2007
The media has been full of stories about an impending split in the Anglican church about gay priests and the blessing of gay marriages.
As usual religious conservatives are playing the homophobic role, quoting scripture on how sodomy is unnatural and all the rest of it. There is huge disgust and passion here. Can it be resolved?
My own perspective is completely influenced by my experience of and belief in reincarnation. I clearly remember many of my own lives and can also see them in other people. The important point here though is that people bring over preferences from past lives into a current one.
If, for example, a soul has had ten incarnations as a woman and then incarnates as a man, that soul is going to bring in some of the patterns and dynamics of being a woman. Even though the gender of the body may be male, it still carries memories of what gave it pleasure and what was normal for a woman in previous lives.
Understood in this way, then, it is absolutely normal for there to be a period of adjustment as people accustomed to being in the body of one gender integrate into the new gender. In my experience gay men and lesbians if regressed into a past life always remember a life in a body of the other gender.
Carrying these past life dynamics, it is completely normal for some of us some of the time to be homosexual. It is not a moral or spiritual issue whether someone is gay or not gay. Its just the way it is and should be warmly accepted as a natural part of life.
There are some other conclusions from this perspective too. If people understood that being gay or straight was an incarnational process and that they have more lives to live, then sex change operations would be understood as completely inappropriate.
In general, people who are obsessed by their body image or a an interbnal sense of awkwardness need to relax and flow with the experience. If there is distress and suffering then this is an opportunity for compassion, acceptance and love. Being a human being is a long educational process and cosmetic surgery is a mistake from the soul’s perspective. It just puts off dealing with reality and feeds into the energy field of glamour and illusion. People need love and self-esteem, not plastic surgery.
That said, however, I am great believer in the freedom of the individual and if someone genuinely wants to opt for surgery, may they be blessed and healed by the process.
Sixteen hundred years ago the Christian church forbad the teaching of reincarnation and it became an unacceptable blasphemy. In the contemporary world most people are familiar with Hindu, Buddhist and many other traditional teachings about reincarnation. More than that, like me me, many people have talents and experiences of familiarity which are most easily understood as past life memories.
One of the best things about reincarnational teachings is that gives us a long sense of our spiritual journeys, so that we can be more patient and understanding. It also supports a powerful tolerance. Can you imagine if the current Archbishop of Canterbury embraced these teachings?
Compassion aside, sir, I do believe you need to learn more about the physical, biological sides of being transgender. It’s not just “I don’t like my body I must fix it”. It’s not as simple as you make it out to be, and while I personally can see that your heart is in the right place and that you mean no harm, I also understand that this sentiment could very well hurt a lot of other transgender people.
If you really are as compassionate and spiritually “evolved” as you appear to claim, I would very much recommend you do more research. Learn about the biological factors (e.g. transgender women actually have the same or similar brain structures as cisgender women), and perhaps take the time to talk to trans folk about their feelings, experiences and situation.
And perhaps, try to imagine how you would feel waking up in a woman’s body. Imagine you are yourself as you are today, but stuck in a body with breasts, a vagina and a slew of emotionally disruptive hormones that turn you into a pile of emotional, hormonal goo every 21 days. Just imagine how distressed you’d become, having to deal with periods and bras, and sexually aroused men who have no sense of boundaries. Just try for about ten minutes to properly imagine that situation.
Most people get quite distressed with that mental exercise if they do it properly. And that distress is the feeling in a much smaller scale to what most transgender people live with every day. I have lived 39 years with a female body, and as much as I have ignored it, as much as I have accepted that it’s what I had to put up with in this lifetime, as much as I’ve made the tolerance and acceptance of my body a part of my spiritual life, I can’t continue on pretending to be a woman when I am a man on the inside of my skin. It’s like acid. It burns every day, all day. And while I agree that it could be a fair assessment that some of the causes of being transgender could be repeated incarnations in the opposite gender (most my recovered memories are male, after all), I don’t think you have whole understanding of the situation. I really think you need to explore the situation from angles other than just your own experiences with spirit.
But I wish you well, many of your articles have been really interesting and I thank you for your expertise in other areas. I hope you educate yourself better in transgender issues in the future.
I was so relieved to see a comment to someone who clearly does not comprehend what it means it to be transgender. I literally cringed with the comparison of a sex change operation to that of plastic surgery.
I don’t pretend as a gay man to know myself what living a life is transgender is like but I do know the hate and the ridicule but definitely to not the degree that I’ve seen in recent years.
It’s agonizing to witness.
I have done my very best to speak up and educate, the best I can, to hopefully one day being about the level of acceptance I enjoy today. I hope you won’t mind that I’m saving your comment to share with those I do certainly encounter going forward, because it is the clearest explanation I’ve read so far.
I want so much for every person to be understood, supported and loved for who they are.
If society could only understand, or just conceptualize, perhaps they just might change.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Much love to you.