I’ve always preferred flying at 30,000 feet, both literally and figuratively. I have accumulated some 2.8 million miles with American Airlines – that’s actual miles, not credit miles. I spend a lot of time on an airplane. The picture of southern Greenland above is from around 36,000 feet, taken on the way home from London in March.

Figuratively, I am a I/D on the DiSC, a Social Two on the Enneagram and an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs. I prefer looking at the big picture rather than getting down into the weeds. I would be very pleased if my life was filled with people who prefer the weeds and would love nothing more than to carry out my grand 30,000-foot plans. I had that for 25 years. I’m not going to lie. It was nice.

I did a keynote presentation in January for the Metro Mayor’s Caucus. There were 35 mayors in attendance from the greater Denver area. I watched them pour over charts, statutes, and codes like children on a playground. They clearly loved the details.

One of the attendees, a former mayor now directing the caucus, came over to me and said, “I will never understand this urge to obsess over data charts. These people love the details.” I told her that I have been encouraged to run for mayor and she said she’d be happy to get together to talk about how to be an effective mayor without having to get down into the weeds.

But I live in Lyons, Colorado. I have a vision of a town that trusts its staff and works from Carver Policy Governance. The elected officials determine the ends they want to achieve, based on the desires of their constituents. The staff determines the means. It worked for me for the better part of 30 years at the Orchard Group. Why not in Lyons, Colorado? Because culture trumps vision every time, that’s why.

Our town has been around for over 100 years and as far as I can tell, the board has always been down in the weeds. Meetings can last six hours. They start at 5:30 in the evening, the first and third Mondays of the month. Last night we were home by 9:30, a small miracle.

This term I am serving as mayor pro tem, a position chosen by the Board of Trustees. I have a few extra responsibilities, but mostly it just requires me to live in the details even more than before.

I’ve worked in the non-profit world, academia, corporate America, and now in the public sector. I worked a bit with the Biden administration’s faith-based initiatives team during the first two years of his presidency. I was invited to the White House three times. I couldn’t go two of the times and my flight cancelled on the third. I figured I’d just go during his second term. Yeah, well, we know how that worked out. So, it’s local government for me, digging into the weeds where the details live, waiting to ensnare you in their complicated web of ordinances, resolutions, and quasi-judicial proceedings.

It appears to me that most people think I know what I am doing. Honestly, I have no idea how they come to that conclusion. I do stuff wrong every month and misunderstand something in just about every meeting. I do not speak up often. People always think you are smarter when you remain quiet. If you speak up too much, as I am prone to do in most other settings, people quickly figure out you’re not as smart as they thought you were. It’s humbling to see that recognition come over their faces.

I loved leading a nonprofit through 25 years of unprecedented growth. The key is that I hired well. The people on our senior leadership team were fantastic. Well, at least until I transitioned and all. But that does not take away from what we accomplished together with their hard work.

If I have a gift as a leader, it is that when I trust my instincts I tend to hire well. I see what people are capable of and empower them to achieve it. It’s fun to watch. Yeah, sometimes they come off the tracks and things go sideways, but we always figure it out.

The first couple of years after transitioning I became convicted that I had contributed in unhealthy ways to the patriarchy and I stopped trusting my instincts. My work experiences since that time confirmed that not trusting my instincts was a bad idea. I’ve been trusting them again for a few years now, which has turned out well.

Whether flying at 30,000 feet or working in the weeds, I love the work I have been able to do. If life is worth living, then it is worth living robustly, with never ending curiosity, an open spirit, and a receptive soul.

And so it goes.

Several nights a month I dream about my former denomination and the friendships I lost. They are difficult dreams. As happened last night, I often dream of our national convention, which I attended every year from 1966 through 1971, and again from 1981 through 2013, a total of 39 national conventions.

My first North American Christian Conventnion was in Atlanta in 1959. I was eight years old. We stayed at a nice motel with a pool and my cousins got ridiculously sunburned. My parents let me buy a Bible storybook published by Standard Publishing. I remember what the exhibit hall looked like – concrete floors and a plethora of colorful exhibits. I still have the book. Forty-four years later I went to work for Standard Publishing as Editor-at-Large of Christian Standard, the denominational magazine published since 1866.

Standard Publishing no longer exists. The North American Christian Convention no longer exists. Yet they persist in my dreams.

I loved the convention because that is where my friends gathered. We ate meals together and planned for the ongoing growth and health of our religious community. It was a safe space, where you could relax with others in similar positions of responsibility. The convention was where I raised money for the ministry I directed, found staff for our new churches, and dreamed dreams of a growing future.

