It took me over a year to slog my way through Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. Between Chernow and Iain McGilchrist’s two volume, four-inch thick, The Matter With Things, I find myself grateful for the 1600 words of a TED Talk. Does it really take 392,000 words (Chernow) or 700,000 words (McGilchrist) to tell a story or explain an idea? Don’t get me wrong. Both Chernow and McGilchrist are brilliant, but a good editor can be a marvelous thing.

My first TED Talk, at 1920 words, was about 300 words longer than the typical TED Talk, but I speak fast. I finished it in 14 minutes, the sweet spot for a TED Talk back in those days. In today’s TikTok world, they are shorter.

When I work with TEDx speakers, where the manuscript must be memorized word for word, they think they will never be able to get their “big idea” down to 1,600 words . First drafts usually come in at around 3,500. We ask the speakers to do their best to get the word count as low as possible, but every word of a speech is a baby to which the speaker has painfully given birth. They just can’t get rid of them.

That’s why we have to take over. We get the manuscript down to 1600 words and you’d be amazed how often speakers say, “I don’t even know what you took out.” That’s because what we took out was extraneous to the big idea. It is not an easy process. My first TED Talk was at edit 38 before it was done.

Had it been a TED Talk, Chernow’s book would have been 2,856 minutes long, or 47.6 hours. By contrast, the audio book of my memoir, which has about 70,000 words, is just under eight hours long.

Okay, I can tell, you are getting bored. Let me make this more interesting.

In the musical Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda took a book that would have taken 47.6 hours to speak and turned it into a 2 hour and 23 minute musical with 20,500 words, give or take a word. That’s 144 words a minute, twice the words-per-minute of a typical Broadway musical. I’ve seen it five times and I’ve still not picked up all the words.

My two New York granddaughters, 17 and 18 years old, not only understand every word, they have memorized the entire libretto. Yeah, the entire libretto. Asha said apologetically, “Well, maybe there is one song late in the second act that I don’t know completely.” Seriously? Other than occasional phrases like, “I’m not giving away my shot,” or “I wanna be in the room where it happened,” or “I may not live to see our glory,” I haven’t memorized anything from Hamilton.

We took Asha and Lyla to see Hamilton last Thursday. The next night Cathy and I saw the Les Misérables 40th anniversary tour at Radio City Music Hall. Both shows were fantastic. I’ve seen Les Mis more times than I can count. As with Hamilton, I’ve seen it in New York, London, and Denver. I do have the entire 2:45 libretto of Les Mis memorized – I have for a long time. But it’s got half the words of Hamilton.

After watching both shows I realized how much has changed in our culture in the last forty years. When Les Mis came out we were still firmly planted in the modern age, with its certainties and clear moral standards. There were no ambiguities. We knew who the protagonist and antagonist were. It was obvious. We still lived under the fantasy that right and wrong were immutable and obvious. They never were, but for the better part of 500 years we hung on to that fantasy.

Hamilton is a completely different story. It is purely postmodern. There is no obvious protagonist except George Washington, who comes off looking pretty good. Certainly Hamilton and Burr, the two key characters, were not obvious protagonists or antagonists. Nor was Thomas Jefferson. Not even King George qualifies as an antagonist. He was relegated to comic relief.

In Les Mis you only see the bad side of Javert and the good side of Jean Valjean. In Hamilton you see the good sides and the dark sides that emerged from each main character because none of them had dealt with their shadow sides. The shadow sides are the unexplored parts of the psyche, the places we do not want to go because we do not want to find what is lurking there, waiting to be worked out. Working out what is in our shadows is hard and takes time.

Both Burr and Hamilton had a childhood that, left unexamined, created huge problems in their lives that finally landed them in Weehawken, New Jersey, where functionally both of their lives ended. You wonder what might have happened if more of our founding fathers had not just lived life at the surface. Washington had clearly done some work related to his early failings on the battlefield, but there did not appear to be much interiority in most of the founding fathers – not many poets in that group.

Which, come to think of it, is a lot like today’s national politicians, but that is another column (you can tell I’m an old magazine writer – I wrote “column”) for another day.

