Finding Real Love

BY CHUA EE CHIEN. Published by Asian Beacon on 28 July 2013.

Edmund Smith is a good-looking pastor, loving husband and father of two children who once led a “wild homosexual lifestyle,” as he says.

Smith had his first gay relationship when he was 18. A pub singer at night and a special education teacher by day, he used to entertain thoughts of having a sex change and tried to behave as femininely as possible. Plucking his eyebrows and shaving the hair on his legs were just two of his many womanly routines. What drove him to this lifestyle and what made him walk away from it?

Confusing Childhood

“I am the fourth boy in my family. When Mum was pregnant with me, they had hoped that I would be a girl. Perhaps that’s why, until I was five, my mother brought me up like a girl. I played with dolls and wore dresses,” says Edmund. “My father rejected me – he never
hugged me or touched me. My rejection deepened especially after my younger sister was born because I could remember clearly my father loving her and saying nice things to her just because she was a girl.”

“So, for the first five years of my life, I remember wishing to be a girl due to all the ‘self issues’ that had developed because of how my parents treated me and my confusing upbringing. I hated being a guy and naturally I began to think, feel and talk like a girl,” he recalls.

“When I reached the age of six and started to go to kindergarten, my mum suddenly decided to stop treating me like a girl after receiving comments from others and she started abusing and beating me up, making me more confused,” he says.

Edmund was later sent to an all-boys school and there he found boys who were just as effeminate. So, at the age of 13, he began his homosexual life.

Triggers

Based on his personal experience, he finds that there are mainly three specific issues which would trigger one’s journey to homosexuality, if not dealt with.

The first is the ‘vacuum’ issue, which is related to a lack of parental love. “Everyone needs the ‘V’ love. A mother’s love flows down from one side, and a father’s love flows down from the other and a child needs both parents’ love. Most gay guys have never had a father’s love,” he says.

The second trigger is the ‘self issue’, which is basically something about ourselves that we reject. For example, if you are a man and you reject your masculinity, that becomes a ‘self issue’ towards your gender.

The third trigger is the ‘barrier issue’, which causes one to look at the opposite gender negatively due to bad experiences such as abuse and bitterness.

Unfortunately for Smith, he had all three issues and therefore, looked for real love among his kind all through his secondary school days, while trying to be as feminine as possible.

Smith had his first real relationship with a man when he was 18 but it only lasted a year as his partner became possessive. He then started another relationship with another man.

It was not until he was 24 when he was dumped by his third lover that Smith decided he was sick and tired of his lifestyle and decided that he’d rather be single than be used by men again. It was a lonely journey to recovery as he had to walk away from his friends and give up his lifestyle of frequenting gay clubs and saunas.

Meeting The Right Man

Brought up in a Roman Catholic home, Smith faithfully went to church even while he was practising the homosexual lifestyle. “I went to church every Sunday, but I never had a relationship with Jesus,” he says.

His turning point came when he met Jenny, his colleague at Salvation Army where he worked as a teacher. “One day, Jenny asked me, ‘Why don’t you give Jesus a try?’ I then decided to open up my heart and receive Christ into my life.”

Upon Jenny’s invitation, he started attending the Salvation Army Church and grew in his relationship with this Jesus.

Looking back, Smith realises that his “right man – Jesus” had always been by his side because when he was going through his third break-up, he happened to be at a place where he was surrounded by Christians.

“If not for Jesus and the support from fellow Christians, I would have gone back to my old lifestyle. The journey to recovery from sexual brokenness is not an easy one. You need a church or group who can listen to you and lift you up when you fall,” Smith says.

One of Smith’s greatest blessings is his wife, Amanda Amutha Perumal, who was his colleague and good friend at Salvation Army. In 1997, Smith and Amanda went to Singapore Bible College to further their studies and there, they got to know about Choices, a Singapore- based organisation which reaches out to homosexuals.

They were trained at Choices for their ministry with homosexuals and in 2003, they moved back to Malaysia and set up Real Love Ministry (RLM) in Malacca.

“I started the ministry with the goal of raising up Befrienders-trained RLM workers who will journey with homosexuals who want to leave their lifestyle. I also started giving talks on the issues of sexual brokenness and formed support groups,” says Smith.

Spreading The Love

In 2006, Edmund and Amanda felt God’s call to start a church in Malacca which they later named Real Love Fellowship. Today, Edmund is the Senior Pastor of the church, reaching out and spreading the love of Jesus to the sexually-broken and marginalised community. His church is attended by the young and old from all walks of life.

The proud father of two – Angel and Ethan – has a passion for the performing arts and still sings, acts and dances professionally. His album, Wake Up, was inspired from his years of community work with the mentally-challenged, AIDs patients and homosexuals. He also travels frequently as an itinerant speaker, sharing his testimony to many.

