Why does one style of music reach into your soul while another elicits a tepid meh? I was in the seventh grade when the Beatles became popular in the US. Though I was very musical and sang in church all the time, I did not like their music. Five years later, when Hey Jude came out, I was a disc jockey at a radio station in Eastern Kentucky. I played Hey Jude all the time. I played it for the same reason I played Richard Harris’s rendition of Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park. At 7:12 and 7:21, they were the two longest singles we had in our stack of 45s at the station.

If I worked weekdays I had a four hour shift. It was six hours on the weekend. Back in the day, the only time you had to go to the bathroom was when a record was playing. We did have news at the top and bottom of the hour, but I was the one reading the news, so there was not even a break then. If I needed to go to the bathroom for anything other than a very brief outing, it was either Hey Jude or MacArthur Park.

Even though it was nine seconds shorter, I played Hey Jude more often. Why? Because I did not like the song, so it didn’t bother me if I heard it on the tinny lobby speakers instead of the professional speakers in the control room. I loved MacArthur Park, and still do. You can find my favorite version of it on YouTube. It’s on David Letterman with Will Lee, Jimmy Webb and a full orchestra. That one was 5:45 long.

The music of the Beatles did nothing for me. It still doesn’t. I do like all of Jimmy Webb’s tunes, particular MacArthur Park and the tunes he wrote for Glen Campbell. But none of those hold a candle to my favorite music of all time, Southern Gospel and 1970s Contemporary Christian music. Think the Oak Ridge Boys before they became country and ruined their sound, or the Imperials, who were in the stratosphere from 1967-1976. After that my loyalty went to Andrus, Blackwood, and Company, and then to the Gaither Vocal Band, particularly the 2009 to 2013 version when they had their best group ever. If you are a fan of the Gaither Vocal Band, you know who was in the group during those years. Nowadays I still like the Gaithers. I also enjoy the harmony of the Isaacs. Sibling harmony is something special.

Back in the 60s and 70s, the Rock and Roll groups I liked the most were the Association, the Fifth Dimension, Chicago, the Eagles, and the Carpenters. As Country music evolved I began to enjoy groups like the Gatlin Brothers and Alabama. In Bluegrass I preferred the Country Gentlemen and Allison Krauss and Union Station, especially when Dan Tyminski was in the group.

If you are of a certain age with a certain kind of musical ear, you recognize that all of these groups, regardless of genre, were all about very tight three and four part harmonies. I see no reason for two part harmony to exist on God’s green earth. Harmony must include at least three parts, always and without exception. I mean, the Trinity is God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, right? It’s not just Jesus and the Spirit, so there should be no such thing as two part harmony. I’m sure you can follow my logic.

If you know much about me, by now you realize I have quite a dilemma. Almost all of those groups came out of the evangelical world, or in the case of Country and Bluegrass music, are intricately intertwined with the evangelical world. None of those groups or the religious communities from which they come, would be the tiniest bit welcoming to me.

In addition to their rejection of LGBTQ+ folks, most Nashville-inspired Christian music has absolutely terrible lyrics, like the song that talks about Elisha raising a boy from the dead, and then singing that God doesn’t ever change, and if you’ll have the faith of that boy’s mother, God will send you a miracle too. What makes those lyrics even worse is that I heard them sung at a 9/11 tribute concert in Carnegie Hall a few months after the terrorist attack, when no matter how hard people prayed, there would be no miracles for anybody.

So what am I to do? I love the sound of the music, but I cannot stomach the theology, and if people realized who I was, would likely be kicked out of a concert I tried to attend. With TED Talks out there with over 10 million views, that is always a possibility. I was constantly looking around and waiting to be tapped on the shoulder when I went to a Ernie Haase and Signature Sound concert at a Baptist church in Georgia a couple of years ago. I was with my good friends Ray and Jane. They would have protected me.

I had my own vocal band for six years back in the 70s. We made five albums. I put together a band with four couples in the 80s and early 90s. Everything was about tight harmony. But alas, as far as I can discern, there is no place in today’s world for a harmony-hearing, baritone-singing transgender woman who knows how to create a tight blend. There’s just no market for us.

Speaking of Ray, you know, the one who would have protected me in that Baptist church, I did not mention that he is a great Southern Gospel bass singer. This past summer Ray and three professional musicians from Nashville sang in tight four-part harmony for about 45 minutes at the Wild Goose Festival. I spoke a total of seven times for over eight hours at this year’s festival, but as much as I enjoyed all of those talks, none of them compare to that 45 minutes of music. As I wrote before, a couple of friends said they enjoyed watching me watch the concert as much as they enjoyed the concert.

Music engages every part of us. We learn to play or sing a piece with our left brain. We perform it from the right brain. Whether Broadway, the West End, or concert halls and arenas all across the world, music has the power to unite and stir the soul.

Ray and his friends have designs on some ideas that, should they come to fruition, would redeem everything I have musically lost. Just thinking about how three gay tenors and a cis straight gay-affirming pastor might heal countless souls through the music we all love and cherish, well now, that stirs my soul. The evangelical world may have cast us out, but musical redemption is drawing nigh.

For those of you who are younger and have ideas about the lives of older people, let me tell you about my schedule from September 1-7, 2026, the year in which I reached the three-quarter of a century mark in my time on earth.

