something more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, or identity. So if your spouse is more important than God for your happiness, meaning in life, or your identity, your spouse has become your idol.

Crossdressing can easily become the all consuming passion in your life. You don’t look to God for happiness, but only to crossdressing. It provides the main meaning in life. You claim that crossdressing is part of your identity, or you take on female identity and feel like life has no meaning without that identity.

3. Your idol likely is the thing you think about most when you are alone and have nothing else to do. Do you spend your time thinking about God and his wonderful love, or thinking about pornography or family or your achievements?

For many crossdressers their minds are constantly consumed with crossdressing thoughts. Maybe you daydream about it whenever you can, even while at work. Maybe you are constantly scheming about how you can crossdress more, and constantly fantasizing about crossdressing.

4. Your idol is the thing you feel like you can’t live without. You might not commit suicide without it, but you feel like you can’t live a joyful life without the idol. Life just doesn’t seem worth living without it.

The common saying is that, “sure you can give up crossdressing, but you will soon realize that you can’t live a happy life without it. You’ll be always missing it and you’ll be miserable.” If there is nothing else in your life that makes it worth living, if you absolutely must be crossdressing in order to feel happy, then it has become an idol.

5. It can help to determine your idol by looking at what your nightmares are. If your nightmares are about rejection, then your idol is probably “approval.” If your nightmares are about uncertainty, then your idol is probably  “control.”

I’m not sure about this one. What do you think? Any connection to crossdressing or autogynephilia?

6. We worship what we think will really make us happy. The meaning of life is to worship God and find our happiness in him. When we seek our happiness anywhere else than in God, that is idolatry.

You think crossdressing will make you happy and that God won’t. In fact, maybe you start to think that disobeying God’s commands in Scripture will make you happy, when you should realize that only in obeying God’s commands can we find true happiness.

7. We eventually become like what we worship. If we worship God, we start to emulate him and become more like him. If we worship an idol, we get more and more consumed by the idol and become more like it.

I’m not sure on this one. Maybe a connection would be that when you worship crossdressing, which is caricaturing a woman, you become more and more of a ridiculous caricature. Rather than becoming a real woman, you become a sexual object of your own lust.

8. When we seek after idols, we are seeking for something good, some need that we have, and trying to find it in false idols, rather than in God. So Keller says we might have beauty or image as idols, and instead of going to God to see how beautiful he is, or recognizing that he finds us beautiful, we instead get eating disorders or look for false intimacy in pornography or adultery. It’s looking for what we need in the wrong places.

You want to feel beautiful, which is good, but you try that feeling through crossdressing, rather than in realizing that God finds you beautiful already in the way he created you (Psalm 139). You want intimacy and love, and try to find that through crossdressing, but you need to realize that you can have intimacy and love from God. You want to escape life pressures by crossdressing, but you fail to find your peace and relief from anxiety in God.

9. The more you seek power from your idols, the more they drain you of strength. They enslave us and we become trapped by them. The more you worship them, the more they bring about spiritual blindness of heart and mind. (Isaiah 44:9, 18). In Romans 1, Paul also talks about the effects of idolatry.  “²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened…... ²⁵ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” We end up being deceived by our idols. 

The more you crossdress, the more you become addicted to it. The more you crossdress, the more you want to crossdress, and the more fully you want to crossdress. It becomes a huge part of your life and you feel like you can’t do without it. You become a slave to it. You might even create an alternate persona that you can’t help but letting out once in a while. You become deceived. You actually begin to think of yourself as a woman, though by any possible definition, you are not.

10. Your idol is what you want to protect, to the point that you are willing to sin against God. If you think of the 10 commandments, usually we don’t break any of the 10 commandments without first breaking the 1st commandment. We sin in daily life in order to protect our idols. What makes us lie or steal or disobey authority for? For whatever idol we are trying to keep a hold on. If our idol is power through our job, what might we be willing to do, how might we sin in order to keep our power and our job?

How many of us have sinned in other ways in order to protect our crossdressing habits? Maybe you pretended to be a real woman and deceived others so that they wouldn’t know you were a man. Maybe you lied about touching clothing belonging to a wife or sister or mother. Maybe you lied about what you were doing on the computer. Maybe crossdressing led you to marital unfaithfulness. Maybe you opted for divorce rather than give up crossdressing. Maybe crossdressing prompted you to steal female clothing. Maybe crossdressing increased your vanity and made you more self-absorbed. Maybe crossdressing increased you jealousy of other women or other crossdressers. Maybe crossdressing caused you to lose too much weight and not take care of your body. Maybe crossdressing caused you to waste a lot of time or money that God would have wanted you to use more productively. Maybe crossdressing caused you to start taking the Bible less seriously and disobeying other commands of God.

11. Idolatry makes us deserving of God’s wrath and punishment. In the same passage, Romans 1, Paul says – “¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” Idolatry makes us guilty before God and deserving of his wrath. We deserve both death and hell. But thankfully we can be 100% fully forgiven for all our sin through Jesus Christ. God himself took the punishment for us. God himself experienced his own wrath against our sin. But even as Christians who are forgiven we should still strongly resist idolatry. If we are truly born again, we will be people who no longer want to give in to idolatry. We know idolatry is not good for us. We know idolatry doesn’t please God and we should want to live for him out of gratitude for his forgiveness. And we we know we can find more joy and fulfillment in God than in idols.

We deserve God’s wrath for our sin of crossdressing. I’m not singling out crossdressing. If we have made an idol out of spouse or family or comfort or money or anything else, that also makes us deserving of God’s wrath. All of us have sinned in so many ways, and all of us have been idolatrous in so many ways. We all deserve hell. But our wonderful merciful God, in the person of Jesus, took the punishment we deserve. If we trust in Jesus, we have complete forgiveness. For those of us who have made an idol out of crossdressing, forgiveness in Jesus is offered freely.

How can we get rid of an idol in our lives? How do we fight against it?  The only way to get rid of an idol in our hearts is to replace it with something else. We need to replace any idolatrous desires with the desire for God. Only the good news about God and who he is, the good news about Jesus and his salvation can replace our idols. We need the Holy Spirit and God’s love to replace the hole in our hearts that we are trying to fill with other things. We need to give up looking for treasures on earth, and realize that God is our true treasure.

We need to stop looking for our needs and our happiness to be met in idols. We have to investigate and figure out what needs and feelings we are trying to meet through crossdressing and realize how God truly provides for those needs and desires we crave. We must have an all consuming passion for Jesus and find our joy, happiness, and needs met in him. Once Jesus becomes the treasure of our life, crossdressing and all other idols will start to become like rubbish. Philippians 3:8 – ⁸ What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ.