I have always struggled to identify my feelings. My therapist used to say, “I did not ask what you thought, I asked how you feel.” Having been raised in a fundamentalist home with hardened categories, I was taught that all decisions should be rational and feelings get in the way of good decisions. I had no practice feeling.

The core emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust all live on their own in the ether. They have no place to lay their heads save the space they demand in your being. And they do demand space. They show up at the door with their bags and inform you they are staying until you deal with them. This is especially true of the substantive trio of anger, fear, and sadness. Fundamentalists lock them in the basement, but everyone knows they are there, beneath the tidied surface.

I have since come to understand you have to allow these emotions entry when they arrive. They have an easement to come and go as they like. They do with all humans. You cannot stop them. You can decide to address them in the living room instead of putting them in the basement. And you can demand their departure when they have overstayed their welcome. But I get ahead of myself. I did not know any of this way back then.

By “then” I mean most of my married life. I, like a lot of husbands, relied on my wife to tell me how I felt. For Cathy, that was exhausting. Not only did she have to deal with her own feelings, she had to feel mine, in an exaggerated way, like you do as a therapist – “Your mother did WHAT!?” People don’t know how abnormal some actions are until you tell them. Wives routinely do this for their husbands because apart from anger, most husbands have no idea what they are feeling. Our culture allows men anger, but none of the other core emotions.

Post transition I did it again, with a friend, and then with another close friend. I finally came to see I was wearing souls out and I needed to feel my own emotions, unaided by another benevolent female. That is when I started memorizing poetry.

Poetry is the right brain finding its expression in language, not straightforward left brain language, but language used slant, as Emily Dickinson might say. I memorize poems that speak to me. I do not ask why they speak to me. They just do, and when they do, I memorize them. Then I pay attention to when they arise unbidden in the course of a day. The right brain is charged with bringing into consciousness what is unconscious.

The lyrics of songs also arrive unbidden, which is interesting, because I almost never know all the lyrics to a song. For me, songs are about the tune, especially the harmonies, not the words. So when the words arrive without invitation, I take notice.

I cannot tell you how often, as a child, I started belting out the African-American spiritual, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” I sang it with all my heart. No one in my family took notice. That is the fruit of fundamentalism.

Lately I keep having the entire David Whyte poem, The Soul Lives Contented running through the course of my days. It is not a poem about contentment. It is a poem about restlessness. The soul lives beneath the ego. The ego wants power and safety. It is a tyrant. The soul is here for the ride. Trembling, it reaches out for your hand, to get your attention, to invite you to the thin places where the ego is bedded down and the soul can speak directly to the gods.

See, not the language of the rational, reasonable, explicit, abstracted, compartmentalized, fragmented, left brain, but the singing, praising, feeling of the right brain. In Jung’s language this is where the self resides. In Christian language, it is the realm of the soul.

The soul is what answers the front door and allows the core emotions entry and takes them to the guest room. It knows what has to be dealt with. It might even help them unpack their bags. It is the soul that brings poems to mind, helping tease out what is going on in the realm of feeling that I learned to suppress so well. It is also what tells those emotions when it is time to go.

Though I am not certain, it seems to me that estrogen and anti-androgens make it easier for the soul to slip forth like a “tremor of pure sunlight before exhaustion” as Mary Oliver said in Maybe. Testosterone is the fuel of anger. Its absence I experience as pure blessing, one of the indicators that I am, in fact, transgender.

I always say I come from the borderlands between genders, a holy liminal space. I once had dinner at a house built by William Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. He put thick girders, left over from the construction of the bridge, in the walls of his house. The door jambs were thick, almost like passageways. That is the kind of liminal space in which I live, neither this room nor that, but a place in between not quite once before a time, but also not quite once upon a time.

Anyway, that is why I still look to my close female friends to tell me what I am feeling, like a man. It is also why I find myself having very strong emotions that demand expression. It feels like that is the estrogen at work, like a woman. As I said, I come from the land between the genders. Sometimes it is the land of the lost, but as I say so very often, it’s okay, because lost is a place too.

I am not sure where this post is going. I want it to circle around and reach a conclusion chock full of insight. Seems like that’s not gonna happen.

And so it goes.

I have a few thousand readers who regularly peruse my blog. Many have it sent to their inbox. I am grateful for all of you.

I am thankful for those from my past life who read this column regularly and occasionally reach out via email or text to thank me for a post. You have no idea how much it warms my heart when you write. My life is lived with discontinuity between what was and what is, so whenever there is some small gesture that comes over the continental divide of my life to thank me for a post, it boosts my spirit far more than you know.

I know some of what I write is painful to those who remain in evangelicalism, and that you disagree about more than a little of what I write. I appreciate your graciousness in taking the posts at face value and that you do not take them personally. Many of you have remained within our denomination and I completely understand. I would have remained if I had been allowed. Sadly, both my transition and my theology no longer allow it.

I also have a lot of transgender people who follow me, both those who have transitioned and those who have not. I am not particularly active within the trans community. I rarely speak on transgender issues. Most of my public speaking is on the subject of my first TED Talk – gender equity. Even with my lack of involvement in the trans community, I am touched that you take the time to follow my journey and let me know the parts that resonate with your own.

