Let’s suppose you had just arrived on the planet and you were very confused at how the Speaker of the House and Secretary of the Department of Defense refer to women as being less than men. The Speaker of the House recently said men are able to compartmentalize their thoughts, while women are not. Prominent Republican female members of the House have attributed this to the evangelical leanings of these two men of power. It hate to tell them this, but it is also the leaning of a plethora of other men with or without political power.

I would say to the alien just arriving on the planet (who’d better watch out for ICE) that what we are seeing is what one can expect when you hand the government over to a certain kind of evangelical Christian.

To be clear, there are two evangelical perspectives on women. The once ascending perspective, now quickly losing steam, is called egalitarianism, and assumes women should have all the rights and opportunities that men enjoy. During my time in evangelicalism I held an egalitarian perspective and rarely was attacked by anyone other than the occasional traditional fundamentalist.

A traditional fundamentalist might sound like an oxymoron, but hey, some fundamentalists are more conservative than others. The editor at the magazine at which I served as editor-at-large got mail about my “extreme views.” Only a small part of the evangelical would have seen those views as extreme – at the time.

Unfortunately, those are the evangelicals now in power in Washington. Doug Wilson, the leader of the denomination of which Pete Hegseth is a part, said women should not even have the right to vote. Have you ever seen a picture of the man? The picture tells you all you need to know. And yes, the head of the most powerful department of male aggression, now known as the Department of War, follows the teachings of this man. What could possibly go wrong?

The kind of evangelicalism prevailing in Washington nowadays is known as complementarianism, a perspective that says God created men and women with different abilities and therefore different roles. Women are supposed to have children and relish in the “traditional” roles of motherhood,  while men, brilliantly equipped for leadership on account of having a penis I guess, were to be in charge of the family, and by extrapolation, the whole world. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

I would have thought Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace would have already known this, since they represent districts where no one is allowed to declare a domicile unless they hold onto this complementarian view. Ron Johnson is not the first person they have encountered who sees life from this perspective. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it is the perspective of their fathers, uncles, brothers, and more than likely, their pastors.

My friends in Boulder County, Colorado are aghast that such a perspective exists in the year 2025. The same is true of my New York City friends. But in Carter County, Kentucky, where I went to high school and college, I’m pretty sure no one is surprised. There are some courageous women there who have worked to change the narrative, but it’ll fall to their daughters and granddaughters to take up the cause. (I’m watching that happen, which is fun.)

Unless they have a deep seated need to repeatedly fail, I do not know what would cause an ambitious woman to be a Republican. If you look just so, you might be afforded a tiny bit of power, but no real power. That will be reserved for the Ron Johnsons, Pete Hegseths, and Donald Trumps of the world, the true heroes of the species.

I was always taken seriously as Paul – way too seriously. I had come to think I deserved to be treated with great respect. As Paula, the gender-based positional power is gone. Like I mean, totally gone, nowhere to be found, a remnant of my distant past. I have the same degrees I had back then, the same abilities I had then. I mean, my goodness, I am way more capable now than I was back then. But I am not going to be rewarded for those capabilities. Not in this lifetime.

No wonder Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning. Word is Nancy Mace might resign too. I hope they both do. They have been awful toward transgender people. I guess they can’t hate the people who really have screwed them over, because those are the people who are in power. It’s easier to transfer their hate onto a helpless group like trans folks. It’s not exactly what Jesus would do, but it is what their pastors would do, and I guess that’s close enough.

And so it goes.