It's been more than five decades since 11-year-old Eric Karl Swenson hid a newspaper clipping with the headline "Ex-Marine becomes bride" in a hole in the bedroom wall of his family home in Atlanta, Ga.

That story about a transsexual Korean War veteran who married a man in the late 1950s "was a thing of hope for me," the Rev. Erin Katrina Swenson said.

But it would take nearly 40 of those years for Swenson to come to grips with her gender identity. In that time, Eric Swenson would marry, father two children, become pastor of a Presbyterian congregation and establish a successful marriage and family therapy practice. Yet, he would struggle with crippling depression, even thoughts of suicide, before confronting himself, his family and his church with a truth he'd known since he was a child: He felt like he was a woman.

"I fought against this for decades. I denied it. I raised my fist at God in anger. I cried. When I was in seminary, I used to go to chapel in the middle of the night and scream. ... I just didn't understand it. It made no sense," Swenson said.

But on the day in 1994 when Swenson took the first dose of female hormones, the clinical depression that haunted him all his life lifted.

When Swenson asked the church to recognize her new name and identity, she touched off a nearly two-year fight to keep her ordination. She succeeded, and in 1996 became the first known mainline Protestant minister to transition from male to female while in ordained office.

Today Swenson, 62, dedicates much of her time to educating religious groups about transgendered people in their midst and calling them to a new definition of inclusiveness. While the number of openly transgendered people serving as mainline church leaders has increased over the past 15 years, Swenson said, they still face rejection and discrimination.

So she has partnered with the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign Foundation to help rally churches across the country to lobby for the legal rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered people at the annual Clergy Call for Justice and Equality scheduled for May 4-5 on Capitol Hill.

One of those participating churches is Glade Church in Blacksburg, which in conjunction with Virginia Tech's Gay Awareness Week celebration, will host two days of workshops with Swenson, said the Rev. Kelly Sisson of Glade.

In a recent phone interview, Swenson talked about her physical and spiritual journey and what she thinks it can teach others.

What made you want to be a minister?

When I was 10, I started going to church. ... It was almost exactly at the same time I started having these very strange feelings of wanting to grow up to be a woman and not a man. I felt really broken. I felt terrible, like there was something just fundamentally wrong with me.

But about the same time, we started going to this little Presbyterian church. Harold Minor was the pastor. He preached a very consistent theme -- a very good Presbyterian theme -- that God knows you down to the very fiber of your being.

But the other part is that God loves you. That God loves me. And God didn't love me in spite of. God loved me with all the stuff that was inside me. That was a powerful thing to hear. And I really never left the church after that moment.

How has your faith changed and evolved as you've gone through this process?

My understanding of God has changed. ... My understanding of how important it is that those who are oppressed not simply be allowed, but be honored and welcomed. Because I think that's what God demands of us.

What would you say to those who are going to be horrified by the idea of this?

I hope and pray that they will hope and pray with me -- that we can, rather than simply stay in this horrified place, to begin to look at why we are horrified and how God might be calling us to a different understanding of who we are. But I think being horrified is an OK place to start, and the reason that I think it is, is because that's where I started. When I was 10 years old and this happened to me, I was horrified.