I cast my ballot for mayor on Monday, the day I received the ballot in the mail. Three weeks from now we’ll find out the results of our town’s election.

Along with trust, collaboration, and good governance, the other word I have been featuring in my campaign for mayor of Lyons, Colorado is civility. Its loss in American discourse is profoundly disconcerting.

When I was in college, my vocal band booked a gig at a large men’s conference in the heart of the Ozark mountains. I had read a monthly newsletter from the conference that included alarming lines about starving children in Biafra. I could not believe what I had read. At the conference there was an abundance of workshops about the dangers of Communism, references to the John Birch Society, and other subjects I found alarming.

These might have been well-meaning people, but you could have powered a small city with the negative energy of their misplaced confidence. It was McCarthyism kept alive in the guise of Christian fundamentalism. I was very grateful that most environments in which I lived at the time were not inhabited by such toxic certainty.

When the conference ended and I returned home, I remember going to the radio station where I worked and telling our chief engineer what I had heard. The engineer, Bill, had grown up on Staten Island and traveled the world before settling in Appalachia. He said, “Ninety-nine percent of the evil in the world is done by people who are 100 percent convinced they are right.”

His words stuck with me. I later heard M. Scott Peck say the same thing. In the years since that time, I have come to realize that the beginnings of incivility are when lack of curiosity is combined with confident certainty. The result is toxicity.

There is nothing new about today’s incivility. A cursory look at American history will find it in every decade of our 250 year existence. But it is worse today than it has been at any time since the McCarthy era. What I saw in the Ozark mountains has now permeated much of the nation, and it saddens me greatly.

That is why I am so encouraged with the civility I’ve seen in the race for mayor of Lyons, Colorado. I was talking with the other candidate after our town board meeting on Monday evening. We both have had to remind a person or two that there will be no attacks in this race, but for the most part no one has even suggested writing pejorative things about the other candidate. Most people in this town want to be civil toward one another. Mark, my opponent, and I are both campaigning on what we believe to be our unique strengths, not the weaknesses of the other. That is as it should be.

The same is true for the nine people running for six open board of trustee seats. There has been no name-calling, just civility and respect. Each of our candidate forums have been great examples of civility, sticking to issues, not personalities. Even social media has been pretty civil.

No matter who wins a seat on the Board of Trustees or the race for Mayor of Lyons, I believe the Town of Lyons will be the winner of this race. It makes me proud to live here, and to serve as Mayor Pro Tem.

Lack of curiosity and confident certainty leads to arrogance, incivility, and toxicity. Curiosity, coupled with humility, leads to good government. I am proud to live in a town committed to good government.

Running for office is a bit weird. When you grow up as an evangelical you are told that self-promotion is wrong – always. Ambition is anathema. Never mind the ambition of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. Apparently they had a special dispensation from the gods to be ambitious. The message to me was clear, I did not have a special dispensation from the gods. I was to be self-effacing, never even whispering to others what my abilities might be.

I’m not sure how you can run for office without promoting yourself. I made a video for my current run for mayor this week. It’s about 90 seconds long and I talked about what I’d like to accomplish as mayor. I also talked about my credentials. I noted that I’ve chaired a lot of boards, including the board of a television network. (Can’t say I enjoyed that one, though I did really like both CEOs I worked with.)

I think I joined my first board, a small Christian college in upstate New York, when I was 29. I remember two elderly gentlemen, probably around 65, took me under their wings and guided my development. I remember thinking they were so, so old. Now I’m ten years older than they were!

I am a big believer in Carver Policy Governance. We utilized Carver Policy Governance back when I was a CEO. The board determined the big rocks to be moved. The staff figured out how to move the rocks and then proceeded to move them. The CEO (me) was held accountable for moving the rocks. The board was responsible for keeping itself in line. It worked well for 35 years.

Back in 2018 we did not start Left Hand Church that way. I was in a new gender, sensitive to criticisms of the patriarchy and willing to try new approaches. They didn’t work. Good to know. I’m back to believing in Carver Policy Governance.

My opponent is a good guy – a person of character, though he can be a bit gruff occasionally. We sit next to each other in board meetings. He’s a board member, I’m Mayor Pro Tem. We usually agree on what the big issues are and vote together probably 80 percent of the time. The difference is in governance style. He likes to get down in the weeds. I don’t think getting in the weeds is our job. That’s the staff’s job.

In our candidate forums I talk about governance. He talks about preferred approaches to specific tasks. I talk about civility, trust, collaboration, and good governance because, well, I think those are really important, particularly in today’s world.

There’s been no mud-slinging in our campaign. There won’t be. First, there hasn’t been enough moisture around here to even make mud this winter. We’d be slinging dust, not mud. Second, neither of us is particularly adept at slinging dust or mud.

We agreed not to use yard signs. They are not recyclable and anyway, both of us feel they are a little ostentatious. I’ll be okay if he wins. He’s a good guy and he’d do a decent job. I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about me. It feels to me like the election could go either way.

So many political contests lack basic civility. One of my friends won her race for mayor this past year, but oh my, what she had to put up with from her opponent!

A couple of folks from out of town made a presentation to our town board last Monday. Afterwards they said, “You guys are punching above your weight.” We hear that a lot in Lyons. We are a small town, but everybody in the state knows Lyons, and a lot of people would love to live here, if they could afford it. (That’s a whole different conversation.) We also have a good board and staff, decent folk who respect one another and disagree often and sometimes loudly, but then go for dinner afterwards. I’m pretty sure that’s what a democracy is supposed to look like.

This is the third time I’ve run for office. It’s always uncomfortable. Anybody who says their ego isn’t bruised when they lose is lying. Being mayor is a lot of work and it pays almost nothing, $700 a month in our town. That’s what I earned when I graduated from college and got my first full-time job in 1973. But you don’t do the job for the money, or for the accolades. There aren’t many. You do it because you feel called. The election is April 7. I’ll let you know what happens.

And so it goes.

Back when I was starting non-profits for a living, we discovered that two things were critical for success. First, we had to have the right leader. We looked for visionary people who were intrinsically motivated and had a high EQ, enabling them to get others to buy into their vision. When you think of visionary leaders, think of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Washington Mall imploring, “I Have a Dream,” or Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down that Wall!”

Good governance was the second key to success. People understood the importance of visionary leaders, but they often did not recognize the importance of good governance.

Good governance is a board that knows its job and sticks to it, and a staff that knows its job and sticks to it. The board’s job is figuring out what big issues need to be addressed. The staff’s job is to complete them. The primary conduit between the two is the board chair and the CEO. The CEO is held responsible by the board for completion of the tasks that have been assigned. It may not sound exciting, but it’s how stuff gets done. Everybody knows their lane and stays in it.

When I used to chair boards, and over the years I’ve chaired a boatload of them, the most important words I would say early in the life of board would be, “Not our job, that’s a staff job,” or “Not a staff job, that’s our job.” Clearly delineated responsibilities make for good governance.

As most of you know, I am running for Mayor of Lyons, Colorado in the April 7 election. I serve as Mayor Pro Tem now (vice-mayor for those of you outside of Colorado) and have served on the town Board of Trustrees for four years.

To put good governance into perspective for Lyons, Colorado, the board is our Board of Trustees; the Mayor is its chair. The board’s job is to figure out what big issues need to be addressed, like infrastructure, wildfire mitigation, economic vitality, and maintaining our quality of life. The CEO is the Town Administrator. The board works through the administrator to get the tasks done.

Staff members are responsible to the administrator, not to the board. The board does not bypass the administrator to direct the work of the staff. They do hold the administrator responsibile for adequately directing the staff. It’s not rocket science, but if you have not worked on many boards, board members can have a tendency to get down into the weeds. That’s not the board’s job. That’s the staff’s job.

Hollie Rogin has been a great mayor. I wish she were in a position to continue, but she is not. To the voters of Lyons I say, if you want that kind of governance to continue here, then vote for me. I will lead with civility, trust, a collaborative spirit, and good governance.

To my readers from around the nation and world, yep, you guessed it. I’ll be writing a few posts about the election over the next six weeks. You’ll see election-related information here when I believe the message of the post is helpful to all. Thank you for accommodating that short-term shift in this blog.

And so it goes.

The awful realities on the ground in Minneapolis have made me search for additional ways in which I can personally make a difference. I have the greatest respect for the dissidents in Minneapolis who are disrupting the incivility they encounter. I have great admiration for the hundreds of people who gather in “the triangle” in the middle of Lyons, Colorado every Saturday to protest what is happening in the Trump administration. We all must do what we can.

