Paula Stone Williams's Blog

Last weekend it was my honor to speak for the Common Good Forum in Boulder, Colorado. This fall’s theme was Common Ground for the Common Good. I did the morning keynote, followed by a panel of four mayors moderated by KUNC reporter Rae Solomon, followed by an afternoon session with Nancy Norton, a Boulder comedian. The whole thing was delightful, my kind of Saturday.

My keynote was based on the proposed title of my next book: When Their Enemy is You – Responding With an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and a Curious Soul. I’ve been working on the talk for a few months, trying to get complicated information into a 40-minute talk that is understandable to all – not an easy task.

There is nothing I love more than taking complex information and making it understandable to a broad audience in as short a time as possible. When I see audience members have aha moments, I know I have succeeded.

Communication demands that the communicator and those to whom the information is communicated are both on the same wavelength. Greater discipline is required of the communicator than of the audience. Who is your audience? What is their level of education and knowledge about the subject? What is their level of interest?

To me, a talk has two goals. First, it must impart information the audience did not previously know. One attendee this past Saturday told me no less than three times, “I already knew all of that information, but I liked the talk.” Oh well, so much for having achieved the first goal.

My second goal is to provide insight. That is also one of my goals as a therapist. Good therapy involves insight, courage, and perseverance. The therapist can only provide insight. The client has to muster the other two.

When I am speaking, I want to take the audience’s knowledge and enhance it in such a way that a new piece of information allows them to connect the dots and have an aha moment. On Saturday I talked about four issues that are exacerbating the problem of our current cultural divide.

First, humans have a tendency to create enemies that do not exist. Second, we do not all work from the same moral standard. The oldest moral standard is that there is no greater moral good than to protect the integrity of the tribe. The second moral standard, also quite ancient, is that there is no greater moral good than to obey the teachings of the gods. This is the moral standard of all forms of fundamentalism.

The third moral standard is the youngest, only about 2,000 years old. It is the moral standard that there is no greater moral good than to protect the freedom of the individual. It is the moral standard of all of western Europe and the secular United States. Most of us work from the third moral standard.

After understanding our tendency to create enemies that do not exist and recognizing that we do not all work from the same moral standard, we come to the third issue I talked about last Saturday.

For the last 500 years we have lived in a left-brain heavy world, which is unfortunate because the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere of the human brain. The left is its emissary. Yep, I know that is not enough information for you to grasp what I was talking about, but I hate it when a post goes over 1000 words. Sorry ’bout that.

The fourth issue about which I spoke was the myth that humans care more about the truth than they care about belonging. That is simply not true. We consistently care more about belonging than we care about the truth. It is the rare person who has enough ego strength to care more about the truth than they do about belonging.

I did manage to cover all four topics in less than 40 minutes, and then was joined by Stan Mitchell for another 30 minutes of Q&A. Stan is my favorite interviewer. It is always best to have an interviewer who is smarter and more knowledgeable than you. Unfortunately the lecture is not available to the public. If you were in attendance I can send the manuscript to you. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the book.

I will write about my observations about the mayors panel next week. Suffice it to say I believe mayors are the politicians most likely to have their feet planted firmly on the ground.

This week I’m preparing lectures for next Monday and Tuesday at Brite Divinity School on the campus of Texas Christian University. It’s a good thing I’m not lecturing at Texas A&M, since when it comes to issues of gender identity, as of today Texas A&M looks more like a bible college than a public university. How did that happen?  I send you back to the beginning of this post. We humans do tend to create enemies that don’t exist.

And so it goes.

It is difficult to maintain an interior life in the midst of today’s cultural upheaval and political uncertainty. We are hardly unique in history. In do understand how easy my life has been compared with so many who have come before. I have not known war within the boundaries of my nation. I have not known starvation or, in my decades as a white male, oppression. Only now am I gaining a tiny glimpse of what so many have known for so long.

In the midst of it all I am surprised that my approach to getting through these times does not differ much from how I have approached my entire life. I have always intuitively recognized that a good life includes someone to love, good work to do, and something to look forward to. Those three needs remain with us regardless of our circumstances.

I bring the three up with my clients all the time. Sometimes what they need to work through is deep and complicated, with elusive solutions. But sometimes what makes their life better is simple. It is always interesting how few people have ever heard of the ability of those three elements to create the alchemy of a well-lived life. We all need someone to love, good work to do, and something to look forward to.

In my case, someone to love is complicated. Well, come to think of it, it’s complicated for pretty much all of us. I love my children and grandchildren. That love is without conditions. I also love Cathy, my companion of almost 55 years. We currently live together, though we both recognize that is not ideal. It has been made recently necessary because of our financial realities, and we are both old and mature enough to make it work. We respect each other. Since we no longer consider ourselves married, we both have dated. Through it all, our devotion remains, though it is expressed quite differently than it was when we were married.

There are dear friends I love who I see often. Only one was with me pre-transition. The others have come into my life in the last dozen years and never knew Paul. One of  my biggest struggles has been the discontinuity between my previous life and my current life. Family has been there through the transition, but few others.

