I have received a lot of correspondence since our family was interviewed on Red Table Talk.  It’s taken me back to pondering the ins and outs of my transition.

I was grateful no one on RTT asked me the obligatory transgender question, “Did you feel like a girl stuck in a boy’s body?”  That is a common narrative regarding transgender women.  While I am sure it is descriptive of some people, I do not know of a trans woman who uses that language to define her childhood.

I usually say that I knew from the time I was three or four that I was transgender.  It is a simplification.  I was about that age when I realized I could not choose my gender.  Until then I assumed gender was a choice that needed to be made sometime before school started.  When I realized gender was not a choice, I was not so much devastated as embarrassed.  Why had no one told me?  Once I understood the truth, living as a boy was not a terrible thing.

I liked boy “things” more than I liked girl “things.”  Earth movers and backhoes and machinery of all types interested me, as did team sports.  I loved playing with girls, but I was not into dolls and such.  Occasionally I would pray for my gender to change, but it was not a nightly occurrence.

What I did know is that I was never really comfortable in my male body.  Something just did not seem right.  And when puberty arrived, nothing felt right.  That is the first time I truly hated the male experience. During my high school years I came to understand that I wanted to date girls, but I also wanted to experience life as a girl.  I was sure it was a secret I would take to my grave.

I loved being a father, but I did not like being a man.  Fatherhood agreed with me.  Maleness did not, though it served me well, as a pastor, CEO, public speaker, and all the other professions I crammed into my active portfolio.  I had an alpha personality and was driven to excellence and achievement.  In that regard, the privilege and entitlement of being a white male worked in my favor.  But I never felt at home in the world of men.  It felt like I was in a never-ending play with no final curtain.  I could play the part well, but I would never have given myself rave reviews.  I would have said, “He seems a little wooden in the role, as if he thought the role had never been expecting him.”

As I have said on many occasions, I felt called to transition.  I might (or might not) have been able to remain in the male role for the rest of my days.  There are differing opinions about that.  For the sake of my family, I would love to have been able to do so.  But the call to become Paula reached into the farthest corners of my being.  I paid a great price to get here, but you reject a call at your own peril.

Given that reality, you might be surprised to learn that while I definitely prefer life as a female  over life as a male, I still cannot say I am completely at home in my female body.  But then are any of us ever really at home within the confines of a human body?  As embodied souls, it seems like we were made for more than this.

I live in the borderlands.  With its rocky shores, brambles and bindweed, it is not easily inhabitable.  Every foray into the realm of males or the realm of females is a journey to another land.  I am comfortable living and breathing within the realm of females.  There is never a day I do not want to visit that land.  But it does feel like I am visiting – an extended visit maybe, with voting privileges, but always as an ex-pat from another land.  My home is in the liminal space of the borderlands.

I am not saying women do not welcome me in their land.  They have been wonderful, far more accepting than I ever imagined.  But though I understand the language of women better than the language of men, neither feels like my native tongue.  It’s like I speak Latin in a world in which every tongue is derived from it, but no one speaks it anymore.  The language I speak sounds familiar to both women and men, but opaquely.  The whole world sees me through a glass darkly.

I do not miss my past life, though I am proud to be the person who lived it.  I am comfortable where I am now.  It is home, and it does look like it had been expecting me.  And that is good enough.

My children and I recorded an episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk in September.  Jonathan and Jael joined me on the show.  Jael was interviewed here in Colorado.  The episode was released on Facebook on October 7.  I thought everyone who worked on the episode did a marvelous job.  Jada, Willow, and Adrienne were wonderful.  They could not have been more supportive.  Though we taped for almost two hours, the show was edited in such a way that virtually every salient part of our conversation was captured in the 27 minutes that ended up in the final edit.  Everything was fairly presented, without bias.  I am truly grateful.  Red Table Talk is a transformative show, tackling difficult subjects with grace.

I’ve heard from a lot of people since the show aired.  The usual group of fundamentalist haters has been active, but most of the comments have been supportive and thoughtful.

I have also heard from a lot of transgender folks who recently transitioned or are hoping to transition.  Many of them would like to visit with me by phone or in person.  I have had to tell them that I am not in a position to do so.  I remember when I was agonizing over whether or not to transition,  I wrote a few well-known transgender women and heard nothing in response.  Because of my experience, I try to answer every single person who reaches out to me. If perchance you have contacted me and I have not returned your correspondence, I apologize.

For those who have a family member who has transitioned, I recommend my son Jonathan’s book, She’s My Dad, published by Westminster John Knox Press.  It is an honest, engaging, redemptive story.  Included in the book are responses I wrote to five of the chapters.

For those wanting to read a good memoir on transitioning, I recommend Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There, Joy Ladin’s Through the Door of Life, Deirdre McCloskey’s Crossing, or Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness.  All are excellent resources.

If you would like to know more about my own thought process as I went through my transition, I would encourage you to go back to the beginning of this blog and look at my entries from 2014.  That is when I wrote the most about the journey from Paul to Paula.  Throughout the last five years I have written about it occasionally, though there has been no rhyme or reason to the timing.  This blog tends to be less strategic and more stream of consciousness.

I know it may be hard for some to understand, but at this point in my life, my transition no longer occupies a lot of space in my daily existence.  I knew when I transitioned that as a well-known pastor, I had responsibilities.  I could not just disappear into the crowd.  I would need to be public about my experience.  But nowadays, only about one in ten speaking engagements is about being a member of the LGBTQ community.  The rest are about gender inequity, a subject about which I am very passionate.

I never speak for the other members of my family.  Their story is theirs to tell or not tell.  It is up to them.  Jonathan has been pretty public about it all, but until Red Table Talk, my daughters stayed pretty quiet.

For those who would like to speak with me, I am truly sorry I am not in a position to do so.  My work with Left Hand Church, my pastoral counseling practice, and my active speaking schedule keep me extremely busy, and I simply do not have the bandwidth for individual conversations.  I do have plans to write a memoir in the near future.  My agent is currently sharing my book proposal with editors.  I will keep you informed of the progress.

In the meantime, thank you so much for your words of encouragement.  My children and I were hoping the Red Table Talk episode would help families going through the experience we faced.  We always knew that as a family we would make it through the dark night to the light of dawn.  It is good to share that hope with others.

Most of my public speaking is on the subject of gender inequity.  Working toward gender equity is a passion and a subject with which I am comfortable.  Last week I was in San Diego speaking to a group of financial advisors.  About 80 percent were male.  The men were politely receptive, but the women were far more enthusiastic.  It is what I have come to expect.  It is difficult for men to grasp the extent of their privilege.  Most would like to see gender equity, they just don’t want to give up their own power in order to make it happen.  I understand.  I once had a lot of power, and still retain a lot of power.  Giving up power is never easy.

While I knew giving up power would be necessary when I transitioned, I had no idea how profoundly my life would change.  I had a lot of ideas about what life would  be like as a female, but ideas don’t fare so well in the face of reality.

I thought transitioning would solve all of my gender identity issues.  While it did make my life more peaceful, meaningful and rewarding, I still feel as though I live in a liminal space, somewhere between male and female.  The borderlands are my home.  I will never have the experience of a cisgender female, and in many ways, I never had the experience of a cisgender male.  We know from fMRI studies that the brains of transgender people, studied before hormonal treatment, function somewhere between male and female.  I could have told them that long before MRIs existed.  I never felt comfortable as a male.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had several opportunities to reflect on my life as a man.  I’ve been providing pictures of myself as Paul to the producers of Red Table Talk.  Looking at the pictures reminds me that integrating the two halves of my life continues to be a challenge.  I’m not sure I’m any better at integrating Paul and Paula now than I was three or four years ago.

There was some progress at the beginning, when Paul was still fresh in my memory.  Now, as my male life recedes from view, I am forgetting how it felt to be a guy.  I still know all the things Paul knew, but there aren’t many people who would tell you I am the same person.  I am not.  I am fundamentally different.  I keep finding myself speaking of Paul in the third person, as if Paul was a distant relative, not the person who shares my heart.

My friend Christy always affirms me when I use a sermon illustration about Paul.  She says, “I like that guy.”  Not many others talk about Paul that way.  Usually when people make a reference to me as a male, it is to question the alpha-based actions they see at work.  They say, “Whoa, is that Paula speaking or Paul?”  I usually say, “Paula’s allowed to be an alpha human, you know.”

There are fine books on the transgender experience, but I can’t say any of them have helped me with the integration puzzle.  It still feels like two different lives.  I think it would have helped if we had memorialized Paul in some way.  But back when that would have been helpful to my family, I wasn’t ready.  I was way too excited about being in my new gender.  (Truth be told, sometimes I think it might not be a bad idea to lock transgender people in a closet for the first year or so.  Our giddiness in those early days does not match the pain made manifest around us.)

This morning our interview on Red Table Talk had its debut.  I was very pleased with the show.  It’s rare that you shoot a television show and you’re happy with the way it was edited.  I thought the show was fair-minded and positive.  I am grateful to Jada and Jack and Katy and Dena and Chelsea for making this such a wonderful experience.

There was a fair amount of conversation about the difficulty all of us have had integrating the two halves of our common family experience.  It gets easier with the passing of time, but it will never be easy.  I suppose that is how things are for those who blaze a trail.  Not many evangelical pastors transition genders.

I’ve repeated the same three sentences in both of my TED talks: “Would I do it all again?  Of course, I would.  The call toward authenticity is sacred and holy and for the greater good.”  I’m doing another TEDxMileHigh talk this fall (November 16), but I don’t think the line is going to fit in the new talk.  I wish I could find a place for it, because living authentically is sacred and holy and for the greater good.  But as many have discovered before me, few things that are sacred and holy and for the greater good are ever easy.