Four years ago I ran for public office for the first time in my life. I was already older than dirt and had been on Medicare long enough to forget how expensive health insurance is, but I figured you’re never too old to start something new.

My first two years as a member of the Board of Trustees of Lyons, Colorado were humbling. I knew non-profit leadership. I had run one for over a quarter of a century. I knew education. I had taught as an adjunct at four universities. I knew corporate America, having served on the board of a national television network and two subsidiaries of a Fortune 500 company. But government was altogether different. I didn’t know an ordinance from a resolution or why Colorado’s Tabor law caused seasoned politicians to break into tears at its mere mention.

By the end of my first term I was beginning to figure out what I was doing, the key word being “beginning.” Not wanting to waste all of that learning, I ran again. In my second term I have also had the privilege of serving as Mayor Pro Tem. (For those of you outside of Colorado, that is basically vice-mayor.) Today I want to announce that I am running for mayor.

In 2021 it was my privilege to be one of the speakers for the Inaugural Prayer Service of President Joe Biden, and for the next two years to serve with members of his faith-based initiatives team. As fulfilling as those national opportunities were, I believe democratic service is most effective at the local non-partisan level, particularly in these turbulent times. I have not been able to do much to change the narrative in Washington, DC, but I have been able to make a difference in this precious and vulnerable Colorado town in which I live.

I believe that civility, trust, collaboration and good governance are all keys to healthy local government. I am a proponent of Carver Policy Governance, in which it is the board’s responsibility to figure out which big rocks are to be moved (the ends of the organization) and the CEO’s job to lead the staff in moving them (the means of the corporation.) My experience is that if you have a competent CEO who is trusted and treated with respect, they will do exactly what you empower them to do – move the big rocks. Our Town Administrator is one of the best. It’s been a pleasure to work with her for the past four years.

I believe healthy collaboration between mayor, board, staff, business owners, town residents, and state and federal officials is important to good government. Most of us get a job because of our qualifications. We advance in that job because we learn how to get people to work together for the common good.

I have great respect for my opponent. For the past two years I have served with him on the Board of Trustees. He passionately cares about Lyons. Most of the time we agree on the important issues facing our town, like wildfire mitigation and infrastructure. But we do have different approaches about how to get that done. I believe my approach, proven over three decades of non-profit leadership in New York and two years as Mayor Pro Tem, is what is needed to get the job done now.

Our current mayor, Hollie Rogin has been one of the best leaders with whom I have ever worked. We are going to miss her, but she is supporting me wholeheartedly in this election, and will continue to do so after I have been elected.

Why am I telling you all of this? Most of you do not live in Colorado, let alone reside here in Lyons. I am telling you because I think this is the moment in which all of us have to find a way to change the narrative in this nation. It’s clearly not going to happen from the top down, so we’d all better get started making it happen from the ground up. As for me, that means I wholeheartedly declare myself as a candidate for mayor of Lyons, Colorado.

If you’d like to give to my campaign, reach out to me at paula@rltpathways.com and I’ll let you know how you can contribute.

Frank lived a few blocks west of me. He was outside our neighborhood gang but inside our elementary school sphere. Frank was the younger of two brothers. His father worked at one of the tire factories ubiquitous to the Akron, Ohio landscape. Frank was loud and obnoxious.

When Leave It to Beaver first came on television (yes, I’m that old) I  thought they might have modeled Eddie Haskell on Frank. Frank was sweet to everyone’s parents, the picture of deferential respect. My dad saw right through him. Mom did not. Taken by his flattery she would ask, “Why don’t you have Frank come over more often?”

I did not invite Frank over more often because Frank was a bully. I saw his father give him a dressing down in his front yard once, in front of a bunch of us. It was utterly humiliating for poor Frank. Being an Enneagram Two and all, I went to Frank and said, “I’m sorry that happened.” Unfortunately I did not understand it at the time, but I had witnessed his true powerlessness, a truth he could not bear to have anyone witness. While he had always been a bully, from that moment on he reserved a special enmity for me.

