I had a wonderful time last weekend at the Lynnewood United Methodist Church in Pleasanton, California. What a delightful group of people, and how incredibly responsive they were. I hope I have a chance to return. The weekend was a reminder of how much good there is in America.

I flew home from San Jose on Sunday evening, and on Monday I spent about seven hours  in meetings at town hall. The town board meeting included a lot of residents who wanted to speak about concerns in their neighborhoods. They were civil, though I’d have to say not very trusting of the town board or staff, which I find puzzling. Under the circumstances, however, I was happy to have civility.

I have served on the Board of Trustees for three and a half years. For the last eighteen months I have served as mayor pro tem. I’ve had a lot of people angry with me over that period, but far more who have expressed support for me and for the rest of the board, grateful for our willingness to do a job that takes a lot of time with little return on investment, other than knowing you’ve done the best you can for our residents. Come to think of it, that is actually a very good return on the investment of my time.

I have been very cognizant of the fact that not once in three and a half years have I heard anyone in town attack me because I am transgender, or even acknowledge it. I think that is wonderful. What I like most is when my gender identity is incidental to the work I do. It is that way in Lyons, but in the rest of the nation, not so much.

Transgender opponents have been greatly emboldened since the 2016 presidential election. In 2024 over 700 anti-trans laws were introduced in the United States with 51 passed into law in 17 states. I tried to see the good news in that – fewer than eight percent actually passed.

All of that now seems almost quaint. On his inauguration day the president signed an executive order that said transgender people do not exist. He has since signed six more executive orders targeting transgender people. That does not include his offer to nine universities to receive preferential treatment for government funds if they will stop teaching “gender ideology” and recognize only two genders, biologically determined. Nor does it include the almost countless number of additional inflammatory statements and threats that have been made by the president and other federal employees about transgender people.

Knowing they are supported by the federal government, conservative states have also been emboldened. The number of anti-transgender bills signed into law has grown from 51 in 2024 to 122 in 28 states thus far in 2025.

Other than losing speaking engagements because corporations are dropping DEI events, I have not personally felt the increase in transgender attacks, until now. Personal attacks are on the increase, enough that I am going to have a conversation with the head of the sheriff’s department in our town. I’m not sure if the attacks I’ve received are at the level of threats, but they are significant enough that I feel the need to have a conversation about them.

I know that the vast majority of you who read my words are supportive of me, even if you remain in the evangelical world. Your support means more than you can know.

Here’s the thing. If I’m getting nervous and a little frightened about how I might be treated as a transgender person, we’ve got a major problem. I mean, I don’t know any trans person who has more privilege than I have.

If I’m starting to feel the heat, how about that trans teen at your local high school, or the trans woman who does not pass as a woman in public, or the trans child whose first phrase was, “Mommy, I’m a girl” and has a lifetime of difficult choices ahead? Those are the people I fear for most.

Is it right to compare what happened in Nazi Germany to the experience of transgender people in the United States today? At this point I still think it is alarmist and not particularly helpful to do so. But when I see the kind of rhetoric and actions accelerating as they are, I am definitely paying attention.

In 2015, when trans acceptance was rapidly increasing, I thought today we’d be seeing broad acceptance of transgender people, not far less acceptance. If things get as bad over the next ten years as they have over the last ten, we will all be in trouble. Not just transgender people, but every freedom-loving American who believes there is more that unites us than divides us. We will all be in trouble because in making that generous assumption about America, we will all have been dead wrong.

And so it goes.

Over the course of my time as a pastoral counselor I have had multiple clients who have been into gaming culture. When I first became aware of its existence, I assumed it was an avoidance mechanism, with gamers preferring electronic interactions to embodied connections. Instead of being together in the same room, these men, and they were all men, were using the Internet to avoid developing real life relationships. With the passing of time I came to see that while my assumption is sometimes true, there is more than meets the eye.

Young men are finding it difficult to find a clear sense of meaning in today’s world. If they live in more liberal environments, they probably have heard ad nauseum how white men are the genesis of all of society’s ills. I saw an advertisement for a workshop this month in a mainline Protestant publication. The title of the workshop was, Curing Whiteness. As well-meaning as the workshop might be, I’m afraid the title is an illustration of the problem these young men face. If my very race is a sickness to be cured, then what meaning is inherent in my life? For young men of color it is a question they have been asking since the beginning of slavery, or manifest destiny, or any of the institutional atrocities that ripped away their historical sense of self.

For many young men, gaming culture provides essential elements missing in modern times. First, in a world devoid of meaning, they provide a clear purpose. Purpose is not the same as meaning. Searching for meaning suggests searching for the ultimate answers of life. Why am I here? What makes my life matter?

Purpose is more functional. It is not asking the deeper questions. It is finding something interesting to do. We were made to work. People are not naturally lazy. Laziness is usually resistance, not true laziness. We are resistant to begin an endeavor because of previous experience, or the likelihood of limited return on investment, or clinical depression, or lack of self-esteem, or any one of a number of other factors. Deal with those factors and the “laziness” disappears.

