I met with a church member last week who spoke about being traumatized by a church in the state in which she previously lived. The more she talked, the more I knew which church she was talking about. It is one of the respected larger congregations from my former denomination. The lead pastor, a sweet guy, was once president of our national convention. Though it has been a long time, it is a church at which I have spoken.

It is not the first time I’ve had someone at Envision Community Church tell me about being wounded by a church with which I used to be affiliated. In fact, the chair of our board attended one when she was in high school. Lots of people move to Colorado from lots of places, so I am not surprised at the breadth of states in which these churches exist: Arizona/Washington/Texas/California/Indiana Kentucky/Ohio/Pennsylvania/New Hampshire/Florida/Illinois/Colorado. I am probably missing one or two states. Three states have multiple churches on the list. They are Colorado, which given where my church is located, is to be expected, plus Indiana and Kentucky.

Our little church has only been in existence for five years, yet already I have had individuals talk with me about their wounding experience at churches affiliated with my former denomination in twelve different states. That is rather remarkable, and sad.

Most are megachurches. None of the people at my church knew of my former affiliation with the denomination. Over coffee or dinner they simply told me how hurt they were when they found out their church did not accept LGBTQ+ people. Sometimes it was in a very public way, spoken by the pastor from the pulpit. Other times the church would not be forthcoming about their stance on LGBTQ+ people, even when the person asked directly. A few times LGBTQ+ issues were not the cause of the harm. It was teaching the substitutionary atonement, specifically that a blood sacrifice is necessary to appease an angry God.

I loved my former denomination. Best I can figure, I am the fifth generation of my family to have been a part of it. Among church historians it is referred to as the Stone/Campbell movement, and I had connections on both sides of it. My mother was a Stone from Bourbon County, Kentucky. And yes, it appears Barton W. Stone is on my family tree. My father’s mother was baptized in Brush Run Creek, where Alexander and Thomas Campbell established a church in what is now northern West Virginia.

My denomination has no headquarters or church hierarchy, though pretty much everybody knows who the fifty or so most influential leaders are. Most would have included me on that list. I served as Vice-President of the national convention, and on its executive committee for a number of years. For those who know the Stone/Campbell movement, I was a part of the middle branch of the movement, the Independent Christian Churches, not the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, or the Disciples of Christ, a more liberal denomination.

Should I be surprised when these folks tell me their stories? Truthfully, no. After all, I knew well over one thousand people by name within the denomination. Post transition, I’ve heard from about 20 of them, and spoken more than once with just six. I am only in regular contact with two. The great majority discarded me faster than you can say “excommunicated.”

Yet still, I am surprised. My love for these churches runs deep. The pastor mentioned by the woman with whom I met last week is someone I have always respected. He has an irenic spirit and is a person of character. Yet he left my church member traumatized (her words, not mine.) And no, he is not one of the 20 people who have reached out to me since my transition.

I, too, once believed that gay relationships were wrong and the substitutionary atonement was true, though I was never comfortable with either doctrine. I read an article challenging the substitutionary atonement in the mid-80s, and kept it in a prominent place in my filing cabinet. I struggled with where I stood on that doctrine until after my transition. I had changed my position on LGBTQ+ issues in the late 80s. I did not go public, other than within my book club of Roman Catholic friends in New York. I thought that was okay at the time. It was not.

I am sure that I, too, traumatized people unknowingly, by not speaking out in support of queer people, or in support of what most call universal salvation, the notion that God loves everyone just as we are, no changes demanded to get into heaven.

One of the most difficult things about being transgender is the discontinuity between my life as Paul and my life as Paula. It is exacerbated by the fact that my ostracization from my denomination was total and unequivocal. The truth is that it would have been just as complete had I only changed my theology, not my gender. I imagine more than six people would have had conversations with me, but based on what has happened to others, my theological shift alone would have still brought about the loss of my denomination.

I think of how different it would have been had I been a part of the Disciples of Christ, the more liberal side of the Stone/Campbell movement. It would have been marvelous to have continuity in my religious community, to have folks who could say, “Do you remember when we changed the magazine from a weekly to a monthly?” or “The first time we met was at that CIY conference in the late 70s. Remember that?” But alas, any possibility of continuity within my denomination is gone.

Integrating the two halves of my life has proven to be quite difficult. My former church world certainly has done nothing to help. And it sure does hurt when time and again church members tell me of their wounding by a church in the denomination I once loved. It’s all hard, really hard.

And so it goes.

I watched Oppenheimer last week and found it to be a very good movie. Over the years I’ve read a lot about the Manhattan Project. I grew up when the possibility of nuclear war seemed imminent. I remember only too well hiding under my desk in atomic bomb drills at my elementary school. We were all terrified of atomic war in the 1950s and early 60s, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis.

A couple of days after seeing Oppenheimer, I went with Cathy to see Barbie because, well, why not? I was not prepared for how good it was. I cried, like, a lot. I cried during America Ferrera’s monologue about the life of women. I’ve only been Paula for ten years, but I have already experienced a lot of what she described. But that wasn’t the only reason I cried.