Some of my trans readers reach  out to have a conversation. Sadly I receive far too many requests to be able to schedule those conversations. I am so sorry that is the case. Thank you for sticking with me and reading my memoir. I am appreciative.

A lot of my readers are folks who have stumbled upon one of my TED Talks and have signed up after searching my name. I heard from one of you this morning. I hear from folks pretty much every week, and I always try to answer your emails as quickly as possible. Taking the time to write me is a precious thing, and not something I ever take for granted.

I’m pretty sure my kids rarely if ever read my blog, unless I specifically ask them to read one. My girlfriend doesn’t either, or my therapist. Cathy, my former wife, usually reads them and I take comfort in that. Same with my best friend, who reads every week, and three of my five former copastors, who let me know when they like a post.

Some read every week. One person writes me an email after almost every post. She has been such a loyal follower. Others wait and read eight or ten in a single sitting. Some friends pick up the phone and call me after a particular post, wanting to talk further. I cherish those calls.

For all of you, I am grateful for your faithfulness and for the respect you show just by reading my words.

A lot of what I write is stream of consciousness, whatever I happen to be working through on the particular day I start writing. Sometimes I have no idea what I am going to write until I type the first sentence. The subject unfolds as I type. I love those days. Sometimes the ideas come so fast my fingers can’t move quickly enough to record the cascade of thoughts. Occasionally I stare at a blank screen and type a sentence or two before waiting for another day.

I will keep writing as long as you keep reading. As this, my twelfth year as Paula unfolds, and I approach the completion of 600 columns (columns – language from bygone days with the Christian Standard) I pray that my thoughts may lessen the suffering in the world just a bit, that my words may bring a little insight into people’s minds, and that my heart comes through to show my respect for each and every one of you who treat one another with dignity. I am grateful for your particular journey on this green earth.

And so it goes.

Light is paradoxically both a particle and a wave. Come to think of it, much of life is paradox. Our time on earth is both wonderful and disagreeable.  As this holiday season unfolds, I am feeling peace and anger, determination and resignation, hope and acedia. Let me explain.

According to an article in the New York Times, Donald Trump won the white evangelical vote by 65 points (85 percent for Trump and 15 percent for Harris) and lost the rest of the American vote by 18 points (59 percent for Harris and 41 percent for Trump.) To put it simply, white evangelical Christians elected Donald Trump.

They elected a man found liable for sexual abuse into the highest office in the land. I suppose I should not be surprised. This is the same group that fired me after 35 years of good work with nary a single negative evaluation, the group that took away my pension, all because I came out as transgender, something never mentioned in the Bible.

I regret working so hard to establish new evangelical churches all over the nation, most of which would not allow me through their doors today, let alone into their pulpits. There are a handful of churches and people who are exceptions, and I do want to acknowledge them. Those churches and leaders have also paid a price, most of them booted from the denomination that birthed them.

Interestingly, the one time I have been publicly cancelled by the left, it was a church that cancelled me for daring to question the appropriateness of giving adolescents irreversible medical treatment for their gender dysphoria. That particular church disavowed me without even informing me there was a problem. But let me be clear, only one mainline congregation has treated me unfairly. The entire evangelical world has rejected me.

What conclusions are my grandchildren to draw about the church and Christianity? I know the conclusions my non-spiritually-affiliated friends have drawn. They are not theologians, but they know enough to see that the church has abandoned the teachings of Jesus, because it has.

Jesus taught in metaphor. Evangelicalism wants literal meaning. Jesus taught awe. Evangelicalism wants scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery. Evangelicalism wants certainty. Evangelicalism has abandoned Jesus in favor of bibliolatry, governed by the interpretation of its supremely confident but poorly educated leaders. They have abandoned the teachings of Jesus in favor of a return to a federated understanding of the old and new covenants, placing us back under the teachings of the law, or at least the specific ones they have decided serve their purposes, like the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals prefer the didactic teaching of Paul over the narrative teaching of Jesus.

All of this is an abandonment of the primary half of the brain, the right hemisphere, in favor of its emissary, the supremely confident but non-contextualized left hemisphere. It is a church more connected to Rene Descartes than it is to Jesus of Nazareth.

I sound angry, you say? I am. But I also understand that sin in the Bible is a not locked up inside the skin of an individual. It is a cosmic collective malevolent force. It is what we do when we come under the influence of a group that behaves in ways the individuals within that group would never behave on their own. My problem is not with individual evangelicals. It is with what they have done as a group. They have behaved in ways the sociobiologist EO Wilson said we’d better get ahold of before we lose the species and the planet as we know it. They have created enemies that do not exist.

The church will pay a price for its arrogant grasp for power. It has abandoned its root cause – to love God, neighbor, and self. What is left is nothing but the collective ego’s need for safety and power. Their narcissism has been made known and it will be justly rewarded.