The second “necessity” is good work to do. I have always been a Renaissance person with varied interests. Currently I am in an elected position as mayor pro tem of Lyons, Colorado. I am considering running for mayor in the spring, but I will not make a decision about that until the end of January.

My doctorate is in pastoral counseling and I continue to serve as a counselor. I have had many wonderful clients over the years. They are delightful humans, one and all. I continue to keep my counseling practice fairly small, by design.

After serving as a speaker’s ambassador for TED and a coach for TEDxMileHigh, I discovered that I love coaching speakers, helping with content and delivery. It’s been my privilege to coach  NPR reporters, an Air Force general, politicians, attorneys, pastors, therapists, CEOs, and sundry other humans. Speaker’s coaching is a vibrant part of my current work.

I also continue to enjoy preaching. It looks like I’ll end up having preached about 20 Sundays this year. I preach regularly at Denver Community Church and The Village in Atlanta. This year I preached everywhere from the iconic Riverside Church in New York to Austin to San Francisco. A fair amount of my speaking has been at churches connected to either the Post Evangelical Collective, a vibrant group of progressive churches, or the Wild Goose Festival, one of my favorite events each summer. It’ll be my privilege to speaking five of the next six Sundays at Pine Street Church in Boulder. The church is located one block east of the intersection of Broadway and Pine in central Boulder. Services are at 10:00 each Sunday. I mention that because I’d love to see you there!

I also have a book proposal with my agent right now with the working title, “When Their Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and a Curious Soul.” I hope to have a contract and be working on the book by the first of the year.

I’ve been fortunate that I have always loved the work I do, which means that having good work and something to look forward to are one and the same for me. Over the next three months I’ll be preaching in Boulder, Denver, Brite Divinity School in Texas, Sarasota, Austin, and somewhere else I can’t remember right now. (I’m old. I forget things.)

On the fun side, I’ll be with my family in Florida over Christmas, in Kauai in early December, and on the beach in Southern California with my granddaughters during their February break. I like to get out of the cold in Colorado at least twice a month during the winter. Snow has outlived its usefulness to me.

Is it a tough time to be trans in America? I mean, what do you think? But you have to keep on living your life without fear. I try to be safe. I cut off the stalkers and trolls and inform the authorities when necessary, but thankfully, most threats are idle.

I’m headed off to a town board meeting now, fulfilling my role as mayor pro tem. Tomorrow I’ll put the finishing touches on my keynote on Saturday for the Common Good Forum in Boulder. Life is good, and also hard, so we take joy when we can.

And so it goes.

In my book proposal currently with my agent I have a chapter with the working title, “How Shall We Then Live?” The sentence has been on my mind for a few months now, ever since I began reading the work of Iain McGilchrist on how left brain/right brain differences affect today’s culture.

The right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere for humans, and the left serves as its emissary. But for the last 500 years left hemisphere thinking has ruled western culture, with plenty of attendant problems. Simply but accurately, the left hemisphere is great at figuring out how to grab things, while the right is great at making sure you’re not eaten by a grizzly bear while you are reaching out and grabbing things.

In a left-hemisphere dominated culture, not enough attention is paid to the right brain’s protection. The left brain says, “I can create AI.” The right brain’s job is to ask, “But is it going to eat us?” In today’s world, not enough people with enough power are focused asking that right brain question.

In the best-selling book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the authors paint a pretty bleak picture of what happens when artificial super intelligence arrives. They present a convincing case that ASI will in fact, eat us. They say it is not too late to stop it. We’ve controlled nuclear weapons for 80 years because the entire world knows how dangerous they are. They believe ASI can be controlled too, but only if everyone in the world stops building it. Of course, that won’t happen until we all see how truly dangerous it is.

I cannot act at a global level, but I can at a personal level, and I have additional concerns about AI. The arrival of cell phones has brought adolescents who do not know how to show empathy, do not have the ability to put information in a holistic context, and who have a low emotional quotient. With the arrival of ChatGPT we can expect a whole new crop of deficits to develop, all harming the development and health of the human brain.

Only recently have I begun to have to interact with AI, primarily through Google search. Google makes it very difficult to turn off the AI feature in their searches, and those searches have a lot of inaccuracies. If you do a Google AI search of my name, the first seven paragraphs contain five errors, and none of the paragraphs contain information that is current. All of it relates to my first few years as Paula.

If that is the case with my name, it is safe to assume that is the case with pretty much anything Google AI pulls up in searches. I am no longer doing my searches through Google. I’m now using DuckDuckGo.

I never activate the AI feature of Word, nor am I using ChatGPT. I am a writer and speaker. I do not want to diminish those skills. I want to enhance them. I work with speakers, and I can quickly tell if a client is utilizing ChatGPT. They end up speaking in a stilted way because they are using words and grammatical structures that are not natural to them. The words may be smooth, but they are not natural when spoken by my client.