Ten years into my life as Paula, I have come to feel comfortable in my own skin, though not always in the world I inhabit. I do not claim a cisgender experience. I do not see the world in 28-day cycles. I see it as linear. I do not have ovaries or a uterus. I have lots of estrogen and no testosterone, both of which feel right, and I also love that the world receives me as a woman. That is important to me, and it is true 99.9 percent of the time, which is very much  a blessing. But I have no illusions. I come from the borderlands between genders, from the liminal space between male and female.

I do not describe myself as non-binary because I am not. I am a transgender woman. Still, I do not feel like I belong in Barbie Land, though I give a big nod to the producers for including a transwoman as one of the Barbies. I also do not belong in the short-lived Kendom, inspired by Ken’s brief trip into the world of the patriarchy. I do not belong in either fantasy land.

Increasingly, I also do not feel like I belong in America. Given what happened to Anheuser Busch after their support of Dylan Mulvaney, I feel vulnerable. Corporate speaking engagements have dried up alarmingly quickly. Companies are afraid of having a transgender speaker. With 78 anti-trans bills signed into law this year, there are now 20 states in which it can be dangerous for me to travel. All of that was also on my mind as I cried through Barbie.

I also cried because of what Cathy and my daughters, daughter-in-law and granddaughters have gone through, living in a patriarchal system in which they do not even realize how heavy their handcuffs are. I know how heavy they are. I lived for six decades without them.

I watched both films while I am also watching Dickinson, the AppleTV+ show about the life of Emily Dickinson. The show ran for three seasons and thirty episodes between 2019 and 2021. In my opinion, it is a superb show, especially after the first few episodes. It takes a while to get accustomed to the somewhat jarring juxtaposition between 19th century New England and the show’s contemporary music score, as well as more than handful of current cultural colloquialisms. But give it time, it works.

There is a point in season two in which Sue, Emily’s sister-in-law, and according to many scholars, her life-long romantic interest, says to Emily, “You don’t want fame. You crave meaning. You crave beauty. You crave love.” That was when I cried hard in Dickinson.

Good storytelling brings tears, and laughter, and all manner of emotions. I cried all the way through Ted Lasso. I imagine you did too. Given how much the show runners were affected by James Hollis’s The Middle Passage, no surprise there.

People sometimes say, “You live life with too much drama.” My response is that maybe they don’t live with enough drama. Life, this short pause between two great mysteries, is complex, awful, wonderful, and profoundly difficult. I accept all the feelings that file in through the front door, bringing their bags with them, sometimes for an extended stay. They tell me I am alive, and making the most of my time on earth.

Life is peaks and valleys and long periods on the open plains. Sometimes bright sunshine, sometimes shadows and storms. Periods of elation followed by pensiveness, followed by the worst, boredom. I need to be busy. So did my father, and his father before him. So do Jonathan and Jana. Jael is more like Cathy, enjoying times of quiet solitude.

I want my work to be meaningful. If you believe the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good, you also believe in the importance of good work.

Oppenheimer’s legacy is complicated. Was his work good? Given the line he spoke to Einstein in the last scene of the movie, it is obvious he asked the same question.

Emily Dickinson was virtually unknown during her life. Most of her poems were not published until well after her death. Her legacy was her poems, and they endure. All things being equal, I’d rather leave a legacy of poems than a legacy that, in the wrong hands, could spell the end of the species.

How will people see the journey of a transgender pastor a century from now? Will anyone care? Will the fight for LGBTQ+ rights be seen as laudable, or will the conservative side have won, or will the controversy surrounding it be so far in the past that no one pays any attention? Who knows?

I do not care about a legacy. I care about living as authentically as I am able, given my flaws and such. I hope my children and grandchildren remember me fondly, when their lives slow down enough to allow them to remember the past at all.

I’ve only memorized two poems from Emily Dickinson. I memorized the first about a quarter of a century ago:

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

While I was at the Wild Goose Festival two weeks ago I talked with several speakers and authors about hate mail. We all get it and respond in ways consistent with who we are. One of the authors I know answers every negative correspondence with a short pithy quote appropriate to the comment. That takes a lot of work. Another publishes what the person says, along with their name. That’s an approach, I reckon. None of the people I was with at the Goose respond that way. They mostly respond as I do.

The second I can tell I am being attacked, I stop reading. Life is too short to respond to people who have already drawn their conclusions, truth be damned. Ninety-nine percent of the evil in the world is done by people who are 100 percent convinced they are right.

If I am challenged, but not attacked, I will respond, though not until I have taken the time necessary to seriously consider the challenge. Often, there is at least a kernel of truth in what they are saying. Though it is painful to acknowledge that kernel, I know of no other way to grow. M. Scott Peck said the path to wisdom is through the brambles and thickets of stringent self-examination and openness to challenge from the outside.

Remaining open to challenge is good. To allow yourself to be attacked is fruitless. My experience is that those doing the attacking are not the people doing the work of stringent self-examination, or open to challenge from the outside. From their perspective the problem is always the actions of others, never their own. There is no value in reading the words of those who always see the problem as “out there.”

It is worthwhile to be open to challenge. The hero of all great myths is the person willing to go where others will not go, which sometimes means facing the parts of themselves they do not want to face. It is a willingness to spend three days and three nights in a dark place. For Jonah, it was the belly of a whale. For Gilgamesh, it was a cave. For Jesus, it was a borrowed grave. Of course the ancients understood the symbolism. There is no moon for three nights every month, and those are the darkest times.