On September  first I flew from Denver to Charlotte, picked up my rental car and drove to Statesville, North Carolina where the good folks at the Wild Goose Festival had made a reservation for me at the Fairfield Inn. During the evening I finished the monthly books for RLT Pathways and compared them to my projections for the year.

First thing Wednesday morning I went walking in the woods for an hour and a half. Normally I would have run, but nagging tendinitis in my right knee has me walking and mountain biking instead of running at the moment. It is aggravating, but I’m fortunate that it is only my third running injury in 47 years. While walking I memorized my presentation for Wednesday evening, which I had written on the plane on the way to CLT the day before. One of these days I’ll explain my memorization process, honed over 55 years of public speaking.

When I got back to the hotel I had a session with a speaker’s coaching client in Georgia, a counseling session with a long-term client, then started going over my full day presentation for the pre-conference event on Thursday. I drove to the Goose site late Wednesday afternoon and gave the presentation three different times in a fireside chat for the presenters at Wild Goose 2026.

The next day I taught for five hours on “How to Stay Human in a Dehumanizing World.” I glanced at my notes exactly once, during a brief break. The material is the subject of my next book so I know it pretty well, but still, I surprised myself that I spoke for five hours without notes. You’ll have to ask the attendees how it went. It seemed to go really well, but then again, it was 95 degrees and we were sitting under a tent for five hours, so I might have been suffering from heat stroke.

After the pre-conference I attended Thursday evening’s opening session, then headed back to the hotel for a couple hours of delightful thought provoking conversation with other presenters at this year’s conference.

Friday morning I decided to make major changes to my 1:00 pm presentation, realizing some people from my marathon session the day before were likely to attend. I memorized the major points on my way to the Goose site. After the presentation I did a book signing at the bookstore, got together with my friend Stan Mitchell to plan our session for 4:00 pm, then attended a couple of sessions, one with Wild Goose founder Jeff Clark (also my age) and another with Colby Martin, author of Unclobber, the best book out there on what the Bible actually says about LGBTQ issues.

At 4:00, Stan and I did a session on Mary, Martha, and Lazarus that left me in tears. Stan is such a great preacher. To team up with him is always an honor. He did the lion’s share of the talking, at my suggestion, and I closed it out. I think it was my favorite session of the week.

After another late evening solving the world’s problems with friends, I went back to my room and worked on my Saturday afternoon workshop. I had to switch up that session because my co-presenter was unable to attend. There are always a lot of moving parts at the Goose.

I spent most of Saturday morning working on the afternoon session on the future of the church. I headed to the Goose site at about 11:00. At 2:00 an extremely nasty storm blew through that overturned tents, sent trees crashing into cars and empty tents, turned over porta-potties, and otherwise played havoc with the afternoon schedule. Fortunately no one was hurt. My 5:00 pm session was cancelled. But the mini-presentation of a new musical being written about southern gospel music still took place at 6:00, much to my great delight. The presentation was fantastic. One of my friends said it was as enjoyable watching me watch the concert as the concert itself.

Saturday evening brought another night of my favorite thing at the Goose, deep conversations about things that matter with other presenters at the conference. It is one of few annual opportunities to spend several days with some of the best post-evangelical thinkers.

Sunday morning I drove my rental car back to the Charlotte airport and had a long talk with Earlene, who has worked at the CLT Admiral’s Club for a hundred years. We wondered how anyone would want to retire when you love what you do.

So many of the staff at the Charlotte club knew me as Paul and have fully embraced me as Paula. So yes, the staff at an airline club have been more charitable toward me than hundreds of former Christian co-workers.

I headed over to the “B” club to say hi to Pam, also at the club since the USAir days, then flew back to Denver. With some time to kill on arrival I went to the club at DEN and talked with my friends there, most of whom were not alive when I bought my lifetime club pass in 1982 for $400. It was a very good purchase, since it now costs over a thousand dollars per year.

Paula Bartlett, my girlfriend, called to give me her airport pickup ETA after teaching yoga, and we headed back to the house where we spent a leisurely evening reading the New York Times and marveling that we were not reading the satirical paper, The Onion. What was chronicled in the Times were actual events occurring in Washington, D.C. in real time. God help us.

First thing Labor Day morning we headed to the barn so Paula could ride her dressage horse, Lyrik, then came back the house where we hauled rocks for the rest of the day, rebuilding part of the landscaping in the back yard. (Picture proudly attached.) After dinner we had a long talk about logical positivism. Seriously, you can ask Paula. But I will admit, that kind of conversation is not the norm. We also talk about things like poetry, literature, and spirituality. Uh, come to think of it, I guess we are nerds.

Paula left early Tuesday morning to drive to her job as a school administrator in Colorado Springs, and I headed to a meeting with the board chair of Front Range Community College, where I am considering joining the board of directors.  That completed the seven days.

Granted, because of the Wild Goose Festival, the first week of September was not a typical week, but it wasn’t exatly atypical either. After finishing this post I’ll work on the last few edits to my next book proposal, then look at the notes for my evening board of directors meeting for the Lyons Creative District. I may be 75, but I’m not slowing down.

William Butler Yeats wrote, An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap hands and sing, and more loudly sing for every tatter in its moral dress.

I’m clapping hands and singing.

Even as a young child I questioned the existence of God. I grew up in a fundamentalist world in which doubts could never be publicly acknowledged without grave consequences, but doubt was always there. As Frederick Buechner wrote, doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.

When I was in Bible college the questions grew exponentially. The theological systems I was taught were so air tight there was no room to breathe. If anything, evangelicalism today has grown even more air tight in its approach to divinity. It is not a world friendly to questioning souls.

Years after seminary I was reading my favorite novel, Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. At one point Jayber, the protagonist, is a student at a Bible college that sounds suspiciously like the one across the street from the cemetery where my parents are buried, the college from which I graduated.

While a student at the Bible college, Jayber seeks out an older professor he trusts and asks questions about God. The professor says, “You have been given questions for which you cannot be given the answers. You will have to live into them a little at a time. I will tell you a secret. It may take your entire life. I will tell you another secret. It may take longer.”

I have quoted those lines many times in my books, articles, television scripts, speeches, and sermons. It is seminal to my understanding of God.

For 500 years we have been under the heavy thumb of the modern age, with its left-brain fixation on categorization and analysis instead of holistic thinking, on knowledge instead of experience, and on things instead of relationships. The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right says I am a body.

To the left hemisphere of the brain, the existence of God is a problem to be solved. To the right, it is a mystery to be embraced. To the left brain spirituality is propositional, to the right it is mystical.

Iain McGilchrist is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. His key works are the massive volumes, The Matter With Things, and The Master and His Emissary. Both are the definitive works of our generation on brain science, and particularly on the relationship between the hemispheres.

McGilchrist does not shy away from talking about spirituality and mystery. He says one of the biggest unanswered questions of the universe is the existence of consciousness. What is it? Where does it come from?

He says, “No one has come up with an explanation for how consciousness comes out of matter.” McGilchrist surmises that matter must inherently have something conscious about it. He believes the universe itself is conscious. Psyche everywhere. That certainly gives new meaning to the words of Jesus in Luke 19:40 that, “the very stones would cry out.”

There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not as long as humans are involved, because we are always subjectively perceiving it. We can get powerfully close through rigorous intersubjective exploration, but even then the limitations of the scientific method leave us with only left brain exploration.

Back when I was still struggling in the evangelical world I read Francis Schaeffer’s He is There and He is Not Silent. I found it helpful at the time. Today it feels almost quaint, with a confidence in Reformed theology, the modern age and Enlightenment thinking that cannot hold.

Hans Küng’s Does God Exist was a valiant effort identifying notions about God throughout western history. I enjoyed it very much when it came out. Sophomoric books like Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demand a Verdict are sadly still out there, with that particular book now updated by McDowell and his son. McDowell’s book has sold more than all of my books combined. There is a certain humility in that, I suppose.

There is no evidence that demands a verdict. God is nothing if not subtle. But now that I am halfway through my eighth decade (which is 75, by the way, not 85 – wanna be sure you know that – I do have some vanity left) I am more convinced than ever of the truth of Jesus and his teaching, to love God, neighbor, and self. I am equally convinced that this universe is enchanted, or as Iain McGilchrist says, conscious.

Though not overtly religious, McGilchrist is partial to Christianity. He finds spiritual strength through the arts and nature. It reminds me of my friend, Joe D’Alessandro, who used to be our director when I was on television. Joe studied in Italy during his college years and Renaissance art is what led him to be a follower of Jesus.

Florence, who with her husband, Stan, hosted a reading group at their home for over twenty years, introduced me to the history and beauty of Christian art. I was always grateful for that. Growing up as an evangelical the art of the church was kept away from us, as was the rich liturgical tradition of the Catholic and Eastern churches.

It’s kind of embarrassing to me how much I loved evangelical megachurch worship. If I wasn’t barred from attending, I’d still enjoy the music today – though not the sermons. Something about the music and the carefully crafted hour always spoke to my soul in a way similar to Broadway. When I was preaching regularly at one megachurch here in Colorado, we would finish on Sunday at noon and I’d say to our worship pastor, “I want just one more service!” I had already preached for four services, mind you, one on Saturday and three Sunday, but that didn’t matter. Something happened in those services that was beyond the sum of the parts and I loved it. I wanted one more.

Today I find God in nature, in my grandchildren’s faces, in the Renaissance painters, in Broadway shows, occasionally in movies, always in Worthy is the Lamb and the Amen Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I believe love is God and God is love. At this point in my three-quarters of a century on this earth, I find that is enough.

And so it goes.

It took me over a year to slog my way through Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. Between Chernow and Iain McGilchrist’s two volume, four-inch thick, The Matter With Things, I find myself grateful for the 1600 words of a TED Talk. Does it really take 392,000 words (Chernow) or 700,000 words (McGilchrist) to tell a story or explain an idea? Don’t get me wrong. Both Chernow and McGilchrist are brilliant, but a good editor can be a marvelous thing.

My first TED Talk, at 1920 words, was about 300 words longer than the typical TED Talk, but I speak fast. I finished it in 14 minutes, the sweet spot for a TED Talk back in those days. In today’s TikTok world, they are shorter.

When I work with TEDx speakers, where the manuscript must be memorized word for word, they think they will never be able to get their “big idea” down to 1,600 words . First drafts usually come in at around 3,500. We ask the speakers to do their best to get the word count as low as possible, but every word of a speech is a baby to which the speaker has painfully given birth. They just can’t get rid of them.