Seeing the huge need of the homosexual community, Smith says that his church is looking to doing more work among the community. “There are hundreds of homosexuals who want to come out, but we have only few Befrienders,” he says. “We need more people to step out to reach out to these people.”

The Smiths also hope to purchase their own building to cater to the increasing needs of their church members and ministry. More information on Real Love Ministry is available at www.r-l-m.com.

Transsexual Returns to Original Gender After Relationship With Christ

By Jeff Schapiro, published by The Christian Post on 11 January 2012.

By his early teenage years, the fantasy had only grown. He adopted the female name Andrea West, and began cross dressing. At age 15, he also began learning about Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and, although he struggled against his desire to be female, he says those feelings were like a radio playing in his head that he just couldn't turn off.

"While I didn't want to be going down this pathway I seemed to be on this track that I couldn't interrupt, stop or change,” he recalled. “But I wasn't homosexual. I was having dates with girls, I never felt any desire to have relationships with men, so from the standpoint of my sexuality I was always heterosexual.”

“That I think, too, is one of the...misleading factors. Most people consider transgenders to be homosexual and, from my experience...98 to 99 percent of the people who contact me are not homosexual...It's really a gender identity issue, not a sexual preference issue.”

In the midst of his struggle, Heyer got married and had two children. He worked as an engineer for a while and achieved significant financial success.

“But the difficulty that I faced was that I couldn't shut the thoughts or the feelings off," he said. He turned to alcohol to cope with his issues, and eventually his life came crashing down around him.

He and his wife split after 17 years of marriage, and he lost his job when he began making the physical transformation into becoming a woman. He got breast implants, began taking hormones, had electrolysis to reduce the hair on his face and had his genitals removed.

As an adult woman, he gave himself the name Laura, and lived under that identity for eight years.

After studying psychology while still living as a woman, however, he says he eventually realized that a person can't actually change genders and that he was delusional. He also later found out that he had a dissociative disorder and multiple personality disorder as a result of his haunting past.

"You're not born transgender, something happens in your childhood that causes you to not want to be who you are...And today the only thing that is...socially acceptable is calling yourself a transgender,” he said.

“I don't think that's an accurate description of where the people are. They're individuals suffering from a delusional disorder that is going to become very self-destructive if, in fact, they don't get good psychological counseling or psychiatric help during that process.”

While he was living as Laura, Heyer says that he believed in Christ but struggled to be accepted in the church. He recalled one church he attended where he entered as a woman but was asked to leave by the pastor once his identity issues were revealed.

Not all his church experiences were bad, however. He found a church that welcomed him in, even with the knowledge of what his struggle was. The pastor of that church told him, “Our job is to love you and it's God's job to transform you.”

“The church, what it did for me was it allowed me to really get to the point where I asked the Lord for forgiveness. I began to pray for forgiveness. And I realized that the critical point is understanding that you can accept Jesus Christ, but there's a point where that doesn't become real...until you're walking with Christ,” he said.

“Because the real truth that Christ is alive is the fact that you see a transformed life. And so what happened in my life is that when I finally... got down on my knees and was working through these things many years after I had accepted Christ – probably 10 to 15 years after I accepted Christ – I finally felt that I was broken enough as a man that I got on my knees and prayed.”

He says that one day he had a vision while praying with his psychologist. He saw Jesus pick up a baby version of himself, look at him and say, “You will now be saved with me forever.” From that point on he could feel the Holy Spirit moving and guiding him in his life.

Today, Heyer says he no longer struggles with his gender identity and uses his testimony to speak out in support of those who have similar struggles and against those who advocate sex reassignment surgery as the solution to the gender identity problems.

A Swedish study published online in February 2011 examined individuals who had sex reassignments between 1973 and 2003, and found that switching sexes can have a significant negative impact on the individual and is not a good solution to someone's gender identity crisis.

“This study found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalizations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population,” the study's authors write in their conclusion. “This highlights that post-surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up.”

Heyer is the founder of websites such as Sex Change Regret and True Trans Christians, and is the author of several related books including Trading My Sorrows and, most recently, Paper Genders, which was published in June 2011.

He emphasizes the point that SRS is cosmetic surgery only, that it is “scientifically, medically and surgically impossible” for a man to actually be changed into a woman, but also says other people need to show compassion toward those who are struggling with gender identity issues.

Today Heyer is married once again, and he says that he has found happiness in being the gender that God created him to be.

Read more here: http://www.christianpost.com/news/transsexual-returns-to-original-gender-after-relationship-with-christ-66932/