The Heart and Soul of Gender Identity

How different the world is today than it was in the 1950s and early 1960s when I was growing up in New York City. Homosexuality was, for all intents and purpose, hidden from the general public. The only openly gay people I knew lived in Greenwich Village. I thought drag queens were just performers in clubs or on Broadway. Transvestites lived in secret, even from their spouses and families. Everyone was shocked when it became known that a WWII veteran from the Bronx had undergone sex reassignment surgery and was living now as a woman named Christine Jorgensen. And, it was a well-guarded secret that movie-heartthrobs Rock Hudson and Cary Grant were both bi-sexual. Now, fifty years since the Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan, we openly celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month in June with pride parades, workshops and concerts.*

The heart knows what the soul wants to be.

In my practice as a Certified Advanced Clinical Hypnotherapist, many of my clients make their gender identity known early in our sessions, and a few are more than curious about why and how they came to question their non-mainstream preferences. Everyone seems to be looking for a context in which to understand the simple fact that the heart knows what the soul wants to be. Just this year, I have had one lovely young woman client questioning whether she might be a lesbian, and a distressed teen furious that she is too young to have “top surgery” and live her life as a man. One of my clients is a married middle-aged woman who enjoys bisexual trysts. But it was a handsome fifty-something rock singer/musician with long blond hair who proved a theory I’ve long held that non-traditional gender identification may (in some cases) be related to a past life.

Looking to the past for explanations.

Max originally came to see me for help dealing with his stubborn nature and his anger towards his obnoxious neighbors and their loud parties. It wasn’t until our third session that he asked me if I would lead him through a past life regression. When I explained that Past Life Regression Therapy requires that I know what insights he was looking to find from a former life, he was clearly reticent to tell me. After a few moments of deliberation, he decided it would be easier to show me than to explain – and took out his cell phone to scroll through his photos.

The photo he chose was of a very gentile-looking blond woman with incredibly long legs dressed in a demure suit and heels. My first thought was that I was looking at his sister, but a closer look brought me to understand I was looking at Max himself. Max explained that while he was an “Oscar Madison slob” who liked staying home and tinkering with cars and electronics dressed in jeans and t-shirts, his “alter-ego” Maxine was a modest, soft-spoken woman who loved going out on weekends to dance and socialize with friends.
During our next session, Max told me that he has felt like Maxine from an early age. As a teenager, he hid her clothes from his family. It wasn’t until his late thirties that he lost weight to become better at being Maxine. Since then, he’s had face, brow and chin lifts, liposuction, and laser hair removal. Although Max admitted to having the “testosterone levels of four men” and “drools over women” as potential sexual partners, he takes hormones to help him look more feminine as Maxine. Unafraid of surgery, he mused about the possibility of undergoing a sex-change at some point in the future.

Max is generally unwilling to label himself – but, if pressed, he says he has a “transgender thing going on.” Clearly, his sense of personal identity and gender does not always correspond with his birth sex, and Max was hoping that Past Life Regression Therapy would help him understand his dual nature.

The information we discovered in his past life regression was startling, to say the least.

An unfinished life continues.

We began the regression using light hypnosis, with the intention of finding a past life that would give Max insights into “Why I have always identified as female.”

Max saw first himself as a young woman in her 20s, wearing sparkly dark red pumps and a knee-length skirt. She was indoors at a social event, perhaps at a dance hall, somewhere in the Midwest near Chicago in the 1940's or early 1950's. Feeling good, and clearly happy with her appearance, she heard glasses tinkling and saw people mingling and socializing, and noticed that the men were all dressed in suits and ties.

In the next scene, Max found himself in a busy newspaper office at some time in the 1950’s. He described the woman he was as a 'Lois Lane' secretarial type, working happily in her job. Although it was clearly the afternoon, she wasn’t thinking about going home to her apartment and was waiting for a 'Clark Kent' type of guy – perhaps to go out on a dinner date.

Moving a few years in time to a later event that I hoped might give us more insight, Max described the young woman as clearly unhappy as she waited outside of a car that had been pulled over on the side of the road on a cloudy day. Annoyed that other people were not paying attention to her, she looked over at the open fields, into the sunset, in an attempt to distract herself from whatever she was waiting for.

Curious to know why this scene was important to our quest for insights, I asked Max to move just one hour later. To our surprise (or shock), Max reported that there had been a car accident in which the young woman had passed quickly. He saw her slumped over the steering wheel, as if he was viewing her from the passenger side of the car while standing on the side of the road. Her thoughts upon passing came through quite clearly to Max: “It’s too soon to die! The car could have been fixed!” followed by a feeling of intense disappointment, the clear “need to carry on,” and her stubborn refusal to accept her own death.

As I always do after a client reports witnessing his or her own death in a past life, I asked Max if the woman he saw needed to forgive herself or others for anything important, to which he responded with a definite “No!” Her overriding thoughts were “How do I get back to the life I was supposed to have???”

Before returning to wakefulness, Max lamented wistfully that, in that past life, “I was very polite, quiet, and bright. I wasn’t looking for the spotlight.” He and I both noticed how much that sounded like Maxine.

Max’s past incarnation as a woman became what I sometimes refer to as “a jumper” – a soul that is so stubbornly determined to get back to living its life that it reincarnates too quickly without taking the time to reflect, grow and learn on the other side. The woman who died accidentally in the late 1950's joined the soul of the little boy named Max born in the early 1960's, and became such an integral part of his current lifetime that she literally shares this incarnation with him. Max’s dual nature, which so confused him during his early years, is now second nature to him. He teasingly refers to Maxine as his alter ego, and his conscious mind is very much present whether he’s dressed as a man or as a woman. He remains stubborn, though. It’s a trait he comes by both naturally and metaphysically.

NOTE: Names have been changed to protect the shy and not-so-shy identities.
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* Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. The Stonewall Uprising was a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events.
    Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBTQ Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.
– Excerpt from the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/lgbt-pride-month/about/
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