That’s why we have to take over. We get the manuscript down to 1600 words and you’d be amazed how often speakers say, “I don’t even know what you took out.” That’s because what we took out was extraneous to the big idea. It is not an easy process. My first TED Talk was at edit 38 before it was done.

Had it been a TED Talk, Chernow’s book would have been 2,856 minutes long, or 47.6 hours. By contrast, the audio book of my memoir, which has about 70,000 words, is just under eight hours long.

Okay, I can tell, you are getting bored. Let me make this more interesting.

In the musical Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda took a book that would have taken 47.6 hours to speak and turned it into a 2 hour and 23 minute musical with 20,500 words, give or take a word. That’s 144 words a minute, twice the words-per-minute of a typical Broadway musical. I’ve seen it five times and I’ve still not picked up all the words.

My two New York granddaughters, 17 and 18 years old, not only understand every word, they have memorized the entire libretto. Yeah, the entire libretto. Asha said apologetically, “Well, maybe there is one song late in the second act that I don’t know completely.” Seriously? Other than occasional phrases like, “I’m not giving away my shot,” or “I wanna be in the room where it happened,” or “I may not live to see our glory,” I haven’t memorized anything from Hamilton.

We took Asha and Lyla to see Hamilton last Thursday. The next night Cathy and I saw the Les Misérables 40th anniversary tour at Radio City Music Hall. Both shows were fantastic. I’ve seen Les Mis more times than I can count. As with Hamilton, I’ve seen it in New York, London, and Denver. I do have the entire 2:45 libretto of Les Mis memorized – I have for a long time. But it’s got half the words of Hamilton.

After watching both shows I realized how much has changed in our culture in the last forty years. When Les Mis came out we were still firmly planted in the modern age, with its certainties and clear moral standards. There were no ambiguities. We knew who the protagonist and antagonist were. It was obvious. We still lived under the fantasy that right and wrong were immutable and obvious. They never were, but for the better part of 500 years we hung on to that fantasy.

Hamilton is a completely different story. It is purely postmodern. There is no obvious protagonist except George Washington, who comes off looking pretty good. Certainly Hamilton and Burr, the two key characters, were not obvious protagonists or antagonists. Nor was Thomas Jefferson. Not even King George qualifies as an antagonist. He was relegated to comic relief.

In Les Mis you only see the bad side of Javert and the good side of Jean Valjean. In Hamilton you see the good sides and the dark sides that emerged from each main character because none of them had dealt with their shadow sides. The shadow sides are the unexplored parts of the psyche, the places we do not want to go because we do not want to find what is lurking there, waiting to be worked out. Working out what is in our shadows is hard and takes time.

Both Burr and Hamilton had a childhood that, left unexamined, created huge problems in their lives that finally landed them in Weehawken, New Jersey, where functionally both of their lives ended. You wonder what might have happened if more of our founding fathers had not just lived life at the surface. Washington had clearly done some work related to his early failings on the battlefield, but there did not appear to be much interiority in most of the founding fathers – not many poets in that group.

Which, come to think of it, is a lot like today’s national politicians, but that is another column (you can tell I’m an old magazine writer – I wrote “column”) for another day.

Hamilton, the musical, does capture the positive, negative, and unexamined shadow sides of the characters. That is quite a tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda and those who helped him shape the musical. Its depth and nuance are remarkable.

I’m headed to London next week, where I’ll see To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems odd to see it in London, but it’s having a short run there and I’ll be in town, and who wouldn’t want to see a play scripted by Aaron Sorkin. I just wish Jeff Daniel’s was playing the lead character. Now there’s someone who has explored his shadow side.

And so it goes.

I have been outside the evangelical world for twelve years this month, and I have drawn some conclusions. Nowadays, very little of my interaction is with people who reside in the evangelical world. According to the Pew Research Center, a reliably accurate polling organization, fewer than one quarter of Americans (twenty-three percent) identify as evangelical. My life is lived with the other seventy-seven percent.

If you live within the evangelical world, you are a part of an insular culture. Higher percentages of Americans are evangelicals in Indiana and Georgia than in Washington and New York. The percentage of evangelicals shifts depending on one’s geography, but there is no state in which it is higher than fifty percent.

When I lived on Long Island (and yes, it is on Long Island, not in Long Island. It is the East Village, not East Village. It is the Bronx, not Bronx. Okay, grammar lesson completed.) only three percent of the population was evangelical. Eighty-nine percent was either Roman Catholic or Jewish. As someone who grew up in an evangelical bubble, it was helpful for me to live on Long Island.

For our purposes, we will stick with the national figure of twenty-three percent. That means over three-quarters of Americans are not evangelical. Among them are virtually all of my friends and acquaintances. After a dozen years living and having my being among such folks, I can say one thing with certainty.

To non-evangelical Americans, the single most defining element of evangelicals is their judgment. I’m so sorry evangelical friends, but I’ve never heard a single non-evangelical say you can spot an evangelical by their love. Not one.

When your primary concern is power and safety, the realm of the ego, you will be defined by judgment. Life will be determined to be safe or unsafe depending on the specific tribe of which you are a part, and your unwavering loyalty to that tribe. If you are judged by that tribe to be lacking, you will be excluded from that community.

When you have bought into the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement, that God’s natural position is to love you, but he cannot because you are actually unlovable, so instead of punishing you, something his holiness requires, he punished his own son instead, you cannot think about much else except doing whatever is necessary to stay in the good graces of that judgmental God.