No one from my old neighborhood knows what happened to Frank. I’ve searched his surname, a very unusual and supremely unfortunate name that relates to things that occur in a private restroom. I’ve not found him anywhere, but then again, he might have changed his name. I mean, it would have been a good  idea to have done so.

Bullies almost always have sad backstories. Profoundly wounded by life, their ego strength is so weak they spend the rest of their lives knowing no other pathway to power than the denigration and diminishment of others. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is very difficult to treat. When I was in training I was told I would probably never treat someone with NPD because they never go to therapy. Their wounding was so early in life and so profound it is unbearable for them to revisit that original wound.

Our president is a bully. In my opinion, he has narcissistic personality disorder, though I cannot diagnose that with certainty because he is not my client. I lived in New York for 35 years. There was virtually no one in New York City who had any use for him. He was known as a terrible businessman and a wannabe fixated with Page Six of the New York Post, the page with all of the celebrity gossip. When he was chosen for the Apprentice, we all couldn’t believe it.

One of my friends lived near him in Florida. My friend’s daughter and Trump’s daughter Tiffany were friendly acquaintances. My friend’s wife was friends with Trump’s wife at the time, Marla. They had kind things to say about Marla and Tiffany, but not Donald.

But that was then, and here we are now. A grown-up Eddie Haskell as president, with half of the nation following news and social media that hide the truth. My safety is decidedly worse than it was before he was elected. My medical care remains, but my options for providers gets smaller and smaller. I really worry about the six members of my family who are people of color, two of whom were not born in the US, though they have been citizens for over forty years. Based on what we’ve seen in Minneapolis this past week, that doesn’t matter anymore.

When people said Trump was a fascist, I thought they were throwing around a term that was sensational, not true. Now, I believe it is true. With the demolition of norms, the glorification of violence, the creation of “alternate facts” from the highest positions in the land, I’ve lost hope for our nation. With our current Supreme Court and Congress, I see no pathway forward. We are failing the stress test of democracy and I fear it will be too late before most of the country recognizes it.

I’ve never been a pessimist. I have always seen the glass half full, even after I transitioned and lost all of my jobs, my pension, and my friends. Hope has been my stock in trade, but in today’s America, my hope is rapidly diminishing. I keep desperately repeating the words of Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.

Why are the evangelicals so much better at evangelism than the rest of us? I have some thoughts.

The two most influential books on religion in the twentieth century were Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, published in 1902, and Stages of Faith by James Fowler, which came out in 1982. Fowler identified six stages of faith we can experience during our time on earth. Fowler’s book can be helpful on this subject. Well, so can James’s book, but I have a secret word count I always remain below in my blogs.

Stage one is magical faith. When my kids were little and my 18 month-old daughter locked herself in the bathroom, my 4-year-old son said with all seriousness, “Get the Incredible Hulk.” That’s stage one. Stage two is a law and order faith, with the boundaries, guardrails, and guides necessary for children and young adolescents. Next comes conventional faith, which is exactly what the name implies. Many people remain in stage three throughout their lives. Conventional religion is easier. Other people make the decisions about what is right and wrong and who the enemies and good guys are. If you keep their rules, you remain in good standing.

Many people eventually find stage three confining and move to stage four, the stage of disenchantment. When I was in college I realized that my denomination, which said we were the only ones certain of going to heaven, was one of about two-hundred denominations that taught the same thing. Something was wrong with that picture.

Stage four usually occurs during our time of psychological  differentiation or individuation, when we start going out on our own in the world. But eventually life catches up with us. We have children, a loved one dies, we lose our job, and the spiritual vacuum of stage four no longer suffices, so we move into stage five, the stage of re-enchantment. Most of us return to the religion in which we were raised, but we return with a broader and deeper faith, less focused on rules and regulations and more focused on loving God, neighbor, and self.

Sixth is universalizing faith, in which we realize the commonalities of all major world religions, and the dangers of the fundamentalist forms of those religions.

For a variety of reasons we won’t go into in this post, a lot of Americans are stuck in stage four, and in today’s polarized world they are looking for spiritual meaning. I mean, if you haven’t noticed, this place is a mess and we have a spoiled child as president. We need somethin’.

For some of those folks, the evangelicals in stage three have crafted a message that feels very inviting. For young men who grew up on video games, evangelicals couch their language in battlefield terms saying, “Come join us in spiritual warfare against the evil forces of the dark state.” That appeals to those looking for direction, a cause to fight for, and a way to increase their standing in the “army” they have joined, just like they do in their video games.