I know most of my readers are not Christians, so I shall answer your anticipated question. Why am I still a Christian? It is because I do believe in the Jesus who taught in metaphor, not literal meaning, the Jesus who encouraged awe instead of offering scientific explanation, the Jesus who gave us blessed mystery instead of sophomoric certainty. I still believe the teaching of Jesus to love God, neighbor, and self.

I still love many people who have left me behind. I would welcome a visit from them. I would not allow myself to be badgered or belittled by them, but I would welcome the chance to rest in the beauty of our shared, flawed and vulnerable humanity. We would walk down to the river and watch its ageless flow as it twists and turns on its way to the sea. The words of Wendell Berry come to mind, from The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be 

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water

And the great heron feeds 

I come into the peace of wild things

Who do not tax their life with forethought

Of grief, I come into the presence of still water

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I spoke Sunday at a delightful Presbyterian church in San Jose, California. I preached and then spoke for an hour about how America has gotten where it is regarding transgender people.

I spoke of E. O. Wilson, the sociobiologist, who said we are the only one of nine tribal species that has come to believe an enemy is necessary for the tribe to survive, and where no natural enemy exists, we create one.

I talked of the three moral standards, and the fact that while secular America works from the standard that says there is no greater moral good than to protect the freedom of the individual, the fundamentalist forms of the desert religions work from the second moral standard, that there is no greater good than to obey the teachings of the gods, as determined by their religious leaders. And in the Middle East, many work from the first moral standard, that there is no greater moral good than to protect the integrity of the tribe.

I then spoke for the first time at any length about study I have been doing recently on the work of Iain McGilchrist, the Scottish psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. McGilchrist’s groundbreaking work on the hemispheres of the brain has fascinated me since I first read about it in Donald Kalsched’s Trauma and the Soul.

I noted how the last five hundred years have been a time of left-brain domination in the western world which has a created a narrow focus on analysis and categorization, the realm of the left hemisphere of the brain, and very little focus on placing that information in the greater context of life, a right hemisphere function.

In the world we have created, instead of metaphor, we want literal meaning. Instead of awe, we want scientific explanation. Instead of mystery we want certainty. All are left-brain. I explained how fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity have sold their soul to left brain thinking, which is tragic, because Jesus did not teach to the left brain. All of his instruction was to the right brain. He taught in metaphor, not literal meaning. He spoke in awe, not scientific explanation. He spoke of mystery, not certainty.

As a result, conservative Christianity has come to ignore the teachings of Jesus while it turns the Bible into a left brain textbook, to be interpreted literally, as a book of scientific explanation, and through the doctrine of inerrancy, certainty. Additionally, they pay more attention to the writings of Paul, more a left brain writer, than they do to the teachings of Jesus.

That shift is how you arrive at 87 percent of evangelicals believing gender is immutably determined at birth, 67 percent believing we already give too many civil rights to transgender people, and yet only 34 percent knowing someone who is out as a transgender person. Instead of following the teaching of Jesus to love God, neighbor, and self, they have created left brain rules and regulations to reject an issue that is nowhere mentioned in scripture.

I believe the only way to counteract this course of events is through right brain influence, primarily achieved through proximity and narrative. If we are bodily in the presence of another, unless we have a right brain deficiency, we stand a better chance of seeing that person in the context of our shared humanity rather than analyzing and categorizing them as “other.” If we hear one another’s stories, we stay in the right brain, the realm of narrative, subtlety, nuance, mystery and awe. While proximity demands bodily connection, narrative can be done on a mass scale.

Comedic television brought America around on marriage equality, progressively moving through All in the Family, where gay issues were first introduced, to the scripted Ellen show, where a gay character was the protagonist, to Will and Grace, in which gay characters interacting with straight characters was the focus of the show, to Modern Family, in which one of three major storylines was about a gay couple, to today, when people in sitcoms are incidentally gay.

Humans do change our minds, but not unless information comes to us in a non-threatening way. What could be less threatening than comedic narrative coming into our living rooms? That is one of the reasons I signed a life rights deal with a Hollywood production company to do a three season story of my life. In today’s environment, getting that funded will be next to impossible, but if they can get it funded, maybe it can help change the narrative.

When I was speaking in San Jose, as is always the case, I opened the talk up to Q&A. It did not take long for the biggest question to come forth, “What about teens receiving non-reversible medical care.” This was not a conservative group, unlike the group to which I had spoken a few weeks ago in which an attendee asked about trans people grooming children. When a question like that comes up I go straight to the facts. There is no incidence, ever, not once, of a trans person grooming children. It is a complete and utter myth. I challenged the questioner to give me a single example. He said nothing because, of course, there are no examples.

In San Jose the vast majority of the congregants were very supportive of trans people. The question about medical care was genuine. I gave an honest and researched answer. When I have given that answer before, I have satisfied neither the right nor the left. I have been attacked from both sides. Until we stop listening to conspiracy theories on the right and engaging in cancel culture, standpoint theory, and essentiality on the left, we will never be able to follow the science. I am committed to following the science.

Today, the studies extant do not support irreversible medical treatment for the majority of transgender adolescents. There is one group that is an exception, but instead of getting the care they need, that small group is caught in the crossfire between the two extremes.