Fighting the mother of Grendel In his own dark place at the bottom of a cold and forbidding lake, Beowulf had to come to grips with the fact that his hubris had caused the death of the king’s best friend. When he killed Grendel, Beowulf confidently told the king he had solved his problem. In reality, Grendel was not the problem. The mother of Grendel was the problem. As David Whyte says, our problem is not the thing we fear. It is that which gave birth to the thing we fear. In Beowulf’s case,  the mother of Grendel was his own hubris. Beowulf had to fight her for three days and three nights  in the dark, cold, forbidding waters of her lair. He rose from those waters wiser, though exhausted.

Jonah had to learn that saying no to the call of God never works out so well. When you reject the call of God, you do so at your own peril. It took three days and three nights in the belly of a fish to know he was called to Nineveh, like it or not.

Every ancient myth includes a time in which the hero must face themselves in the mirror. They must own their abiding shadows, those parts of themselves that have always been a problem and will always be a problem. Only after they have completed that work is the hero able to move on.

Once you have faced your own abiding flaws, you can be okay when others name them, though it is always painful. Having them named means that once again, they have escaped from the basement and done their damage. You must get to work putting them back in the basement, where they can do as little damage as possible. Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer comes to mind. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

There are six words I will not speak – “I am too old to change.” If you are too old to change, you are too old. When I hear people speak those words, I wonder when they gave up? When were they so wounded they could not recover? When did they abandon the belief that getting out of bed in the morning includes facing your entire self in the mirror, not just the parts you like.

Being open to challenge creates wisdom. Being attacked does not. It only generates despair. When you are challenged, turn inward and discern the truth that might exist within the challenge. When you are attacked, build a wall. Protect yourself. Create boundaries. None of us can withstand an onslaught of terrible words, particularly when they have been designed to wound us as deeply as possible.

I will continue to be open to being challenged. On the other hand, I will not subject myself to attack.

And so it goes.

I’ve just returned from the 2023 Wild Goose Festival. I have attended the festival every year since 2016. When I attempt to describe the Goose, I always fall back on the same language – The Goose is where Woodstock meets liberal Christianity.

This year’s event was the second at VanHoy Farms in Union Grove, North Carolina. I still prefer the old site in Hot Springs, North Carolina, nestled among hardwoods on the banks of the French Broad River. The biggest advantage of the Hot Springs location was the shade. The biggest disadvantage of the Union Grove location is the lack of shade. It was hot, very hot. And humid, very humid.

I always enjoy the program, but the main reason I go to the Goose is for the conversations. I get to hang out with friends, most of whom are very accomplished and have a lot to teach me. Each evening we sit around the lobby of the hotel, drink bourbon, and discuss the state of the church and the nation.

This year I suggested to the curators of the festival that they create a Wednesday evening event for speakers before the festival began. I suggested they form three groups and move through three different campfires, where the attendees would hear three experts talk about three topics relevant to the times. I had been a part of such an event with current Hollywood television writers last fall, and found it to be wonderfully stimulating.

They took me up on my suggestion and I was one of the speakers, focused on why transgender issues have become such a hot topic in the US. Another speaker talked about the spiritual nature of psychedelics, and another about climate change. We each gave the same presentation to all three groups, then engaged the attendees in conversation about shifting the narrative on all three topics. It was a wonderful evening. They’ve already decided to do it again next year.

During the festival itself I did a longer presentation about our current political environment. It was a full venue with lots of Q&A. I was encouraged that so many people want to figure out how to help the trans population.

My second presentation during the festival was on developing resilience. I’ve done a corporate talk on the subject, but only virtually, so I’ve not been able to interact with an in-person audience.

People often say children are very resilient. The truth is that children are not resilient. Children develop coping mechanisms to get by, but those coping methods do not foster resiliency. They foster survival. The problem is that people take those childhood coping mechanisms into adulthood, and try to use them to create resiliency. It doesn’t work. The reason is simple. They are the coping mechanisms of the helpless, and adults are not helpless.

In therapy, a big part of my job is to help clients throw away their old coping mechanisms and replace them with tools to develop resilience. The resiliency talk I did at the Goose was based on the old English myth of Beowulf. I loved putting the talk together, and it was satisfying to see people respond so favorably.

My last event at the Goose was a podcast with John Pavlovitz, Mark Sandlin, Amantha Barbee, and Sheri Pallas. Now, that was fun. I am an Enneagram Two with a social instinctual subtype. I love nothing more than to try to improve the lives of others and help them reach their full potential. Social Twos are comfortable doing that in a crowd or one-on-one. I had plenty of both types of opportunities at this year’s Wild Goose.

A key to aging well is to continually reinvent yourself. I remember a co-worker from my college years who said 25 years after graduation that he had not changed one tiny bit. I said, “I am so sorry, that must be difficult.” I’m not sure he understood that I did not think it was a good thing that he had not changed.

One of the joys of the Goose is that there are plenty of people in attendance who are around my age. Most of us have been on similar journeys that took us out of the denomination of our youth, through the dark night of the soul, and into the light again, more humble, but also more confident. If we work all the way through difficult times we gain wisdom, the place in which great confidence and great humility come together.

