She Spent 30 Years Living as a Man, Looking for Love

Everyone knew Wanda Jo preferred jeans over dresses, they just didn’t know why.

“The boys was rough and tough like myself,” said Wanda Jo. “And the girls was dainty and pretty and I was attracted to them. I knew that at a young age.”

Her mother, Opal thought her youngest child was going through a phase.

“I knew she was a tomboy but everyone said leave her alone she’ll grow out of it.”

But Wanda Jo couldn’t change what she was feeling.

"I feel like a boy trapped in a girl's body.  And I didn't understand me.”

Wanda Jo embraced her identity as a boy, and started having sexual contact with other girls.  She managed to keep it secret until at 18, she got caught with a neighbor girl.

“I came out to tell the whole world I was gay and I was proud, and I lived my life the way I wanted to live life,” said Wanda Jo. “I couldn't live like my mother, nobody.  I did what I, what Wando Jo, I did my will, what I wanted to do.”

Her mother, Opal said, “I was hurt. I cried and cried.  I kept a headache.”

After high school Wanda Jo landed a good paying job as a computer programmer and dove into the homosexual lifestyle.

Her mother said, “I prayed all the time, hoping she would change.  She went through so many women.  She’d go into a club with one woman and come out with another one.”

For the next 30 years, Wanda Jo pursued many women and had a few serious relationships.  But they were chaotic at times, violent, and she couldn’t hold onto them for long.

“You’re fighting and no trust, the jealousy, the envy, the drama that’s in that lifestyle that I was in, oh my god,” said Wanda Jo.  “One of my exes would call my mom and say, ‘Mrs. Taylor, Wanda Jo, you need to go to her house cause she’s bleeding.  You need to go to her house, she just got hit upside the head.’”

None of them gave Wanda Jo what she really wanted.

“I was searching for love in all the wrong places.  That’s what I was searching for.”

The one thing Wanda Jo never indulged in was drugs and alcohol.  But when she nearly died after one of her lovers stabbed her, she found crack cocaine eased the physical and emotional pain.

Wanda Jo said, “I was just tired.  I was so tired I didn’t know what to do.”

For 2 ½ years she lived at the mercy of a crack cocaine addiction, and dropped down to a mere 98 pounds.  Finally, Wanda Jo remembered something she learned in church as a child, that in times of despair, she could always call on God.

“I was broken.  My god, I was broken.  I was tired at so much of just everything,” said Wanda Jo.  “I went home and got on my knees and I cried out to God and I said, “God, take this away from me.  Jesus, help me.  And when He did he in the snap of a finger, blink of an eye.”

Wanda Jo says her desire for cocaine was completely gone.  She never smoked crack cocaine again and that deliverance by God fueled a hunger to return to church.  She found one that accepted her just as she was.

Wanda Jo said, “I was in the church, had been going there in my men suits.  They loved me.  See they let me some in the church broken, lost as the sinner that I was, a homosexual.  I was like, “Wow!” They was treating me with so much love and now he’s talking the truth, the word.  And now I’m getting this word in my heart.”

Wanda Jo continued going to church and reading the Bible.  For the first time after 30 years living as a man, she discovered her true identity.

“I opened up my Bible to the scripture that he gave me, and the scripture was Isaiah 43:18 &19.  And it says, ‘Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old.  God said, “Behold I do a new thing and a new thing shall spring forward, shall ye not know it?  I’ll make a road in the wilderness, and a river in the desert.’”

“But I read it the third time.  And when I read it the third time He said, ‘Remember not the former things, all the gay stuff and neither consider the things of old, the drugs and crack and all that, and whore mongering and fornicating, committing adultery, lying and cheating, those things.’”

Right at that moment her mother called.  Wanda Jo told her everything God had showed her in the scriptures.

Wanda Jo said, “My momma heard for 30 years I was gay and I was butch and I was a stud.  She said, ‘Wanda Jo, 12 o’clock midnight, who are you then Wanda Jo?’  I said the old Wanda Jo is gone I’m the new Wanda Jo.”

Wanda Jo gave her life to Jesus Christ that night in 2007.

“I’m just like Jesus’ first miracle turning water into wine.  The old Wanda Jo was the water and the new Wanda Jo is the wine.  I’m a miracle, hallelujah! I’m a miracle to myself.  He took the desire away.  I don’t desire women no more.  He took that desire away.”

Today she works in full time ministry sharing God’s truth and love to people she meets in Dallas, Texas.

“So now I have a true and a personal relationship with God.  See that’s why I was searching for love in all the wrong places all the time.  It was Jesus who I was searching for.  He filled this void and now I’m whole.”