The audience was warmly supportive, with many thoughtful questions  and comments after the session was over. I left grateful for the Builders and Baby Boomers who have been fighting the good fight for equal rights since the 1960s.

I eagerly accept invitations to speak at thoughtful and open churches. I do not request the fees I receive from corporations, conferences, or universities. I am just happy to get the word out that transgender people have a right to basic civil rights. I am quite sure the facts matter, and our stories must be told.

And so it goes

Many times in my life I have experienced a sustained longing for something more. Some television show, movie, or speech calls to my soul and says it is time to reach for the stars.

As Jungian analyst James Hollis says, the ego is a tyrant that desires only power and safety, which is tragic because both will eventually fail us. In The Heart Aroused, David Whyte says the ultimate safest place is a cemetery. Power and safety have their limits.

While the ego is interested in power and safety, the soul is interested in the ride. The soul is most connected to the right hemisphere of the brain, the primary hemisphere, the one that places everything in context and communicates with us in longings that struggle for words. These longings show up in well-told stories, paintings, photographs, and songs. They create awe, a decidedly right brain experience.

It is instructive to me to reflect on the specific elements that conspire to create this longing in me. The writing of Aaron Sorkin does it, whether in the West Wing or Newsroom. The novels of Wendell Berry (his essays being left-brain in their focus.) David Lean films, the film work of Roger Deakins, or television shows created by Carlton Cuse (Lost) can bring it forth. Musically it might be a great performance in a Broadway show, music of the vocal group Voctave, or 19th century hymns.

We grow complacent and allow the ego to have its way, lying on the couch, numbing itself on MSNBC, nothing but a viewer powerless to bring about change. Smart phones have not been good for the species. They invite endless scrolling, mindless time with the irrelevant. Too often the same is true with social media, feigning human connection when we are in reality incarnate beings with the need to physically connect, not via an electronic screen. Social media avoids genuine human contact, with its body language, subtle shifts in intonation, eyes telling their own stories, and a plethora of other subtle clues inaccessible on a screen.

I am not a Luddite, I just wish those who created these tools had thought about whether or not they were good for the souls of those for whom they were created. We live in a left-brain-centric, right-brain-deficient civilization, where the important questions are rarely asked. That is why we are lonelier than ever.

When I am jolted out of my acedia by one of these gifts of creative magic I realize I have been settling, and it is again time to unsettle and look to the stars. As David Whyte says in Sweet Darkness, the night has a horizon further than you can see. The possibilities are endless, a constantly expanding universe.

To what am I being called? I’m not sure. Discerning a call is rarely easy. The easy ones turn out to be somebody else’s call, not ours. True calls combine fear with excitement, the paradoxical alchemy of being inexorably pulled upward and ahead, into the unknown, expectant and frightened.

I currently serve as Mayor Pro Tem, an interesting position. I’ll leave it at that. Am I being called to another position in politics? Heaven knows the political world needs those who answer to soul, not ego, those with nothing left to prove. Or maybe it is to find that new TED Talk that can expand my speaking platform. My agent already has my next book proposal, so I’m just waiting to see what publisher picks it up. But I think it may be something that has not risen to the surface just yet, some way in which I need to stretch myself within my gifts.

I was asked to audition for the lead role in a feature film that began shooting in Toronto last month. I gave it a thought for a minute, but I knew it wasn’t for me. Speaking of acting, there is a character in a Sorkin television show that resonates with me. I’m still puzzling through the reason. Interestingly, the actor is also represented by my speaker’s agency. I’d like to meet sometime, or better yet, speak on the same platform.

Mary Oliver’s The Journey begins, “One day you knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice…” I do not yet know what I have to do. I am waiting for it to come. This is life, discerning the next call onto what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Discerning and answering the call gets no easier with the passing of time. That much I know. Most calls require you to let go of something to which your ego is clinging before you can take hold of something new.

The older you get the less comfortable you are letting go and reaching out. The resistance is about time and its passing. You wonder if you are too old. But if you succumb to that temptation, you already have one foot in the vicinity of the grave. It’s a shame to die of sheer boredom.

I’ll let you know once I have a little more clarity about my current restlessness. Until then I’ll listen for the still small voice that arrives in the thin places.

And so it goes.

Okay, I lost it the other day when the Speaker of the House declared that women’s restrooms would be off limits to Sarah McBride, Delaware’s newly elected member of Congress. Sarah has been Sarah as long as I have been Paula. I imagine when she’s out in public her experience is pretty much the same as mine – everyone treats her as a woman. Most of her hate mail probably comes via the Internet or texts and voicemails, as does mine. Being prohibited from using a women’s restroom, or even being stared at in a women’s restroom, is not a part of my experience, and probably not a part of hers either. She has responded with intelligence and grace to this ridiculous affront. Inside, she has to be bitterly disappointed.

My entitlement and self-confidence know no bounds. It rarely occurs to me that a worst-case scenario could come true. Only this week did I realize it is a distinct possibility that a national bathroom bill will be passed and signed into law. Even then I know I need not worry when I fly through ORD, LAX, LGA, or even CLT. But I fly through DFW a lot and it is already a surly and unwelcoming airport for everyone. For me, flying through Texas could get a lot worse.

