Part 2 of 2. Interview w/ Paula Sophia Schonauer, LCSW, a trans woman who is a former police officer in Oklahoma City. We discuss her coming out trans at work as a police officer, discrimination from local police officers as well as police associations, the hardnose tactics of some academy trainers and officers, the concept of "good activity" in policing (e.g. traffic stops, tickets, arrests), and her own philosophy of working as a police officer.

We also further discuss her relationships to local churches and her role as a deacon and storyteller and how this influenced her work style of community policing, her eventual career change to social work as she became more involved with social justice activists (e.g. the Occupy Movement), her volunteer work at a refugee center, and examples of and the need for restorative justice.

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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!