Seventy-two percent of people who attend a church for the first time are there because a friend invited them. The truth is that evangelicals invite a lot more friends to church than the rest of us. It’s pretty simple, and quite true. If you don’t invite folks to your church, they won’t attend.

Those of us in stage five almost stumble over ourselves when we talk with friends about our church. “You can come to my church, I mean, if you’re looking for a church, which you’re probably not. Our church is a mess, like they all are, but it has a lot of good stuff too, though it might not be for you. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why I attend.” Not exactly a compelling invitation.

The problem is not the people in stage three churches. The problem is their religious leaders who take a Turning Point attitude toward spirituality, making their focus not the love of God, but the “Satanic empire” that must be defeated. The problem is that their Satanic empire includes me! If you’re reading this blog, it probably includes you too.

People need spirituality, a spirituality expressed in embodied community, focused on that which is sacred. We need to do good deeds in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We need spiritual community to learn to be human together. But the majority of Americans are not going to church.

Between 1999 and 2021 our nation went from 70 percent of Americans being affiliated with a local religious body to just 47 percent, a 23 percentage point drop in 22 years. The drop has stabilized since then, but still, fewer than half of Americans count themselves as members of a local religious community. But we are beginning to recognize our need for community. Adults are realizing that not only are their kids damaged by spending too much time staring at screens; adults are too. The third place, after work and home, should not be a screen, it should be a community.

Here’s a challenge. Invite your friends to church. If you don’t go to church, gather a few friends and commit to finding a church together.  We need what stage five and six faith provide – a community focused not on deciding who goes to heaven and hell, but focused on loving the God who loves us just as we are, loving our neighbors, particularly those who do not look like us, and loving ourselves. As a therapist, I do know that if you cannot do the last one, you cannot do the other two. But that’s a different post for a different day.

And so it goes.

About three years ago all five granddaughters were in their downstairs bedroom at our house. It was about 6:00 in the evening and they were not making a sound. The girls were between thirteen and sixteen at the time, so that kind of quiet just didn’t seem right. I went downstairs and peeked in the door. There were all five, lying on two beds, quiet as a church mouse. Why? Because they were all on their smartphones.

Suddenly I knew why all five of them have phone-free hours set by their parents. Here were five girls who love nothing more than being together, but while they were bodily in the same room they were not looking at each other, speaking to each other, touching each other, or otherwise interacting.

I will say I do remember similar times with my cousins, when we’d all be in the same room reading Nancy Drew mystery novels. But that was after a creative day of play, and reading sessions like that were rare. But my children are aware enough of teen culture to know that if hours were not regulated, their girls would be tempted to look at their phones all day.

I’ve been reading a lot over the past year about the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how our current culture, for about five centuries now, has rewarded left brain thinking and minimized the importance of right brain functioning. This is a shame, because the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere of the human brain. The left is its emissary. We function best when the left hemisphere works at the direction of the right. The right hemisphere knows it needs the left. The left, unfortunately, believes it can get along just fine without the right.

The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right hemisphere says I am a body. The left is interested in what it knows, the right is interested in what it experiences. The left brain is interested in things, and the right in the relationships between people and things. The left brain is more mechanistic, the right more organic. The left brain focuses on analysis and categorization, the right on placing information in context. The left is more rational, the right more intuitive.

With that brief explanation you can see we have become a left brain dominant species. This left brain fixation plays out in a myriad of ways, some of them quite frightening. As I have been reading Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, I have been fascinated by how much of the negative fallout of current teen culture is related to this left brain fixation.

Between 2010 and 2015 America went from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. The shift is damaging our children. For centuries, children’s relational and social learning was embodied. It was synchronous, taking place in real time, where you learn to take turns and read the emotions of others. You were bodily in the same place with others, so it was in your best interest to learn how to get along. All of that is right hemisphere learning. It is necessary to learn empathy, to place information in context, and to develop a high emotional quotient.

Since 2015 and the mass adoption of smart phones, children’s relational and social learning is disembodied. It is asynchronous, not taking place in real time. There is no longer one to one communication or one to several, but one to many, even multitudes.

