Month: July 2025

Trying Not to Take it Personally

/ Paula Stone Williams / 3 Comments

Nowadays there are not many worlds in which I accept assigned tasks. Age and semi-retirement have given me the freedom to decide what responsibilities I will or will not accept. A couple of years ago I was volunteering in one of the rare places in which I am willing to do whatever is asked, no matter how unappealing the task – the world of all things TED. I’ve been a TED speaker, TED Speaker’s Ambassador, TEDx speaker, speaker’s coach, and emcee. I believe so much in the work of TED that I am willing to do pretty much whatever they ask of me.

A couple of years ago I was assigned a speaker to coach who was an elected official from the conservative side of the political spectrum. (It might be helpful to note that I am an elected official from the liberal side of the political spectrum.) This person represented a region that is not known for its support of the LGBTQ+ community. I was not pleased to have been assigned to work with this individual. I made assumptions. He did too.

Initially we treated each other warily as we worked on his script. It was not until we started working on his delivery that things began to change. He had never memorized talks before and my notes on memorization techniques worked for him. I knew things had shifted when on dress rehearsal day he introduced me to his young children as his friend and coach, Paula. I had become Paula, the freind and speaker’s coach, instead of Paula, the transgender woman.

I always want the fact that I am transgender to be incidental to who I am. I imagine that is a deep seated desire of most trans people. We do not want to be defined by our transition. We just want to get on with our lives. With so few transgender people in the world and with so much controversy about the subject, it is a desire unlikely to find much fulfillment in my lifetime.

I have always said that proximity and narrative are what will close the political divide. If we can come in close contact with one another and hear each other’s stories, understanding will change and tolerance will increase. But as a self-referential human (we are all self-referential) I tend to think the other guy needs to change more than I do. Our initial tendency is always to think that way, try as we might to be objective and open-minded.

I discovered with this particular speaker that whether or not another person is likely to see my gender transition as incidental to our relationship depends as much on me as it does on the other person. What assumptions do I make? When someone’s initial response to me is reserved or questioning, do I take it personally? You already know the answer to those questions because you know your own tendency. We all make assumptions and take things personally.

Cathy and I used to have a marriage therapist who would ask, “Have you asked her if she feels that way, or have you just assumed it? You know, she’s right here, we could ask her.” He said it with a straight face every single time he had to say it, which was often.

You do not have to be transgender to understand that when others have identified you as their enemy, there is absolutely nothing you can do about the other person. There is a lot you can do about you.

The fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous is to make a searching and fierce moral inventory of yourself. As with so many of the tenets of AA, this one works for everyone. Blaming others comes easily. Looking inward, not so much. The only path toward maturity I know includes the hard work of being dedicated to stringent self-examination, being open to challenge from the outside, and being committed to a life of honesty. Honesty with others is important. Honesty with yourself is even more important.

The stories we tell ourselves are many, and a lot of them are wrong. They are stories concocted of whole cloth from old maps, maps that served us once upon a time, but are useless once after a time. For instance, many of my counseling clients still work from childhood maps. I remind them that those maps were essential when they were helpless children, but they do them no good now. They are the maps of the powerless, and my clients are no longer powerless. (It might be good to note that I do not work with children and adolescents, who are indeed pretty powerless.)

Since transitioning I have learned that women do not give other women the benefit of the doubt, something in my experience men are more inclined to do. As a woman, I get no free passes. I do not start closer to the finish line, as well-educated white men do. In fact, as a transgender woman who is subject to the wildly inaccurate public imagination about what it means to be transgender, I face a lot of disadvantages. I could focus on the injustices of that, but what does it get me? Not much.

I find the onus is on me to do the work I need to do if I am going to live wholeheartedly. Because of the privilege I experienced as Paul, I did not have to face shadow sides of myself very often. As Paula, I do.

I’ve mentioned that I am working on a new book. Its working title is: When Their Enemy Is You – Responding with an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and a Curious Soul. Here is the outline of the book, as it currently stands:

An Open Mind

            Avoiding our tendency to create enemies that do not exist

            When a person’s moral foundation is not the same as yours.

            Why belonging wins over truth every time

            Those who see you as an enemy are not evil, they just want to be safe

            Why power and safety are so important

            When fear becomes your shadow government

A Receptive Spirit

            Confronting the enemy in your own heart

            When it’s time for a new map

            Tolerating otherness as a sign of maturity

            The heart has its reasons

            Placing knowledge in the context of experience

            Beneath the ego lies the soul

A Curious Soul

            What supports you when nothing supports you?

            Spinning honey out of your old failures

            Choosing a path that enhances rather than diminishes your life

            Discerning and serving that which is worthy of your service

            Moving from insight to courage to endurance

            Up until the end, she kept trying to figure it out

I am in the process of writing the proposal for the book. It is slow going. But I do not want fear to be my own shadow government, so I am laboring away. I’ll keep you informed about how things are going.

And so it goes.

