I just finished Yascha Mounk’s new book, The Identity Trap, A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. It’s the best book on current culture I’ve read since The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

Mounk writes about the unfortunate contributions the left is making to our current cultural divide and what might be done about it. He includes a short section on the debate over transgender issues. For the most part, I have no problem with what he writes.

As a transgender speaker, I have not had much pushback from the anti-trans community, With my TEDTalk views approaching 10 million, I find that intriguing. To be sure, I receive  hate mail, mostly from the evangelical community, but not as much as others. I also have had conferences and corporations pass on me as a speaker because of my gender identity, but again, not as often as you might think.

The difference might be in the way in which I approach my gender identity. In my first TEDTalk I said, “People ask me if I feel 100 percent like a woman. I feel 100 percent like a transgender woman. There are things a cisgender woman knows that I will never know.” Those three sentences set a tone throughout the talk that says I’m not trying to claim to be something I am not.

I come from the borderlands between genders, a certain kind of liminal space. I have no doubt I am supposed to be living as Paula. The world receives me as a woman and that feels appropriate. I never felt as comfortable as Paul as I do as Paula. But I am not a cisgender woman. I am a transgender woman.

I do not understand it. You do not have to understand it either. I have read everything there is to be read on the causes of gender dysphoria, and as it relates to me, a lot of them seem plausible, even probable. Do I need to know if it was some hiccup in the second trimester of gestation or a genetic marker that caused me to be transgender? I’m curious, but I don’t need to know. I know testosterone was wrong and estrogen is right. Not many men would be happy losing their testosterone and having it replaced with estrogen, nor women losing their estrogen and having it replaced with testosterone. That alone is enough to assure me I am transgender.

There is a certain segment of the left that leans toward a strange form of isolationism. They say, “No one who is not transgender can understand what my life is like, so don’t even try.” It is a form of what Mounk calls Identity Synthesis, in which we are identified only by that which separates us from everyone else. From that perspective the only appropriate way to interact with a transgender person is to acquiesce to whatever we say, because we are the minority. Question our perspective and you become a part of the majority culture oppressing us. Since transgender people are about one half of one percent of the population, by the logic of Identity Synthesis, 199 out of 200 people can never understand us.

Uh, okay. The truth is I don’t even understand me. I’ve had the same therapist for 30 years and we’re still trying to figure it out. It is okay, you don’t know why you do half the stuff you do, either. We are all complex and mysterious and difficult to understand.

Like Mounk, I am a fan of classic liberalism. I prefer the kind of language you heard from Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Junior, and come to think of it, Jesus. As members of this species, we all have more in common than we have that separates us. We will never bridge a divide by increasing the divide. We will bridge it by coming together in the areas we hold in common.

Are transgender people oppressed? Yes. Do I experience oppression? Again, yes. But I brought a lot of White male entitlement with me when I transitioned, and that also plays a part in how I experience life. Oppression is bad all the time, wherever and whenever it is experienced. But I don’t think we end oppression by increasing the divide.

I get paid a lot of money to speak at universities. As long as they do not censor me, I speak at Christian universities pro bono. I haven’t upset anybody yet with what I have said from the platform, though my sheer existence has threatened a lot of people who want to say gender dysphoria is not legitimate.

Why do I go to these institutions pro bono? Because if we do not get in close proximity to one another and discover that our commonality exceeds our differences, we will never close the divide. We need to close the divide. We need to stop arguing about who can use which restroom and focus on the real problems that could destroy our planet.

Climate change is rapidly hitting the point of no return. Probably not the time to buy that beachfront property you’ve been dreaming of. There are two wholly unnecessary wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, and countless other rumors of war.  Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly more complex as headlines blare the news that computers could one day overpower and even exterminate our species. One expert says the chances of that happening are somewhere between two percent and fifty percent. Truly frightening. What do you say we battle those problems instead of widening the great cultural divide.

Classic liberalism believes all humans are created equal, with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words are just as important today as they were 250 years ago. I want to embrace and extend that message.

I am first a human, Paula Stone Williams. After that I am everything else – tall, white, curly headed, transgender, American, Christian, pastoral counselor, speaker’s coach, TED speaker, member of the Lyons Board of Trustees, and longsuffering New York Mets fan. But for all of those particularities, what I hold in common with you far exceeds that which separates us. That is the truth I want to champion. That is the way we close the divide.

And so it goes.