The Spiritual Wound at the Heart of Trans

From chasing euphoria to finding Christ

A Life of Searching

I am a detransitioner, having spent eight years of my life living as a transgender woman and taking cross-sex hormones. I am also a recent Catholic convert. These two aspects of my life are intimately related. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching about the root causes of my transition. Why did I think that living as a transgender woman, modifying my body, crossdressing, and all these things would make me happy? I’ve come to realize that, ultimately, this was a spiritual problem, not just a psychological one. There was a spiritual wound in my life, and it stems from what St. Augustine discusses in terms of inner restlessness, made famous in his line from the Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You."

The Inner Restlessness

There is an inner restlessness in the soul of every human. We all yearn for the transcendent, for something greater than ourselves, something eternal. God has made us for the infinite; that is our ultimate resting place, our ultimate destination in life; it’s why we were created, and it is the ultimate meaning of life. And so, we try to fill that void in our hearts with all kinds of things that aren’t really going to truly satisfy us. We fill it with the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of power, the pursuit of fame, the pursuit of success, all these different things that culture models for us as what we ought to strive for in order to find happiness.

In my particular case, my pursuit was hedonism. My lifelong vice has been the vice of effeminacy: avoiding difficult things to chase after hedonism. I pursued pleasure. I pursued what felt good. For me, this was about crossdressing and escaping boredom through the pursuit of euphoria through drugs and lust. This is very common for transwomen to pursue euphoria. Many transwomen didn’t really have a lot of dysphoria prior to transition, but they had a lot of euphoria when they crossdressed, when they presented themselves as women. This indulgence brings a lot of pleasure and positive euphoric feelings (“euphoria boners”), and so they chase that feeling, and it ends up becoming almost like an addiction. You get addicted to that feeling, and you’re seeking that out, chasing the dragon of “gender euphoria” in the hope that you can make that feeling last forever. You’re longing for that sense of satisfaction, something that will calm that inner restlessness.

The Limits of Detransition

When I detransitioned, it solved many of my problems, as I was now living in reality. I was grounded in reality, and I wasn’t dealing with all the social anxiety that comes with trying to pass myself off as a female and all the neuroticism that comes with passing and living as a transgender person. But even when I detransitioned, there was still this restlessness. I hadn’t really healed the core spiritual wound in my life until I found Christ, until I found Jesus, the Great Physician, the Prince of Peace, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Finding Peace in Faith

Coming into the Catholic Church and discovering the sacramental life, the Eucharist, partaking in daily Mass, praying the Rosary, developing a prayer life, reading Sacred Scripture and the lives of the saints, aspiring to live a life of holiness and virtue as a man—that is what solved that core spiritual wound in my life. I’m not saying “solved” in terms of me somehow being a perfect saint now with no problems or struggles with temptation. But for a lot of men who struggle with gender issues, with gender insecurity, they deal with issues like lust, hedonism, pleasure-seeking, sensation-seeking, and novelty-seeking. They use transgenderism, crossdressing, and seeking out “gender euphoria” as a way to solve that inner restlessness, as a way to sublimate their dissatisfaction with materialism and hedonism into a confused search for their “true self.”

But denying the truth of our created sex, our ontological reality as male or female beings, is no way to find your “true self.” It is a false self, an artificially constructed self. The only “true self” in this world is being a child of God and a branch of the True Vine, who is Christ, our Savior.

The Persistent Struggle

After I detransitioned, I was still struggling with the temptations of lust and escapism through drugs. I was still chasing hedonism in a desperate attempt to calm that inner restlessness. I was lapsing back into crossdressing and kink and degeneracy. While I wasn’t identifying as a woman or presenting myself as a woman, I was still trapped in this endless cycle of chasing the dragon, chasing euphoria, chasing pleasure, chasing hedonism, chasing lust, and all these temporary carnal pleasures. I was still a slave of the flesh. It wasn’t until I really found Christ, when I found the sacraments and the truth, the grounding of truth in the Catholic Church, in traditional Christianity, grounding my being, my reality, in the eternal, in the transcendental, in what’s ancient and true—that has been the only thing that has truly begun to heal that spiritual wound that led me down the transition path in the first place.

A Deeper Healing

I wanted to share this insight because I think a lot of people believe that hormones, surgeries, and all these transition milestones are going to bring them peace and happiness, but in reality, it’s just papering over a deeper spiritual wound. Until you find peace in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, the Great Physician, you’re not going to find true healing. You’re not going to find true rest. You need to rest in God. That is the ultimate answer for the crisis of transgenderism in our modern society.