But here’s the thing. What good does it do me to get caught up in the net of attention-seeking transphobia. Since the election the trolls have come out in force, again. I have been attacked from within the fundamentalist Christian world and from without. It is going to be an ugly four years.

But having had a few days to let this truth settle in, I am beginning to put it in perspective. I realize just how tiny my concerns are compared to what my daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and three of my five granddaughters face on an ongoing basis.

I’m not up against what Palestinians are facing in Gaza, or even what Jewish students are facing on elite university campuses where anti-Jewish sentiment is frighteningly real. None of my grandparents were exterminated in concentration camps. I have a friend whose grandmother was the only member of her family to survive Nazi Germany. My friend is planning to move back Spain and has every reason to do so. Generational trauma is real.

As for me, I will ignore the haters because I can. I’ve been busy unfriending folks from social media and removing my phone number from all of my online sites, again. As an elected official I can have law enforcement come by my home at the beginning of every shift, though I don’t feel that is necessary, at least not for now. And I can ignore the bathroom laws, as I have been doing where they have existed.

I will not play into their hand. I will live with dignity, treat my enemies with compassion, and play the role of the greater fool. In economic theory, the lesser fool is the person who optimistically buys a stock at a high price believing it can be sold to a greater fool at an even higher price.

I believe most people might believe the price of attaining civility, equity, and tolerance are too high right now, not worth buying into. The downside is too great.  There is too much to lose.

But I believe civility, equity, and decency can become the currency of our nation, the currency that found expression in the farewell address of George Washington, the Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln, the inaugural speech of John F. Kennedy, and the traditional liberalism that says there is more that unites us as than separates us.

I will continue to believe the ultimate building blocks of the universe are predicated on love, and that against all appearances, love is what makes the world go round. If that makes me the greater fool, it is a role I shall be honored to play.

And so it goes.

I often quote the last several lines of David Whyte’s poem, Sweet Darkness. Since last week I’ve been at the front of the poem, quoting its first few lines:

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also

When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you

Time to go into the dark, where the night has eyes to recognize its own

I’ve been lost for the last week with no map or working compass. I was blindsided in 2016 and I immediately determined to fight back. This time I’m not yet ready to fight back. I am weary. While I am greatly concerned for our democracy as a whole, much of my current weariness is self-referential, related to transgender rights.

The focused attack on transgender rights is about eight years old, with many victories celebrated by the right in state legislatures over the last three years. Almost 600 bills were introduced and 90 signed into law in 2023 alone. Now I fear there will not just be state laws, but federal laws or executive orders eliminating medical care for transgender people. The anti-trans rhetoric is on the increase and it is frightening.

Republicans made transgender rights a major issue in this campaign. Focus groups showed the anti-trans commercials that aired in swing states were more effective than others at getting out the Republican vote.

It is also concerning that the extreme left has played a part in creating such a perilous environment for transgender people. My greatest fears are for the very small percentage of children who are transgender, children no longer able to get the medical care they so desperately need. These children knew they were trans at a very early age and made it known at an early age. There was no mistaking their gender identity.

With the exception of these children, who are fairly easily identified, I question the appropriateness of medical treatment of teenagers who do not present with gender dysphoria before their teen years. An inordinate number of them were identified female at birth, and a significant number are no longer identifying as transgender once they are in their twenties. We should be looking at the data, as European nations have been doing. Many of those nations have become more cautious about providing teen medical treatment of gender dysphoria until we understand the trends.

I also understand why many feel that a transgender woman whose body developed as a male should not be playing women’s sports. Anti-androgens and estrogen do diminish one’s physical strength, but if your body developed as a male, not all sports advantages have been lost. I have felt that in my own body.

For having those opinions I have been castigated by the left, sometimes with the same level of vitriol with which I have been castigated by the right. I am nervous about publishing this post because of the power of cancel culture. Strategic essentialism and standpoint theory have created an environment that threatens freedom of speech. Just look at how easy it has become to lose your status as a tenured professor at a university, or how Jewish students are being treated on many campuses. Put that together with the newly empowered right and no wonder I do not know how to proceed. I want to be involved in the birth of something new, but I cannot find purchase. I do not see where to take the first step.

At the moment I will serve where I am comfortable, working within the church and writing about its effect on American culture. I have a sixty-five page book proposal with my agent tentatively titled, Can Religion Be Good – Creating Change and Finding Hope in a Polarized World. I’m eager to see which publishing company picks it up.

These are trying times, but life goes on. I will live with more caution, because I must. I will also live fully, because as I say so often, the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good.

And so it goes.

This post is longer than usual. It is important. It will initially read rather negatively. Bear with me. It will turn the corner.

The election and all of its awfulness has left me concerned not only about the future of the nation, it has left me pondering my own life. It would seem half of the nation has done its best to fill my heart with shame. It started with pretty much an entire denomination’s instant rejection of me, with the attendant letters, emails, and texts, some of which continue to this day, more than ten years after I transitioned.