After multiple speaking engagements, hosting my family for a wonderful holiday visit, investing hundreds of hours in the most recent TEDxMileHigh event, and speaking at the Goose, I’m ready to settle into a little slower rhythm for the next month. I will write more, run, mountain bike, hike, and sit by the firepit on the back patio. Four weeks of that kind of pace will be delightful. Anything more than that would be frustrating. I get antsy if I’m not busy.

I told a group of people this week that I am semi-retired. They laughed. I said, “Let me explain. Being semi-retired means I work hard, but I only do work that I enjoy.” For the most part, I am able to avoid the soul-sucking stuff. It still comes up in church every now and again because, well, it’s church. But for the most part, I get to do tasks that enhance my life, not tasks that diminish it.

As for today, I’ll go for a short run, answer a few emails, and start on next Sunday’s sermon.

And so it goes.

A few weeks ago I spoke for a large group of therapists, teachers, and administrators about the state of transgender affairs in the world, the challenges of providing care to individuals with gender dysphoria, and the ways in which fundamentalist religion gets in the way of that treatment. It was a six hour training session for which the therapists received ongoing licensure credits.

When I began, most of the therapists wore expressions I have when I attend such trainings. I am ready for a boring day, with marginally helpful information presented perfunctorily. I wondered how long it would take to win them over.

I had prepared a 30-minute introduction to make the audience comfortable with my presence and style, and help them see it would be a good day to pay attention. I’m relatively well-versed in transgender issues, though the horrific statistics related to anti-transgender laws are getting worse literally every day. The first half of the day was focused on transgender issues. The second half was focused on religion.

On the subject of why the fundamentalist forms of the desert religions are so opposed to transgender rights, I could talk off the top of my head for an entire day. I’ve been studying religion for five decades, since I took my first course in church history in 1971. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which religious people figure out how, generation after generation, to ignore Jesus’s instruction to love God, neighbor, and self. They get caught up in the identity of Jesus, and are not particularly concerned about the way of Jesus.

The audience to whom I spoke was for the most part secular. There were a dozen or so pastoral counselors, but they are all affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations and are theologically liberal. The rest of the audience was fairly unaware of the religious landscape in the US. I find that to be the case in the northeast, the Pacific northwest, and in college towns. Twenty-eight percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion. Most of those people are highly educated, and many live in those regions. They are as shocked at the anti-trans laws as they were at the election of Donald Trump. Unaware of just how much power evangelicals hold in conservative regions, they are aghast at the laws being passed to remove the rights of transgender people.

Kentucky and Florida now have laws that not only affect transgender children, but adults as well. The religious right has gone on record saying they want to end all medical treatment for all transgender people. They want a theocracy and want all scripture interpretations to come from conservative theologians. To date, over 500 anti-trans laws have been introduced in state legislatures in 2023. Seventy-one have been signed into law, with another eight sitting on governor’s desks awaiting signatures.

Last fall I was able to spend an evening speaking with television writers, talking about how transgender characters are portrayed in television series. We have passed the period in which a trans character was a curiosity, and moved into a period in which the fact that a character is transgender is incidental to the storyline. That is very positive progress, and helps the cultural normalization of trans people.

Next month I will be speaking to another group of national influencers about ways in which they can shift the narrative about trans people. When it comes to gender issues, young people have moved on. Millennials and Gen Z are over it. It is primarily Baby Boomers and to a lesser degree, Gen X, that are initiating these anti-trans laws, and yes, an inordinate number of them are Evangelical Christians.

I do not like that I have felt the need to write about this subject so often recently, but these are frightening times. We need allies who will stand up for the rights of trans people. We cannot do it alone. The best thing you can do is correct inaccuracies about trans people when you hear them. When someone says high percentages of transgender people detransition, tell them the facts. The truth is that 92 percent of trans people are pleased with their transition. Of the 8 percent who are not, only one in twenty-five of those people actually dislikes their new body. The other 24 do not like the rejection they experience as a transgender person. Transitioning isn’t the problem. The negative response of their environment is the problem.

While it is true that many older adolescents who identify as trans or non-binary change their minds after a period of experimentation, that is normal differentiation, and it is a good thing. It is not something to fret over or fear. Individuation demands a period of experimentation. Young people who have consistently and persistently identified themselves as transgender since early childhood almost never regret transitioning genders. Their gender dysphoria is hard-wired. They are not experimenting. They are trans, always have been and always will be.

It is difficult to have large segments of the population deny your very identity. I had a lot of decades of privilege and entitlement I brought with me when I transitioned, so it is not as hard for me to handle the current political environment. But I am concerned for others, and particularly for our children.

I know this crisis will eventually pass, but I hope it doesn’t take the death of an entire generation of Baby Boomers to get it done. This negative narrative has grown up over just 6 or 7 years, and it can wind down just as quickly, but only if we work together to shift the narrative.

And so it goes.

I am concerned for trans kids. My greatest concern is for those who need medical care and are being prohibited from receiving it. In Kentucky, physicians can be indicted for not beginning detransition care. That’s right, they can be arrested for not undoing transitions that have already begun! Altogether this year, there have been 495 laws introduced or signed into law taking away the civil rights of transgender people.

