Trading Your Map for a Compass – Part II

/ Paula Stone Williams / 2 Comments

When you finally realize you must exchange your map for a compass, it always comes with great fear, because it means you are stepping into the unknown. You come into a certain ennui or dysthymia or cynicism and you know you must change.

What had been a knowing now becomes a calling. Is it from God? Maybe. I can’t say I really understand these things. But I do know that this calling comes from place deeper than the ego. It comes from the realm of the soul.

When you come to this place of having been called, you will find you are right on time, ready to collect the gods who have arrived down at the station.  With trembling, you embark on a path in service to the numinosity of those gods wanting to make themselves known through you. Previously, we avoided engaging in that endeavor because we were not sure we wanted the gods to make themselves known through us. Doing so comes with a responsibility we are hesitant to accept.

The world is desperately in need of the gods making themselves known through us. It is how we are touched by the numinous, an experience we all crave. It is why we cram into concert halls and theaters, hoping to be transported onto a higher plain by a person or persons who are open to the gods making themselves known through them.

We have no idea why Stonehenge exists. When I visited Stonehenge with my daughter Jael, I did my own musing as to its existence. I thought, “Some powerful person had a profoundly meaningful experience on this plain. Maybe this is where they fell in love, brought here by their heart’s desire because the love of their life knew exactly where to sit and watch the sunset on the summer solstice. The person later paid homage to that luminous moment by using their power to engage an army in moving a lasting tribute into place, where for millennia the solstice sun would be captured between the stones every year. The encased sun a reminder of that moment of luminosity from so many years ago.”

It was just a fantasy, but it meets all the requirements of a moment of numinosity. I have a water color of Stonehenge just outside my therapy office. I always hope my clients might search for their own explanation for the stones as they come and go.

When moments of numinous beauty arrive, we desperately want to memorialize them. We set them in stone as a way to hang onto them for as long as we breathe and beyond. This is what religious dogma represents. Jungian analyst James Hollis calls it the afterthought of a people seeking to contain the mystery of an original experience. The experience itself is transformative, but the attempt to codify it is little more than thoughts after the moment of numinosity. It is afterthought, and in its desire to hold onto the ephemeral, it is transformed into dogma.

Dogma is trying to encase a numinous experience in a plaster cast we can place on a holy shelf. To those who did not experience the numinosity, it is but an empty shell vainly trying to hold an experience. It might be a family Bible on the coffee table, unopened for decades but representative of something that was alive to someone once upon a time. It no longer has a heartbeat. Dogma is doomed to fail in its attempt to encase a numinous experience in time.

We cannot live in the dogma of someone else’s numinous moment. We must experience our own.

The most numinous of experiences do have a timeless quality. The experience takes place in real time, but even then, as Pascal noted, we wander in times that are not ours. We have all said of such as experience, “It was as if time stood still.” The lingering of a moment is a true gift.

I always knew I was transgender, but in my sixth decade I came to realize it was more than a knowing, it was a calling. I wrote about it in my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned. The journey was perilous. I lost all of my jobs, my pension, my friends, pretty much everything from my past life but my family and a couple of  friends. My life now is marked by discontinuity from my previous life. In many ways it feels as if my life began twelve years ago. I dislike the discontinuity. My dreams are filled with narratives attempting to reengage with my past life, all of them fruitless. When evangelicalism expels you, it expels you for good.

The last dozen years have been incredibly productive. I have influenced far more lives and engaged in more experiences than ever. I have done three TED Talks with over 10 million views. I’ve coached TED speakers. I have been interviewed by more media outlets than I can count. I have spoken for scores of companies, conferences, and universities all over the world. I have written two books and built a thriving therapy practice. I started a church, and have preached at dozens of churches around the nation. I serve as the mayor pro tem of Lyons, Colorado.  And I am humbled by the reality that countless numbers of people from all over the world have told me how inspired they are by my journey. For them, I have been a source of light.

I find all of that more than fascinating, because I still have the same human flaws I have always had. I am too needy of the spotlight, too impatient, always in a hurry. I rarely have an unexpressed thought. I continue to be prone to dysthymia and think the sky is falling when I receive any kind of bad news. It is quite a paradox that people find the numinous through someone with so many manifest weaknesses.

