I thought it would be helpful to compile a list of good beginning steps for those who want to give up crossdressing for good. This is just a starting point for those who wish to stop crossdressing completely. Stopping crossdressing altogether is a long process, and there is much more that could be said and be done besides the brief steps I’ve outlined here. But for those that want to finally overcome crossdressing in their lives, this is a good place to begin.

I’m going to only briefly lay out these points. For some of them I will link to other blog posts and articles, (some of them not my own), that explain further these points. For most of these points, I plan to write about them in a more deep way, each individually, in the future in other detailed posts. Also, I’m sure this list could be improved, edited, added to, so if you have any suggestions please let me know.

These steps are in an order. The order is just my own opinion on what I think would be most helpful. Obviously many people will disagree with these steps, or the order, or that crossdressing even needs to be stopped. But for those that do want to stop crossdressing, I hope this can be helpful for you.

1. Desire to stop crossdressing.

The first obvious step is that you have to actually want to stop crossdressing. Maybe you think crossdressing is sinful and so you want to stop. Maybe you think its destructive in your life and so you want to stop. Maybe its harming your marriage and so you want to stop. Maybe you are just afraid of the reality of getting caught. But whatever the case may be, the first step has to be some desire to stop. If you aren’t to that point yet, consider reading these posts.

Summary – Reasons Crossdressing is Sinful and Harmful

Fool! You will be Caught!

My Addiction to Crossdressing Fiction

Deuteronomy 22:5

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 Prohibits crossdressing

Crossdressing is like Pornography

Crossdressing is about Envy

Crossdressing can become idolatry

Crossdressing demands sacrifice of self

How do we know what is true? Is crossdressing sinful?

But I was born this way

The Myth of “Choosing to be yourself”

They are just clothes right?

Here a couple posts by a friend about why he stopped.

Why I don’t anymore

Ironing it out

2. Believe that it is possible to stop crossdressing.

What finally helped me to find real freedom from crossdressing addiction was to come to a new belief that it was possible to control myself and stop crossdressing. I had to believe it in my head and my heart. Face the truth about crossdressing and realize that you have the ability to stop by reading through the posts on my website, as well as blog posts and articles that I have linked to on my site. Spend some hours reading. Read and watch testimonies on my links page. Most crossdressers are stuck in the belief that it is impossible to stop crossdressing and are stuck in the self-deception of crossdressing. Read some new perspectives from these websites.

Links Page

Can God deliver me from crossdressing?

I quit crossdressing and I am happy!

Change is Possible!

Healing is Possible

3. Decide to stop crossdressing.

Following this desire to stop crossdressing and the belief that it is possible, make a firm decision for yourself that you are going to fight to stop crossdressing and get it out of your life. Make this a clear firm moment in your life and maybe even write down the date. We always have the freewill to make such a decision. See my post – You have a choice! After you make the decision, make a plan of attack for yourself. Don’t leave things up to chance. Change your old habits. Make a detailed strategy and plan to fight crossdressing. You will get many practical ideas from my website.

4. Pray.

If you are not a Christian, I think figuring out what you believe about the meaning of life and what you believe about God, is far more important than anything to do with crossdressing. It’s more important that you think about life and death and why we exist than to read my website. But for help in thinking this through, you could read My Christian Perspective.

For those who already have a relationship with Jesus, prayer is vital. There are few components to this. 1. Prayers of confession and repentance and asking God’s forgiveness for past crossdressing and related sins. 2. Prayers of thanksgiving for forgiveness, salvation, and God’s love. 3. Prayers to ask God for help to overcome the crossdressing addiction. 4. And just talk to God. Grow in your relationship with him. Praise him, thank him, worship him, talk to him. Become more intimate and purposeful in your relationship with God. Continue with this step until you die 🙂 The more you find joy in your relationship with God, the more pitiful crossdressing will seem in comparison.

5. Read, study, and memorize Scripture.

Delve into Scripture, also known as the Bible, God’s Word. Fill your mind with truth. Fill your mind with God’s promises of forgiveness and grace. Fill your mind with God’s promises of him giving us the power to resist sin. Learn about God. Read about Jesus’ life. Grow in your relationship with him. Follow the Bible’s instruction about how to life a full, joyful, fulfilling, fruitful life as God intended. Continue with this step until you die as well. It would be helpful to read some of the “Helpful Bible Verses” posts I have done. These posts explain some good passages for you to begin with. I also have some posts on specific Bible passages. On my sidebar go to the “Bible” category to find all of these posts.