This post is not about those laws, and the damage they are doing to transgender people. I’ve written about that before, and will write about it again. But not today. This blog is about something else.

I have a second concern, one that does not curry favor with everyone in the transgender community. The percentage of the transgender population has remained steady for a long time at about .58 percent of all people. Roughly one in every two-hundred people is transgender. Recently, however, that number has tripled, and almost all of the growth has been among adolescents, specifically adolescents who were identified female at birth.

The vast majority of mental health providers believe that exploring gender identity, particularly during one’s adolescent years, is good and appropriate for individuation and differentiation. In both the United States and Europe, the biggest controversy among medical personnel is not such exploration, but about the medical treatment of adolescents who say they are transgender or nonbinary.

A study in the January 19, 2023 New England Journal of Medicine followed 315 transgender adolescents through two years of hormone therapy. A total of 60.3 percent were transmasculine and the remainder transfeminine. The study found that the majority of young people who received treatment had a remarkably better quality of life after those two years than they had before. The truth is that for a certain subset of the trans population, we have known that to be true for a long time. But the study failed to answer an important question. Were these study participants individuals whose gender dysphoria was later onset or earlier onset?

Most clinicians with concerns about treatment, including those who are generally supportive of medical treatment for trans youth, are concerned about the increasing numbers of young people whose dysphoria is later onset, after the age of 12. It is still true that any child five or six years of age who consistently and persistently says he or she is not the gender listed on their birth certificate, will continue to feel that way throughout life. Providing gender affirming care to these young people is still supported by the vast majority of clinicians in the United States and Europe. I am not talking about that segment of the population. My question about medical care is reserved for adolescents who do not present as transgender until 12 or later.

In the United States, providing medical care to any transgender young people, regardless of age of onset, has become a political lightning rod. To gain a more balanced perspective on the circumstances, I want to turn to Europe, where the subject is less political.

There is significant rethinking of medical treatment for transgender adolescents in Europe, including the United Kingdom. Why? One study in the UK of 221 adolescents receiving treatment at the Tavistock Clinic, found no detectible improvement in overall mental health after three years of medical treatment. While that study is an outlier, it does raise yellow flags.

No European nation has legally prohibited medical care for transgender adolescents, but there is growing concern about the demographic shift. One clinic in Ghent, Belgium has seen a 42-fold increase in those presenting for treatment. The increase in Sweden has been 17-fold. Finland has seen a marked increase of those presenting for treatment as having been identified female at birth, 75 percent of whom have a separate and severe mental health diagnosis, as opposed to fewer than 33 percent comorbidity in other studies. There is even concern being expressed in Netherlands, the birthplace of transgender adolescent care with what became known as the Dutch protocol.

Amsterdam’s first transgender care center was opened in 1972, and they have been the most progressive nation in terms of transgender care since that time. The Dutch protocol for children was developed in the 1990s. Over the last ten years the number of children seeking care has grown from 60 to 1600, with the vast majority being adolescents who were assigned female at birth.

What is increasingly clear is that for children who present as transgender at a very early age, providing puberty blockers during adolescence is appropriate. For those whose presentation with gender dysphoria is later onset, more study needs to be done. Are these children truly transgender, or are other maturational issues at work?

I have a lot of observations, but have reached no firm conclusions. It appears that a lot of young people who might have presented as goth in a previous generation are now identifying as transgender or nonbinary. Is what we are seeing typical differentiation or individuation, albeit with a new presentation, chosen for its ability to shock and trouble a new generation of confused parents or right-wing politicians? I believe it is possible.

How many of the adolescents who present as transgender today will identify as transgender ten years from now? The truth is that we do not know. My suspicion is that it will be about .58 percent, the same percentage that has always identified as transgender.

What about those who are nonbinary? The 2017 US Transgender Survey found that 62 percent of those who identified as nonbinary were between 16 and 26 years of age. Is that because older people were not free to identify as nonbinary until now? It is possible. There are several nonbinary individuals in my church, none of whom fall into the age category above. But it is also possible that the majority of adolescents who identify as nonbinary today will not do so in ten years.

Having anti-transgender zealots attacking all medical care for trans adolescents is tragic. And let’s be clear. It is evangelical Christians who are behind these laws. In 2017, 84 percent of evangelicals believed gender is immutably determined at birth. Sixty-one percent believed we give transgender people too many civil rights, and only 25 percent knew someone who was out as a transgender person.

Six years later, the numbers have gotten worse. Eighty-seven percent of evangelicals now believe gender is immutably determined at birth. Sixty-seven percent believe we give transgender people too many civil rights, and 31 percent know someone who is out as a transgender person. The number of evangelicals who know someone who is transgender has increased, but so has the opposition to trans rights. What accounts for the increase in knowing someone who is trans? It is probably an increase in those who know a transgender adolescent, not those who know a trans adult. That makes a difference in the conclusions one draws about gender dysphoria.