When you trust the soul to follow its own compass instead of someone else’s map, people want to know you. They want to understand where you found the strength to set aside the conventional for the road less travelled. They are looking for someone a step or two in front of them on the journey toward authenticity, and they realize that for them at least, you are that person. The gods are making themselves known through you.

The responsibility is heavy. You warn these fellow travelers of the rocks and shoals that want to smash your boat to pieces, including the ones yet to be faced. You do not want them to follow you, but to be moved by your journey to find their own compass, their own true north, their own journey toward living authentically. Then the gods will make themselves known through them too. This is how we all move forward.

I am grateful I abandoned my maps for a compass. I may not know the specifics of where I will journey next, but I do know the direction of true north.

And so it goes.

 

Trading Your Map for a Compass

/ Paula Stone Williams / 2 Comments

In his book, Living With Borrowed Dust, Jungian analyst James Hollis says the most important question we must answer is this: “What supports you when nothing supports you?” Where is your inner compass and how do you access it when sky and terrain blur into one impenetrable fog?

We are born with a working compass, though for many of us a myriad of awful religious teachings, like the Christian notion of original sin, have corrupted our trust in that inner compass. Much of the work of therapy is removing the obstacles stopping us from finding and following our inner compass. For most of us, it is hidden beneath the ego.

In another of his books, Tracking the Gods – The Place of Myth in Modern Life, Hollis says it would make a huge difference if every child could hear their parents say, time and again, “You are brought into life by nature having all you need. You have a great force, a great spirit, a great energy within. Trust it, stay in contact with it, and it will always lead you toward what is right for you.” In other words, a living, breathing, pulsating, well-calibrated inner compass.

Unfortunately, most of us receive the opposite message. My mother, a very bright and engaging woman, suffered from major depression and used to lie behind a closed door in her bedroom for days at a time. The doctor would come and I would hear muffled words and weeping from behind the door, but she did not emerge. During my early teen years my father, a kind and loving man, said to me, “Your mother’s been this way since you were born.” A statement like that has a tendency to stick with you. Dad did not make a connection with how I heard those words.

Even when the message is not so dramatically delivered, parents still find a myriad of ways to tell us that their problems are because of us, and that if it was not for the protection provided by our parents, we would be eaten by some kind of monster or another.

Those early maps stay folded in our hearts, and are unfolded with regularity. The asterisk at the top of the map sends you to words at the bottom: “There is something inherent within you that causes you to be unworthy of deep human connection. If you want to avoid complete abandonment, you must carefully follow this map.”

Nowhere does the map say to look inward for direction. It says to look at the one who is the greatest threat to you. The threatener might be a parent, or a punitive god, or a religious community whose primary interest is the retention of power.

As I said in my last post, though we become adults, we continue to follow the map of our childhood. The map served us well when we were powerless and our environment was filled with overwhelming external threats. But we are powerless no longer. The map is a map for the helpless, and we are no longer helpless, yet we still refer to the same old map.

That map must be discarded. We do not need a new map. Maps will always have to be discarded. What we need is the compass with which we came into the world.

Without the instruction that comes from that compass, we meander. We move, because we exist in time and time keeps changing, but our movement is like stepping on the gas without a steering wheel. We go wherever the wheels, the terrain, and the physics of it all take us.

A part of finding the inner compass involves another question Hollis suggests: “What is this path in service to inside of me?” There is an inner story to all of our paths. Many have no idea what inner story they are living out. For some, life has never been safe enough to allow that question. For others, the family or culture in which they were raised prohibited it, and they did not have the ego strength to stand up to the powers that be.

In the first half of life, when we are following the map of childhood, our path is in service to the unfulfilled dreams of our parents and the demands of the tribe in which we were  raised. It is important work, but it does not sustain one’s soul. Somewhere in the middle of the road of your life you awake in a dark wood in which the true way is wholly lost. At least that’s how Dante defined it. Maybe you come into a certain ennui or dysthymia or cynicism in which you say with McBeth, “Life is but a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

This is when you become uncomfortable enough to begin a serious search for that long buried compass. You desire a path in service to the numinosity of the gods wanting to make themselves known through you. We avoid engaging in that search because we’re not sure we want the gods making themselves known through us. Doing so comes with a responsibility we are hesitant to accept. Ever heard of the Hero’s Journey?