For girls, it takes place on social media. Girls are more relational and image conscious than boys. Unfortunately, when girls become aggressive on social media, they tend to destroy relationships and reputations. In an embodied community, they learn there is a price to pay for that kind of behavior. They become known as one of the mean girls. Online, there are no real consequences to destroying relationships and reputations.

For boys, their online activity is primarily video games, not played with a friend on a console, but online with others scattered all over the globe. If they are not playing video games, they are watching porn, which does not help them develop meaningful romantic relationships.

Cathy and I have both had teens in our counseling practice who have had suicidal ideation based on online attacks. We both can see that the problem is increasing.

All of us need embodied community. It is how we learn to be human together, how to do work together in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and where we maintain the social skills necessary to a healthy life.  What smartphones have wrought is a disengagement from embodied community. The price we are paying for that disengagement is just now being made manifest.

Our granddaughters were seldom on their phones while we were in Florida. We all interacted together with laughter, thoughtful conversations, play, and shared activities. It was a great week. We are all wired for deep human connections. We are an incarnate species. We cannot get those deep connections electronically. We must get them bodily.

Let’s suppose you had just arrived on the planet and you were very confused at how the Speaker of the House and Secretary of the Department of Defense refer to women as being less than men. The Speaker of the House recently said men are able to compartmentalize their thoughts, while women are not. Prominent Republican female members of the House have attributed this to the evangelical leanings of these two men of power. It hate to tell them this, but it is also the leaning of a plethora of other men with or without political power.

I would say to the alien just arriving on the planet (who’d better watch out for ICE) that what we are seeing is what one can expect when you hand the government over to a certain kind of evangelical Christian.

To be clear, there are two evangelical perspectives on women. The once ascending perspective, now quickly losing steam, is called egalitarianism, and assumes women should have all the rights and opportunities that men enjoy. During my time in evangelicalism I held an egalitarian perspective and rarely was attacked by anyone other than the occasional traditional fundamentalist.

A traditional fundamentalist might sound like an oxymoron, but hey, some fundamentalists are more conservative than others. The editor at the magazine at which I served as editor-at-large got mail about my “extreme views.” Only a small part of the evangelical would have seen those views as extreme – at the time.

Unfortunately, those are the evangelicals now in power in Washington. Doug Wilson, the leader of the denomination of which Pete Hegseth is a part, said women should not even have the right to vote. Have you ever seen a picture of the man? The picture tells you all you need to know. And yes, the head of the most powerful department of male aggression, now known as the Department of War, follows the teachings of this man. What could possibly go wrong?

The kind of evangelicalism prevailing in Washington nowadays is known as complementarianism, a perspective that says God created men and women with different abilities and therefore different roles. Women are supposed to have children and relish in the “traditional” roles of motherhood,  while men, brilliantly equipped for leadership on account of having a penis I guess, were to be in charge of the family, and by extrapolation, the whole world. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

I would have thought Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace would have already known this, since they represent districts where no one is allowed to declare a domicile unless they hold onto this complementarian view. Ron Johnson is not the first person they have encountered who sees life from this perspective. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it is the perspective of their fathers, uncles, brothers, and more than likely, their pastors.

My friends in Boulder County, Colorado are aghast that such a perspective exists in the year 2025. The same is true of my New York City friends. But in Carter County, Kentucky, where I went to high school and college, I’m pretty sure no one is surprised. There are some courageous women there who have worked to change the narrative, but it’ll fall to their daughters and granddaughters to take up the cause. (I’m watching that happen, which is fun.)

Unless they have a deep seated need to repeatedly fail, I do not know what would cause an ambitious woman to be a Republican. If you look just so, you might be afforded a tiny bit of power, but no real power. That will be reserved for the Ron Johnsons, Pete Hegseths, and Donald Trumps of the world, the true heroes of the species.

I was always taken seriously as Paul – way too seriously. I had come to think I deserved to be treated with great respect. As Paula, the gender-based positional power is gone. Like I mean, totally gone, nowhere to be found, a remnant of my distant past. I have the same degrees I had back then, the same abilities I had then. I mean, my goodness, I am way more capable now than I was back then. But I am not going to be rewarded for those capabilities. Not in this lifetime.