It is not difficult to determine the adolescents who need puberty blockers during adolescence. They are the early-onset individuals who have consistently and persistently identified as transgender since early childhood. They need medical care, or their suicide completion rate will increase dramatically. Being deprived of that medical care could have tragic consequences. No wonder people are moving from Texas to Colorado. Texas has some of the most restrictive transgender laws in the nation. Colorado is a wonderful environment for thoughtful treatment of transgender adolescents. We Coloradans are pleased to see so many families finding refuge in our beautiful state.

As for those who have later onset gender dysphoria, I believe watchful waiting is advised, as well as a good therapist well-versed in gender identity issues. Time will tell if these young people continue to identify as transgender or nonbinary, or if they will later identify as cisgender adults. There is nothing wrong with watchful waiting.

I imagine some of you will have thoughts about this post. I look forward to hearing from you.

When I was in Hawaii a few weeks ago I began reading James Hollis’s book, The Eden Project – In Search of the Magical Other. I don’t run across a lot of people reading Hollis, though last year’s Ted Lasso season featured a camera pan of the cover of The Middle Passage, more than a bit of a nod to the book’s influence on the writers. My favorite Hollis book is Swamplands of the Soul. Most of life is lived in the swamplands, so a map of the terrain seems like a very good idea.

The Eden Project brilliantly explains why we mess up every romantic relationship we ever have. We cannot avoid wanting the Other to take us back to the earliest stage of longing for the omnipotent, omniscient mother. Until we find that within, we will never truly be the romantic partner our lover deserves. John O’Donohue, in his book Eternal Echoes, writes about doing the work of becoming yourself:

There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become. You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands. This is a wonderful privilege and such an exciting adventure. To grow into the person that your deepest longing desires is a great blessing. If you can find a creative harmony between your soul and your life, you will have found something infinitely precious. You may not be able to do much about the great problems of the world or to change the situation you are in, but if you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul, you will bring light wherever you go. The gift of life is given to us for ourselves and also to bring peace, courage, and compassion to others.

“A great harmony between your soul and your life.” Yes, that is something precious. Hollis says once we have done the work O’Donohue has so beautifully described, we can finally become a worthy partner to our lover.

Joseph Campbell said marriage has nothing to do with being happy. It has to do with being transformed. The original projection onto the Other offers the fantasy of happiness, but reality cannot sustain that promise. Once the beloved is revealed as really Other, not just the carrier of  our projections, the troubles begin. Hollis says transformation is about enlargement and enlargement comes only through suffering.

Discovering the otherness of the Other can lead to the kind of loving energy which comes through caring for the other as Other, valuing and celebrating their otherness. For those fortunate enough to achieve that kind of love, the relationship is transformative. They allow the beloved to be who they are, even as they struggle to live authentically as they are.

Marriage has never been two halves becoming a whole. It is two wholes creating a third entity, the relationship, that must be nurtured as children are nurtured. It is the only entity created by the couple that stays in the house throughout their lives. Children are gone within a couple of decades. The relationship remains.

I am grateful for the marriage Cathy and I had. We still have a good relationship, though it is very different than it once was. It took us a long time to realize that if you are not committed to your own growth, you cannot truly appreciate the unique otherness of your partner. I wish it had not taken us so long to learn that lesson.

The core wound we all experience, that there is something about us that makes us unworthy of deep human connection, affects all of our relationships. Much of the reason is because our ego expends all of its energy trying to avoid the core wound. The ego believes acquiring power and safety are the only way to deal it. The ego blocks the soul from following its own path. The soul knows it is worthy of deep human connection, so it desires a richer journey. The soul is searching for meaning. It is, of necessity a solo search. You cannot appropriate the meaning your spouse has discovered, or postpone your own search in deference to theirs.

A healthy relationship is a base camp, with each person climbing his or her own mountain looking for the resonance, depth, and awe that indicates great meaning is nearby. You come back to the base camp at the end of the day, exhausted, exhilarated or discouraged. Whatever the case, you return ready to engage the Other on their equally fascinating quest.

You figure out all this good stuff when you’re old and have learned to suffer. We humans are not quick studies or willing sojourners. We have to be forced onto the road less traveled by, the easier road having been blocked by circumstances, leaving us no choice but to traverse the road filled with fallen branches and stones.

I finished The Eden Project and immediately started it again. It feels like one of those books you have to ponder. I might be able to eventually gain the wisdom of James Hollis or John O’Donohue. All I have to do is live another hundred years or so, and then I might be able to fully embody that kind of wisdom. Yep, that’s all I have to do.

And so it goes.

I’ve been contemplating what my next TED talk should be about. I don’t have one scheduled, but I have started thinking about what the subject should be. It’s been on my mind because I have the pleasure of coaching TEDxMileHigh speakers and I am always amazed at the breadth and depth of their talks. It is a joy to help the speakers bring them to life.

I am emceeing the June 24 event, which is always fun. We just had our first meeting with the speakers, and I can’t wait to start working with them. I told them they’d be sick of me by the time we get to June 24. The wife of one of the November speakers said, “My husband was equal parts terrified of you and grateful for you.” I said, “Yeah, that’s about right.” Helping speakers be at their best on the day of the event brings me immeasurable joy. To be alongside them at what has the potential to be one of the most important times of their lives is a great honor.