The world is desperately in need of the gods making themselves known through us. It is how we are touched by the numinous, an experience we all crave. It is why we cram into concert halls and theaters, hoping to be transported onto a higher plain by a person or persons who are open to the gods making themselves known through us.

That we might become a source of that numinosity is terrifying. It should be. It comes with a lot of responsibility, a responsibility I will talk about in my next post.

Trying Not to Take it Personally

/ Paula Stone Williams / 3 Comments

Nowadays there are not many worlds in which I accept assigned tasks. Age and semi-retirement have given me the freedom to decide what responsibilities I will or will not accept. A couple of years ago I was volunteering in one of the rare places in which I am willing to do whatever is asked, no matter how unappealing the task – the world of all things TED. I’ve been a TED speaker, TED Speaker’s Ambassador, TEDx speaker, speaker’s coach, and emcee. I believe so much in the work of TED that I am willing to do pretty much whatever they ask of me.

A couple of years ago I was assigned a speaker to coach who was an elected official from the conservative side of the political spectrum. (It might be helpful to note that I am an elected official from the liberal side of the political spectrum.) This person represented a region that is not known for its support of the LGBTQ+ community. I was not pleased to have been assigned to work with this individual. I made assumptions. He did too.

Initially we treated each other warily as we worked on his script. It was not until we started working on his delivery that things began to change. He had never memorized talks before and my notes on memorization techniques worked for him. I knew things had shifted when on dress rehearsal day he introduced me to his young children as his friend and coach, Paula. I had become Paula, the freind and speaker’s coach, instead of Paula, the transgender woman.

I always want the fact that I am transgender to be incidental to who I am. I imagine that is a deep seated desire of most trans people. We do not want to be defined by our transition. We just want to get on with our lives. With so few transgender people in the world and with so much controversy about the subject, it is a desire unlikely to find much fulfillment in my lifetime.

I have always said that proximity and narrative are what will close the political divide. If we can come in close contact with one another and hear each other’s stories, understanding will change and tolerance will increase. But as a self-referential human (we are all self-referential) I tend to think the other guy needs to change more than I do. Our initial tendency is always to think that way, try as we might to be objective and open-minded.

I discovered with this particular speaker that whether or not another person is likely to see my gender transition as incidental to our relationship depends as much on me as it does on the other person. What assumptions do I make? When someone’s initial response to me is reserved or questioning, do I take it personally? You already know the answer to those questions because you know your own tendency. We all make assumptions and take things personally.

Cathy and I used to have a marriage therapist who would ask, “Have you asked her if she feels that way, or have you just assumed it? You know, she’s right here, we could ask her.” He said it with a straight face every single time he had to say it, which was often.

You do not have to be transgender to understand that when others have identified you as their enemy, there is absolutely nothing you can do about the other person. There is a lot you can do about you.

The fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous is to make a searching and fierce moral inventory of yourself. As with so many of the tenets of AA, this one works for everyone. Blaming others comes easily. Looking inward, not so much. The only path toward maturity I know includes the hard work of being dedicated to stringent self-examination, being open to challenge from the outside, and being committed to a life of honesty. Honesty with others is important. Honesty with yourself is even more important.

The stories we tell ourselves are many, and a lot of them are wrong. They are stories concocted of whole cloth from old maps, maps that served us once upon a time, but are useless once after a time. For instance, many of my counseling clients still work from childhood maps. I remind them that those maps were essential when they were helpless children, but they do them no good now. They are the maps of the powerless, and my clients are no longer powerless. (It might be good to note that I do not work with children and adolescents, who are indeed pretty powerless.)

Since transitioning I have learned that women do not give other women the benefit of the doubt, something in my experience men are more inclined to do. As a woman, I get no free passes. I do not start closer to the finish line, as well-educated white men do. In fact, as a transgender woman who is subject to the wildly inaccurate public imagination about what it means to be transgender, I face a lot of disadvantages. I could focus on the injustices of that, but what does it get me? Not much.