Posts about Bible passages

6. Get rid of as many temptations as possible.

Giving up crossdressing will be extremely difficult at first. To help ourselves as much as possible we need to try to lessen the amount of triggers and temptations in our lives. One obvious first step is getting rid of any secret stash of clothing right away. Take it to Goodwill and be done with it. There is no reason for you to keep it. If you think you might go back to crossdressing someday and therefore it would be a waste of money to get rid of the clothes, then you really haven’t committed to stopping yet. You need to go back to some of the first few steps again. Don’t keep a raging fire in your house that will burn you.

If the internet is a problem for you, consider getting an internet filter immediately. If your wife’s clothing being left out is a problem for you, consider telling her what she can to help you better. Don’t do things that are technically “okay” if they will trigger your addiction. Perhaps wearing an apron is a trigger for you. If so, avoid wearing one. Be wise about how you take trips. Don’t spend too much time alone. Have an accountability partner on standby. Grow a beard so that crossdressing will be less satisfying and easy. (Plus this also might help you to feel more like a man again) – Grow a Beard! Take some time to get in shape to make yourself appear more like a man and make it more difficult to crossdress – Lifting Weights and Becoming Muscular. Be careful about being alone so much of the time. Get around other people. Spend more time with friends or outside hobbies. Fill your time with something different things – Get a Hobby. Be wise when you travel – Resisting Temptations During Trips.

I think it is important to stop crossdressing cold turkey rather than through gradual lessening of crossdressing in the attempt to lessen the desires and temptations. See my post – Unconditioning. However, there are other forms of conditioning/unconditioning, mostly done with counselors, that could be helpful in stopping crossdressing.

Consider fasting – Fasting can be a good recovery tool. Listen to the Holy Spirit convicting you – Be Aware of God’s Presence

God gives me physical warnings against sin

Don’t expect it to be easy to heal from this addiction. Don’t expect it to be easy to reduce the temptations. You would put a lot of time into learning a language or an instrument. You would put a lot of effort into getting rid of a drug addiction. Why expect this to be different? Read this important post: No more half measures.

7. Fight the temptations that come.

It’s one thing to get rid of as many temptations as we can. But what do we do when temptations come? What can we do when we suddenly have a strong desire to put on our wife’s sexy high heels or really want to read the latest crossdressing fiction story online? We have to be ready to deal with the temptations and desires we will inevitably still experience. Here are a few ideas.

First of all, stick to your commitment not to give in to crossdressing at all. And I would add, do not to let yourself fantasize about crossdressing at all. You don’t need to kick yourself for having a crossdressing thought come into your mind. But don’t let yourself dwell in pleasurable crossdressing fantasies. If you want to really successfully stop crossdressing and find healing from it, you have to fight these fantasies as well. Fantasizing about it only adds more power to it, and you’ll probably eventually manifest the fantasies through concrete actions of crossdressing. (Not to mention God cares about what goes on in our hearts and minds beyond just what we do).

But this is not to say we should suppress our crossdressing desires. When they come we should acknowledge them and deal with them. Trying to ignore them or bury them will probably either just cause them to bubble forth like a volcano at some later point, or cause you mental anguish. It’s important we be honest with ourselves about the thoughts that come into our minds, but then deal with them without burying them. See a friend’s post about suppression here – Suppression. Try the Rain approach to temptation – Don’t Suppress your desires.

Learn how to fight against Satan’s temptations – How Satan tempts us to crossdress. When a temptation comes, imagine how angry or disgusted you would be if your wife crossdressed – Imagine your wife crossdressed.

Something I’ve found most helpful is telling myself affirmations of truth during times of temptation. I break through the crossdressing rationalizations and lies by reminding myself, “I don’t really want to crossdress.” “I don’t want to sin because I love God and am thankful for his forgiveness.” “I always feel stupid after crossdressing.” See a more full description of this here – Importance of Affirmations.

I also have found distractions to be helpful during times of temptations. The sexual power of crossdressing temptations often makes me lose my head. But if I do something else briefly, rational thinking returns and the strong temptation subsides. For me playing an engaging video game helps a lot. For others it could be playing an instrument, taking a walk, working out, etc. See my post – Get a Hobby.

It also helps to have some way to get rid of sexual build up and tension. For those of us who are married, finding ways to have more sexual or just physical time with our wives can be very helpful. And if you’ve opened up to her about your fight against your crossdressing addiction, she may be more willing to help you out with more sexual time together. If she is not in the mood, ask her if she might be willing to stimulate you with her hands, which might not be as pleasurable and intimate as sex, but it is far better than you falling into sin. (And learn to be at peace with nocturnal emissions that will give you your needed release).

