KathyGrace Duncan spent years living life as 'Keith' and was so convincing as a man that her girlfriend and the church she attended for years had no clue she was really a woman.
Duncan grew up in Portland, Oregon, and remembers wanting to be a boy from a very young age. Her home was 'very dysfunctional', with her dad often being verbally and emotionally abusive towards her mom. Then later on, her older stepbrother sexually abused her.
It convinced her women were weak and she would rather be a strong and affirmed male, she tells The Christian Post in an insightful interview into the journey of a Christian woman who transitioned into a man only to detransition back into a woman again after truly understanding what God's will for her was.
By the age of 20, Duncan was living as 'Keith.' She had taken the necessary hormones to transition and had a full mastectomy.
She was also a committed Christian and active in her church. Things didn't work out so well though in one church when they found out the truth about her gender and they asked her to leave.
'Their response was, they basically said, ''We love you but we can't have you coming back here,'' she said.
It was difficult to accept but amazingly, it didn't turn Duncan off church and she simply found another one. This happened through a Christian girl she met when she was living in Vancouver, Washington, who took her to her church.
Her real gender was so well hidden that no one at church and not even her girlfriend at the time had any idea she was actually a woman.
At the same time, she was deepening in her desire to know the Lord and she had no idea He was about to take hold of her in a radical way.
One night, the young adults Bible study group was working through 1 Corinthians 6 and the Apostle Paul's teaching on the body being the temple of the Holy Spirit.
It was a lightbulb moment that would change Duncan forever - she knew she could no longer live as a man.
She remembers, 'Something kind of struck me, and I was just like 'what have I done?'" said Duncan. 'If my body is a temple, I'm ruining my temple, and I don't know about this.'
Unlike her previous church, Duncan revealed the truth to the pastor and although he admitted he wasn't really sure what to do, he agreed to walk alongside her and help her find a counselor to assist her detransition from being a man.
By this time she was 30, but for the first time in her life, she really, deeply wanted to live as the gender God gave her - a woman.
Now, 24 years on, she is still happy being a woman, but she also has a powerful message for Christians. She wants them to stop quoting Scripture at transgender people and instead work on building a personal relationship with them first.
'They [transgender people] did not get there overnight, so they are not going to be healed overnight,' she said. 'And Christians have to establish a relationship. They can't just come in and thinking that they are going to bring all this healing.
'You have to establish that place of trust. And as you're walking alongside a transgender person, don't make them a project. I had to know that I was loved and that the people who were walking with me loved me and that they were not going to push me to a place where I couldn't go yet.'
Read the interview in full here
