Okay, I lost it the other day when the Speaker of the House declared that women’s restrooms would be off limits to Sarah McBride, Delaware’s newly elected member of Congress. Sarah has been Sarah as long as I have been Paula. I imagine when she’s out in public her experience is pretty much the same as mine – everyone treats her as a woman. Most of her hate mail probably comes via the Internet or texts and voicemails, as does mine. Being prohibited from using a women’s restroom, or even being stared at in a women’s restroom, is not a part of my experience, and probably not a part of hers either. She has responded with intelligence and grace to this ridiculous affront. Inside, she has to be bitterly disappointed.

My entitlement and self-confidence know no bounds. It rarely occurs to me that a worst-case scenario could come true. Only this week did I realize it is a distinct possibility that a national bathroom bill will be passed and signed into law. Even then I know I need not worry when I fly through ORD, LAX, LGA, or even CLT. But I fly through DFW a lot and it is already a surly and unwelcoming airport for everyone. For me, flying through Texas could get a lot worse.

But here’s the thing. What good does it do me to get caught up in the net of attention-seeking transphobia. Since the election the trolls have come out in force, again. I have been attacked from within the fundamentalist Christian world and from without. It is going to be an ugly four years.

But having had a few days to let this truth settle in, I am beginning to put it in perspective. I realize just how tiny my concerns are compared to what my daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and three of my five granddaughters face on an ongoing basis.

I’m not up against what Palestinians are facing in Gaza, or even what Jewish students are facing on elite university campuses where anti-Jewish sentiment is frighteningly real. None of my grandparents were exterminated in concentration camps. I have a friend whose grandmother was the only member of her family to survive Nazi Germany. My friend is planning to move back Spain and has every reason to do so. Generational trauma is real.

As for me, I will ignore the haters because I can. I’ve been busy unfriending folks from social media and removing my phone number from all of my online sites, again. As an elected official I can have law enforcement come by my home at the beginning of every shift, though I don’t feel that is necessary, at least not for now. And I can ignore the bathroom laws, as I have been doing where they have existed.

I will not play into their hand. I will live with dignity, treat my enemies with compassion, and play the role of the greater fool. In economic theory, the lesser fool is the person who optimistically buys a stock at a high price believing it can be sold to a greater fool at an even higher price.

I believe most people might believe the price of attaining civility, equity, and tolerance are too high right now, not worth buying into. The downside is too great.  There is too much to lose.

But I believe civility, equity, and decency can become the currency of our nation, the currency that found expression in the farewell address of George Washington, the Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln, the inaugural speech of John F. Kennedy, and the traditional liberalism that says there is more that unites us as than separates us.

I will continue to believe the ultimate building blocks of the universe are predicated on love, and that against all appearances, love is what makes the world go round. If that makes me the greater fool, it is a role I shall be honored to play.

And so it goes.

I often quote the last several lines of David Whyte’s poem, Sweet Darkness. Since last week I’ve been at the front of the poem, quoting its first few lines:

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also

When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you

Time to go into the dark, where the night has eyes to recognize its own

I’ve been lost for the last week with no map or working compass. I was blindsided in 2016 and I immediately determined to fight back. This time I’m not yet ready to fight back. I am weary. While I am greatly concerned for our democracy as a whole, much of my current weariness is self-referential, related to transgender rights.

The focused attack on transgender rights is about eight years old, with many victories celebrated by the right in state legislatures over the last three years. Almost 600 bills were introduced and 90 signed into law in 2023 alone. Now I fear there will not just be state laws, but federal laws or executive orders eliminating medical care for transgender people. The anti-trans rhetoric is on the increase and it is frightening.

Republicans made transgender rights a major issue in this campaign. Focus groups showed the anti-trans commercials that aired in swing states were more effective than others at getting out the Republican vote.