And right there, in a single too-long sentence, is the crux of the problem. That form of Christianity is not driven by love, it is driven by judgment. Non-evangelicals have concluded that evangelicals are nothing if not judgmental because they have observed the landscape and they have come to the inescapable conclusion that they are, in fact, judgmental.

That evangelicals can fire their pastors for any hint of moral indiscretion, then distort themselves into pretzel-like shapes to endorse the presidency of Donald Trump, is beyond me. It is if they are saying, “We are really judgmental, but if it has to do with gaining and maintaining power within a political system, we will look the other way when a president’s morality is so corrupt that he’s already had to pay five million dollars to a woman he raped.”

Thomas Jefferson slept with his fourteen-year-old slave and continued to sleep with her for decades, fathering six children with her. But we won’t judge that because Jefferson was quite the writer, penning a Declaration of Independence that is one of the most beautiful documents ever initially rendered in English.

The truth is that Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant mess. So was King David, and Jacob, and the Apostle Paul, and you and me. We are all made in God’s image, and we are all a brilliant mess. That is not an oxymoron, it is a paradox, and it is endemic to the human condition.

When I transitioned I had more than one well-known leader with the Restoration Movement of churches ask me if I was going to “out’ them for their indiscretions of which I was aware. I told each of them, “I transitioned genders, not character. Of course I will not out you.” In their question was their own judgment. They now judged me as lacking, since I had transitioned genders, so they assumed I would publicly expose their lacking. It was sad.

When I transitioned I had already been a pastoral counselor for two years. If you add in all my years mentoring pastors and listening to church members, there was not much of anything that would have surprised me coming out of the mouths of evangelical leaders. On the whole I have found them to be no more or less morally pure than non-evangelicals. They just hide it better, and live in greater fear of being found out. Why? Because they know their peers are nothing if not judgmental.

Where brings me back to where I started. The single most defining element of evangelical Christians is their judgment. Their judgment trumps their love every single time.

Now that I live on the other side of such judgment, and inhabit a world of understanding and grace, I feel profoundly sad for my evangelical friends. They are missing the one thing I have known over the last dozen years in exponential measure – the joy of being truly alive and living as the authentic mess that I am. When you believe the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good, you will discover that three-quarters of the world will celebrate that calling with you.

That’s the way I see things.

And so it goes.

After twelve years, it is still maddening. I have lived as a man and I have lived as a woman, and life was much easier as a man.

That subject was the theme of my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned. It was the subject of my first and third TED Talks, which have had over eight million views. I’ve heard from women from all seven continents (yes, including two from Antarctica) thanking me for validating their experience.

For the last four years I served on my town’s Board of Trustees. In the first term I never felt dismissed as a woman. Our mayor was a woman, as is our town administrator. It felt good to be taken seriously. In the last term, not so much. There were male members who before arriving on the board, questioned my competence. One assumed I simply rubber-stamped what the staff suggested. When I was Paul, not once did anyone ever make that assumption about me. It was obvious I had my own thoughts. But as a woman, different story.

In this last term there were those who did not give me the respect I would have expected given my corporate experience, my years chairing a plethora of boards, my leadership abilities, and my accumulated wisdom. Rarely were they overtly misogynistic, but their assumptions belied their misogyny, as did their tendency to cut me off when I was speaking.

I have met with politicians who were mildly interested in the fact that I was mayor pro tem, but when I was talking with most of them, they had an eye on the room looking for someone else more powerful with whom they could engage. Once they found out about my TED Talks, books, and international speaking career, that all changed. But by then the damage had been done. Their glances over my shoulder had already told me what they really thought, that I was expendable, little more than talking wallpaper.

As Paul, when I could be helpful on an airplane I would offer my knowledge, thinking the other person would be pleased that someone who has flown three million miles was able to help them navigate the overhead space in the front of a 737-800. (Because the fuselage narrows toward the front, the bins are not as large as they are further back in the plane.) But for the last ten years or so, I say nothing. The poor souls turn their bags on end and try to slam the compartment shut, to no avail. But hey, as a woman apparently I cannot possibly know anything about complicated flying machines, so I keep my mouth shut.

What I did not include in my TED Talks was what I have learned about competition among women. As one of my close female friends said, “You missed the teenage years when we learned how to deal with the mean girls.” Over the past twelve years I have developed close female friendships and watched them crumble into dust in ways that never happened, not even once, with my close male friends. Until I transitioned, I never lost a friendship. As Paula, I have lost more than one.

Women know they have to fight for what they have, and protect it once they have it. The world does not hand them anything. My experience is that women are reluctant to empower one another. They understandably work from a scarcity mentality because opportunities are, in fact, scarce.

With the friendships I lost, I found myself confronted by female drama, something I had never experienced as a man. Since then I have learned to identify and avoid it. I back away the second I see the spinning tornado of toxic drama coming. Now I know why Paula, my girlfriend, generally prefers working with men to working with women. She has said, “If you are both competent and attractive, other women will try to take you out at the knees.” Good to know.

Still, the difficulties of female relationships do not hold a candle to the power I relinquished when I transitioned. Men almost never treat me with the same respect with which I was treated as Paul. There are a few exceptions, like Stan, Fred, Mark, Josh, Colby, and others. Interestingly, most of them are post-evangelical pastors.

