The Rosary as Spiritual Sword: My Testimony of Victory

The importance of Marian devotion and mental prayer in battling temptation

Introduction: My Background and Ongoing Struggle

As most of my readers know, I’m a detransitioned male as well as a Catholic convert. This means I lived as a transgender woman for eight years before ultimately rejecting this false, self-determined identity and embracing my God-given male identity. And today I want to talk about how I overcame my most recent struggle with temptation in regards to falling back into my habitual sin of crossdressing, which is what drove me down that pathway in the first place.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay where I related how I relapsed into the habitual sin of crossdressing so deeply that I almost lost my faith. This habitual sin stems from my autogynephilia, my paraphilia, which anyone who knows my story knows that my lifelong struggle in terms of habitual sin, in terms of lust, has been dealing with the battle against the flesh with this paraphilia, this unholy kink of crossdressing fetishism, which is something that I’ve been struggling with since I was a very young boy. Even prior to puberty, I was secretly stealing pantyhose from my mother. It has just been something that’s been part of me for a long time. It is the root of my sin nature and concupiscence.

And it drove me down the transition pathway. But then, when I detransitioned, all those same sexual fantasies and desires and lustful thoughts, the thoughts of the flesh, came roaring back. And ever since I detransitioned, it’s been a battle against the flesh to live out a life of chastity and figure out what to do with these desires. And as anyone who knows my story knows, a big part of my battle against this, in terms of coming to terms with these disordered sexual desires, these disordered sexual fantasies, is my conversion to Catholicism last February, where I had my Damascus Road encounter with God, convicting me of my sins.

And my Catholic faith has given me great resources, great spiritual strength to deal with this because first and foremost, it gave me a conviction of sin, a conviction in my conscience, the moral law written on my heart by the grace of God, who convicted me that I shouldn’t be engaging in all this kinky masturbatory crossdressing fetishism and watching all this kinky pornography related to crossdressing, sissy hypnosis, and all these things that have been a real struggle for me and I’ve shared about that very openly on my substack and elsewhere.

When you become a Christian, you start this gradual process of sanctification, this gradual process of theosis, of becoming more like Christ, becoming sanctified, growing in holiness, growing in righteousness, growing in virtue. But it is an ongoing process. It doesn’t just happen immediately upon conversion to Christianity (unless God grants that rare grace.)

So that’s been my struggle for the past year, since I converted to Catholicism: dealing with this cycle of habitual sin, where I would be doing good for a while, and then I would deal with these unbearable temptations, lapse into mortal sin, go to confession, do good for awhile, lapse back into mortal, go to confession, endlessly repeating.

After I’d been doing well for a while, the temptations just came out of nowhere. And I truly think there’s a diabolical element to that in terms of just how overwhelming the temptations were and how it often felt like I was an automaton, like I didn’t have any free will, that it was just like this overwhelming force stemming from this sin nature within me, which enslaved me to its own prerogatives.

And that’s why I think the addiction model is so helpful here, because you are enslaved to your habit. You’ve worn a groove in your mind. The wagon wheels have carved out a groove and a rut, and you’re stuck in that rut, and it’s almost impossible to get out of it except by the grace of God.

And that’s something I’ve come to learn: to get out of these habitual sins of lust, you need to humble yourself and realize you can’t do it without God. This is the lesson of St. Augustine’s The Confessions. You need the grace of God to get out of that sin. Even though it was your own free will that committed the sins in the first place, the intrinsic punishment for the sins is the formation of a habit, and once you get into that habit, there’s really not a whole lot you can do just by white knuckling it with your own human willpower. You really do need the grace of God, humbling yourself, asking for those graces to escape from the mire of sin you yourself willingly trapped yourself in.

The Recent Relapse and Recovery in December

So anyway, the first few weeks of December, I was once again dealing with overwhelming temptation. I lapsed into mortal sin once again and I really went to a dark place spiritually because I was just so deep into the degeneracy that I was even questioning giving up my Catholic faith and retransitioning, going back down the kinky crossdressing lifestyle, and giving up my Catholic convictions and going back to that liberal worldview where it’s okay to watch porn, engage in kinky masturbation, acts of masturbatory sodomy, and unspeakable evils I won’t even mention.