It continued with many of the 13,000 comments on my first TED Talk, comments I have never read because, well, you can’t read stuff like that and survive. And now it continues with half of the nation attacking all transgender people, questioning diagnosis, treatment, and every other aspect of a complex and perplexing experience. They are certain they know all they need to know about it.

Oh, but that any kind of certainty in all things transgender could exist. Most questions about the causes of gender dysphoria are difficult to answer. Not enough peer review studies have been completed. But that does not seem to stop people on both ends of the political spectrum from being quite certain about it. And those on the right have made it a huge issue in the presidential election.

The transgender controversy is just one example of our culture’s desperation for certainty, which is an illusion, whatever the subject. Have we learned nothing from Quantum physics?

I have a pretty healthy ego structure. For that I can thank my white male entitlement, a loving and nurturing father, a doting grandmother and an education system that was predisposed toward children who easily learn in traditional ways. I have a fair amount of ego strength, with less ego need than many.

Nevertheless, I am weary of the assaults. I am saddened by the educational institutions, corporations, and conferences that have rescinded invitations for me to speak because I am transgender. Things looked a hell of a lot better for trans folks ten years ago than they do today. If this week’s election turns out as I fear it will, it is only going to get worse.

I rarely speak with people considering transitioning. I know many would love to talk with me, but I have discovered it is not good for my soul. They are all overly optimistic about how the world will receive them in their new gender, and woefully unaware of how difficult it is going to be. I always say, “My life has gone far better post-transition than I ever could have imagined. The same is not likely for you. I am one of the lucky ones.”

I came into this gender with a lot of privilege and a very fortunate TED Talk that has garnered over seven million views, resulting in a plethora of opportunities. Even with that good fortune, the last year has been difficult as I have come to see that self-confidence not withstanding, a lot of people in the world think of me first as transgender and second as anything else. I am referred to as the transgender speaker, the transgender speaker’s coach, the transgender elected official, or the transgender pastoral counselor. I could go on but you get the idea. Previously I was the non-profit CEO, the public speaker and writer, the television host, the husband, father, and son. No other qualifiers were necessary.

This is my reality, yet I do not live in despair. Wholeness comes from within. All of these external attacks I see as anti-wholeness agents. If I could draw, which I cannot, I would picture these anti-wholeness agents as pitiful looking ogres with giant clubs and not much intellect, fierce on the outside but consumed by fear that they are somehow not enough, and if anyone looks too closely, their secret will become known.

To be clear, these ogres could some day literally kill me. I am frightened by the people who have found my phone number, which I do not share publicly, and text me with their sickening taunts. But just because they could kill me does not mean they have the power to stop me from being whole. Again, wholeness comes from within.

As a therapist, friend, partner, and parent, I think one of the most important things I can do is affirm when I can see a person’s wholeness. As a therapist, I am called upon to hold an image of a client’s wholeness when they cannot yet see it themselves. I see the wholeness of my dearest friends, their brokenness too. Sometimes I see the wholeness of those who oppose me, and though they have rejected me, it does not diminish my appreciation of their wholeness. I am thinking of two very dear lost friends as I write that last sentence.

Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched says a person brings their history with them into therapy. At the center of this history is the divine spark of the person, the God-given essential self, seeking incarnation in the world. They are asking the most holy request of you, that you be available as a witness to make the way for this divine spark to come forth. That is the sacred duty of being a therapist.

Carl Jung said the pursuit of wholeness, and its pursuit of us, is the lifelong struggle of every person. What he called individuation is the unfolding of this wholeness from within. The unfolding is sacred, holy, and for the greater good.

The psyche is called to integration and wholeness. It is the spark of the divine from within. All religions have traditionally given us the teaching or doctrine about the wholeness of the world, and have drawn us to seek our own wholeness. In today’s fragmented world the left brain and right brain never meet, and the left brain is worshipped while the more holistic right brain is ignored. (When was the last time you saw literature, music, or art receiving as much focus in our education system as science and mathematics?) Religion has been passed over at an alarmingly accelerated pace, the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater of fundamentalist excess. Gone are the numinous mystical experiences at the core of all major religions.

Wholeness and unity have been sacrificed in the interest of power. We must depend on literature, film, music, art, poetry, or an epiphany that comes from the beauty of the natural world to return us to our own wholeness. Of course, even that will not make us whole unless we know we are loved. But that would be a different column for a different day.

I believe this world is not random. I believe loving God and loving neighbor are my greatest responsibilities, both impossible if I cannot first love myself. I believe we are called to wholeness whatever our circumstances. Jesus knew it on the cross (Forgive them, for they know not what they do.) Galileo knew it under house arrest (by the church) for daring to insist the earth was not the center of the universe. Solzhenitsyn knew it in the gulags of the Soviet prisons, and Nelson Mandela in a prison cell in South Africa. Maya Angelou knew it in the wholeness of her Black female experience; Mary Magdalene knew at the tomb. Mary Oliver knew it in her wanderings and wonderings through nature, and Emily Dickinson in her scraps of paper saved in a cloistered room.