It is not that people dismiss me because I am transgender. Most do not know I am transgender. They dismiss me because I am a female, and an older female at that. In American culture older females are functionally invisible. Older males, on the other hand, are granted positions of honor for their supposed wisdom. Four of our last seven presidents have fallen into that category, including one who is spectacularly devoid of the tiniest shred of wisdom.

I do not expect things to change anytime soon. When I watch the elk during the rut I realize gender arrived out of  a primordial soup that gave the male of most species more muscle mass than the female, and therefore the power to treat females as objects and possessions. It’s been that way for millennia.

The good news is that one species has evolved to the point in which males have developed the agency to allow them to grow beyond that misogynistic behavior. Now, if just more of them would exercise that agency.

And so it goes.

I was working in Kentucky last week and took time to visit Mill Ridge Farm in Lexington, the Kentucky Horse Park, and the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. The pastoral scenes were calming, an immaculate horse farm and the Shaker Village with its order and simplicity. We spent the night in a room at the East Family House at the village and had a delightful dinner and breakfast there the next morning. I took the picture above at the village on Wednesday evening.

At Mill Ridge Farm, as the guide talked about the farm’s fifth generation ownership, I watched through the door of the breeding barn while Casa Creed, one of the stallions, ran back and forth in pleasure, waiting for his chance to dazzle us with his brilliance.

On the final day of the trip I visited with my brother and his wife. We talked about our years in Akron, Ohio, and the good people who were a part of the West Akron Church of Christ. There were so many pleasant memories of so many people who were very good to us. The time in Kentucky was a delight. I even had a chance to introduce Paula to Skyline Chili, three-way, dry, as it should be eaten. The trip home was a shitshow, as air travel has become in these greedy times, but it couldn’t dampen my spirit.

On Saturday morning we headed to Blue Roof Equestrian Center in Erie, Colorado, where Paula keeps her warm-blooded Hanoverian dressage horse, Lyrik. I watched her ride in the outdoor arena for an hour before we headed to our guilty pleasure, Cracker Barrel, (Shh! Don’t tell anyone we go there) for a very early dinner, as old people (well, I’m old – Paula is not) are inclined to do.

This is what summer is, blue skies, Kentucky bluegrass, Colorado’s purple mountains majesties. I was feeling pretty good about life. Then the Knicks won on Saturday night and I mean, maybe there is a God. I’m pretty sure Jonathan and Kijana are still celebrating.

Then came Sunday evening, and the absolutely surreal, disturbing debacle on the lawn of the White House, as grown men beat each other to a bloody pulp while thousands of the most powerful people in the world sat there and cheered.

I was reminded of the demand for bread and circuses and the part that played in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but I doubt anyone who would actually know what those references mean was attending the spectacle.

I have no illusions, there has always been brutality in our nation. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn so poignantly said, the line between good and evil runs straight through the center of the human heart. But thousands of people watched, apparently without irony, as abject violence was celebrated on Flag Day. It may as well have been the spectacle of a public hanging, the last of which took place in the US in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936. Only that was not at the White House.

Unless I am missing something, not a single elected politician in attendance spoke out against the unconscionable comment one of the fighters made about Michele Obama. And yes, that includes the president. It is all so very troubling.

I still believe in this nation and in our ability to right the ship of American democracy, but scenes like last night’s are not giving me much to work with in the way of hope.

November 3, 2026 will be an extremely important day in the history of our nation. Do those of us who care what happens, care enough to do the grassroots work to put guardrails on this presidency? I have been actively contributing to the campaigns of candidates who will stand up to growing authoritarianism. I ran for office in an attempt to bring civility to local government. I’ll let our town residents decide how the man they elected is doing in that department.

It is ironic that evangelical Christians, who are always ready to talk about the fruit of the Spirit, are still supporting the Christian nationalism on display at the White House last night. It is an oxymoron that they should speak of the fruit of the Spirit at all.

Galatians 5: 22, 23 describes the nine specific virtues that comprise the fruit of the Spirit. They are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Please, someone from that world, tell me which of those virtues was on display on the White House lawn last night? Anyone?

And so it goes.

Years ago I was hiking alone to Bridal Veil Falls in Rocky Mountain National Park. It had been a dry winter and there was no snow on the trail. The morning of the hike it snowed about an inch or two. As I headed out of McGraw Ranch, I was making fresh footprints in the snow.

About two miles into the hike I saw tracks in the snow laterally across the trail. I looked closely and there were four toes, with a three-lobed heel. It was the first time I had seen a mountain lion track, and the size indicated it was not a small cat. As I kneeled on the ground, measuring the tracks with the ruler printed on the back page of my book, Scat and Tracks, I jumped to full height. (I dunno, is it a little weird that I own that book?) I did not need to be kneeling in the snow so the mountain lion could think, “Aw, that’s so nice of my lunch to make themselves smaller so I can more easily prepare my meal.”

I gingerly turned back toward the trailhead when I happened across a ranger heading up the trail. I told him about the tracks and he was eager to see them. I showed him the tracks and then turned toward the trailhead. He said, “There’s no need to shorten your hike. You’re tall enough no mountain lion is going to attack you.” I said, “I understand what you are saying, but has anyone told the mountain lion that?” The ranger laughed and I kept walking back to the trailhead, off in search of a safer trail.