No wonder Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning. Word is Nancy Mace might resign too. I hope they both do. They have been awful toward transgender people. I guess they can’t hate the people who really have screwed them over, because those are the people who are in power. It’s easier to transfer their hate onto a helpless group like trans folks. It’s not exactly what Jesus would do, but it is what their pastors would do, and I guess that’s close enough.

And so it goes.

 

She could jump up on all fours to an ungodly height, enough to slam the lower jaw of Teresa, the UPS driver. The heights to which she jumped were in direct proportion to how much she loved you. The only problem with that was that she loved everybody, very much. So she jumped high for everybody, all the time.

To a new person on the street she begged to be turned loose from her leash. She would look at me and say, “I know I know her, if you’d just let me go and remind her. Or maybe I don’t know her, but probably I do. Yeah, I do, for sure! Please let me go and tell her how much I’ve missed her! Please?”

This happened on every walk. Rabbits, mildly interested. Other dogs? Ever since an unfortunate encounter at a dog park, other dogs were not an object of much interest. Well, she was interested in other dogs, only because if there were dogs, that meant the dog’s human must be nearby. And the human was probably, no definitely, somebody she knew, who would no doubt want to be greeted by her.

When we were out running she’d tug on the leash and want to stop and smell a strange weed, the name of which I never learned. I knew what it looked like because of how much she wanted to sniff it. Other dogs had not left their scent there. It was something about the weed itself. They were in two places, on the pathway east of Sheridan and about a quarter of a mile up Stone Canyon Road, after the turnoff for Eagle Ridge.

Or maybe there was nothing special about that particular weed at all. Maybe it was all a trick. She’d always want to stop and smell that particular type of weed, and unless I was timing my run for speed, I’d let her. But on far too many occasions she would only feign interest in a weed. The true object of her interest was a dead something in which she could roll. She’d get a couple of good rolls in, rubbing her back against the thing in all of its deadness before I realized I’d been duped and would yank her away.

I live in the foothills, where there are bear, mountain lions, foxes, bull snakes, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs, skunks, and the occasional stray elk. On the day she’d arrive for a visit, every inch of the side yard was carefully studied by her considerable olfactory system. She usually found something in which she could roll. Then it was a trip to the giant bathtub, which for 18 years has had only purpose – to remove smells from overly curious dogs.

She could grab the poop of a strange animal and swallow it before I could say, “Nope!”  I’d forget about it until later that night, when she’d give me a kiss. She found my breath as fascinating as the dead things in which she’d roll. That always concerned me a bit.

She was not technically my dog. She was Kristie’s dog, and then Kristie and Mara’s dog. I think I may not have been the only one who felt like she was my dog. In my heart I loved her as much as Lilly, our golden/border collie mix who left us for the other side back in 2011.

I taught her never to bark when clients came to the door for counseling. She did bark in the middle of the night when large things lumbered into the backyard. She hated the windstorms. She’d lean hard against me on the couch, glancing at my face to make sure I was good with it all.

Finn was in my life for seven years. She will be in my heart for the rest of my days. Her ears, neck, belly, and the outside of her hind legs begged to be scratched. I got in trouble for it. Kristie would send us out onto the back patio where the hair could be blown toward the heavens. Cathy let me scratch her, but also made me schedule the cleaners for the day after she left. Hair was everywhere. I’ll never get it off of the back seat of my car.

She ran with me every day we were together. The last time we ran together she did the last mile in an 8:42. I hadn’t run that fast in years. Her last few visits she was restricted to walking. Still, I let her off the leash when she heard the UPS truck. She’d hear it long before I saw it. She’d take off like a streak of greased lightning, jump in the truck, and slobber Teresa with kisses. Then she’d sit on the passenger floor facing forward, giving me the tiniest side glance as if to say, “You can go ahead and go home. Teresa and I have got this for now.”

At every meal in every location we shared, she sat immediately next to me, not because I’d sneak her food, but because she knew I was the messiest person at the table. By my feet is where she could reliably count on the most crumbs to fall.

When Kristie told me yesterday that she was gone, I could not stop weeping – not just gently crying, but weeping. My God, how I loved that dog.

She slept by my side, sat next to me on the couch, and spent hours in the oversize chair pictured above, her favorite place when she was at my house. I took this picture four weeks ago.