Hamilton, the musical, does capture the positive, negative, and unexamined shadow sides of the characters. That is quite a tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda and those who helped him shape the musical. Its depth and nuance are remarkable.

I’m headed to London next week, where I’ll see To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems odd to see it in London, but it’s having a short run there and I’ll be in town, and who wouldn’t want to see a play scripted by Aaron Sorkin. I just wish Jeff Daniel’s was playing the lead character. Now there’s someone who has explored his shadow side.

And so it goes.

I have been outside the evangelical world for twelve years this month, and I have drawn some conclusions. Nowadays, very little of my interaction is with people who reside in the evangelical world. According to the Pew Research Center, a reliably accurate polling organization, fewer than one quarter of Americans (twenty-three percent) identify as evangelical. My life is lived with the other seventy-seven percent.

If you live within the evangelical world, you are a part of an insular culture. Higher percentages of Americans are evangelicals in Indiana and Georgia than in Washington and New York. The percentage of evangelicals shifts depending on one’s geography, but there is no state in which it is higher than fifty percent.

When I lived on Long Island (and yes, it is on Long Island, not in Long Island. It is the East Village, not East Village. It is the Bronx, not Bronx. Okay, grammar lesson completed.) only three percent of the population was evangelical. Eighty-nine percent was either Roman Catholic or Jewish. As someone who grew up in an evangelical bubble, it was helpful for me to live on Long Island.

For our purposes, we will stick with the national figure of twenty-three percent. That means over three-quarters of Americans are not evangelical. Among them are virtually all of my friends and acquaintances. After a dozen years living and having my being among such folks, I can say one thing with certainty.

To non-evangelical Americans, the single most defining element of evangelicals is their judgment. I’m so sorry evangelical friends, but I’ve never heard a single non-evangelical say you can spot an evangelical by their love. Not one.

When your primary concern is power and safety, the realm of the ego, you will be defined by judgment. Life will be determined to be safe or unsafe depending on the specific tribe of which you are a part, and your unwavering loyalty to that tribe. If you are judged by that tribe to be lacking, you will be excluded from that community.

When you have bought into the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement, that God’s natural position is to love you, but he cannot because you are actually unlovable, so instead of punishing you, something his holiness requires, he punished his own son instead, you cannot think about much else except doing whatever is necessary to stay in the good graces of that judgmental God.

And right there, in a single too-long sentence, is the crux of the problem. That form of Christianity is not driven by love, it is driven by judgment. Non-evangelicals have concluded that evangelicals are nothing if not judgmental because they have observed the landscape and they have come to the inescapable conclusion that they are, in fact, judgmental.

That evangelicals can fire their pastors for any hint of moral indiscretion, then distort themselves into pretzel-like shapes to endorse the presidency of Donald Trump, is beyond me. It is if they are saying, “We are really judgmental, but if it has to do with gaining and maintaining power within a political system, we will look the other way when a president’s morality is so corrupt that he’s already had to pay five million dollars to a woman he raped.”

Thomas Jefferson slept with his fourteen-year-old slave and continued to sleep with her for decades, fathering six children with her. But we won’t judge that because Jefferson was quite the writer, penning a Declaration of Independence that is one of the most beautiful documents ever initially rendered in English.

The truth is that Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant mess. So was King David, and Jacob, and the Apostle Paul, and you and me. We are all made in God’s image, and we are all a brilliant mess. That is not an oxymoron, it is a paradox, and it is endemic to the human condition.

When I transitioned I had more than one well-known leader with the Restoration Movement of churches ask me if I was going to “out’ them for their indiscretions of which I was aware. I told each of them, “I transitioned genders, not character. Of course I will not out you.” In their question was their own judgment. They now judged me as lacking, since I had transitioned genders, so they assumed I would publicly expose their lacking. It was sad.

When I transitioned I had already been a pastoral counselor for two years. If you add in all my years mentoring pastors and listening to church members, there was not much of anything that would have surprised me coming out of the mouths of evangelical leaders. On the whole I have found them to be no more or less morally pure than non-evangelicals. They just hide it better, and live in greater fear of being found out. Why? Because they know their peers are nothing if not judgmental.

Where brings me back to where I started. The single most defining element of evangelical Christians is their judgment. Their judgment trumps their love every single time.