I thought of that ranger when I read the New York Times bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. The authors said we should not listen to the artificial intelligence entrepreneurs who offer confident assurances that AI will never become nefarious. The authors say those creating artificial general intelligence do not even fully understand how it works! It’s like saying, “That mountain lion won’t eat you,” when you know absolutely nothing about the feeding habits of mountain lions.

I was pleased last week when graduates from multiple universities booed as commencement speakers spoke in glowing terms about artificial intelligence. The speakers were caught off guard, confused, flummoxed. In their Silicon Valley bubble, apparently no one dares confront them about the dangers of artificial general intelligence.

An additional concern about AI is that in many nations, safeguards have been put in place to protect people from losing jobs to artificial intelligence, as well as regulate every stage of its development in an attempt to limit its abilities. With the current administration in Washington, that is not going to happen in the US.

Silicon Valley is ruled by people with overactive left brain hemispheres and underdeveloped right hemispheres. The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right says I am a body. The left is interested in what it knows. The right is interested in what it experiences. The left is interested in things, the right is interested in the relationships between people and things. The left is focused on categorization and analysis. The right is interested in putting information in a wholistic context. The left hemisphere is more mechanistic, the right is more organic.

The truth is that the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere. In a healthy person, information comes into the right hemisphere, is passed to the left for categorization and analysis, and then brought back to the right to be placed in context. Unfortunately, in our current world, for 500 years or so, we have valued the left hemisphere over the right. In other words, the half of the human brain that asks how but never asks why is in charge, and that should frighten us all.

Thank goodness some powerful voices are speaking out about the dangers of AI. In a commencement address to Stanford graduates last week, Apple founder Steve Wozniak said, “You all have AI. That’s right, you all have AI, actual intelligence. We’ve discovered it takes nine months to make it.” Wozniak was applauded.

In his first encyclical, Pope Leo said, “Humanity, in all of its grandeur and woundedness must never be replaced or surpassed.” He also said we must “abandon construction of yet another tower of Babel and join forces in building up the common good.”

There are a lot of mountain lions in the Rocky Mountains. Cathy and I have seen tracks in our yard. Last winter Cathy saw one outside the office window. I ran after dark when I lived on Long Island. I do not run after dark in Colorado. Why take a chance with an enemy that is potentially lethal?

I am not much for celebrating birthdays, though I did enjoy it as a child. Most birthdays meant inviting Bob and Dave May over for dinner and eating chicken my mother had fried in Grandma Stone’s iron skillet. On my ninth birthday Bob and Dave gave me the model car pictured above, a 1959 Oldsmobile. It’s on a bookshelf in my office, along with a green 1960 Ford Galaxy, a red 1964 Ford Galaxy, and a yellow 1964 Thunderbird.

In a lot of ways I was a typical boy. I loved cars, erector sets and chemistry kits, and spent a good bit of every August obsessed with praying mantises. We caught them, built generous sized cages, and fed them grasshoppers. We loved watching them eat the grasshoppers. One year we made the mistake of putting a male and female praying mantis in the same cage. The female ate the male while they were engaged in, shall we say, memorable activities not well understood by ten-year-old boys. That memory stayed with me. But I digress.

A lot of random anniversaries remain in my mind, locked there by the memory gods. My parents wedding anniversary was May 20. This year would have marked their 80th anniversary. They made it to 73 before Mom passed. Dad died six months later. Grandma Stone, my maternal grandmother, was born 139 years ago this coming May 28. She lived into her nineties, as did both of my parents.

Cathy, my former wife, reminded me this morning that today was her mother’s birthday. She would have been 95. She passed away last year, October 12 to be exact. I remembered it was her birthday first thing this morning, before Cathy told me. Today is also the anniversary of one of my “firsts” as Paula. I’m not telling you which one or what year. That’s private. Another is coming up in nine days.

I did my first TED Talk on November 11, 2017. I can’t believe it’s been almost nine years. The talk was released on December 19. I was speaking the next morning at a high school in Littleton, Colorado and watched the talk for the first time when it had fewer than 100 views. To date it has had over seven million views. There are still at least 100 views a day. Last fall there were a couple of months when the algorithm gods were smiling and the talk was back up to 5,000 views a day. Go figure.

I graduated from high school on May 21. The girl I was in love with at the time had turned 18 the day before. Though I was crazy about her, she chose the other guy. I remember the summer they got married, though I do not remember the day.

Cathy and I got engaged on June 22, 1972. I asked her to marry me while we were standing in front of Jackson Christian Church in Massillon, Ohio. Not exactly a romantic spot. One of my closest friends was born in Boulder, Colorado six days later. I always think of my friends as being about my age. Most are much younger than I. I imagine that means something.

The woman I am happily dating now was born exactly 40 days before I graduated from high school, 21 days before I turned 18. That just seems weird. We first held hands when we were at a restaurant where I was eating a wedge salad and shepherd’s pie. Also weird. I remember the date of that too.

The Stone Canyon fire started on the afternoon of July 30, 2024. I was just returning from a run up Stone Canyon Road when it broke out. I was Mayor Pro Tem at the time and spent a good part of that day and the next at the fire station, watching agencies coordinate firefighting efforts. It was like a carefully choreagraphed dance. I was on NBC Nightly News that day, still in my running clothes, covered in sweat, no makeup, hair sticking out like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons.

The day Cathy and I got married is an easy one to remember, December 31. We were pronounced husband and wife right before midnight.

I remember lots of other random dates, but I can tell I’m starting to bore you.

