I was reading an article the other day about the difficulty getting biographies right. It is rare that anyone does. There are over 15,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. As a kid I read every book about him that was available in my branch of the Akron, Ohio Public Library. Even those elementary level books didn’t agree amongst themselves. Did the Lincoln’s really have a three-sided cabin, and if so, for how long?

It took me years but I finally slogged through Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. Lin Manuel Miranda not only made his way through it, he wrote a musical about it. That’s biographical dedication. Not sure the musical or the biography have done as much for the nation as Miranda and Chernow would have liked.

While children’s books, young adult books, and novels get shorter and shorter, biographies keep getting longer. Chernow’s new book about Mark Twain is over1200 pages and if the reviews are right, they give us all the sordid details of his life and none of the fun.

In the musical, Hamilton, the final song is Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. The anthropologist and philosopher René Girard reminded us that it is the victors who get to tell the story. They are the ones who create the “truth” of their generation. Doesn’t sound very objective.

I respect Chernow’s effort to get it right, or Jon Meacham’s, or any of the other respected biographers. Objectivity, however, is an illusion. If it is a subject perceiving the information, then it is no longer objective, no matter how hard the author tries to make it so. I suppose the best we can hope for is a biographer who has done his or her best to get out of their own way as much as possible.

Autobiographies don’t get it right any more than biographies do. I know a little something about that. My autobiography, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned, was published by Simon & Schuster four years ago this month.

I tried to be as honest and truthful as I knew how to be. Yet today, four years later, I wonder why I chose to include some stories and not others. And of course, all of the stories are told from my perspective. As I did with my TED Talks, I verified the information in the book. The fact checkers at Simon & Schuster did their part as well. But still, someone with another perspective would tell a different story.

Do any of us really know who we are? If we sat down for an interview with a biographer on a Monday, would we give the same answers we would have given the previous Friday? I mean, the weekend intervened between the two interviews. Who knows what insights we might have gained during that weekend? I am constantly changing, growing, unfolding into the next iteration of me. Unless I choose to stop growing, that process will never end.

James Hollis says dogma represents the afterthought of a people seeking to contain the mystery of an original experience. The experience is transformative, but the attempt to codify it is afterthought, and afterthought turns into dogma.

Our experience takes place in real time, but even then, as Pascal noted, we wander in times that are not ours. Rilke said something similar, “We are not much at home in the world we have created.”

We have lost the great metanarratives that grounded previous generations. In postmodern life the only metanarrative allowed is the one that says there can be no metanarratives, no big stories that explain the meaning of life.

The old myths are being crowded out in our postmodern age, but we need them to thrive. As a species, we impose order on chaos to bring meaning to life. Whether it’s Oedipus, Odysseus, or Beowulf, these stories all have patterns that are consistent throughout history. Jung called them archetypes. The same is true of the great religions. The Hero’s Journey is one such archetype. These patterns (archetypes) come to us through what Jung called the collective unconscious. We form these stories because, as Pascal said in Pensées, “The silence of these empty spaces frightens me.” We desperately want to make sense of our lives. That is ubiquitous to the human experience. Whether hero, accomplice, or acolyte, we want to place ourselves in a grand story.

That’s why biographies and even autobiographies always get it wrong, because making sense of one’s life is a shifting target in an ongoing story. You can’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. Even the Lone Ranger can’t do it. You can peel off layers, but the real you is not at some inner core. It’s being created as you peel off the layers.

I have a hard time reading my own autobiography without wanting to edit it. Interestingly, I can listen to it without a similar compulsion. I think that’s because my voice held all the things for which my left brain could not find words. Listen to the book, you’ll see what I mean.

I was fortunate to have an excellent sound engineer. I recorded the audiobook during the pandemic, and because he lived nearby, Simon & Schuster assigned me their top engineer. He used to be a rock and roll engineer who worked on Pet Sounds and Graceland, two of the most iconic albums in rock history. He knew how to coax me beneath my ego and into my soul.

We finished the recording in three and a half days. It just about wrecked me. It was early April and before we recorded I had to turn the heating system off so there was utter silence in my study. After a while it’d get too cold and I’d take a break and turn the heat back on. The night after I finished I slept for ten hours. It wasn’t the temperature variations that got to me, it was the emotional yoyo I went through reliving the stories as I read them aloud. If you decide to read my book, and I hope you do, I’d suggest the audio version. It gets closer to the silence of the empty spaces.

I have another book with my agent right now. The working title is When Their Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, Receptive Spirit, and Curious Soul. The book will explore how to live when a culture has decided you are its enemy. So yes, it will also be autobiographical, and even finishing the proposal is hard interior work.