Now that I live on the other side of such judgment, and inhabit a world of understanding and grace, I feel profoundly sad for my evangelical friends. They are missing the one thing I have known over the last dozen years in exponential measure – the joy of being truly alive and living as the authentic mess that I am. When you believe the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good, you will discover that three-quarters of the world will celebrate that calling with you.

That’s the way I see things.

And so it goes.

After twelve years, it is still maddening. I have lived as a man and I have lived as a woman, and life was much easier as a man.

That subject was the theme of my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned. It was the subject of my first and third TED Talks, which have had over eight million views. I’ve heard from women from all seven continents (yes, including two from Antarctica) thanking me for validating their experience.

For the last four years I served on my town’s Board of Trustees. In the first term I never felt dismissed as a woman. Our mayor was a woman, as is our town administrator. It felt good to be taken seriously. In the last term, not so much. There were male members who before arriving on the board, questioned my competence. One assumed I simply rubber-stamped what the staff suggested. When I was Paul, not once did anyone ever make that assumption about me. It was obvious I had my own thoughts. But as a woman, different story.

In this last term there were those who did not give me the respect I would have expected given my corporate experience, my years chairing a plethora of boards, my leadership abilities, and my accumulated wisdom. Rarely were they overtly misogynistic, but their assumptions belied their misogyny, as did their tendency to cut me off when I was speaking.

I have met with politicians who were mildly interested in the fact that I was mayor pro tem, but when I was talking with most of them, they had an eye on the room looking for someone else more powerful with whom they could engage. Once they found out about my TED Talks, books, and international speaking career, that all changed. But by then the damage had been done. Their glances over my shoulder had already told me what they really thought, that I was expendable, little more than talking wallpaper.

As Paul, when I could be helpful on an airplane I would offer my knowledge, thinking the other person would be pleased that someone who has flown three million miles was able to help them navigate the overhead space in the front of a 737-800. (Because the fuselage narrows toward the front, the bins are not as large as they are further back in the plane.) But for the last ten years or so, I say nothing. The poor souls turn their bags on end and try to slam the compartment shut, to no avail. But hey, as a woman apparently I cannot possibly know anything about complicated flying machines, so I keep my mouth shut.

What I did not include in my TED Talks was what I have learned about competition among women. As one of my close female friends said, “You missed the teenage years when we learned how to deal with the mean girls.” Over the past twelve years I have developed close female friendships and watched them crumble into dust in ways that never happened, not even once, with my close male friends. Until I transitioned, I never lost a friendship. As Paula, I have lost more than one.

Women know they have to fight for what they have, and protect it once they have it. The world does not hand them anything. My experience is that women are reluctant to empower one another. They understandably work from a scarcity mentality because opportunities are, in fact, scarce.

With the friendships I lost, I found myself confronted by female drama, something I had never experienced as a man. Since then I have learned to identify and avoid it. I back away the second I see the spinning tornado of toxic drama coming. Now I know why Paula, my girlfriend, generally prefers working with men to working with women. She has said, “If you are both competent and attractive, other women will try to take you out at the knees.” Good to know.

Still, the difficulties of female relationships do not hold a candle to the power I relinquished when I transitioned. Men almost never treat me with the same respect with which I was treated as Paul. There are a few exceptions, like Stan, Fred, Mark, Josh, Colby, and others. Interestingly, most of them are post-evangelical pastors.

It is not that people dismiss me because I am transgender. Most do not know I am transgender. They dismiss me because I am a female, and an older female at that. In American culture older females are functionally invisible. Older males, on the other hand, are granted positions of honor for their supposed wisdom. Four of our last seven presidents have fallen into that category, including one who is spectacularly devoid of the tiniest shred of wisdom.

I do not expect things to change anytime soon. When I watch the elk during the rut I realize gender arrived out of  a primordial soup that gave the male of most species more muscle mass than the female, and therefore the power to treat females as objects and possessions. It’s been that way for millennia.

The good news is that one species has evolved to the point in which males have developed the agency to allow them to grow beyond that misogynistic behavior. Now, if just more of them would exercise that agency.

And so it goes.