I was talking with an old acquaintance from that world last month and he told me how many people from my denomination quietly and respectfully watched my transition, understanding that I had been called to give up my former life for the more authentic life I am living today. I was grateful for the conversation, because it came in the same month as another former friend castigated me for “always having lived a lie.” It is interesting that I knew enough about that person’s life to have gotten him fired fifty years ago. But as was my inclination, I opted for grace and mercy. I have discovered that many of those who have attacked the most vociferously are those who had the most to hide. When you know that, you are less inclined take their attacks personally.

That world is gone, though I would still be a part of it if I could. For a decade nothing rose to take its place. I was a part of the Open Network from 2016 to 2018 or so, but its leadership was transferred to a group with whom I did not have much affinity, and it died a year or two later.

Last year I spoke for the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference, a ministry established by church pastors from around the nation, including two from my former denomination. I did the opening keynote and received a wonderful response from the crowd. It was the first time I was in a religious community whose response was as animated as the audiences are when I speak for corporations or the TED world. It was marvelous.

I was invited to speak again this year. I led a workshop, interviewed another keynote speaker, and closed the conference with a call to action. After the final session, eight attendees from my former denomination gathered for a picture. Each night of the conference I spent time with dear friends who have also walked through fire and come out the other side intact, stronger, wiser. The conversations were similar to those I enjoyed at my former denomination’s national convention, but deeper. I probably do not have to explain the deeper part. We ate meals together and planned for the ongoing growth and health of our religious community. Most were guys. I’m not sure what that means.

All of this year’s keynote speakers were wonderful, unafraid to go where they felt called to go. I have great respect for their wisdom, insight, intelligence, oratorical skills, and spirit. Unlike my previous life, where I loved the convention but avoided the main sessions because of the predictable messages, at the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference I did not want to miss a single speaker. Aha moments were frequent.

These people have paid a price to be where they are, and they have the wisdom, insight, and prophetic voices that come from having followed the path less traveled by. It is an honor to count them as friends and to navigate through the shoals of post-evangelicalism together. I am grateful for my new friends from the Post-Evangelical Collective. I look forward to many years serving together.

Still, one longs for continuity in life – the book of Bible stories that is 66 years old – the people who stood with you at your wedding – the co-worker you sat across from as you set themes, chose writers, and shared gratitude for the heritage you share. Those things are gone. But that is life. Chapters close and new chapters begin. I think about this as I repeat lines from Chaim Stern’s poem, Tis A Fearful Thing:

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch

A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be

To be, and Oh, to lose,

A things for fools this, and a holy thing

For your life once lived in me

Your laughter lifted me, your word was gift to me

To remember this brings painful joy

Tis a human thing to love, and a holy thing to love what death has touched.

Friendships are lost and friendships are born. And so it goes.

Between 1999 and 2021, America went from a nation in which 70 percent of the population identified with a local religious body, to 47 percent, a drop of 23 points in 22 years. This caused the New Atheists to celebrate the death of religion. It turned out to be a short-lived celebration. Since 2021 the number of Americans who identify with a local religious body has remained stable at 47 percent, and now appears to be modestly increasing. What changed?

There has never been a culture in history that did not have robust religious communities. We did not take off as a species until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe. That is when civilizations developed and our species gained strong momentum.

What brought us together as tribes? As I’ve written before, it was not our need for safety. That was secondary. The primary reason was our search for meaning. Why do you think Stonehenge was built, and why over one million people a year visit the 5,000-year-old historic site? Our left hemisphere dismissively proclaims, “This is just a bunch of rocks in a circle.” The right hemisphere says, “Quiet, there’s something going on here.”

When my daughter Jael and I went to Stonehenge last month, we arrived just as it opened, before the crowds. It was a cold, gray morning, the only cloudy and cold day of our trip, and it felt just right. It somehow enhanced the experience. The last time I was that mesmerized was when I first saw Monet’s The Red Kerchief in the Cleveland Museum of Art. But that’s a different post for a different day.

The modern age was built on the narrow foundation of the left hemisphere and its fixation with categorization and analysis. It only wants data. For the last 500 years we have virtually ignored the right hemisphere, the primary hemisphere, that puts knowledge in context, giving meaning to the bigger picture.

The modern age was also built on the human ego and its tyrannical demand for just two things, power and safety. The right hemisphere is the realm of what Carl Jung called the self, and every major religion calls the soul. The left hemisphere might bring us knowledge, but the right hemisphere is where knowledge grows into wisdom.

Classic liberalism did not kill religion. The two coexisted nicely. Classic liberalism said there is more that unites us than separates us. Religion says the same. Post-liberalism and religious fundamentalism are what brought about the downturn in religious affiliation. The desert religions may have understandably begun as religions of scarcity, but in their mature forms they have become religions of abundance, compatible with classic liberalism. In their fundamentalist forms, however, they remain religions of scarcity, forever fragmenting into ever smaller groups in the fruitless search for power and safety.