I do not pretend to know the causation of gender dysphoria or the genesis of my own. I do know wholeness is closer as Paula than it was as Paul. I wish that was not the case, particularly for the sake of my family, but it is what it is. That knowing is enough. As I pursue wholeness and it pursues me, brief glimpses of wisdom tell me I am on the right track, naysayers and politicians be damned.

I love the end of David Whyte’s poem, Sweet Darkness:

You must learn one thing

The world was made to be free in

You must give up all the other worlds

Except the one to which you belong

Sometimes it takes darkness

And the sweet confinement of your aloneness

To learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive

Is too small for you.

When I was in my twenties and thirties I had two mentors. One was a generation older than me, the other was two generations older. A third, fifteen years my senior, is still living. With all three, I thought of myself as someone who might eventually achieve what these three had achieved, and maybe more. Life was nothing but possibility. (White male entitlement goes a long way.)

One of the harder things of this age is realizing when people who are smarter, better educated, and more accomplished than you are also younger than you.  I was at an event with Brian McLaren last weekend. He is prolific, brilliant, and humble. We have been on the platform together a number of times over the past few months, and one time this summer, when we were on a panel together and he couldn’t retrieve a word, I said to the audience, “I just want you to know I’m having no trouble retrieving words, and I’m five years older than Brian.” Yep, I’m five years older than Brian.

This morning I was listening to an amazing conversation between Iain McGilchrist, the British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist, and John Vervaeke, director of the Cognitive Science program at the University of Toronto. McGilchrist is now retired, and two years younger than me. And Vervaeke, yep, younger than me. The moderator was Daniel Schmachtenberger, clearly very smart and probably younger than my children. (Am I the only one whose Wikipedia page lists my age?)

My three favorite preachers are between 47 and 55. All three could be my children. Actually, one is my child.

When did I get so old? I was talking to an American Airlines pilot today who flies 777s internationally. She has six more years to fly before she has to retire, which means I am fourteen years older than she is. If I had been an airline pilot, I would have had to retire eight years ago. I was telling her that the first commercial plane I ever flew on was a BAC1-11, followed by a YS-11 and a Convair 440. She said, “Wow,” as if to say, “I didn’t know anybody was still alive who flew on those planes.” She was five when the last Convair 440 was built. Microsoft Word doesn’t even think Convair is a word. Go ahead, type it and see.

I get calls, not texts or emails, but calls from people at my Medicare provider asking if I would like to have a nurse come to the house and do a wellness check, free of charge. They call because apparently I’m so old I cannot figure out how to use email or texts. I told the one who called last week that I had just finished an 8 mile run on a trail with 1,600 feet of elevation gain, so no, I did not need anyone to come to the house to take my blood pressure.

I meet other 73 year-olds. They look ancient. I’m not sure how you can even look that old at this age. Have these people never heard of sunscreen? Some of them look like the only place they have eaten in 25 years is Golden Corral. I’m thinking they probably do need a nurse to come because they can’t climb more than three steps at a time. Is that what other 73-year-olds think when they look at me?

It’s the really smart people whose books I read and videos I watch that bother me the most. Most of them were not alive when Truman was president. Come to think of it, most were not alive when Eisenhower was president, or Nixon. People are turning fifty this fall who were born after Nixon resigned. Geez, I’m old.

And yet these “young people” have amassed all of this information I need to know. When did they learn all this stuff? While I was vacationing at Disney World? Or when I was running around the world? (If I’ve done the calculations correctly, I’ve run around 35,000 miles in my life.)

When did I slack off? I know I did not get the best education available to man. Chalk that up to being born into a strong Evangelical family. But I have read voraciously for decades. I had mentors who had not one, but two doctorates. Yet here I am, the old person telling the audience that Brian McLaren is five years younger than me.

I thought I was doing pretty good that I have had nine books published, two as Paula, seven as Paul (plus two more if ebooks count. Do they count?)  Brian has published almost 50. What was I doing all that time he was researching and writing? Probably running at Disney World.

My doctors are all younger than I am, and I probably would not trust any of them if they were older than me. When I got my doctorate I thought, “Nobody minds if their therapist is old, as long as they don’t fall asleep during your session.” So far no one has cared about my age, nor have I fallen asleep during a session. So, at least there’s that.

I stopped telling people how old I was at corporate speaking gigs. I figured if they knew, they’d say, “Why are we paying that old person so much?”

I still have time. I could write that Pulitzer Prize winning book, or do another TED Talk that has millions of views. I’ll think about that later, I need to go running now. Yesterday I ran my last mile of a three mile run at a 9:36 pace. There was a day I ran the last mile of a three mile run at a 5:56 pace. Sigh.

And so it goes.

Throughout the 20th century seventy percent of all Americans belonged to a local religious body. Between 1999 and 2021 that number dropped to forty-seven percent, a decline of twenty-three points in just twenty-two years. Some say organized religion is dying, and the four horsemen of atheism (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) certainly thought that was true. But proclamations about the demise of organized religion are premature, to say the least.