The more deeply you live into it, the easier life becomes. Yeah, that’s not true, not true at all. I was messing with ya. Life is hard. Frederick Buechner said, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

The Buddha famously said life is suffering. The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck began his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, with the words “Life is difficult.” More poetically, Seamus Heaney said there are tears at the heart of things.

I have been writing a lot lately about the tears at the heart of things. I cannot read the newspaper any given morning without being overwhelmed by the heartless machinations of the current administration. Sadness gives birth to anger, and anger works, but only until sunset. Then your anger must be replaced by a receptive spirit, an open mind, and a curious soul.

I have been trying to bring a receptive spirit, open mind, and curious soul to understanding the anti-transgender agenda of the far right.

Before 2016, gender dysphoria was hardly a major political issue. Up until that time it was little more than the quiet stepchild of the LGBTQ movement. In 2016, the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School did a survey based on responses from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 19 states. They estimated that about 0.6 percent of the American population identified as transgender. The numbers fluctuated between 0.8 percent in Hawaii and 0.3 percent in North Dakota.

The margin of error suggested that somewhere between 0.36 percent to 0.95 percent of the population identified as transgender. In that 2016 study, the term transgender was used as a binary term, indicating that a transgender person was someone who felt they were the opposite gender from that listed on their birth certificate.

In the 2016 study 0 .7 percent of those between ages 18 and 24 identified as trans. A total of 0.6 percent of those between 25 and 64 identified as trans, and 0.5 percent over 65 identified as transgender. Those numbers are consistent with many other studies done before that time.

In their follow-up study in 2022, the Williams Institute found significant changes. A total of 1.3 percent of those between 18 and 24, and 1.4 percent of those between 13 and 17 identified as transgender, while the rest of the population (those over 24) remained at between 0.5 and 0.6 percent, the same percentage as in 2016.

That means that while the number of transgender adults remained steady, the number of transgender teens doubled. That is a statistically massive shift in just six years, a 100 percent increase in teens and early twenty-somethings identifying as transgender.

A Pew Research Study in 2022 found even higher numbers of young people who identified as transgender. Their surveys showed that 5.1 percent of those under 25 years of age identified as transgender or non-binary. About 2 percent identified as transgender, while 3 percent identified as non-binary (an option not presented in the Williams Institute 2016 study.)

I presented that information at a university several months ago and a number of people left the auditorium. Two confronted me in the hallway after the presentation and told me they had been traumatized by my presentation. At the point at which they chose to leave, all I had done was present the information above, without commentary.

When the right blasts the transgender community, this is part of what they are frustrated by – the wholesale refusal of the trans community to listen to any information that could call into question their understanding of gender dysphoria.

Whether these students liked it or not, a major university found a 100 percent increase in teens who identified as transgender. If we accept the Pew Research number, it was a 300 percent increase. That is information that should give one pause and be approached with an open mind.

Why have the numbers risen so dramatically? If the percentage of those over 25 who identify as transgender has remained steady at 0.5 percent, does that mean when those under 25 get older, between half and two-thirds of them will no longer identify as transgender? That is a really important question to answer.

It is of less importance if these young people are exploring their gender identity and not taking medications that have long term side effects. Let their individuation and differentiation continue unabated. They will figure things out on their own. Young people have been doing that for millennia.

If, on the other hand, they are taking testosterone or anti-androgens and estrogen that have life-long effects, what happens if they decide they are not transgender after all? The data would indicate it is possible that fully half of them might find themselves in that position.

These questions are not right or left. They are legitimate data-based queries. If a person storms out of the room because this data exists and these questions are being asked, are they any more fair-minded than those who blindly and arrogantly say, “God created only two genders, and the gender you were at birth is the gender you are.” Both are positions of passion rather than thoughtful conclusions based on the best scientific evidence. The Cass Report in England asked similar questions. It has been excoriated by most in the trans community.

During the Biden presidency I was twice invited to the White House for their Pride Celebration. I did not get there either time. The first time my flight was cancelled, but the second time was different. I was aware that most of those in attendance were not people who would appreciate my nuanced approach to gender dysphoria. Just mentioning the Cass report in that environment would have created a firestorm. I decided not to go.

My lifelong friend, David, and I started using a term in the 1980s that we still use today – the radical middle. The middle is radical because culture trumps truth every single time,  and culture demands that you take one side or the other. The middle is not an option. But what if the radical middle is where the truth lies?

Whether it comes from the right or the left, I’ve grown weary of the rhetoric on transgender issues. I want to take the radical middle, looking at the data and watching with great curiosity as the future unfolds. What percentage of the population is and shall remain transgender? Will it be a half percent, as it has historically been, or will today’s higher numbers remain? The truth is that we don’t know. And yes, the truth matters.