And so, but by the grace of God, right around the time I was going down to Florida to visit my family for Christmas, once again, by the grace of God, I got a conviction of my heart and received the wonderful grace of true contrition for my sins. But that conviction happened right before I was about to leave, and I didn’t have a chance to throw away all the crossdressing paraphernalia that I had accumulated during those couple of weeks, and so of course, when I was in Florida visiting my family, not giving into temptation was super easy because I’m with my family, which was great. So I had a couple of weeks to cleanse my mind of those dopamine patterns while living in a state of grace. I went to confession. I was going to Mass. I was reading Sacred Scripture. Praying the Rosary. I was really doing well spiritually.

But I knew that, as I was going back to St. Louis, it was going to be a long road trip. I knew that all that crossdressing stuff was just waiting for me at home, and I would have to get home and immediately throw it away. But historically, it’s been on these types of road trips where I have a lot of time to myself, where I’ve really struggled with temptation, this unbearable temptation to relapse into the crossdressing. Because if you know anything about autogynephilia, about sexual paraphilias, about sex addiction, these thoughts, these urges are very strong, particularly because they’re powered by the male hormone of testosterone. And also, I’ve come to realize there’s a diabolical influence here.

So I knew I would need to engage in a serious spiritual battle as I drove back to St. Louis. And I’m happy to say, by the grace of God, it’s now Thursday as I write this, and as I drove back this past weekend, I was able to resist all temptations, and I’ve been clean and sober for 18 days now (cannabis addiction and sobriety from that ties into my sexual addiction as well, but I don’t have time to go into that in this essay.)

St. Paul says that God will not give us a temptation that we cannot bear and that God will always provide a path of escape from any temptation. So, while yes, it does seem sometimes that the temptations are unbearable and that we are automatons, Sacred Scripture says that God will always provide a path out of temptation. And so by the grace of God, I found that path, I stayed the course, and by the grace of God I was able to resist falling back into mortal sin this past weekend. And all that stuff is completely purged from my house and I’m not struggling with overwhelming temptation this week (Praise be to God!). I also doused my whole house with Holy Water when I got home. In the past, I would throw away my paraphernalia and then repurchase it, throw it away, repurchase it—really like junkie behavior, even digging it out of the trash—which is why I know the sex addiction model is applicable because these binge/purge cycles are very common for autogynephiles struggling with crossdressing fetishism. But by the grace of God I have not been struggling with such junkie behaviors this week!

So by the grace of God, the temptations on my drive up to St. Louis were not beyond my capacity to bear. And there are a couple of things that really helped me on my road trip. I was really engaged in constant prayer. I was praying the Rosary. Listening to Sacred Music. I was listening to spiritual works by the great saints on vice and virtue. I asked many saints for their intercession. And I also had some male accountability partners, friends, and others from a Christian ministry focused on healing from crossdressing, whom I knew I’d have to be accountable to when I got home. Before the road trip, I also shared publicly on social media my struggles and asked my community of online Christian brothers and sisters to pray for me, and I am so grateful that so many of my supporters let me know they were praying for me this past weekend. I truly believe those prayers were efficacious!

But above all, what really helped me in this spiritual battle was the Rosary and the intercession of our Blessed Mother, the crusher of the head of Satan.

The Power of the Rosary and Mental Prayer

So what I really want to credit my success here with avoiding mortal sin, with avoiding temptation, is the intercession of our Blessed Mother the Virgin Mary, praying the Rosary, and mental prayer.

Let me start with mental prayer. And this ties into the Rosary: many people think the Rosary is just mindlessly repeating Our Fathers and Hail Marys, but that’s not actually what the Rosary is. While yes, those vocal prayers, all the Hail Marys and Our Fathers, they provide structure to the Rosary, and there is power in those words as they come directly from Sacred Scripture, the real secret of the Rosary is mental prayer to meditate on the life of Christ.

So, for example, in the sorrowful mysteries, the fifth sorrowful mystery is the crucifixion. So when you’re praying and meditating on the fifth sorrowful mystery, what you’re supposed to do is you’re supposed to use your imagination to put yourself at the foot of the cross as if you were right there in the life of Jesus.

And this was so powerful to me because I’m imagining myself at the foot of the cross, and I’m looking up, and I’m seeing the feet of Jesus, and His feet have a nail through them, and they’re bleeding, and He’s just bloodied and beaten up. He’s beaten to a pulp but He’s looking down on me with great mercy and forgiveness and love and yet I’m looking up at Him looking at these bloody feet and saying to myself, “I did this to you O Lord! I crucified you!” and I could imagine myself as if I was the Roman soldier pounding the nails into His feet or at the scourging at the pillar I’m the one that’s whipping Him and beating Him. At the crowning of thorns, I’m the one that’s mocking Him and spitting on Him. So I could see clearly in my mind that it was all my sins that crucified him, that scourged him, and caused Him agony in the Garden.