After working with 24 speakers last year, I keep thinking more and more about the subject of my next talk. An obvious choice would be America’s current fixation with transgender people. Having lost the war against gay marriage, the far right started looking for another enemy. Who knew they would choose transgender people? Though I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Zealots have been creating enemies since the beginning of time, and they always choose enemies that are powerless minorities.

At .58 percent of the population, we trans folks are definitely a minority. We have no lobby in congress, and no large contingent of supporters to whip up sentiment among the masses. We were the perfect foil for the right wing Republicans who now have 196 anti-transgender bills pending in state legislatures. If you want to think about the true absurdity of that, just consider that those same state legislatures do not have a single gun violence bill pending. Because, you know, I’m clearly a bigger threat to America than guns.

If I do a talk on being transgender, I think I’ll throw in a good bit of humor. Maybe it’ll be a nice little reminder that y’all shouldn’t kills us because we make you laugh and all. Of course a TED Talk on transgender issues would not have any traction outside of the United States. In most Western nations, the subject brings a big yawn. Only the United States has gone to seed on it.

I’ve also thought about doing a talk on staying young while growing older. Nobody ever thinks I’m the age I am. They usually think I’m at least ten years younger. That pleases me greatly. But if I do that talk, then the whole world will know how old I am, and if you haven’t noticed, age discrimination is real.

I might do a talk on resilience. I just did a speech on resilience last week. I’ve been working on the talk for months. It seemed to go well, though you can never tell when you’re sitting in your living room talking on Zoom and viewers are scattered all over the planet. I like to mix humor with pathos, and I couldn’t find much humor in the actions that forced the development of my resilience. I mean, getting fired by evangelicals after 35 years of good work isn’t very funny. Neither is losing your entire pension, or having hundreds of friends abandon you because you are no longer useful to them. Nope, nothing funny there. “Hey, did you hear the one about the friend of 40 years who never spoke to me again because of an issue that isn’t even in the Bible?” Yeah, not funny.

I could do another talk on more stuff I’ve learned about gender inequity. You might be surprised to hear this, but my list of examples of being treated misogynistically grows exponentially. I have entire new categories of having been dismissed that I did not have when I did my first talk in 2017.

That 2017 talk was lightning in a bottle. Between TEDxMileHigh and TED it has had over six million views. I’ve heard from women from all seven continents thanking me for validating their experience. Back in the late summer I got my second email from Antarctica. I guess they don’t have much to do there during the Antarctic winter. I know I probably won’t catch lightning in a bottle again, but I think I can come up with a compelling talk. Though I must admit, it is definitely easier coaching TED speakers than being one.

My five granddaughters think I should do a talk about them – you know – like how extraordinary and brilliant they are and how remarkable that is, you know,  given the fact that they carry my genetic material and all. Or maybe I give up the idea of doing a talk altogether and my granddaughters collectively give one on how they’ve been ruined by having a grandparent who is transgender. I mean, that’d guarantee the right wing viewers. But wait a minute, right wing folks don’t watch TED talks. Scratch that idea.

I’m going to put off thinking about my next talk until after the June 24 event. I already know what those talks are going to be about. Trust me, you don’t wanna miss them.

I check my junk file every week and notice I sometimes receive emails from a watchdog group riding herd over evangelical ministries. Every now and again, I check out their latest news.

Recently there has been a lot of controversy regarding Acts 29, a large church planting ministry similar to the one I directed for a quarter of a century. They’ve grown rapidly, have a huge position in the market, and have managed to get themselves into a fair amount of trouble over the last few years.

Some of the complaints about the ministry come from pastors who started churches with them. They are upset over Acts 29’s lack of transparency over whether or not they still believe in a complementarian view of women. For those not schooled in evangelical language, that is the view that women are not to preach or serve as elders, and that the husband is the head of the family. It is a view held in opposition to the egalitarian view, which teaches gender equality.

I forget there is still a world in which intelligent people believe men are supposed to be in charge of their families and churches and pretty much everything else. It is so foreign to anything I have known over the last ten years that it leaves me dumbfounded when people say with a straight face that God expects wives to submit to their husbands.

Conflict over women’s roles in the family and the church is just one example of the fantasy bubble of evangelicalism. The evangelical bubble makes me chuckle until I realize how much damage is being done to our nation because of evangelical perspectives on gender. It is not as bad as the horrible misogyny of fundamentalist Muslims in Afghanistan, nor as bad as a fictional America in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s bad enough.

Currently there are more than 900 anti LGBTQ+ bills pending in legislative bodies across the United States, 407 of them in state legislatures, and 196 of them trans specific. Pretty much all of those laws are driven by evangelical Christian men. As long as evangelical skirmishes remained contained within their own ranks, I viewed them as a tempest in a teapot. I could shake my head and dismiss them as a dying breed. Not anymore.

It all started in the 1980s with the Moral Majority. Grassroots organizers encouraged evangelicals to run for school boards, local governments, and state legislatures. It turns out evangelicals are as good at organizing as they are bad at biblical interpretation. Because of the abilities of state legislatures to gerrymander districts, and because of our forefathers accommodation to rural states giving them outsize power in the US Senate and Electoral College, we now have a nation of minority rule. That minority is made up of white, evangelical Christians, and they believe it is their God-given responsibility to enforce their moral code on the entire nation.