Dogs were domesticated 30,000 years ago, so we’ve been able to watch them evolve along with us. No wonder they evolved to love us unconditionally. They knew that was our greatest need. Finn loved me like there was no tomorrow. And my love for her was the same.

I will miss you, sweet baby girl. And Kristie, thank you for sharing your pup with me. I will be forever grateful.

And so it sadly goes.

There has been another unfortunate turn in the war against transgender Americans, a war fought on so many fronts it is hard to keep up.

Another hideous anti-trans group is gaining influence. “Transvestigators” is a conspiracy group alleging that many well-known American woman are transgender and part of a conspiracy to, well, take over the world. They utilize “scientific” measurements of physical characteristics to make their determinations. They claim everyone from the wife of the president of France to Jennifer Anniston is transgender. I’m not joking. This group is serious.

It reminds me of phrenology, the 19th century pseudoscience that said personality traits can be identified through various bumps on the head. You’ve probably never heard of phrenology because it was thoroughly debunked over 150 years ago. Yet here we are again.

The thirst for special knowledge that sets one apart from others is as old as the species. That there is a group claiming this is not surprising. That a multitude of followers have embraced  this conspiracy is not funny, it is frightening. The misinformation about trans people is exponentially worse than it was ten years ago. I want to again briefly remind you, as I did back in 2014, about what it means to be someone who transitions from one gender to the other.

Let’s look at the facts. Transitioning from one gender to the other has been happening for millennia, in every culture, language, ethnicity, and people group. Trans people are about one half of one percent of the population, people whose sex at birth does not match how they experience themselves to be. We do not know what causes it, though it is as certain as the fact that some people are gay. We do not know what causes a person to be gay either.

I am carefully using the specific language of those “who transition from one gender to the other,” because over the last decade the term transgender has been significantly broadened to include a much larger group of people who feel gender is a social construct, and that anyone is welcome to identify at will as either gender or as non-binary. This is a new phenomenon without historical equivalency, and though it is broadly espoused by many on the left, there is little scientific information to suggest its genesis or its future trajectory.

Over the last decade this newly identified group has become the majority of people who identify as transgender. It is heavily represented by adolescents, particularly those who were identified as female at birth. It is also associated with people who did not identify as transgender until late adolescence.

Many of these young people are simply exploring gender, having rejected the gender binary. I do not think there is anything wrong with that exploration. The hardened gender categories of the past have not served us well.

On the other hand, should these young people be treated with body-changing hormone therapy when the onset of their gender dysphoria is quite recent? I think not. Many have comorbidities, such as body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and complex trauma. I believe these young people should receive therapy from licensed therapists well-acquainted with gender dysphoria before receiving hormones. For those views I have been roundly cancelled and excoriated by the left. So be it. When dealing with vulnerable young people we must follow the data. The data are not clear. Caution is in order.

This is not the same group as those who from a very early age consistently and persistently found themselves to be extremely uncomfortable in the gender of their birth. Most of these people have been in decades of therapy before deciding to transition. The distress is so great that over forty percent have attempted suicide. This group used to be called transsexuals, and maybe that is a term that should be resurrected to identify this specific group once again. As I stated earlier, there is a very long history of the legitimacy of transsexual people.

We know who these people are. It is not difficult to identify them. As stated, the onset of their gender dysphoria can be traced to early childhood and is consistent throughout their lives. It does not suddenly arrive or depart. The same is true of those who are gay. Being transsexual or gay is an integral part of one’s identity. No amount of therapy will cause a person to no longer be gay or transsexual. Neither can be “cured” through any kind of therapy.

I write all of this because most of my readers are not well-versed on these issues. I have studied them in depth, because as a therapist and trans person, I must. If you are inclined to see me as a thoughtful individual who tries to research every angle of an issue before speaking or writing, you may find my words helpful.

Misinformation can be little more than a nuisance or it can be deadly. If a map tells someone to get to my house by turning south at the light at the corner, they will be inconvenienced, but no one will die. Within a couple of minutes they will figure out they should have turned north at the light.

If someone wants to believe vaccines cause autism, and they force that belief on an entire nation, it is deadly. The same is true of those who dismiss transsexuality as an illegitimate diagnosis. They are not just inconveniencing millions of people. They are placing our very lives at risk.

Look at the data. Do not repeat misinformation. Lives are at stake. Follow the science and together, let’s save lives.