And so when you’ve engaged your imagination, you’re recollecting to yourself to the reality of the presence of God, reminding yourself that God is with you, the Blessed Mother is with you, Jesus is with you, the Holy Spirit is with you (Come, Holy Spirit!), and importantly, you’re resting in the silence of the encounter to wait for the Lord to speak to you via reverberations of your own heart.

Those sorts of meditations are very powerful because, in your imagination, you encounter Christ. And so, these encounters with Christ on this road trip practically eliminated the weight of these temptations and made them so much easier to bear compared to past struggles.

Yes, I would still get temptations because when you have a lifelong addiction to things like pornography and all this masturbation and stuff, your memory stores those images in your mind, and then the demons can use those things in your imagination to taunt you, to haunt you, to flash those images in your mind, which provides a massive temptation. And so, historically, that’s something I really struggled with: these flashes of decades of addiction, flashing these images in my mind, tempting me and accusing me.

But every time those temptations and memories flash into my mind, or I had an image of these lustful temptations, I would just turn to the Blessed Mother, invoke her name, and say, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” Because that is the angelic salutation. That is the words of the angel Gabriel himself as recorded in Sacred Scripture, announcing in the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin the impending Incarnation of our lord, and it is the Incarnation of our Lord and ultimately His Paschal Sacrifice on the cross, Resurrection, and Ascension which conquered death once and for all, providing the final crushing blow to Satan and the forces of evil in this fallen world. Christ came into this world to conquer death for our sake, to suffer death for our sake. So that we can also share in His conquering of death. So that while He rose from the dead, we too will rise from the deadness of our sin nature. We can also be restored to eternal life. So we participate in that vitality from Christ who conquers death.

And so that is why the angelic salutation of “Hail Mary, full of grace” is so powerful because it’s also prefigured in Genesis, when, after Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed Satan, and God’s curse to Satan is that he said to the serpent I will put enmity between you and the woman. Well, the woman he’s referring to is Mary, who is the New Eve, the Ark of the Covenant because Mary, the Blessed Virgin, plays a critical role in salvation history by being the Gate of Heaven through which the Word became flesh, through which the second person of the Trinity was incarnate and became man. This is why Popes throughout history have taught us she is the Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Grace.

Which is why so many exorcists attest to the fact that the demons hate Mary. They cannot stand to be in her presence. Because when they saw in the beatific vision God’s plan for Incarnation through Mary and saw that He would give her the grace of being the most exalted and perfect of all His created creatures, in their pride they resented the fact that a mere mortal, a mere fleshly creature, would be elevated by God to be even higher than the angels in the order of created excellence. So when a demon encounters Mary, it is a total humiliation because they are 100% aware of the final plan God has to use Mary, via her role as Co-Redemptrix, to crush the head of Satan, and they cannot stand this idea and are repulsed by both her humility and her perfect, spotless holiness.

So Mary plays that critical role via her fiat because God didn’t just come down here and impregnate her against her will. He asked her permission. He asked for her consent because it is a marital bond of union between her and the Holy Spirit. Great saints like Maximilian Kolbe said that the Holy Spirit is the spouse of Mary, and a spouse isn’t going to engaged in martial union without consent.

And so this is why Mary’s fiat reflects her total humility and obedience to God: “Let it be done to me according to your word, Lord. I am your handmaiden.” She’s the handmaiden, which is more accurately translated: slave of God. And she models for us the perfect ideal as followers of Christ: we are to be total slaves of Christ Jesus in total submission to His Lordship.

So this humility, this obedience, is so critical to salvation history. Which is why the angelic salutation, “Hail Mary, full of grace,” is so powerful. Which is why the Rosary is so powerful. Which is why the Blessed Mary gave us the Rosary. According to pious tradition, she gave St. Dominic the Rosary as a spiritual weapon in the 12th century to combat the Albigensian heretics. And ever since then, and in various apparitions, she’s confirmed that the Rosary is her preferred weapon in spiritual battle against Satan and his enemies. Sister Lucia, the eldest of the three children who witnessed the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima, said:

“The Most Holy Virgin in these last times in which we live has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary to such an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families . . . that cannot be solved by the Rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary.”

