Part 1 of 2. Interview w/ Paula Sophia Schonauer, LCSW, a trans woman who is a former police officer in Oklahoma City. We discuss how she was ordained and then defrocked by the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma, her military career, her deployment in Desert Shield and Storm in Iraq, her desire to spend more time with her son, some tropes about how gay and trans people's identities, her involvement of the early men's movement (e.g. Robert Bly) before it became misogynistic and "red pilled", her experience with Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT), her first encounters with other trans women, her popular youth program teaching low income kids martial arts, how she was non-consensually outed as a trans person, and the awards she won for her work as a police officer.

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Links to topics in our interview.

Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma

https://www.epiok.org/

Church of the Open Arms, United Church of Christ (UCC)

https://www.openarms.org/

Robert Bly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bly

Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_ask,_don%27t_tell

Social Gospel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel

Hull House

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_House

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Other Conversations is an independent, informal oral history project by Shane Brodie, a multi-issue activist and sculptor. This project is on hiatus as of Fall 2023 as I continue to slowly upload previous interviews, but it may continue later on in 2024 or thereafter. If you are interested in being interviewed sometime in the future, please email me (see below) and we can talk about that privately.

I've interviewed transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conformist, agendered, neutrois, and intersex people who are anarchist, independent, conservative, egalitarian, progressive, free speech and gun rights enthusiasts, rural, religious, atheist, voluntaryist, mutualist, apolitical, skeptical, constitutionalist, classic liberal, libertarian, small political party members, socialist, DSA, communist, radical, revolutionary, or have a mixture of right/left views etc.

In this project, I've striven for thoughtful content from a variety of points of view. I haven't allowed comments because I want to limit harassment of my interviewees. This means that my project is barely treading water in the tsunami of anti-trans content on social media. If you've found these interviews interesting, please "like" and share them. If you are interested in starting your own interview project, you are welcome to contact me if you think my experience might be useful to you and you want some advice.

My email address is [email protected]

Thanks!