His problems started when his grandmother made him wear a purple chiffon full-length dress when he was five years old.
This planted the seed of gender confusion in Walter Heyer that nearly destroyed his life—until the time when he saw a vision of Jesus Christ that turned his life around, according to God Reports.
Heyer revisits his life's heartbreaking journey from man to woman and then to man again in his autobiography "Trading My Sorrows."
He says he was a normal boy, "a rough little kid," before his grandma—for reason he still could not understand—secretly dressed him up as a little girl.
This sparked an inner conflict in him that intensified in high school when he developed a split persona.
"Who am I? Am I really a girl? Am I really a boy?" These questions preoccupied his mind.
The conflict persisted through college, when he started working as an associate space engineer and up to the time he got married to a woman he met at a church.
Even though his wife bore him two children, he still could not shake off the feeling that there was a woman inside him. He began cross-dressing and going to bars to "relieve the stress."
When he could no longer bear the conflict raging inside him, he went to a transgender doctor who told him he was suffering from gender dysphoria. The doctor advised him to undergo gender reassignment surgery, take hormones, and completely change and become female.
Heyer waited two more years before finally confessing to his wife about his real persona and what he was about to do.
Enraged, his wife divorced him. His son and daughter also left him.
After he went ahead with the gender reassignment surgery, Heyer soon found himself jobless, penniless and homeless—living in a park in Long Beach, California. He became a "full-blown alcoholic" and thought of killing himself.
A friend came to help him, introducing him to a pastor who offered to take care of him in his family's home.
He changed his name to "Laura Jensen" and started working again. He also went to Bible study and church with his new family in Pleasanton, California.
This was not yet the turning point in his life, although it provided the initial push towards that end.
Still sporting Laura's persona, Heyer went to University of California Santa Cruz and began to study the psychology of addictions in the hope of working as a counsellor.
After two years of studying, he came into a startling conclusion. "I realised that nobody changes gender. The whole thing is a myth, a fantasy, it's delusional, a psychological disorder," he says.
"I realised I was a fraud as a female. I hadn't really changed. I only made it look like I had," he says.
Heyer then decided to change his name back to Walter and began dressing as a man again.
One day, he visited a Christian psychologist as he sought to come to grips with the traumas of his past. When the two of them began to pray, an extraordinary vision filled Heyer's mind.
"I could see the Lord Jesus Christ in white and he was ... reaching out to me. There was a little baby and the baby was me as a boy. He reached down and picked up the boy and cradled him in his arms and then said, 'You will be safe with me forever.'"
He said from that moment on, his life was redeemed and restored.
"The Lord has taken this horribly broken life and restored it ... Now my life serves to honour and glorify Jesus Christ. My testimony is that being transgender is redeemable and you don't have to live that way," Heyer says.