Purpose relates to the feeling you get when you have good work to do, work that contributes to something bigger than you, and gives you a sense of satisfaction when doing it. It is even better if the task is meaningful.

Gaming culture provides a sense of purpose. It gives a narrative structure, a story that makes sense, and tells you your place within that story. You are a part of something bigger than yourself. Gaming also provides a feeling of competence and a pathway to move to higher levels.

A story you can understand. Work you can do that will further that story. Feeling competent to do that work, with a path to higher levels. All of these were once provided by our culture. In today’s world, however, with more and more people in meaningless jobs without opportunities for advancement, should we be surprised that these elements essential to people’s health, especially men’s sense of wellbeing, have to be artificially provided via gaming culture?

There are dangers inherent in gaming culture. One of the dangers in finding purpose through gaming is that it is a decidedly left brain pursuit, without the ability to be placed in the greater context of one’s life. That is one of the reasons some young men become addicted to the games they play, spending every waking moment immersed in their alternate disembodied universe.

Without having work that is placed in the context of an embodied life, they come to lack empathy, have a lower emotional intelligence, and experience difficulty placing information into a holistic context. These are all elements that need embodied activity, relationally completed. A pickup basketball game is vastly preferable to solo gaming. In the basketball game we bring all of our bodies and brains to the game. We are experiencing life in an embodied way.

Interestingly, the rise of gaming culture has been paralleled by the rise of what many call Bro culture, a hypermasculinity that focuses on dominance, aggression, and competitiveness. Bro culture does answer two important questions related to our wellbeing: “What do you want to exist if you don’t?” And a related question, “How are you contributing to that right now.” The problem is with the answers provided by Bro culture.

A couple of decades ago I watched with curiosity as Mark Driscoll built a huge conservative church in liberal Seattle by encouraging men to be unashamedly misogynistic, using a corrupt interpretation of the Apostle Paul to justify their behavior. I thought it was an aberration. I was wrong. Now there are pastors saying the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake, something Charlie Kirk said in 2023, and that giving women the right to vote was a mistake. These extreme views have found purchase because they provide in real life the same elements available in gaming culture: A story you can understand. Work you can do that will further that story. Feeling competent to do that work, and an opportunity to move to higher levels.

In Bro culture, all of these things are available to men without a college education, meaningful employment, or opportunities for advancement. Seeing the need, conservative churches have filled the gap.

No wonder Pete Hegseth had no idea how ridiculous he appeared when he brought all the nation’s generals together to give them a pep talk about how to be a real warrior. This, from a man who was a weekend anchor on a Fox News opinion show. But he is excited about what he has found and wants to share that excitement, as well as flex his leadership muscles. He has found meaning through the hypermasculine Bro culture he discovered through his church and its denomination. The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches is a radical denomination founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor in Idaho who espouses Christian Nationalism and an extreme patriarchal view of life.

We all need a story we can embrace. We all need work we can do that will further that story. Feeling competent to do that work and having a pathway to higher levels are important to our satisfaction. Say what you might, Bro culture has provided those things. What have Democrats provided in return? Not much, but there are signs of hope.

Watch Pete Buttigieg and listen to his words. He knows what is at stake and how to proceed. He is able to speak to men. Evangelicalism will reject him because he’s gay, but when I listen to him I see light at the end of the tunnel. Jimmy Kimmel provides a similar hope, as well as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Bro culture is dangerous. It will set women back decades and it ultimately does not provide men with the guidance they need. But there are men whose example can be followed. Here’s a novel thought. How about we follow Jesus? You know, not the one ignored by the religious right, but the one in the Gospels, the one who commanded us to love God, neighbor, and self. How about we follow that Jesus?

It has not been a good week. Monday evening brought extremely angry rhetoric at a town board meeting over zoning, of all things. As the week unfolded, that all seemed trivial in comparison to the tragedies that unfolded.

Tuesday brought awareness of a major personal problem a good friend is facing, as well as the loss of a speaking engagement because of reluctance to allow DEI events. Wednesday was, well, Wednesday. Two students were shot at a high school not 20 miles from where two of my granddaughters attend high school.

The other shooting that took place that day took the life of a young husband and father who was living out with conviction his beliefs that he thought were incontrovertably true. He was mistaken, as most are who are one hundred percent sure of the rightness of their perspective, but no one deserves to be killed for it, not ever. The Utah killing received overwhelming national media coverage. I have a lot of thoughts.

First, I was greatly encouraged by the way in which Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, handled the killing there. Every time he spoke, there was an appeal to a classic liberal understanding of America, that there is more that unites us than divides us. His words attempted healing, and poignantly so.  It was in extreme contrast to what the president of the United States was saying. I would like to know Governor Cox, though I imagine he would not generally be supportive of me as a transgender person.