Three days from now is my 75th birthday. I am hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park that day. I won’t have cell coverage, just so you know. I don’t want you to think I’m rude if you text and you don’t hear back from me.

Seventy-five does not seem nearly as significant as 70 was. I’m not sure why. It feels like 80 will be the next tough one. I mean, I still run six days a week, mountain bike, hike, and fly all over the world speaking and whatnot. That is not likely to change anytime soon.

Every day of this life is holy, sacred, and to be lived for the greater good, including this coming Saturday, May 2. Life is good, and I am blessed on this 29th day of April, in the year of our Lord 2026.

Around seven years ago I went through one of the more difficult experiences of my life. Because of the millions of views of my first TED Talk, I was earning a good living speaking around the world. I was pastoring a new church. Five years after my transition, I was really settling into my life as Paula.

In the midst of this upturn I was suddenly afflicted with internal turmoil. I had a new therapist with whom I was doing EMDR, a rapid eye movement therapy known to heal trauma. The trauma I experienced when I came out as transgender and lost all of my jobs and most of my friends needed to be healed. That was the reason I began EMDR, but as if often the case, it brought up deeper trauma that had been retained in my body.

When we are threatened, the cerebral cortex turns over its functioning to the midbrain – the amygdala and hippocampus. The hippocampus goes into hyper memory mode, though what it remembers is not necessarily what is ultimately helpful. The amygdala helps us respond with fight, flight, fawn, or freeze, depending on the nature of the trauma. Flight is usually the first choice, if the midbrain decides fleeing is likely to be successful. If flight is not an option, we will fight. Fawning occurs when we befriend the perpetrator, prioritizing staying alive over fight or flight.

If the midbrain decides none of those options is available it goes into freeze mode. Freeze mode turns off active memory and in short, prepares you to die without consciously experiencing the death. If you survive freeze mode, you have no memory of the event. Though your mind has no memory of the trauma, your body does. The trauma is held in the body until it is released.

If you’ve ever seen a deer recover after being chased by a predator, you will notice the deer shake and shiver from head to toe. In that physiological response the body is ridding itself of the trauma just experienced. It is literally shaking off the trauma.

Humans have no such automatic physiological way to release trauma. It remains in the body until it can be released, often through therapeutic methods like EMDR, somatic therapy, cognitive processing therapy, or prolonged exposure therapy. I am fairly well acquainted with the first two. The clearest and most understandable book that explains the process of healing trauma is Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger.

It is one thing to treat people experiencing post-traumatic stress. It is another when the post-traumatic stress is your own. On three occasions when I was in EMDR back in 2019, I left the therapy session without the trauma contained. Containment is a process in which the session is wound down so the trauma does not leave the therapy office with you. One time I went to the home of one of my copastors and literally slid to the ground in tears, completely dissociated. My copastor had no training to know how to deal with that.

On two other occasions I went to a close friend who did intuitively know what to do. She sat with me until I could move out of my dissociation and become regulated. On one occasion that took several hours. I will always be grateful for her presence, care, and nurture.

That was seven years ago. For the last two weeks I have found myself again in a place in which trauma has been triggered and I have found myself dissociating. If you know me at all, you know I am nothing if not controlled. Becoming dissociated is very troubling.

This trauma response arrived with the loss of the mayoral election. I wrote last week about some of the reasons for the loss. Doing a postmortem of the campaign was important, both for me and for other transgender candidates who might consider running for office. But this emotional response was not about understanding. It was about feeling, and the overwhelming feelings were shame and guilt for having let others down.

That has resulted in an inability to concentrate, an avoidance of friends, dysthymia (a generalized malaise,) acedia (spiritual torpor) and a few moments of dissociation.

You might ask why I am writing this. It’s a fair question. Why would I want to invite a few thousand folks to look into the process of my inner workings? The reason is because I know there is a very good chance you too have had a similar experience, past trauma you do not even recognize coming forth in your body via an unexpected trigger. You do not have to run for mayor for this to happen. The triggers that cause post-traumatic stress are many, and often bear little resemblance to the original trauma.

But when they come, you need to care for yourself. Do what you must to get through the day. This is not a time to be concerned about disappointing others. You must take care of yourself. Things began to lift when I left a conference I was attending with friends and cancelled my attendance at another. I felt like I was letting people down both times, though none of them gave me the slightest indication that I was.

As the weight began to lift, I found the strength to attend my last meeting of the Board of Trustees as Mayor Pro Tem. I gave a little speech, focused on helping the incoming board members feel comfortable in their discomfort. It is a big job, and anyone who takes it on without feelings of inadequacy does not understand just how big the job is.

I then attended a party honoring our outgoing mayor, who has become a very close friend over the last four years. I had delightful conversations with folks from town, politicians from the region who have become acquaintances and friends, and others who wanted to celebrate Hollie’s service to the town. I was complimented on how I ran my campaign and encouraged to try again. The trying again part does not sound very appealing, but the evening was very encouraging.

Life is not a problem to be solved, it is an experience to be lived. Sometimes it is a puzzle and a mystery. Some parts of life cannot be solved or even understood. They must be lived, and trusting the flow is a part of the living.

To be clear, I am good, and there is no need to reach out in concern. I have proven to be a very resilient soul. I just thought it might be helpful if I shared my experience with you. As I say at the end of many a blog post…

And so it goes.