It is also concerning that the extreme left has played a part in creating such a perilous environment for transgender people. My greatest fears are for the very small percentage of children who are transgender, children no longer able to get the medical care they so desperately need. These children knew they were trans at a very early age and made it known at an early age. There was no mistaking their gender identity.

With the exception of these children, who are fairly easily identified, I question the appropriateness of medical treatment of teenagers who do not present with gender dysphoria before their teen years. An inordinate number of them were identified female at birth, and a significant number are no longer identifying as transgender once they are in their twenties. We should be looking at the data, as European nations have been doing. Many of those nations have become more cautious about providing teen medical treatment of gender dysphoria until we understand the trends.

I also understand why many feel that a transgender woman whose body developed as a male should not be playing women’s sports. Anti-androgens and estrogen do diminish one’s physical strength, but if your body developed as a male, not all sports advantages have been lost. I have felt that in my own body.

For having those opinions I have been castigated by the left, sometimes with the same level of vitriol with which I have been castigated by the right. I am nervous about publishing this post because of the power of cancel culture. Strategic essentialism and standpoint theory have created an environment that threatens freedom of speech. Just look at how easy it has become to lose your status as a tenured professor at a university, or how Jewish students are being treated on many campuses. Put that together with the newly empowered right and no wonder I do not know how to proceed. I want to be involved in the birth of something new, but I cannot find purchase. I do not see where to take the first step.

At the moment I will serve where I am comfortable, working within the church and writing about its effect on American culture. I have a sixty-five page book proposal with my agent tentatively titled, Can Religion Be Good – Creating Change and Finding Hope in a Polarized World. I’m eager to see which publishing company picks it up.

These are trying times, but life goes on. I will live with more caution, because I must. I will also live fully, because as I say so often, the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good.

And so it goes.

This post is longer than usual. It is important. It will initially read rather negatively. Bear with me. It will turn the corner.

The election and all of its awfulness has left me concerned not only about the future of the nation, it has left me pondering my own life. It would seem half of the nation has done its best to fill my heart with shame. It started with pretty much an entire denomination’s instant rejection of me, with the attendant letters, emails, and texts, some of which continue to this day, more than ten years after I transitioned.

It continued with many of the 13,000 comments on my first TED Talk, comments I have never read because, well, you can’t read stuff like that and survive. And now it continues with half of the nation attacking all transgender people, questioning diagnosis, treatment, and every other aspect of a complex and perplexing experience. They are certain they know all they need to know about it.

Oh, but that any kind of certainty in all things transgender could exist. Most questions about the causes of gender dysphoria are difficult to answer. Not enough peer review studies have been completed. But that does not seem to stop people on both ends of the political spectrum from being quite certain about it. And those on the right have made it a huge issue in the presidential election.

The transgender controversy is just one example of our culture’s desperation for certainty, which is an illusion, whatever the subject. Have we learned nothing from Quantum physics?

I have a pretty healthy ego structure. For that I can thank my white male entitlement, a loving and nurturing father, a doting grandmother and an education system that was predisposed toward children who easily learn in traditional ways. I have a fair amount of ego strength, with less ego need than many.

Nevertheless, I am weary of the assaults. I am saddened by the educational institutions, corporations, and conferences that have rescinded invitations for me to speak because I am transgender. Things looked a hell of a lot better for trans folks ten years ago than they do today. If this week’s election turns out as I fear it will, it is only going to get worse.

I rarely speak with people considering transitioning. I know many would love to talk with me, but I have discovered it is not good for my soul. They are all overly optimistic about how the world will receive them in their new gender, and woefully unaware of how difficult it is going to be. I always say, “My life has gone far better post-transition than I ever could have imagined. The same is not likely for you. I am one of the lucky ones.”