So the Rosary is the preeminent weapon of spiritual warfare precisely because you are invoking the angelic salutation, which brings the Incarnation, which brings the conquering of death, which brings the defeat of Satan by Jesus via Mary. It is always to Jesus through Mary. Always.

Also, in the Rosary you have the meditation on the life of Christ in mental prayer. You’re meditating on Jesus. You encounter Jesus at the cross when you encounter Jesus at His Agony in the Garden, taking on all the weight of our sins. You encounter Him at the scourging at the pillar, where you are the one crucifying Him. You are the one scourging Him. It is such a powerful weapon against temptation because there’s this promise that the Blessed Mary gave St. Dominic as Our Lady of the Rosary. She promised St. Dominic that if anyone says the full Rosary every day, all the mysteries, all the decades, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, and the Glorious, and now the Luminous, when we say the full Rosary, it defeats vice. It utterly destroys habitual mortal sin. As Our Lady promised to St. Dominic, anyone who prayed her full Rosary every day, “The Rosary shall be a powerful armor against hell. It will destroy vice, decrease sin, and defeat heresies.”

And there’s this saying that when you’re praying the Rosary to combat vice, you either give up the Rosary or you give up vice. You cannot consistently pray the rosary every single day, all the mysteries, and engage in habitual mortal sin. That’s just not going to happen because Our Lady is just so powerful against these demonic forces. She’s so powerful against this. All the saints, all the saints throughout history have testified to this. It’s in Sacred Scripture. It’s just baked into the spiritual economy of how things work.

So that was my strategy on the road trip to combat my temptations: to really focus on the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Focus on mental prayer, focusing my mind on spiritual things, and also meditating on death, knowing that if I got home to St. Louis, engaged in mortal sin, and then immediately had a heart attack, that would potentially risk everything for my eternal salvation, because you need to focus on the fact that our life here on earth is temporary.

We are bound for the eternal, and we will face Last Judgment, every one of us. And so you need to orient your entire life so that your most important goal is to get to heaven. Everything you’re doing in life should be about getting to heaven. Not necessarily because you have this fear of hell. You’re not doing it because you have a fear. It’s ultimately because you love God, you don’t want to offend God, and you want to become like Christ. This process of theosis is all about becoming godlike, becoming divine, becoming more and more like Christ because Christ is living in us, strengthening us via the Holy Spirit He sent us. Because when you love God, you don’t want to offend God.

And it is a grace of God to hate what is evil and to love what is good. And when you hate what is evil, and you love what is good, you’re naturally going to want to obey Christ. Because when you see Christ as your Lord and your King, what do you do to your Lord and your King? You obey him. You obey his commandments. You submit to His total Lordship. And Jesus says that you will not get to heaven if you don’t obey the commandments of His Father. But you’re not doing it out of this fear. You’re doing it out of love because you love the Lord, because you submit to the Lord out of obedience. Which is why the Blessed Virgin is the model Christian. She models the perfect Christian because her ultimate attitude is one of obedience, humility, and submission to God. Her soul magnifies God through obedience, and it is the essence of holiness to become completely obsessed with uniting yourself to the Will of God.

So that is why she is such a perfect saint for us to model after, because she models humility, obedience, and submission. And when you do that, you’re naturally going to want to be virtuous. Not because you’re fearing punishment, not because you want selfish rewards, but because you don’t want to offend God, because you recognize him as the Lord and King of the universe.

The Sacraments and Marian Devotion

So all that to say by the grace of God I’ve been doing very well in my spiritual life this week and also being in a state of grace I naturally want to go to Mass every day to worthily receive the Eucharist every day because Jesus Christ in his mercy He gave us the sacraments to help us grow in holiness, to help us grow in this process of sanctification because when you consume the Eucharist, you’re consuming Jesus in His entirety, His body, blood, soul, and divinity. And so, you’re literally bringing Jesus into you because the whole purpose of the Christian life is that your old self dies. All those habits that are sinful habits die, and in their place Christ begins to live inside you, inside the deepest dwellings of your heart. And it is only because Christ is living in you that you’re able to conquer those habits of mortal sin, the habits of the flesh that ensnare us because we are dead to sin without the Grace that flows from Calvary.

We are so ensnared in these habits of sin that we can’t get out of them by ourselves. We need grace. And Jesus, in His mercy, gave us the Eucharist, the institution of the Eucharist, to give us graces because when you receive the Eucharist worthily, you are getting grace infused into you. You’re getting that righteousness infused into you. You’re getting that holiness from Jesus infused into you. So Jesus is living in you. And in the Lord’s prayer, it says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That daily bread is the Eucharist—literally supersubstantial bread—he gives us these sacraments so that we can grow in holiness.