Unfortunately, religious fundamentalists of all religions also believe it is all right to force their religious convictions on the rest of us. We used to look at Afghanistan and think, “Well at least we don’t have to worry about that here.” Notice I said “used to.”

And always, there is the other extreme. Post-liberalism also tried to force their worldview on us, becoming ever more extreme until we were left with standpoint theory, strategic essentialism, the rejection of anything approaching objective truth, cultural appropriation, and other teachings that say there is more that divides us than unites us. Only capitulation to the oppressed group, whomever they are, will allow us to move forward, they say. They captured the major universities, but that has now brought about a powerful pushback.

On the conservative side, Christianity gave up Jesus in favor of a Bible they could worship. Not the Bible as it was written, mind you, but the Bible as their religious leaders interpreted it. Instead of Jesus’s preference for metaphor, they reimagined the Bible as a book of literal meaning. Instead of Jesus’s teaching awe of the creation, the Bible became a book of scientific explanation. Instead of Jesus’s embrace of mystery, the Bible became an inerrant book of certainty.

When you abandon Jesus for a simplistic version of the Bible, no wonder you end up leaving a church with a fear-based political perspective that knows nothing of love and forgiveness. There are two kinds of Christianity. There is the kind that focuses on fear, and the kind that focuses on love. They opted for a fear-based faith.

In the midst of all of that madness from the religious right and radical left, where did hope go? I am happy to say while hope may still be elusive, people are at least searching for it again. They are looking for a church that is not going to tell them they are going to hell, but also not going to tell them that because they are white and educated they are the primary cause of someone else’s living hell.

So where are the churches that welcome with open arms, and do not focus their primary attention on telling you that you are the problem? These are churches that boldly preach the good news of loving God, neighbor, and self. They are places in which we can figure out how to be human together, learn to worship that which is beyond our ego, and synergistically serve to lessen suffering.

Do these churches exist? I preach at a number of them regularly. I saw signs of the church moving anew at the Center for Faith and Justice Conference in San Francisco in February. I will see it again next week at the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference in Nashville and this August at the Wild Goose Festival.

If we can focus on love and forgiveness, a movement will flourish that brings hope. I believe it has already begun. In fact, I am getting ready to write a book about it. I will write about what brought us to this point, and how we are digging ourselves out of this current mess. More about that later.

And so it goes.

I was in London a couple of weeks ago and had lunch with Rocky Roggio, the creator of 1946, the excellent documentary about what the Bible says about being gay. We talked a bit about what it would be like to produce a similar movie supporting the transgender community. It was a very preliminary conversation, but it got me thinking.

Marriage equality became the law of the land because the media, primarily comedic television, normalized gay people. As I have written before, it started with Norman Lear’s All in the Family, which introduced the subject in a sympathetic way. From there it went to the scripted Ellen show, in which the protagonist came out as a gay woman. After that is was Will and Grace, a comedy in which the showrunners wanted to focus on the concepts of will and grace and what life is like for those who are gay. From there we went to Modern Family in which one of three storylines was about a gay family. Today, in television, characters are incidentally gay. It is evidence that our culture has come to embrace gay people, a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately, the same has not happened for the transgender population. We could use a few television shows or movies to help our cause. As Jonathan Haidt said in The Righteous Mind, humans do change their minds, but not unless information comes to them in a non-threatening way. As I’ve written before, I do have a life rights deal for a three-season 30 episode television show with a Hollywood studio, but getting the show funded is a whole different story.

Short of a media miracle, what can ordinary Christians do? First, we must return to teaching Jesus. As I have written recently, for the last 500 years we have lived in a culture fixated with the left brain, the hemisphere focused on what it knows rather than what it experiences.  It is the hemisphere that wants literal meaning, scientific explanation, and certainty.

Evangelical Christianity long ago sold its soul to the modern age, which was not good for the teachings of Jesus. Jesus taught in metaphor; they want literal meaning. Jesus taught awe for the creation; they want scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery; they want certainty.

So they jettisoned the teaching of Jesus and started worshipping the Bible – not as it was written, but as their religious leaders interpreted it. The Bible became a book of literal meaning. Therefore the earth was created in six days and is only 6,000 years old. They wanted scientific explanation, so the Bible became a book of science. They wanted certainty so the Bible became a book without errors, something it never claimed for itself. And they focused on the teachings of Paul, more left brain, rather than the teachings of Jesus, which were decidedly right brain.

Therefore there is nothing more important than returning to the Gospels. If we teach the stories of the Gospels, we will not go wrong.