I came into this gender with a lot of privilege and a very fortunate TED Talk that has garnered over seven million views, resulting in a plethora of opportunities. Even with that good fortune, the last year has been difficult as I have come to see that self-confidence not withstanding, a lot of people in the world think of me first as transgender and second as anything else. I am referred to as the transgender speaker, the transgender speaker’s coach, the transgender elected official, or the transgender pastoral counselor. I could go on but you get the idea. Previously I was the non-profit CEO, the public speaker and writer, the television host, the husband, father, and son. No other qualifiers were necessary.

This is my reality, yet I do not live in despair. Wholeness comes from within. All of these external attacks I see as anti-wholeness agents. If I could draw, which I cannot, I would picture these anti-wholeness agents as pitiful looking ogres with giant clubs and not much intellect, fierce on the outside but consumed by fear that they are somehow not enough, and if anyone looks too closely, their secret will become known.

To be clear, these ogres could some day literally kill me. I am frightened by the people who have found my phone number, which I do not share publicly, and text me with their sickening taunts. But just because they could kill me does not mean they have the power to stop me from being whole. Again, wholeness comes from within.

As a therapist, friend, partner, and parent, I think one of the most important things I can do is affirm when I can see a person’s wholeness. As a therapist, I am called upon to hold an image of a client’s wholeness when they cannot yet see it themselves. I see the wholeness of my dearest friends, their brokenness too. Sometimes I see the wholeness of those who oppose me, and though they have rejected me, it does not diminish my appreciation of their wholeness. I am thinking of two very dear lost friends as I write that last sentence.

Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched says a person brings their history with them into therapy. At the center of this history is the divine spark of the person, the God-given essential self, seeking incarnation in the world. They are asking the most holy request of you, that you be available as a witness to make the way for this divine spark to come forth. That is the sacred duty of being a therapist.

Carl Jung said the pursuit of wholeness, and its pursuit of us, is the lifelong struggle of every person. What he called individuation is the unfolding of this wholeness from within. The unfolding is sacred, holy, and for the greater good.

The psyche is called to integration and wholeness. It is the spark of the divine from within. All religions have traditionally given us the teaching or doctrine about the wholeness of the world, and have drawn us to seek our own wholeness. In today’s fragmented world the left brain and right brain never meet, and the left brain is worshipped while the more holistic right brain is ignored. (When was the last time you saw literature, music, or art receiving as much focus in our education system as science and mathematics?) Religion has been passed over at an alarmingly accelerated pace, the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater of fundamentalist excess. Gone are the numinous mystical experiences at the core of all major religions.

Wholeness and unity have been sacrificed in the interest of power. We must depend on literature, film, music, art, poetry, or an epiphany that comes from the beauty of the natural world to return us to our own wholeness. Of course, even that will not make us whole unless we know we are loved. But that would be a different column for a different day.

I believe this world is not random. I believe loving God and loving neighbor are my greatest responsibilities, both impossible if I cannot first love myself. I believe we are called to wholeness whatever our circumstances. Jesus knew it on the cross (Forgive them, for they know not what they do.) Galileo knew it under house arrest (by the church) for daring to insist the earth was not the center of the universe. Solzhenitsyn knew it in the gulags of the Soviet prisons, and Nelson Mandela in a prison cell in South Africa. Maya Angelou knew it in the wholeness of her Black female experience; Mary Magdalene knew at the tomb. Mary Oliver knew it in her wanderings and wonderings through nature, and Emily Dickinson in her scraps of paper saved in a cloistered room.

I do not pretend to know the causation of gender dysphoria or the genesis of my own. I do know wholeness is closer as Paula than it was as Paul. I wish that was not the case, particularly for the sake of my family, but it is what it is. That knowing is enough. As I pursue wholeness and it pursues me, brief glimpses of wisdom tell me I am on the right track, naysayers and politicians be damned.

I love the end of David Whyte’s poem, Sweet Darkness:

You must learn one thing

The world was made to be free in

You must give up all the other worlds

Except the one to which you belong

Sometimes it takes darkness

And the sweet confinement of your aloneness

To learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive

Is too small for you.