8. Get some accountability.

Here is my most thorough post on the need for an accountability partner – Get an Accountability Partner.

Realize that you probably are not going to be successful doing this alone. Find others in your life to support you, some for indirect support, and some people for direct support who know about your crossdressing struggle. Part of this support could be going to church. It could be finding a specific church small group to admit your struggle to. It could be joining Celebrate Recovery or joining a sex addicts anonymous group – Sex Addicts Anonymous’s Twelve Steps.

It could include telling a couple close friends about your addiction and getting their encouragement and accountability. It could involve telling your wife. Telling close friends and my wife was immensely helpful to me. We all need some friends to confess our sins to because when we confess to someone, temptations lose their power over us. We need people to ask us regularly how we are doing. We need people who will stick by us through thick and thin. We need people who will encourage us. We need people who will celebrate with us when we are successful at beating crossdressing, and people who will help pick us back up and remind us of God’s grace at times that we fail. We need to commit to telling the truth if we are going to be successful. See my post on telling the truth about our crossdressing to others – Telling the truth.

I’d highly encourage you to tell your wife about your crossdressing struggle. Being a woman, and being in such an intimate relationship with you puts her in a unique position. Just telling her will help you, even though it could be very painful for both of you at first. But the truth may just set you both free. Having your wife know brings a reality check to your actions that is hard to match. She can help you realize the foolishness of what you were doing and encourage you in your new fight against it. She can help you think through your own personality and struggle with crossdressing. I also think this kind of honesty is extremely vital for such an important and intimate relationship like marriage. Crossdressing is something that has shaped your entire life, and it would help her to understand you better to know about it. Here are three posts that will help you think about telling your wife:

How do I tell my wife, a friend, or a pastor about my crossdressing?

The role of a wife in your recovery

Giving Pastoral Care to a crossdresser or transgendered person

You also might want to consider confessing sins of crossdressing to your wife, sister, mother, or others in your life that you might have confused or hurt by your crossdressing, as well as asking them for forgiveness. Last, this website has a built in prayer group I created to bring together those who are struggling so they can pray for each other and give each other accountability. It’s a great way to receive prayer and help from others who are also fighting crossdressing – Prayer Group.

9. Make peace with the reality that the temptations might never go away.

Like most temptations to sin, the reality is that the temptations to crossdress might never completely go away. This is something we need to face, but it should not make us depressed. Treat crossdressing like an addiction. An alcoholic might always have certain small desires to drink, but he or she continues to resist until they die. Similarly, we might desire crossdressing at times for the rest of our lives, but we can still resist. And we can still lead a healthy fulfilling life. To read more about this, please read my post – Healing doesn’t mean no more temptations.

But don’t focus so much on the future, just to take things one day at a time. The day’s problems and temptations are enough to worry about.

I would like to encourage you though that it is of course possible for your crossdressing desires to completely go away. Each person is different and there are some who seem to have no more temptations. For me, my crossdressing desires are largely nonexistent these days. Once in a while, rarely, I’ll have some crossdressing temptations, but they’ve become easy to resist. I think that for any of us who stop crossdressing, after the first really hard withdrawal period, the crossdressing temptations slowly start to lessen in strength. Read Our Temptations Should Lessen Over Time.

10. Find a valuable purpose in life and positive ways to use your energy.

I think a lot of us can’t seem to give up our struggle with crossdressing because we don’t take life very seriously. We don’t get much fulfillment out of other things in life. We are just ticking the time away, not working hard at our jobs, not finding ways to contribute to the world and help other people. We have no ultimate purpose in life, such as the purpose of loving God, living for him, and loving other people because of God’s love for us. If life is pretty meaningless for you, and nothing really stretches you, or gives you joy and fulfillment, then of course you’d keep turning back to crossdressing or pornography for fleeting pleasures. So my first piece of advice here again is to find your ultimate purpose and meaning in life in God. And then figure out what his specific purpose is for you in your life. What has he created you to do? How can he use you to impact the world and make it a better place in some small but meaningful ways? Consider reading “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Besides just finding a purpose in life, we need positive ways to use our energy. Volunteering, helping people out, fun hobbies, and getting involved in church are just a few ways to learn how to spend our time differently. Instead of spending all of our free time hiding in closets or looking at ourselves in the mirror in female clothes, we can do things that have value, and things that help others. Try something new. Read some good books. Stretch yourself out of your comfort zone. Find some adventure in life beyond crossdressing.