Second, we can refuse to work from an evangelical hermeneutic. There is no value in getting in debates over exegesis. The Bible is silent on transgender issues. If you wanted to make a case for the New Testament saying anything about trans people, it would be the positive words spoken by Jesus in Matthew 19: 11-12. Do not take their bait suggesting Genesis 1 precludes the existence of transgender people. It is lousy exegesis that absolutely no one taught until being anti-trans became a thing.

Third, stop teaching the rhetoric of the extreme left. Essentialism, standpoint theory, cultural appropriation, and the like have not helped anyone’s cause except the anti-woke cultural pushback. A return to classical liberalism, in which we believe there is more that unites us as humans than divides us, is the only way out of this morass.

Fourth, speak up. There are more than a few similarities between what is happening here now and what happened with Jews in Germany. From vilifying rhetoric to extermination took just 9 years. Look at these striking similarities. Jews were a tiny fraction of the population. Vilifying rhetoric began in 1933. Bureaucratic measures stripped away rights. Jews were banned from the military in 1935. In 1942 mass extermination began. One of the most striking things was the silence of the masses.

Trump in his State of the Nation speech spent five minutes denigrating trans people and ten denigrating immigrants. In the Democratic response there was no mention of trans people and one mention of immigrants. That is not speaking up for a beleagured minority.

The silence of our potential allies is stunning. Back in the day, Francis Schaeffer wrote about modern man wanting only personal peace and affluency. He equated that attitude with the end of the Roman Empire, when people only wanted bread and circuses. It appears most people are too comfortable to do anything about the plight of transgender people or immigrants. It is time to speak up.

Fifth, own what you know. Stop apologizing for being a Christian and start having confidence in the Jesus story, rightly told. No culture has thrived without robust religious communities. We have ceded robustness to the religious right. It is time to properly claim what we know to be true – that loving God, neighbor, and self is the hope of the world.

Yes, I believe a robust church can change the narrative. The reality is that a perverted church claimed the narrative while the rest of us stood by and watched. It is time to return the church to its rightful place as a cultural influencer, and make America what it has never truly been, the land of the free.

One of the great joys of this life is that we get to keep learning new information right to the end of our days. I am currently reading Iain McGilchrist’s groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they function in humans. I have already written a bit about it, but I am just beginning to scratch the surface.

To refresh your memory, McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. He writes that the right hemisphere of the brain is the primary hemisphere, with the left serving as its emissary. There are a plethora of differences between functions of the hemispheres. I find it all fascinating, but every now and again one insight pops out that is so obviously true, you have no idea how you’ve never noticed it.

Humans (and primates) most commonly hold infants in the crook of the elbow of their left arm. The reason is that the left side of a face, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, shows a greater range of emotion than the right side of the face, controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. (By the way, this tends to be true whether you are right-handed or left handed. The reasons for that are a little complicated.) By showing the left side of the face to the infant, you are teaching them how to read facial expressions, critical in developing an emotional quotient.

It is also easier for us to see the left side of the face of the infant when the infant is held in the left arm. That enables us to be able to read the emotions of the child’s face better than if we see the right side of the infant’s face.

Other fascinating tidbits? Sadness comes from the right brain and anger from the left. The right hemisphere has a preference for the color green and the left for the color red. The right prefers vertical lines and the left horizontal lines. The right brain is what identifies the moral of a story or the point of a joke. It is the hemisphere that recognizes sarcasm. If you have a right brain deficit, sarcasm is lost to you.

When a word or thought is on the tip of your tongue, your left brain is trying to retrieve it and can’t quite get there. If you stop trying to remember it, your right brain will bring it forth easily. That is why when you move on and stop consciously trying to remember a thought, it suddenly pops into your brain. The right brain is the location of “Aha” moments. Since it places information in the context of a greater whole, it is the place disparate ideas come together in a unified whole.

Arts and literature are primarily from the right hemisphere. Music is primarily in the right hemisphere, but learned musicians who can read and write music and understand music theory experience music in both the right and left hemispheres. They first become interested in a musical piece because it touches their right hemisphere. Then they began to study and master the piece to be able to play it well. That is a left hemisphere process. If it remains in the left hemisphere, the artist with play the piece technically well, but there will be no soul or vibrancy to it. Once it has been mastered, it must be returned to the right hemisphere for the soul and vibrancy to emerge.

The left brain says I have a body. The right brain says I am a body. It is the right brain that experiences ourselves as embodied. The left brain is necessary to create civilization but complete capitulation to it can destroy civilization.