I find the onus is on me to do the work I need to do if I am going to live wholeheartedly. Because of the privilege I experienced as Paul, I did not have to face shadow sides of myself very often. As Paula, I do.

I’ve mentioned that I am working on a new book. Its working title is: When Their Enemy Is You – Responding with an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and a Curious Soul. Here is the outline of the book, as it currently stands:

An Open Mind

            Avoiding our tendency to create enemies that do not exist

            When a person’s moral foundation is not the same as yours.

            Why belonging wins over truth every time

            Those who see you as an enemy are not evil, they just want to be safe

            Why power and safety are so important

            When fear becomes your shadow government

A Receptive Spirit

            Confronting the enemy in your own heart

            When it’s time for a new map

            Tolerating otherness as a sign of maturity

            The heart has its reasons

            Placing knowledge in the context of experience

            Beneath the ego lies the soul

A Curious Soul

            What supports you when nothing supports you?

            Spinning honey out of your old failures

            Choosing a path that enhances rather than diminishes your life

            Discerning and serving that which is worthy of your service

            Moving from insight to courage to endurance

            Up until the end, she kept trying to figure it out

I am in the process of writing the proposal for the book. It is slow going. But I do not want fear to be my own shadow government, so I am laboring away. I’ll keep you informed about how things are going.

And so it goes.

Here We Go Again

/ Paula Stone Williams / 6 Comments

This is my summer of of air travel discontent. The season is halfway over and I have taken eighteen flights. Four have flown on time. On Saturday we sat on a taxiway in Dallas for thirty-five minutes as the flight crew fixed an electronic gauge issue. Fixing it took five minutes. Filing the paperwork and getting approval to depart took the other half hour. The flight to Austin, once we took off, was only 33 minutes, two minutes shorter than the time we sat on the taxiway. They could have told us what was going on while we waited, but nope, they kept us in suspense until the end. It was 100 degrees outside and pushing 80 inside the plane.

While we sat on the taxiway I had no idea where we were because everyone on the entire flight was staring at their phones. From the time people sat down after they boarded until the seatbelt sign went off and they could leave the plane, they stared at their phones. If they happened to be sitting in a window seat, the window shade was never opened – not ever. You could be flying over the Grand Canyon, but you would never know because heaven forbid someone should open a window shade and cause a glare on someone else’s phone screen.

I used to sit in the first row on the aisle, to be close to the bathroom and to be the first person off the plane. Now I sit in the window seat in row one, so I can control the window shade and actually look out the window. The Front Range of Colorado was beautiful Saturday morning.

Saturday’s was not the hottest flight I’ve been on. There are a couple of aircraft types that do well with air conditioning when you are on the ground. On the whole Airbus is better than Boeing. As for the worst aircraft for keeping you cool when you are on the ground – a Bombardier CRJ200 wins, hands down. The CRJ200 is a clown car with wings. It also serves nicely as an oven should you want to bake a bunch of flyers while you wait to take off in Phoenix.

I should have expected the DEN-DFW-AUS fiasco. Do not ever fly through Dallas in the summertime. Come to think of it, do not ever fly through DFW anytime. Everyone who works there is surly, even more than Philadelphia, and PHL has a high bar for surliness.

Do not fly into Denver after one in the afternoon during the summertime. The thunderstorms that come off the mountains will get ya. Never fly into Newark, ever, regardless of the time of day. The reasons are too numerous to list. Cathy and I flew into Newark once from Vienna. It took us longer to drive home to Long Island than it did to fly from Vienna to New Jersey. It was a Friday afternoon in the summertime. If you live in metro New York, you understand.

On the list of airports to avoid, you can add Chicago O’Hare, unless you like taxiing for hours on end to and from the terminal. I’m pretty sure you land in Wisconsin and they drive the planes the rest of the way to the ORD gates.

Heaven forbid the flight you are taking into ORD should be late and therefore miss it’s slot at the gate. If that happens you will go to the penalty box (yep, that’s what the pilots call it) until the following weekend. And of course, since you are on the ground, you cannot get up to go to the bathroom the entire time you are in the penalty box. Should you defy their firm orders and get up to use the bathroom anyway, you’d better hope they don’t get clearance to leave the penalty box while you are in the bathroom. For the record, I do not say this from experience, but I have seen what happens to people who do. It’s not pretty.