I also include in this step rediscovering who we are as men. Start letting your male traits out. Enjoy being a man. Have your wife affirm your manhood. Upgrade your male wardrobe. Enjoy taking care of your appearance as a man. Enjoy looking good as a man. Randall Wayne has wrote some on this. Our perspectives might be slightly different, but he’s got a lot of good stuff to say in his testimony – here. Study about the real biological differences between men and women. Study what the Bible says about the roles of men and women. Embrace the role God has called you to. Here is a free book – Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Find out what the Bible says about true manhood and personhood. Many of the stereotypes about masculinity and femininity in our culture are at best stifling, and at worst destructive, and may even have contributed to our developing desires for crossdressing. Learn to integrate the contrasting aspects of your personality that were divided into your male self and crossdressing self. Be a whole complete human being. Those aspects of your personality that you stifled in order to be a man of our culture, and which came out in your crossdressing times, integrate them into your real self. I have written a very thorough post about this process – Integration and Contentment

My friend has a thoughtful post along these lines:

Counter-productive

Last, a little tidbit. Take your desire for female beauty and interest in fashion and point it towards your girlfriend or wife. Talk to her about fashion and what you find beautiful. Go shopping with her and help her find things that look good on her. You can enjoy the female clothes in the way they were supposed to be enjoyed by you, that is, on your wife or girlfriend. This way you can utilize your healthy attention to female beauty in a healthy non-deceitful way. A friend has a helpful post on this – Insights from Outlets

11. Deal with failure in a healthy way.

If you fail, spend time confessing to God and enjoying his forgiveness, and then get going again in your fight against crossdressing. Don’t let Satan use your failure for evil. Satan hits us hard in our failures. He loves to make us wallow in condemnation, reminding us that we aren’t good enough to be forgiven by God, and so we don’t believe we are truly forgiven or loved by God. It’s true we aren’t good enough, but God forgives us because of his merciful and loving nature, not because we deserve forgiveness. And Satan also likes to use failure to make us think we have no power over sin and so we might as well give up. But God promises us that he has given us the power to resist any temptation that comes our way. See my post – Healing doesn’t mean no more temptations. Also read – Persevere! It’s going to be a long struggle.

Satan also likes to encourage us to conquer sin using our own strength. This only leads to failure or pride. The true way to fight sin, is to find joy in God’s forgiveness, and be transformed by that forgiveness and grace. Then we fight sin, not for our own pride, not using our own strength, but we do it with God’s strength. We fight sin out of thanksgiving for God’s grace, not in order to earn God’s grace. Keep going back to God’s forgiveness and grace. It should be the motivation for all the good that we do. We aren’t trying to earn anything.

Each time you fail, take some time to analyze how it happened. What were the triggers? What rationalizations did you make? What can you learn from this painful failure? See these posts about times I dealt with failure:

Resentment, Compromise, and Escalation = Yet We Rejoice in Christ!

No Condemnation

10 Minute Relapse

How I successfully fought temptation…but then failed.

12. Try to understand yourself more deeply.

I’m convinced that an important part of the healing process from crossdressing is trying to understand ourselves more deeply. Rather than just stopping crossdressing and leaving it in the past, we should spend some time researching, studying, and thinking about what caused us to develop the crossdressing desires we have. But be careful about doing this. Don’t use studying crossdressing as an excuse to fantasize, or you may end up stumbling while doing research.

Ask yourself these questions. What emotions and thoughts were going on behind the actions and behind the temptations? Think about how crossdressing has shaped your personality both positively and negatively. How did God use this part of your past for good, or how will he use it for good? Think through gender issues. Think through personality issues. Think through the ways crossdressing has affected your life. Try to learn contentment regarding your male body and male identity. See these posts: Integration and Contentment and Fearfully and Wonderfully Made – Psalm 139 and Looking in the Mirror.



You could also consider seeing a counselor to help you work through these issues, but realize you may know far more about crossdressing and its effects than your counselor. It’s a subject that hasn’t been studied enough. Further, many counselors seem to think its harmless and don’t realize how destructive it can be.

If you struggle with gender dysphoria as an aspect of your crossdressing, these two books are helpful:

Book Recommendation – Understanding Gender Dysphoria

Book Recommendation – God and the Transgender Debate

I’ve also written dozens of posts about transgenderism and gender dysphoria and linked to dozens of articles.

On my site and the sites I’ve linked to, there are plenty of thoughtful authors and articles that think through these types of questions. I won’t link to all of them because I could link to dozens from each site. But here is a friend’s post about this process itself of discovery and understanding ourselves.

A narrow way

You can start working through my full blog post list – List of all blog posts

Conclusion – I hope these steps have been helpful to you. There’s obviously much more that could be said. But this is a beginning. Feel free to contact me. Let me know if you would like prayer.