Okay, so at this point you are probably thinking, “Uh, so if a person has a stroke and loses the left hemisphere of the brain, they’d basically be okay?” Nope. We need both hemispheres. Without the left hemisphere we lose the ability to form words, though the meaning of phrases and sentences is in the right hemisphere. Both hemispheres are necessary for the species, but as McGilchrist says, the right is the primary hemisphere.

The problem is that for the last 500 years we have, as a culture, focused almost exclusively on the left brain. You know, Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Locke, Silicon Valley and all. The left prefers manmade objects, the right living individuals. The right is more personal and the left more impersonal. I could go on, but I’m getting dizzy. Also, I need to finish the book.

Suffice it to say, I like learning new information, particularly when it creates one “Aha” moment after another. Insight is a marvelous thing. I love when the light comes on and you suddenly see a clear picture of what you have only been able to see through a glass darkly. With McGilchrist’s book, so much that has always been elusive about understanding how humans function is starting to become more clear. I find it also explains a lot about the functioning of the current Washington administration. But that is a different article for another day.

And so it goes.

I rarely write about my family because my relationship with them is private. I define a difference between what is public, what is private, and what is a secret. What is public is something I am comfortable with the whole world knowing. My memoir is public.

I define a secret as something you withhold from others because you do not want to face the moral consequence of having it made public. M. Scott Peck always said lying was creating a shortcut around legitimate suffering. In my own definition, a secret is something about which you feel guilt or shame. It is moral.

That which is private is just that – private. It is withheld because it is no one else’s business, not because you are avoiding legitimate suffering. For decades only a small of handful of people knew I had gender dysphoria. I do not believe having gender dysphoria is a moral issue any more than not liking mayonnaise is a moral issue. If being transgender had been a moral issue, then keeping it from others would have been keeping a secret. Since it was not a moral issue, it was private.

Now that my definitions have been established, let me say again that I do not write about my family because my relationship with them is private. In Q&A when I speak, I am often asked about my relationship with my family and I do share basic information, but nothing more.

My transition has been difficult on my family. Because of their age when I transitioned and how comfortable their generation is with all things related to gender, it was pretty much a non-starter for my five granddaughters, all between 14 and 17 years of age. If you want to know Jonathan’s deepest thoughts on the subject, I’d suggest you read his excellent book, She’s My Dad.

Jael and Jana have not written publicly about my transition, nor has Cathy. Jana did join Jonathan and me on an episode of Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith and her mother and daughter.

Jonathan is the director of development of a non-profit in New York, and a teaching pastor at Forefront Church in Brooklyn. Jael is an administrator with Denver Public Schools. Jana directs a large pre-school in Golden, Colorado. Cathy is a therapist in Boulder County, where we both live. Cathy and I, while close and still working together at RLT Pathways, do not identify as a married couple. We are good friends.

Of all the people previously in my life, my nuclear family has been by far the most supportive of my transition. My children and their spouses have been wonderful. If you’ve read my memoir, you know how I feel about Cathy.

It is extremely difficult for a family to go through the transition of a father. Our family will never be what it was before. In some ways we are stronger. In some ways the losses are just that, losses, which cannot be redeemed. They can be ameliorated, and the open wounds can scar over, but the scars remain. I have said many times that had I known how difficult my transition would be on my family, I would have worked even harder to live without transitioning.

For years my depression was great, almost unbearable. My family knows that better than anyone. Those with whom I worked knew it to a lesser degree. That knowledge, coupled with the lifting of my depression post-transition, has been some slight compensation for what they all have gone through, but from my perspective, it is not enough. If there was a way to stop gender dysphoria before it begins, I would be 100 percent supportive of it. That is one of the incredible arrogances of the right. How dare they have the nerve to say that we choose to be trans. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would give anything if I did not have to visit this difficulty upon my family and close friends.

People show a lot of compassion toward me. I wish they did the same for my family. Too often they behave as people are inclined to behave after someone has passed. They avoid the person. Virtually no one from my former denomination has reached out to Cathy. Once I was out of their lives, she was gone as well. Here in Colorado, Cathy had highly visible involvement with the church we were a part of for for seven years. After my transition, one single person has reached out to her.

My transition has been very hard on my family. To put it bluntly, the evangelical church has not helped – at all. I know what I did to gain their ire. What did Cathy do?

In these days in which animosity toward transgender people is growing exponentially, it is painful to remember these truths, and to know that it is evangelicals who have driven the current hatred toward so many minorities in this nation.

Hubris precedes a downfall. If anyone studied history anymore they would know that. I do not know when it will happen, but it will be soon. Evangelical triumphalism will implode under the weight of its own hubris, and American exceptionalism will do the same. Their demise has inexorably begun. To everything there is a season.

And so it goes.