So for me, I have found great spiritual benefit in going to Mass every day, receiving the Eucharist every day, getting that spiritual power up, getting that spiritual infusion of grace from having Jesus literally be inside my body to become one with Jesus. As my body is digesting His body, He’s living in me literally, not figuratively, not metaphorically. He is literally inside me, infused into my body, and that infusion of grace also has a supernatural element. It is like swallowing a nuclear reactor of pure holiness and pure grace. So the Eucharist is very powerful stuff. Jesus was very wise and merciful to give us these sacraments. Same with confession. With the sacrament of reconciliation, when we do fall into mortal sin, we need to restore our right relationship with God. And that’s what the sacrament of reconciliation is. So we can restore and cleanse our souls, because when we sin, our souls get blackened. It gets darkened, and we darken our minds. And so we need to cleanse ourselves so that we can receive Him worthily and ultimately stand before God purified.

Because if we want to ultimately stand in heaven before God, before Christ the Judge, we need to be pure. You cannot stand in front of God to behold God in the beatific vision if there’s the blackness of sin in your heart and in your soul. So we need to purify ourselves. But we don’t just want to wait till we get to purgatory to purify ourselves. We’re supposed to be engaged in the process of purification and sanctification, divinization, and theosis on this earth itself so that when we die we are that much closer to being purified so that we can arrive at the ultimate goal of Christianity which is theosis, union with God in the beatific vision so that we are for all eternity united with God, sharing in His glory, sharing in His beauty, sharing in His magnificence as the Creator of the universe, the sustainer of all reality.

That’s what Christianity is all about. It is to become like God. St. Athanasius, one of the Church Fathers, said, “God became man so that man can become like God.” And that is the ultimate purpose of Christianity, and we are all called to be saints. It is helpful to keep this endgoal in mind at all times, especially throughout the mundane banalities of daily living.

So by the Blessed Virgin Mary’s intercession, she can help with this. So, rely on the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is your Mother. Jesus gave her to us as our spiritual Mother. At the cross at the foot of the cross, He said to the beloved disciple, meaning us Christian disciples, “Behold, your mother,” and that is a model for all of us. He was saying all of us need a spiritual Mother, just like we need a spiritual Father. We need a spiritual Mother who cares for us; she loves us so much as if we were in the manger as little babes in need of her tender care. And moreover, crucially, God in His love for His most perfect created creature, actually gave her the power as Queen of Heaven to intercede for us and thus exercise her tender love for his children efficaciously. And all she wants to do is point us to her divine son, Christ Jesus. So it’s always to Jesus through Mary. So Mary is not a stopping point. Mary is a pathway, a window, a doorway through which we get to Jesus.

So that is why Marian devotion is so important because she points us better than anyone else to her Divine Son. Because if you really reflect on why Mary is important, you cannot help but start thinking about Jesus. And when you think about Jesus, you think about the fact that He came into the world. He incarnated. Well, how did He incarnate? Through the Blessed Virgin Mary’s womb, her sacred womb, this golden womb, the Ark of the Covenant, the Gate of Heaven, the Mystical Rose, the Tower of Ivory, the House of Gold. And so Mary and Jesus are intimately related. And nobody loved Mary more than Jesus. You will never ever ever love Mary, honor Mary, respect Mary more than Jesus did, because Jesus was a perfectly obedient Jew, and Jews followed the Ten Commandments, and honoring your father and your mother was seen as extremely important. And so Jesus honored his mother better than anyone. It is impossible to honor Holy Mary more than Jesus did.

So don’t fear that, “oh, I’m focusing too much on Mary. I’m not focusing on Jesus enough. Oh, I’m worried I’m spending too much time thinking about Mary. I need to focus on Jesus.” No! If you deeply meditate on Mary, you will inevitably get to Jesus. And not only that, you will understand Jesus more deeply. So Marian spirituality is very important for developing in our spiritual maturation. Pray the Rosary, meditate on the life of Christ, and ask the Blessed Virgin Mary for her intercession.

Closing Prayer

So, with that said, I want to end with prayer.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Addendum:

I highly recommend Gabriel Castillo’s new book on the Rosary, The Power of the Rosary. It is St. Louis de Montfort’ The Secret of the Rosary updated for the 21st Century.