Now that the Dobbs decision has been handed down, we see America waking up to the outsize power these groups wield. We can see the direct line from complementarian thinking to anti-abortion legislation. Women should not be given agency over their own bodies. God says so. Except of course, God never said so. Their doctrinal positions are based on a very narrow type of hermeneutics and exegesis best described as literalism or originalism. Within the world of most scripture scholars, this type of biblical interpretation was dismissed more than a century ago. Unfortunately, no one told fundamentalists and evangelicals that, and through shrewd manipulation, they now hold great political power.

Evangelical men have mounted a campaign to take away my civil rights and declare me a non-person. They want to eradicate me from the face of the earth. As I wrote a few weeks ago, one of the leading organizations rallying people against trans rights is the American Principles Project. Terry Schilling, president of the organization, was asked if their opposition will stop with bans on medical care for adolescents. He answered, “I want transition care to be thought of as horrific medical practices that happened in the past.” The end game is clear. These Christians will fight tooth and nail to eradicate all transgender rights. Barring trans kids from scholastic sports is just the beginning.

I know that once Millennials and Gen Z become the majority of the electorate things will change. They are far more socially liberal than their parents, and they already make up 42 percent of voters. By 2036 they will be 62 percent of the electorate. Once my generation dies off, there will be few left to fight against LGBTQ+ rights and women’s equality. But last I checked, my generation isn’t dying off all that quickly. Until then, trans folks  and women are in trouble.

We need allies and apprentices on deck. Allies work from their own perspective to speak up on our behalf. Apprentices work at our direction to do the work. We need both groups. These attacks are not going away without a strong and vibrant resistance. I am grateful for those who are willing to speak up. There is no room for passive citizenship. Our nation’s future depends on active citizens willing to fight for equality for all Americans.

And so it goes.

Four Christian schools in Northern Colorado, including Longmont Christian School, not far from the church I serve, closed on March 31st because a large group of transgender people were headed up I-25 planning to destroy Christian churches and schools along the way. Yep. Awful, right? A Denver television channel showed a video of the principal of one of the schools in which he detailed the supposed threat. I sat on my couch and laughed at the absurdity of the accusation.

I think about the transgender people who now attend or have attended Envision Community Church (formerly Left Hand Church) in Longmont. We are people who have a hard time destroying dandelions in our front lawns, because you know, they are dandelions. We take spiders outside and wish them well on their journey. We rush injured birds to the local wildlife center. We cry at garage sales. The idea that we would be on a rampage to destroy property is beyond absurd. Have any of these people actually ever met a transgender person?

Yep, that’s the problem. They have not. Over 60 percent of evangelicals believe transgender people already have too many civil rights, yet only 25 percent have actually met someone who is out as a transgender person.

I used to preach regularly at LifeBridge Christian Church in Longmont, a megachurch of a few thousand people. Do you know how many of those people have had conversations with me since I transitioned? It’s not hard counting them. It’s fewer than a dozen, and three of them didn’t realize they were talking with the person who used to preach for them. I’ve met with everyone who has asked to meet with me, but that is exactly three people.

Now you see the problem. It takes hearing people’s stories and being in close proximity to one another to narrow the political divide. And today that simply doesn’t happen. So, some Christian School principal in Loveland, Colorado, earnestly warned his student’s parents about a “threat” that was so absurd it actually made me laugh. After all of the laws and rhetoric of the last few months, it’s pretty hard to make me laugh about this subject. Most of the time I’m sad, and often I am considerably frightened.

The board members of the town in which I live were all encouraging one another to run for office again next year. We enjoy working together and share similar concerns about the priorities of our beautiful town. I had to remind them that as the anti-trans rhetoric increases, my chances of reelection dwindle. It is just a fact.

Sometimes the media adds to the problem. March 31 was International Transgender Day of Visibility, but our local paper had no article about this important celebration, only a front page article about the four Christian schools that closed because they were afraid of transgender people. Thanks Longmont Times-Call. That certainly helps trans people. In the newspaper’s defense, the article did focus on the fact that the threats were completely unsubstantiated. Nevertheless, frightened evangelicals got news coverage, while anything positive about transgender people was absent from the pages of the paper.

I keep thinking about all of the trans people who now attend or have ever attended our church. I keep thinking of the threat we are to society. Getting to know us is a threat to maintaining bigotry and hatred toward transgender people. Spending time with us is a threat to maintaining the fantasy that we are anything other than ordinary humans, roughly as healthy or unhealthy as everybody else. Attending our church is a threat to being able to back up your principal’s harried call to close the school doors because we are headed en masse to destroy every Christian thing in our path. I mean, among other things, that would include destroying my own church.

Reading my memoir would be a threat to continuing your chosen ignorance about the pain transgender people experience from a very young age. Reading my son’s book would be a threat to your conviction that transgender people destroy their families. Meeting my co-pastors would be a threat your conviction that people who support trans people are evil, or at the very least, misguided.

I have a friend from New Zealand who said on a call last week, “What is wrong with America? You are a sick society?” I said, “Yes, we are. And all of this has happened in less than a decade.” If we can fall this far this fast, I am truly frightened about what might come next.