One of the great joys of this life is that we get to keep learning new information right to the end of our days. I am currently reading Iain McGilchrist’s groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they function in humans. I have already written a bit about it, but I am just beginning to scratch the surface.

To refresh your memory, McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. He writes that the right hemisphere of the brain is the primary hemisphere, with the left serving as its emissary. There are a plethora of differences between functions of the hemispheres. I find it all fascinating, but every now and again one insight pops out that is so obviously true, you have no idea how you’ve never noticed it.

Humans (and primates) most commonly hold infants in the crook of the elbow of their left arm. The reason is that the left side of a face, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, shows a greater range of emotion than the right side of the face, controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. (By the way, this tends to be true whether you are right-handed or left handed. The reasons for that are a little complicated.) By showing the left side of the face to the infant, you are teaching them how to read facial expressions, critical in developing an emotional quotient.

It is also easier for us to see the left side of the face of the infant when the infant is held in the left arm. That enables us to be able to read the emotions of the child’s face better than if we see the right side of the infant’s face.

Other fascinating tidbits? Sadness comes from the right brain and anger from the left. The right hemisphere has a preference for the color green and the left for the color red. The right prefers vertical lines and the left horizontal lines. The right brain is what identifies the moral of a story or the point of a joke. It is the hemisphere that recognizes sarcasm. If you have a right brain deficit, sarcasm is lost to you.

When a word or thought is on the tip of your tongue, your left brain is trying to retrieve it and can’t quite get there. If you stop trying to remember it, your right brain will bring it forth easily. That is why when you move on and stop consciously trying to remember a thought, it suddenly pops into your brain. The right brain is the location of “Aha” moments. Since it places information in the context of a greater whole, it is the place disparate ideas come together in a unified whole.

Arts and literature are primarily from the right hemisphere. Music is primarily in the right hemisphere, but learned musicians who can read and write music and understand music theory experience music in both the right and left hemispheres. They first become interested in a musical piece because it touches their right hemisphere. Then they began to study and master the piece to be able to play it well. That is a left hemisphere process. If it remains in the left hemisphere, the artist with play the piece technically well, but there will be no soul or vibrancy to it. Once it has been mastered, it must be returned to the right hemisphere for the soul and vibrancy to emerge.

The left brain says I have a body. The right brain says I am a body. It is the right brain that experiences ourselves as embodied. The left brain is necessary to create civilization but complete capitulation to it can destroy civilization.

Okay, so at this point you are probably thinking, “Uh, so if a person has a stroke and loses the left hemisphere of the brain, they’d basically be okay?” Nope. We need both hemispheres. Without the left hemisphere we lose the ability to form words, though the meaning of phrases and sentences is in the right hemisphere. Both hemispheres are necessary for the species, but as McGilchrist says, the right is the primary hemisphere.

The problem is that for the last 500 years we have, as a culture, focused almost exclusively on the left brain. You know, Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Locke, Silicon Valley and all. The left prefers manmade objects, the right living individuals. The right is more personal and the left more impersonal. I could go on, but I’m getting dizzy. Also, I need to finish the book.

Suffice it to say, I like learning new information, particularly when it creates one “Aha” moment after another. Insight is a marvelous thing. I love when the light comes on and you suddenly see a clear picture of what you have only been able to see through a glass darkly. With McGilchrist’s book, so much that has always been elusive about understanding how humans function is starting to become more clear. I find it also explains a lot about the functioning of the current Washington administration. But that is a different article for another day.

And so it goes.

I rarely write about my family because my relationship with them is private. I define a difference between what is public, what is private, and what is a secret. What is public is something I am comfortable with the whole world knowing. My memoir is public.

I define a secret as something you withhold from others because you do not want to face the moral consequence of having it made public. M. Scott Peck always said lying was creating a shortcut around legitimate suffering. In my own definition, a secret is something about which you feel guilt or shame. It is moral.

That which is private is just that – private. It is withheld because it is no one else’s business, not because you are avoiding legitimate suffering. For decades only a small of handful of people knew I had gender dysphoria. I do not believe having gender dysphoria is a moral issue any more than not liking mayonnaise is a moral issue. If being transgender had been a moral issue, then keeping it from others would have been keeping a secret. Since it was not a moral issue, it was private.

Now that my definitions have been established, let me say again that I do not write about my family because my relationship with them is private. In Q&A when I speak, I am often asked about my relationship with my family and I do share basic information, but nothing more.

My transition has been difficult on my family. Because of their age when I transitioned and how comfortable their generation is with all things related to gender, it was pretty much a non-starter for my five granddaughters, all between 14 and 17 years of age. If you want to know Jonathan’s deepest thoughts on the subject, I’d suggest you read his excellent book, She’s My Dad.

Jael and Jana have not written publicly about my transition, nor has Cathy. Jana did join Jonathan and me on an episode of Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith and her mother and daughter.

Jonathan is the director of development of a non-profit in New York, and a teaching pastor at Forefront Church in Brooklyn. Jael is an administrator with Denver Public Schools. Jana directs a large pre-school in Golden, Colorado. Cathy is a therapist in Boulder County, where we both live. Cathy and I, while close and still working together at RLT Pathways, do not identify as a married couple. We are good friends.

Of all the people previously in my life, my nuclear family has been by far the most supportive of my transition. My children and their spouses have been wonderful. If you’ve read my memoir, you know how I feel about Cathy.

It is extremely difficult for a family to go through the transition of a father. Our family will never be what it was before. In some ways we are stronger. In some ways the losses are just that, losses, which cannot be redeemed. They can be ameliorated, and the open wounds can scar over, but the scars remain. I have said many times that had I known how difficult my transition would be on my family, I would have worked even harder to live without transitioning.

For years my depression was great, almost unbearable. My family knows that better than anyone. Those with whom I worked knew it to a lesser degree. That knowledge, coupled with the lifting of my depression post-transition, has been some slight compensation for what they all have gone through, but from my perspective, it is not enough. If there was a way to stop gender dysphoria before it begins, I would be 100 percent supportive of it. That is one of the incredible arrogances of the right. How dare they have the nerve to say that we choose to be trans. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would give anything if I did not have to visit this difficulty upon my family and close friends.

People show a lot of compassion toward me. I wish they did the same for my family. Too often they behave as people are inclined to behave after someone has passed. They avoid the person. Virtually no one from my former denomination has reached out to Cathy. Once I was out of their lives, she was gone as well. Here in Colorado, Cathy had highly visible involvement with the church we were a part of for for seven years. After my transition, one single person has reached out to her.

My transition has been very hard on my family. To put it bluntly, the evangelical church has not helped – at all. I know what I did to gain their ire. What did Cathy do?

In these days in which animosity toward transgender people is growing exponentially, it is painful to remember these truths, and to know that it is evangelicals who have driven the current hatred toward so many minorities in this nation.

Hubris precedes a downfall. If anyone studied history anymore they would know that. I do not know when it will happen, but it will be soon. Evangelical triumphalism will implode under the weight of its own hubris, and American exceptionalism will do the same. Their demise has inexorably begun. To everything there is a season.

And so it goes.