Minister Ricardo Simms’ life has taken a 360-degree turn since he gave up his transgender lifestyle to embrace Christianity.
Minister Simms shared his transformational story on Sheena Power Talk during a livestream hookup from Paris.
Born and raised in an inner-city Kingston community, he said his father wasn’t in his life that much. Although a stepfather was in the picture, he said he was just so confused growing up about his identity.
According to him, a lot of people might be puzzled wondering how a child of five could be confused about his identity and gender, but it is something he said he cannot explain; he just knew he was different.
“I just knew that I didn’t want to do the things I saw my boy cousins doing or other boys were doing. I was just so caught up with things that I saw my girl cousins doing, so I was more gravitating to things that girls were doing – the way I looked and the way I spoke,” he revealed.
He recalled being teased by people in the community, saying he looked and spoke like a girl.
Growing up in Jamaica, he had some wonderful times, but he still had internal struggles, and there was nothing he could do about them as he was afraid to give voice to these issues. Living especially in the inner city area, some things were looked down on, and so he had no outlet to talk about his struggles.
“You could hear it in the music, and I just didn’t want to bring disgrace to my family; I just knew that if I should tell anyone about this, it would be something, you know, dangerous to me, so I kept this secret all my life as a child growing up,” he confessed.
The older he got, the more struggles he faced, beginning with his attraction to the same sex. He said he didn’t know what it meant, and he continued the inner struggle. He also saw girls he thought he liked but wasn’t sure he liked them enough to be with them.
In his teens, with his hormones kicking in, the struggles intensified. As he got older, he said men started finding him attractive and started abusing him. He didn’t see anything wrong with it, as he shared that he thought they knew his secret, and so he didn’t tell anyone.
As he got older, he met two other gay persons in high school who introduced him to the community in Jamaica, and he said that was when he knew he wasn’t alone as there were more people like himself.
Growing older and going out in the world, a lot of things started changing for Simms as he was introduced to parties and others like himself, making him feel welcomed and that he had finally found his place.
“I felt welcomed; I felt like I found my place. I felt like I found somewhere…where, you know, I belong, even though it was difficult. It was still a secret because I didn’t want to disgrace my family, but I felt like this is where I belong, and some day when I get older, I’m going to walk from this, you know, hiding situation,” he continued, adding that his plan was to live his life fully and not be confused anymore.
Simms eventually migrated, and in his own words, “it was when all hell broke loose!” in his life, as he no longer had to hide as everything was out in the open and he knew that was where he would be living.
Simms, who shared that he was raised with proper Christian values and principles, said looking back, he was introduced to religion and not Jesus, so he knew religion but was yet to meet Jesus.
He mused that he never met the other side of God, which is love; all he heard about was hell and brimstone. When he came in contact with that side, he knew it was time to walk away from his lifestyle.
He said he never presented his lifestyle to his mother’s face, but she knew he was living a double life. No matter what he did, Simms shared that something was missing, he now realises it was the void that Christ was supposed to fill.
Continuing on his double life, he said his mother, being a Christian, was the only reason he didn’t live that lifestyle in Jamaica.
“I thank her so much for just loving me and showing me the love of Christ. She never rejected me. She never came and judged me for what I did. She prayed for me for what I did. She fasted for me, and that is what helped me to encounter God because God is faithful; He answered her prayers even though she has since passed.”
After his mother died, Simms said he went on a spiral and didn’t want anything to do with God. He started stressing, and no one could understand what he was going through.
Those emotions, he said, opened a door for the enemy, planting the seed that he too could die without doing what he really wanted to do. He said he started doing hormones, deciding to be true to what he was feeling. He said he went to the doctor, and when he started on the medication, he said he literally went through puberty all over again, just like any young girl.
When he finally got his wish, Simms said it didn’t make him happy; he was even more depressed and he couldn’t understand it. He now had everything; he was travelling, had money, and had friends, but there was a void.
After the transition, he was introduced to drugs, card reading, all sorts of things, meeting people, continuing to be exposed to drugs, and introducing others to it.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, he remembered he was getting ready to have fun—he was smoking, he was sober, and he was perfectly normal, packing on his birthday to travel when something supernatural happened.
“My eyes were just opened to another realm of the spirit, where I was literally being driven out of my mind because of the things I was exposed to. I was seeing things that if I should say [them] to others they would call me crazy, they would call me a madman, they will think something was wrong with me, but during this process I knew whatever I was going through, keep it to yourself because this is going to expose and reveal people in your life,” he related.
He didn’t tell anyone but allowed God to talk to him, revealing His love to him. It was a battle for his soul, culminating with him closing his eyes, feeling a warm embrace, and knowing that everything was going to be alright. And with that knowledge came the reminder that God created him a man and not a woman.
In Simms’ testimony, which he shared with Minister Sheena Hanson, he spoke more about his awakening and said that after taking out the implants, he finally experienced the infilling of the Holy Ghost.
He shares his entire story in his book “Wrong Identity: Three Decades of Lies,” now available on digital platforms.