A close friend died suddenly this past week. We had been friends since 1984. We worked in church planting together, served our denomination in leadership capacities, and supported each other’s lives in more ways than I can count. For years he would fax me his sermons on Friday morning. I’d watch each page print, gather them, and read.

When we met at national meetings, there were many late night conversations. We shared a lot about our personal lives. He was a man of integrity and character. My first trip to Colorado happened at his invitation.

I knew this friend well. He was the Inspirational Pattern on the DiSC Classic (I/D.) The Enneagram wasn’t all that popular back then, but I’d be pretty sure he was a three with a strong two wing, or vice versa. He loved empowering others, but he also was pretty single minded, with his eyes fixed on the goal. For that and many other reasons, he was quite successful.

My friend wasn’t perfect. He tended to be a little self-referential, as most I/D folks are, but not in an off putting way. He was just very excited about whatever project he happened to be working on. I’ve known few who championed others more than he did. He was always more theologically conservative than I, but that didn’t much affect our friendship.

We talked a good bit when it was time for him to retire. I met with his leaders a time or two about how they might honor him. I was at his retirement dinner, quite a delightful affair. It was obvious he was very loved. As with most of us who led a large ministry for a long time, I knew he would not sit still in his “retirement.” I was not surprised when I heard he was working encouraging pastors all over the nation.

He was one of the very few I told about my gender dysphoria a very short time before I came out. It was the last time we ever spoke. I understood his decision to no longer be in contact with me. For him it was theological. Just because I understood that did not make it any easier.

No one told me he died. Cathy’s sister told her. I have a few friends who I imagine would have told me, but they probably assumed, understandably, that someone local would have reached out, though no one did.

I will miss my friend. I’ve already missed him for eleven years.

This is life. Sometimes it is hard.

Many of you are asking how I’m doing nowadays.  Thank you for asking. These are not good times to be transgender in America.

I did renew my passport before the election. Unless the government goes to extraordinary lengths to identify whose passport has ever had a gender marker change, something that would be incredibly expensive and time consuming to do, I should be good for another ten years. After that, who knows?

I expect my Medicare coverage for estrogen will end sometime this year, which will increase that cost one hundred times over, from five dollars every 90 days to $500 every 90 days. It is difficult to see a new item in the news almost every day unveiling new limits on transgender life.

Fortunately, I am able to travel in the world without prejudicial treatment, except for the occasions in which people are aware of my TED Talks, books, or television appearances. Additionally, as I was saying to our mayor just this morning, my white male entitlement  serves me well. I just assume people are going to be accepting of me, and forge ahead accordingly. Usually it works out fine. On the rare occasions in which it does not, I am always taken aback. It is possible those times will be on the increase.

I spoke to the Metro Mayors Caucus retreat a couple of weeks ago and in the Q&A one person asked why I don’t just withhold the information that I am transgender. In most situations I do withhold that information. At a restaurant, airport, hotel, store, or just about any other setting, I do not announce myself as transgender and no one knows that I am. But again, in settings in which I speak or lead, it is generally known that I am transgender.

The bottom line is that I am not as much concerned about how I will be treated by the public as I am about all trans kids and the transgender adults who clearly do not pass in their new gender. They are in for a very tough time.

I am concerned about my legal rights being chipped away, right by right. The flurry of executive actions being taken is dizzyingly disarming. I know it is a plan to flood the zone with so many orders that we can’t keep up. But we must. Every one of these orders impacts people all over the globe. And not just people. Programs protecting elephants in Africa, virgin jungles in South America, and coral reefs in Asia are already being affected by the dismantling of USAID.

I believe certain priorities must be at the forefront of our opposition. First, anyone who has a basic understanding of American history knows that all the framers of the Constitution felt Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, should have the power of the purse. This is the first time in the history of our nation that a toothless House of Representatives has abandoned that power. Our democracy will not survive that abandonment, and I’m not sure we can wait two years until Democrats can flip the House. Former Treasury Secretery Robert Reich just published a frightening post on just this subject. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/this-is-what-dictatorship-looks-like?r=45vjat&fbclid=IwY2xjawISNl9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWoF-xZBj6OnbY6-PGTKUrAdPEe9XfzZEVQgIQnBAq-nZo0YxR5r9BCQFg_aem_vfpZLpp3_tt-rrg7PhmTGA&triedRedirect=true

Even the small town in which I serve as mayor pro tem has 4.5 million dollars at risk if last week’s executive actions are reinstated. That is why I believe stopping the power grab over funding must be the leading edge of our opposition. We lose our democracy without it, and all other issues become moot.

And what about the transgender population? When it comes to sports, that ship has already sailed, and I do not think there is enough support, even on the left, to fight that battle. Transgender people in the military? That is going to be a tough battle too, since it is a relatively recent protection. Transgender women being housed in male prisons? That is a death sentence, and should qualify under cruel and unusual punishment, though with today’s Supreme Court, who knows? They seem to want to fiddle while Rome burns.