Other things not to do when traveling – do not get a rental car in Phoenix. The rental car complex is 279 miles from the airport. The same is true of the rental car complex at Cleveland Hopkins airport. The rental building is somewhere across Lake Erie in rural Ontario. You have to have your passport to get there.

What four flights have flown on time for me this summer, you might ask. Believe it or not, two were flying into and out of LaGuardia, which is now one of the best airports in the nation. (Yep, I’m not kidding.) The others were into and out of LAX. If New York City and Los Angeles can figure out how to run on-time airports, why can’t anybody else?

Which airport has the worst TSA experience? Denver, without a doubt. They spent literally 2.3 billion dollars to update the terminal and TSA screening is now less efficient than it was before the updates. How do you even do that? I waited 30 minutes to get through the TSA checkpoint in Denver on my way to New York last month, and I have both pre-check and Clear. It took me literally 30 seconds to get through at LaGuardia on the way home. You read that right – 30 minutes at Denver and 30 seconds at LaGuardia! I have a theory about that. Denver’s TSA workers are from Denver, which has the worst drivers in America. LaGuardia’s TSA workers are from New York, which has the best drivers in America. Wasting time is not a New York option.

Do I have a favorite airport? Yep. It’s any airport where the lines are quick, the workers efficient,  the gate agents known how to board a flight, and there are enough marshallers and wing walkers when you arrive to actually get you to your gate. Don’t get me started about waiting for wing walkers.

Why can’t other gate agents be as efficient as Karen at DEN, or MaryLynn or Debbie were at ISP, or pretty much 90 percent of the USAir people, folks who now have to deal with legacy American Airlines agents who board stray cats before first class flyers, especially at DFW.

I flew with Edwin Colodny once. I sat across from him. He was the CEO of USAir. I thanked him for running a wonderful airline. He was very gracious. Employees said he was one of the best airline CEO’s ever, along with Tom Davis at Piedmont. If I ran into Robert Isom on a flight, today’s American CEO, I would not be praising him for his wonderful airline.

I’m writing all of this on Sunday evening, while I wait for my flight back to Denver. My first two return flights cancelled. American said they can’t get me home until Monday evening. I switched to United. The flight that is supposed to leave at 8:30 is now pushed back to 10:10, arriving in Denver at midnight.

Reading through this I’m pretty sure I sound like that cranky old person who says, “Dang it, things ain’t as good as they used to be.” Come to think of it, when it comes to flying, things ain’t as good as they used to be.

I’ll let you know if I ever get home.

And so it goes.

The Old Lone Ranger

/ Paula Stone Williams / 1 Comment

I was reading an article the other day about the difficulty getting biographies right. It is rare that anyone does. There are over 15,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. As a kid I read every book about him that was available in my branch of the Akron, Ohio Public Library. Even those elementary level books didn’t agree amongst themselves. Did the Lincoln’s really have a three-sided cabin, and if so, for how long?

It took me years but I finally slogged through Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. Lin Manuel Miranda not only made his way through it, he wrote a musical about it. That’s biographical dedication. Not sure the musical or the biography have done as much for the nation as Miranda and Chernow would have liked.

While children’s books, young adult books, and novels get shorter and shorter, biographies keep getting longer. Chernow’s new book about Mark Twain is over1200 pages and if the reviews are right, they give us all the sordid details of his life and none of the fun.

In the musical, Hamilton, the final song is Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. The anthropologist and philosopher René Girard reminded us that it is the victors who get to tell the story. They are the ones who create the “truth” of their generation. Doesn’t sound very objective.

I respect Chernow’s effort to get it right, or Jon Meacham’s, or any of the other respected biographers. Objectivity, however, is an illusion. If it is a subject perceiving the information, then it is no longer objective, no matter how hard the author tries to make it so. I suppose the best we can hope for is a biographer who has done his or her best to get out of their own way as much as possible.

Autobiographies don’t get it right any more than biographies do. I know a little something about that. My autobiography, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned, was published by Simon & Schuster four years ago this month.