I am not making these decisions because of my age. Learning new technology continues to be relatively easy and natural for me. I am rejecting AI because it is not good for me. I will stick my neck out and say it is not good for you either. If you can explain to me how it truly enhances your life instead of diminishes your life, then I will acquiesce. But nothing I’ve read or heard convinces me that it is good for any of us.

Will AI eat us? That is a bigger question than I can answer, but I would recommend the book I mentioned earlier in this post. I would not suggest reading it when you are depressed, or dysthymic, or suffering from acedia. It will not help you break out of your ennui. But if you are in a place in which sober thinking has room to take root, I’d suggest you inform yourself of the dangers of AI, both for your personal growth, and for the future of the species and planet.

Okay, I promise, in my next post I’ll find something positive to write about. My posts have been skewing a little dark of late.

And so it goes.

A spotlight was shone on gaming culture when it became known that the young man charged with killing Charlie Kirk was a gamer. It is a growing worldwide phenomenon whose major adherents are young men in their twenties. Many become so immersed in gaming culture that it becomes the defining feature of their lives.

As with America’s fixation with zombies, which I will get to a little later, gaming culture is a direct result of the search for meaning in postmodern life. Humans are hard-wired for story. As I have written many times, we do not sleep without dreaming, and we do not dream in mathematical equations. Well, at least most of us don’t. We dream in stories. Story is a biological necessity for humans.

Today’s world is bereft of meaningful metanarratives, (big stories that explain the meaning of life and provide structure for living.) With our need for story being biological, when our culture provides no meaningful stories, we will create our own, hence the arrival of gaming culture, among other cultural shifts taking place today.

What is the allure of gaming culture? It gives the participants a role in a big story with understandable rules, a clear task, and a way to increase their standing in the world. They can immerse themselves in the game and get in a flow state in which they lose track of time, something that happens to all of us when we are immersed in something that requires our full attention. All of these are missing for young people today.

Video games do not require a high emotional quotient or the ability to bodily interact with other humans, making it attractive to those with a left brain preference and/or right brain deficit. It might be noted that with the arrival of AI “relationships” these young people can also have all kinds of interactions, including sexual, without human contact, something we already see on the increase.

Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, is a generation marked by a sense of digital fluency, pragmatism, and unfortunately, meaninglessness. No wonder they gravitate to video games. They provide the elements otherwise missing from their lives.

Interestingly, Gen Z is also returning to church, conservative churches to be exact. You might be surprised to learn that more young men are turning to church than young women. One third of Gen Z are not religious and 38 percent never go to church. None of that is a surprise. But 24 percent go to church every week, quite a surprise, with young men more likely to attend weekly than young women. Only 60 percent of Gen Z females say they are religious, while 66 percent of males say they are.

What kinds of churches do these young men attend? Conservative churches that give them a role in a big story with understandable rules, a clear task, and since only men are allowed into leadership, a unique way to increase their standing in the world. Sound familiar?

With only men allowed in leadership, conservative churches actually have a one-up on video game culture. If we understand this, we understand the allure of Charlie Kirk, a man with a limited education but  high intelligence, with a focused ability to make arguments from very specific categories in rapid-speak that demands one’s full attention. He gave young men a big story with understandable rules, a clear task, and a way to advance in the world.

Had he not been killed, as the years passed Kirk might have come to see the sadly narrow categories of intellectual ability he had nurtured. He might have come to understand the need for a better education, and he might have come to see that his brand of Christianity had more in common with Plato than Jesus. But then again, the kind of power and notoriety he enjoyed would have made it difficult to develop the self-examination necessary to come to those insights. Tragically, we will never know the ways in which he might have grown had he come under the influence of better angels.

When we see the dilemma of Gen Z young men, however, we can understand Kirk’s meteoric rise. He provided a religious and political alternative to gaming culture, with the added feature of misogynistic notions of leadership. Mark Driscoll provided the same elements when he was in his heyday at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, before he was let go for his “domineering leadership style, quick temper, and arrogant demeanor.” One wonders if those features of his personality would have caused him to be terminated today? I’m thinking probably not.

The current fixation with zombies is also a sign of a culture that has lost any sense of meaning. Zombies move collectively, but not communally. They move in the same direction with arms outstretched, but alone. Now, think of the streets of Manhattan during rush hour? What you see is people moving collectively, but not communally. Only instead of their arms stretched out in front of them, they are stretched downward and slightly forward as they stare at their phone screens.

Zombie culture also illustrates a world in which there is no spiritual transcendence. There is a resurrection, but it is not to life as a greater being. One is resurrected to life as a lesser being.

Cultural trends do not develop in a vacuum. If we are willing to spend the time necessary to study them, they will provide clues into the sicknesses of our times. The loss of meaning in today’s world is an epidemic. AI is not going to help, as humans become less connected, and ultimately, less necessary. It might be time to take another look at the Luddites.

And so it goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 his book, 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 unfortunately they 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.

Nowadays there are not many worlds in which I am 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 difficult or 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 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 transgender 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.