Charles Darwin said all natural selection evolved at the individual level and at the group level. Groups with more virtuous members survived and replaced those with more selfish members. There has never been a culture that did not have thriving religions, because religion has, on the whole, been good for the species.

E. O. Wilson, the late sociobiologist from Harvard won a Pulitzer Prize identifying that the key social unit for the human species was not the nuclear family, but the tribe. We did not take off as a species until we moved to a tribal, community level. That is when we started creating civilizations and moving rapidly forward.

What caused us to create tribes? Many assume it was the desire for safety in numbers. Evidence points elsewhere. What brought us together was man’s search for meaning. Think Stonehenge, or the carved bodies of Rapa Nui, or burial mounds of native Americans. One of the pillars of religion is addressing man’s search for meaning.

Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, said humans are 90 percent chimpanzees and 10 percent bees. Humans have a selfish gene, like all other species, but we also are one of only nine species that also has a “hive” gene. (Wilson called these eusocial species.) We will sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the hive.

Haidt says humans have a hive switch that can be turned on. It is the space of the sacred, where self disappears and group interests dominate. It is a space of collective joy, love, mourning, even survival. It can be found by participating in team sports, singing in choirs, playing in marching bands, rooting for a sports team in a stadium, hallucinogens as group ritual, or joining together after a natural disaster, anything that turns on the hive switch.

Turning on the hive switch can even come via awe, a universal human experience, most often arriving when we see the expansive universe in all of its beauty. Think the first images from the JWST telescope or standing over the Grand Canyon. Anything that places us in perspective in nature moves us toward oneness with other humans.

Through history the hive switch has very commonly been turned on via religious community and its rituals. The religions that survive make groups more cohesive and cooperative. They unite members into a moral community. Such is the appeal of Jesus’s simple but not easily practiced command to love God, neighbor, and self.

We even come into the world wired for moral community. Morality in children is innate, meaning organized in advance of experience. It is self-constructed by children on the basis of their own experience with harm. At six to ten months of age, babies will choose a puppet who helps others as opposed to a puppet that hurts others. Morality also comes from childhood learning, which often takes place in religious community. Virtually all religions have rituals for children as they grow into adulthood. The loss of those rituals has hurt adolescents in the western world.

Religions also promote cooperation and trust within a group. Utopian communities in the 19th century all eventually failed, but those that were religious were seven times more likely to survive for much longer periods of time than those that were not religious.

Four out of five studies of religion (79 percent) have found that religion and well-being have a positive correlation on mental and physical health and longevity. Religious Americans are better neighbors than secular citizens. They also give seven percent of their income to all charities (not just religious ones) while secular people give only one and a half percent. It is not keeping rules and regulations that causes this kind of altruism. It is being in community with others of like mind.

There are broad benefits to organized religion. As mentioned, it is the place in which we search for meaning together. In spite of rugged American individualism, our species has always thrived when we work in community to search for meaning.

Jonathan Haidt says humans do change our minds, but not unless information comes to us in a non-threatening way. Religious communities provide a safe place in which to hear new and challenging ideas. They can create a secure environment in which we will be open to change, if encouraged to do so. Unfortunately, they can also be a place that creates hardening of the categories when a “protect the gates” mentality emerges.

In a polarized environment, the best way in which to truly see and hear those unlike you is via proximity and narrative. I speak at educational institutions all over the world, and am paid handsomely to do so. I go to Christian universities pro bono, because I know if I can get in close proximity to those students, and they can hear my story, their tendency to classify me as “other” is greatly diminished. They realize I’m normal, or at least as normal or abnormal as they are.

Religious communities are where we learn to be human together. They are messy, and they are supposed to be messy, because it is where we learn to work through conflict, our shared humanity, and our search for meaning through the various boundary conditions of life.

Religious communities also historically have done amazing amounts of social good in the world. They provide more than one half of food programs and one quarter of housing programs in the United States. Fifty-seven percent of faith based organizations participate in health programs. Working together in religious community, the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

It is also good to remember that fifty-two percent of Christians are supportive of marriage equality. We hear from the vocal minority that is not supportive, but ignore the majority that is supportive.

Religious communities have always been with us, and always will be with us. They change forms, with those surviving having more virtuous members and those dying having more selfish members, but religious communities are baked into the DNA of the species. And that is a good thing.

——

And for those I saw at the pre-session to Theology Beer Camp today, here are the words we used at Left Hand Church:

We strive to love the God who burst on the scene 14 billion years ago in all of God’s complexity, mystery, and ever expansiveness, rooted in relationship and grounded in love. We strive to love our neighbors, particularly those who do not look like us.  And we strive to love ourselves, because if you can’t do that, you cannot do the first two.

In the first sentence we are defining God as the Big Bang and more. Quantum physics teaches us that the ultimate building blocks of the universe are not made of matter, but of a pattern of relationships between nonmaterial entities. If the ultimate building blocks of the universe are relationships, then is it much of a stretch to say the most powerful force in the universe is love? Therefore, “the God who burst on the scene 14 billion years ago in all of God’s complexity, mystery, and ever expansiveness, rooted in relationship and grounded in love.”

And so it goes.