I tried to be as honest and truthful as I knew how to be. Yet today, four years later, I wonder why I chose to include some stories and not others. And of course, all of the stories are told from my perspective. As I did with my TED Talks, I verified the information in the book. The fact checkers at Simon & Schuster did their part as well. But still, someone with another perspective would tell a different story.

Do any of us really know who we are? If we sat down for an interview with a biographer on a Monday, would we give the same answers we would have given the previous Friday? I mean, the weekend intervened between the two interviews. Who knows what insights we might have gained during that weekend? I am constantly changing, growing, unfolding into the next iteration of me. Unless I choose to stop growing, that process will never end.

James Hollis says dogma represents the afterthought of a people seeking to contain the mystery of an original experience. The experience is transformative, but the attempt to codify it is afterthought, and afterthought turns into dogma.

Our experience takes place in real time, but even then, as Pascal noted, we wander in times that are not ours. Rilke said something similar, “We are not much at home in the world we have created.”

We have lost the great metanarratives that grounded previous generations. In postmodern life the only metanarrative allowed is the one that says there can be no metanarratives, no big stories that explain the meaning of life.

The old myths are being crowded out in our postmodern age, but we need them to thrive. As a species, we impose order on chaos to bring meaning to life. Whether it’s Oedipus, Odysseus, or Beowulf, these stories all have patterns that are consistent throughout history. Jung called them archetypes. The same is true of the great religions. The Hero’s Journey is one such archetype. These patterns (archetypes) come to us through what Jung called the collective unconscious. We form these stories because, as Pascal said in Pensées, “The silence of these empty spaces frightens me.” We desperately want to make sense of our lives. That is ubiquitous to the human experience. Whether hero, accomplice, or acolyte, we want to place ourselves in a grand story.

That’s why biographies and even autobiographies always get it wrong, because making sense of one’s life is a shifting target in an ongoing story. You can’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. Even the Lone Ranger can’t do it. You can peel off layers, but the real you is not at some inner core. It’s being created as you peel off the layers.

I have a hard time reading my own autobiography without wanting to edit it. Interestingly, I can listen to it without a similar compulsion. I think that’s because my voice held all the things for which my left brain could not find words. Listen to the book, you’ll see what I mean.

I was fortunate to have an excellent sound engineer. I recorded the audiobook during the pandemic, and because he lived nearby, Simon & Schuster assigned me their top engineer. He used to be a rock and roll engineer who worked on Pet Sounds and Graceland, two of the most iconic albums in rock history. He knew how to coax me beneath my ego and into my soul.

We finished the recording in three and a half days. It just about wrecked me. It was early April and before we recorded I had to turn the heating system off so there was utter silence in my study. After a while it’d get too cold and I’d take a break and turn the heat back on. The night after I finished I slept for ten hours. It wasn’t the temperature variations that got to me, it was the emotional yoyo I went through reliving the stories as I read them aloud. If you decide to read my book, and I hope you do, I’d suggest the audio version. It gets closer to the silence of the empty spaces.

I have another book with my agent right now. The working title is When Their Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, Receptive Spirit, and Curious Soul. The book will explore how to live when a culture has decided you are its enemy. So yes, it will also be autobiographical, and even finishing the proposal is hard interior work.

The more deeply you live into it, the easier life becomes. Yeah, that’s not true, not true at all. I was messing with ya. Life is hard. Frederick Buechner said, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

The Radical Middle

/ Paula Stone Williams / 2 Comments

The Buddha famously said life is suffering. The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck began his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, with the words “Life is difficult.” More poetically, Seamus Heaney said there are tears at the heart of things.

I have been writing a lot lately about the tears at the heart of things. I cannot read the newspaper any given morning without being overwhelmed by the heartless machinations of the current administration. Sadness gives birth to anger, and anger works, but only until sunset. Then your anger must be replaced by a receptive spirit, an open mind, and a curious soul.

I have been trying to bring a receptive spirit, open mind, and curious soul to understanding the anti-transgender agenda of the far right.

Before 2016, gender dysphoria was hardly a major political issue. Up until that time it was little more than the quiet stepchild of the LGBTQ movement. In 2016, the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School did a survey based on responses from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 19 states. They estimated that about 0.6 percent of the American population identified as transgender. The numbers fluctuated between 0.8 percent in Hawaii and 0.3 percent in North Dakota.