Here We Go Again

/ Paula Stone Williams / 6 Comments

This is my summer of of air travel discontent. The season is halfway over and I have taken eighteen flights. Four have flown on time. On Saturday we sat on a taxiway in Dallas for thirty-five minutes as the flight crew fixed an electronic gauge issue. Fixing it took five minutes. Filing the paperwork and getting approval to depart took the other half hour. The flight to Austin, once we took off, was only 33 minutes, two minutes shorter than the time we sat on the taxiway. They could have told us what was going on while we waited, but nope, they kept us in suspense until the end. It was 100 degrees outside and pushing 80 inside the plane.

While we sat on the taxiway I had no idea where we were because everyone on the entire flight was staring at their phones. From the time people sat down after they boarded until the seatbelt sign went off and they could leave the plane, they stared at their phones. If they happened to be sitting in a window seat, the window shade was never opened – not ever. You could be flying over the Grand Canyon, but you would never know because heaven forbid someone should open a window shade and cause a glare on someone else’s phone screen.

I used to sit in the first row on the aisle, to be close to the bathroom and to be the first person off the plane. Now I sit in the window seat in row one, so I can control the window shade and actually look out the window. The Front Range of Colorado was beautiful Saturday morning.

Saturday’s was not the hottest flight I’ve been on. There are a couple of aircraft types that do well with air conditioning when you are on the ground. On the whole Airbus is better than Boeing. As for the worst aircraft for keeping you cool when you are on the ground – a Bombardier CRJ200 wins, hands down. The CRJ200 is a clown car with wings. It also serves nicely as an oven should you want to bake a bunch of flyers while you wait to take off in Phoenix.

I should have expected the DEN-DFW-AUS fiasco. Do not ever fly through Dallas in the summertime. Come to think of it, do not ever fly through DFW anytime. Everyone who works there is surly, even more than Philadelphia, and PHL has a high bar for surliness.

Do not fly into Denver after one in the afternoon during the summertime. The thunderstorms that come off the mountains will get ya. Never fly into Newark, ever, regardless of the time of day. The reasons are too numerous to list. Cathy and I flew into Newark once from Vienna. It took us longer to drive home to Long Island than it did to fly from Vienna to New Jersey. It was a Friday afternoon in the summertime. If you live in metro New York, you understand.

On the list of airports to avoid, you can add Chicago O’Hare, unless you like taxiing for hours on end to and from the terminal. I’m pretty sure you land in Wisconsin and they drive the planes the rest of the way to the ORD gates.

Heaven forbid the flight you are taking into ORD should be late and therefore miss it’s slot at the gate. If that happens you will go to the penalty box (yep, that’s what the pilots call it) until the following weekend. And of course, since you are on the ground, you cannot get up to go to the bathroom the entire time you are in the penalty box. Should you defy their firm orders and get up to use the bathroom anyway, you’d better hope they don’t get clearance to leave the penalty box while you are in the bathroom. For the record, I do not say this from experience, but I have seen what happens to people who do. It’s not pretty.

Other things not to do when traveling – do not get a rental car in Phoenix. The rental car complex is 279 miles from the airport. The same is true of the rental car complex at Cleveland Hopkins airport. The rental building is somewhere across Lake Erie in rural Ontario. You have to have your passport to get there.

What four flights have flown on time for me this summer, you might ask. Believe it or not, two were flying into and out of LaGuardia, which is now one of the best airports in the nation. (Yep, I’m not kidding.) The others were into and out of LAX. If New York City and Los Angeles can figure out how to run on-time airports, why can’t anybody else?

Which airport has the worst TSA experience? Denver, without a doubt. They spent literally 2.3 billion dollars to update the terminal and TSA screening is now less efficient than it was before the updates. How do you even do that? I waited 30 minutes to get through the TSA checkpoint in Denver on my way to New York last month, and I have both pre-check and Clear. It took me literally 30 seconds to get through at LaGuardia on the way home. You read that right – 30 minutes at Denver and 30 seconds at LaGuardia! I have a theory about that. Denver’s TSA workers are from Denver, which has the worst drivers in America. LaGuardia’s TSA workers are from New York, which has the best drivers in America. Wasting time is not a New York option.

Do I have a favorite airport? Yep. It’s any airport where the lines are quick, the workers efficient,  the gate agents known how to board a flight, and there are enough marshallers and wing walkers when you arrive to actually get you to your gate. Don’t get me started about waiting for wing walkers.

Why can’t other gate agents be as efficient as Karen at DEN, or MaryLynn or Debbie were at ISP, or pretty much 90 percent of the USAir people, folks who now have to deal with legacy American Airlines agents who board stray cats before first class flyers, especially at DFW.

I flew with Edwin Colodny once. I sat across from him. He was the CEO of USAir. I thanked him for running a wonderful airline. He was very gracious. Employees said he was one of the best airline CEO’s ever, along with Tom Davis at Piedmont. If I ran into Robert Isom on a flight, today’s American CEO, I would not be praising him for his wonderful airline.

I’m writing all of this on Sunday evening, while I wait for my flight back to Denver. My first two return flights cancelled. American said they can’t get me home until Monday evening. I switched to United. The flight that is supposed to leave at 8:30 is now pushed back to 10:10, arriving in Denver at midnight.

Reading through this I’m pretty sure I sound like that cranky old person who says, “Dang it, things ain’t as good as they used to be.” Come to think of it, when it comes to flying, things ain’t as good as they used to be.

I’ll let you know if I ever get home.

And so it goes.