Losing trans specific medical care through Medicaid, Medicare, and other health insurance? That will be devastating to many, and costly to the rest of us. But make no mistake, it is coming. And after they have wiped away all transgender rights, they will start with the LGB population, and then people of color. I see the trajectory. At this stage in the process, the willpower to stop them does not exist. Project 2025 is becoming a reality, and white evangelical Christians will wield their power with impunity. They have already abandoned the teachings of Jesus. Why stop there?

I was asked in November to write a letter to an English court stating that a transgender American citizen, sentenced to deportation because of actions against an employer, would be in danger if she was sent back to the United States. I declined to write the letter because I did not believe the person would be in danger. But that was then.

For me, the biggest problems are internal. I already consider myself to be a person who comes from the borderlands and lives in the liminal space between genders. I do not claim a cisgender experience. I claim a transgender experience. While there seem to be some indicators, I do not have a clue why I am transgender. I just know my former wife, best friend, and therapist believe I would have ended my life if I had not transitioned. I do know it became more and more impossible to sustain my life as Paul.

Someone asked me a while ago what would likely happen if I detransitioned. I told him that the numbers are not very encouraging. Well-known trans people who detransitioned have had a very clear trajectory. We know that trajectory because of the very definition of those people – they are well-known. As far as I can discern, 100 percent of nationally and internationally well-known transgender people who detransitioned have ended their lives.

And it appears to me that the majority of Americans do not care. As long as they feel safe, they do not care what happens to me. I am full of doubts about my identity. If you are honest with yourself, you are too. We all are. Every one of us feels there is something wrong with us that at our core makes us unworthy of deep human connection. Add to that self-doubt the fact that a majority of the nation is attacking your very identity? Well, it does not take long before that self-doubt turns to shame, and that shame turns to despair.

I am embarrassed by all the decades in which I did not understand that, while my own brown-skinned daughter was living it every day. It is not just me. A lot of us are running scared, and we have every reason to be.

I arrived at the Brighton, Colorado conference center at 7:45 on a snowy January morning. Given the condition of the roads, I was surprised to see the parking lot was full. Inside were a few dozen mayors from the Denver Metro Mayors Caucus, all ready for a full day retreat, despite the Colorado weather.

I serve as mayor pro tem of Lyons, Colorado. I am a member of the Board of Trustees of our town and was chosen as mayor pro tem by the mayor and members of the board. If the mayor is out of town, I chair meetings, sign checks and whatnot. Under normal circumstances I would not have been invited to the retreat. However, I had been invited to give the keynote address to kick off the morning of the retreat.

It was quite an honor to speak to the mayors representing pretty much the entire Front Range of Colorado. Sixty percent of the state’s sales tax revenue comes from those cities. You might expect these mayors to be ambitious folks with a lot of ego need and not much ego strength, kind of what we see in national politics nowadays. If you thought that, you would be wrong.

Only the mayors of Denver and Aurora (you know the city “taken over” by Venezuelan gangs) have full time jobs. The rest have a day job, and for most of them, a pretty demanding day job. From my observation these mayors had the kind of strengths Henri Nouwen talked about as being common in great leaders – equal parts confidence and humility. They were not particularly enamored with themselves, but they did take their task seriously.

These folks certainly do not serve for the pay. Our mayor in Lyons earns $8,000 a year. Most of the folks there earn $20,000 or less. And though it is not full time, serving as mayor is pretty consuming. In most locations the job is nonpartisan. With a couple of exceptions, I had no idea about the party affiliation of those at Saturday’s retreat. In a late morning session all of them gathered around tables to set priorities about ways in which they can work together for the betterment of their citizens. It was fun watching them brainstorm priorities among subjects that might put the rest of us to sleep, like infrastructure, construction defects, and zoning.

They also talked about the character traits most important to them in their coworkers. Highest on the list were trust, honesty, and follow-through, traits I saw in the mayors themselves.

I was able to stay through mid-afternoon, through the presentations by the kinds of organizations known by their acronyms, CML, DRCOG, RTD, and such. These organizations serve the needs of the cities. The general public might not know they exist, but the mayors do.

I was greatly encouraged by the retreat. This is where most of the real work gets done in America – at the local level, and these people refuse to be deterred by national politics. Of course they have concerns, and when the new president arbitrarily halts all federal funding, they know their citizens will be the ones who are hurt, regardless of how they voted. But these local leaders press on, because nobody else is going to repair that box culvert, secure those water rights, or increase services to senior citizens.