The margin of error suggested that somewhere between 0.36 percent to 0.95 percent of the population identified as transgender. In that 2016 study, the term transgender was used as a binary term, indicating that a transgender person was someone who felt they were the opposite gender from that listed on their birth certificate.

In the 2016 study 0 .7 percent of those between ages 18 and 24 identified as trans. A total of 0.6 percent of those between 25 and 64 identified as trans, and 0.5 percent over 65 identified as transgender. Those numbers are consistent with many other studies done before that time.

In their follow-up study in 2022, the Williams Institute found significant changes. A total of 1.3 percent of those between 18 and 24, and 1.4 percent of those between 13 and 17 identified as transgender, while the rest of the population (those over 24) remained at between 0.5 and 0.6 percent, the same percentage as in 2016.

That means that while the number of transgender adults remained steady, the number of transgender teens doubled. That is a statistically massive shift in just six years, a 100 percent increase in teens and early twenty-somethings identifying as transgender.

A Pew Research Study in 2022 found even higher numbers of young people who identified as transgender. Their surveys showed that 5.1 percent of those under 25 years of age identified as transgender or non-binary. About 2 percent identified as transgender, while 3 percent identified as non-binary (an option not presented in the Williams Institute 2016 study.)

I presented that information at a university several months ago and a number of people left the auditorium. Two confronted me in the hallway after the presentation and told me they had been traumatized by my presentation. At the point at which they chose to leave, all I had done was present the information above, without commentary.

When the right blasts the transgender community, this is part of what they are frustrated by – the wholesale refusal of the trans community to listen to any information that could call into question their understanding of gender dysphoria.

Whether these students liked it or not, a major university found a 100 percent increase in teens who identified as transgender. If we accept the Pew Research number, it was a 300 percent increase. That is information that should give one pause and be approached with an open mind.

Why have the numbers risen so dramatically? If the percentage of those over 25 who identify as transgender has remained steady at 0.5 percent, does that mean when those under 25 get older, between half and two-thirds of them will no longer identify as transgender? That is a really important question to answer.

It is of less importance if these young people are exploring their gender identity and not taking medications that have long term side effects. Let their individuation and differentiation continue unabated. They will figure things out on their own. Young people have been doing that for millennia.

If, on the other hand, they are taking testosterone or anti-androgens and estrogen that have life-long effects, what happens if they decide they are not transgender after all? The data would indicate it is possible that fully half of them might find themselves in that position.

These questions are not right or left. They are legitimate data-based queries. If a person storms out of the room because this data exists and these questions are being asked, are they any more fair-minded than those who blindly and arrogantly say, “God created only two genders, and the gender you were at birth is the gender you are.” Both are positions of passion rather than thoughtful conclusions based on the best scientific evidence. The Cass Report in England asked similar questions. It has been excoriated by most in the trans community.

During the Biden presidency I was twice invited to the White House for their Pride Celebration. I did not get there either time. The first time my flight was cancelled, but the second time was different. I was aware that most of those in attendance were not people who would appreciate my nuanced approach to gender dysphoria. Just mentioning the Cass report in that environment would have created a firestorm. I decided not to go.

My lifelong friend, David, and I started using a term in the 1980s that we still use today – the radical middle. The middle is radical because culture trumps truth every single time,  and culture demands that you take one side or the other. The middle is not an option. But what if the radical middle is where the truth lies?

Whether it comes from the right or the left, I’ve grown weary of the rhetoric on transgender issues. I want to take the radical middle, looking at the data and watching with great curiosity as the future unfolds. What percentage of the population is and shall remain transgender? Will it be a half percent, as it has historically been, or will today’s higher numbers remain? The truth is that we don’t know. And yes, the truth matters.

Abandon Hope?

/ Paula Stone Williams / 7 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a Good View from Here

/ Paula Stone Williams / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it goes.

Tis a Holy Thing

/ Paula Stone Williams / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch

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

To be, and Oh, to lose,

A things for fools this, and a holy thing

For your life once lived in me

Your laughter lifted me, your word was gift to me

To remember this brings painful joy

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

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

It Feels Like Morning

/ Paula Stone Williams / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it goes.