Second, it was moving to see how a father in southern Utah put the nation’s wellbeing over his son’s, convincing his son to turn himself in. Whatever else is true about the alleged shooter’s father, he did have an extraordinary sense of moral clarity in the midst of what was undoubtedly the worst day of his life.

I was also struck by the similarities between the two shooters. Both had been radicalized by the Internet. Both were loners, young men obsessed with their online activities. The etchings on the shell casings showed someone obsessed with gaming culture, which is often violent in nature, and almost always the territory of young men struggling to find their way in the world. I think of my past clients who have been obsessed with video games. All were male. All were angry. And I loved them all. They were good young men, struggling to find their way. There are evil people in the world, but most who do evil are not inherently evil. They are horribly wounded.

The media responded on Wednesday as they are programmed to do. We have become so inured to school shootings that outside of Colorado Public Radio and other Denver media, no national media led with the school shooting. They led with what would bring ratings, which drives profits, the shooting in Utah. James Hillman said the only God that remains is the economy. I think he is right.

For two reasons, I was frightened for my own safety on Wednesday. I thought of the lawmakers killed in Minnesota, killings already fading from the news. I don’t think I’m in danger as mayor pro tem in my town, but I am no longer certain that is the case.

Mostly, I feared for my own life this week because very quickly after the shooting, it was apparently leaked from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that etchings on the bullet casings had transgender messaging. It turned out to be a lie, but in today’s world that does not matter one tiny bit. The conspiracy machine will churn out hatred. Will anyone try to find and discipline the ATF employee who took that message public? You know the answer to that.

The last question asked in Wednesday’s Utah event related to transgender people and mass shootings. When asked if he knew how many transgender mass shootings there were in America, the answer was “too many,” which elicited cheers and applause from the audience. It was a technically correct answer, but ultimately disingenuous. The answer was two. More importantly, two of 502.

Less than one half of one percent of mass shooters were  identified as transgender. And their identification as transgender included an exceedingly broad definition of what it means to be transgender. How many of the 502 were young men who were loners, radicalized online? Just about all.

It is frightening that I have been targeted as a danger to society. That is what happens when fear becomes your shadow government. It is the result of those who espouse divisive rhetoric and eschew data. Anger is more than just toxic. It is deadly. We live in the midst of a wildfire of toxic anger.

The world is not evil. Mankind is not evil. Original sin is a made-up doctrine of the Reformation. Are there evil people? Yes, a few. Do hurting people perpetrate evil? Yes. That is what we saw this week and tragically, it is what we see every week. It is unlikely that my life will end in violence, but it is not out of the question. Should that happen, remember, the world is not evil. It is hurting people who perpetrate evil.

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.

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.

Every day, I struggle. I open my computer and against my better judgment I read the Washington Post and the New York Times. It is not the best way to start out the morning. I really need to develop a different habit.

Never in my life have I been more aware of the moral foundation from which people operate. Apparently, many of the people who elected our current administration hold the moral foundation that there is no greater moral good than to protect the integrity of their tribe or the teachings of their gods.

Unfortunately, it appears some of those at the highest levels government are operating without any moral foundation. Their moral code is in service to nothing but their own ego and its tyrannical desire for just two things – power and safety. (By the way, every ego’s tyrannical desire is for power and safety. It’s why we need to grow beyond our ego.)

Then there is another half of the nation, the half without much power, the half that still operates from the moral standard that gave birth to Western Civilization. It is the moral standard baked into the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I typed that quote from memory. I think part of the problem is that most Americans could not type that quote from memory. In fact, many have no idea those words are from the Declaration of Independence, or even what the Declaration of Independence is. I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible the only reason my grandkids know those words is because they have virtually memorized the entire libretto of Hamilton, which is a good thing. Public schools barely teach civics anymore.

My discouragement is turning into hopelessness. That is dangerous. I’ve spoken on NPR and in live venues from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco about solutions to the current crisis. I spoke to a group of 35 Colorado mayors, most of whom held my perspective on politics. Outside of my keynote, most of their time was devoted to the loss of federal funding for most their social service programs.

That event took place in February, when I still had fight in me. Since January I’ve been talking with folks from TED about potentially doing a TED Talk on the working title of my new book, When the Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and an Inquiring Soul.

The new book, speaking wherever I can, serving as Mayor Pro Tem – all are attempts to make a difference. But with each passing week I become less motivated. The overwhelming onslaught of self-centered, bigoted decisions with international consequences has overwhelmed me.

I fear I am headed into the place called, “Without Hope.” “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. I am afraid it has become the inscription above the gates of the entryway into the United States.

I am weary. Give me a way to fight and I will fight. Give me an articulate leader to follow, one not beholden to the right or the far left, and I will follow. Give me someone who believes in the Declaration of Independence and the future of our nation and I will do my part.

In Matthew 16:18 Jesus talked about a church so effective even the gates of hell could not withstand its onslaught. It is time for that church to rise up. If only I understood the part I am to play.