I thought of our own town board meetings, starting at 5:30 pm and often lasting over four hours. There are some really late nights, with most people getting up early the next morning to go to their day jobs.

In these days in which all the ego-needy national pundits desperately grasp for power, it was good to be reminded that the people who actually keep this nation running are meeting together on a nonpartisan basis, keeping our democracy functioning and stable.

I’m reminded of the phrase commonly attributed to former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill – “All politics is local.” I hope it is true, because if it is, I see some light at the end of the tunnel.

And so it goes.

The week after the election I took a break from thinking about what action I can take related to the future of our nation. What happened at and after the inauguration brought me out of my stupor.

Four years ago today I was speaking at President Biden’s Inaugural Prayer Service. It was quite an honor. Today, at the same hour four years later, I was reading Trump’s executive order stating that gender dysphoria is not real. I renewed my passport a couple of months ago – because I knew I needed to renew it before new orders went into effect. Same with my TSA Pre-check and Global Entry renewal. I’ve also been stockpiling estrogen, because Medicare coverage for that will go next. In the midst of this madness, what can I do? What can any of us do?

Initially I will put my head down and continue my work as Mayor Pro Tem of Lyons, thankfully a non-partisan body. If all politics is ultimately local, then this must be the place to begin. I consider it an honor to serve my town, and I greatly appreciate how my town receives me – warmly and fully accepting. But that is here, in Lyons, Colorado.

What can I do about national affairs and the state of our democracy? Over the past couple of months, as I have ruminated on the election loss, I attended to a number of facts, not always easy to come by in today’s Internet informed world. Donald Trump won 49.9 percent of the vote, compared to Kamala Harris at 48.4 percent. This was not a landslide. Yes, for the first time Donald Trump would have won an election with the popular vote, something that would not have happened in 2016, but not by much. Also, for the second straight election, he did not win half of the American vote.

Still, he won. I believe one of the reasons he won is because of the lack of serious engagement with public issues. Most people do not bother checking their news sources for accuracy. I am often shocked that people watch the opinion shows of Fox News as if they were fact. The inability to separate fact from fiction has always been with us in America, since the days of competing newspapers in the late 18th century. But the Internet takes it to a whole new level.

Second, I have concluded that most Americans are not much interested in doing the work necessary to get to the truth of things. Belonging has always been more important than the truth. Look at any family system that backs an abuser, even when they know the truth of the abuse.

Third, I believe the American education system, focused as it is on the left brain subjects of higher mathematics, science, engineering and the like, has left right brain subjects like literature, history, and social studies behind, no longer requiring a balanced education in the humanities. Without an understanding of world history, there can be no understanding of how democracy can slip from a nation’s grasp.

Fourth, the left did not help themselves. As Yascha Mounk so ably has written in The Identity Trap, the left’s obsession with standpoint theory, essentialism, cultural appropriation, identity sensitive public policy, progressive separatism, and limits on free speech all created a backlash, not just from the right but from the center. These excesses of the left have also effectively killed the very important work of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI.) Universities have played a huge part in these excesses, but an argument could be made that the Democratic establishment and the mainline Protestant world also contributed to these excesses.

Fifth, I want to be clear that the single most significant factor in the election was white evangelical Christians, 85 percent of whom voted for Trump. Without their vote, Harris would have won 59 percent to 41 percent. As I explained in a sermon I preached recently, the evangelical world wants a left-brain Christianity, where the Bible is seen as a book of literal meaning, scientific explanation, and certainty. It is not. The Bible, like the teaching of Jesus, is metaphor, not literal meaning, awe for the creation, not scientific explanation, and mystery, not certainty. Evangelical Christianity long ago sold its soul to the modern age, which fascinatingly has more power in evangelical Christianity today than it does in the culture at large. The culture at large has moved on to postmodernism.

In my quarter century as a non-profit CEO, I always said to our employees and board, “Do not tell me about a problem if you are not ready to suggest or work on a solution.” How do you combat the spread of misinformation, or counter society’s loss of interest in intellectual pursuit? These are massive problems with no easy solutions.

This much I do know. I still believe that proximity and narrative can solve a host of our problems. If we can get close to one another, in the same room, we will see each other’s humanity and hear one another’s stories. I find that people’s understanding of what it means to be transgender shifts significantly when they have spent time with me. Unfortunately most of those on the right refuse to spend time with me. Social isolation is a disease that cannot be cured by anything other than ending the isolation.

I am in conversation with people who could provide a large platform in which to come face to face with those opposed to transgender people. It would not be easy, but I believe it would be good. I’ll let you know what happens.

In the meantime, please know that I will be fine. It is the transgender kids and those who have only recently transitioned that I worry about. Pray for them and pray for America.