Chaplain Dahron Johnson: 2025 Inspiration

Insightful, humorous, story-telling advocate and activist for the LGBTQIA+ community and beyond

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? flynnconsult@gmail.com

Friends, The following interview occurred on 11/17, just 10 days after the 11/7 election when I turned to the loving partner, parent, minister, and Trans activist that is Dahron Johnson for guidance as we began to face the reality that there would no longer be a slight buffer in Washington, DC to protect us from what is happening in Tennessee. I also wanted to explore with Dahron how we can move forward with integrity, hope, and grit- things we call our children and grandchildren to embody but which seem so difficult for us adults today.

I took a long break, as you know because this Substack has been very quiet, to spend time with loved ones and also with myself, to look deeper, learn more, and explore ideas about how best to lend my voice to what we are facing in this new year of 2025.

I’ve been reading and watching several political pieces to gain insight into where we’ve been, where we ended up where we are now, and how we might move forward as a people and a country into a positive future. This included a deep dive with other local activists into the lives of civil rights leaders engaged in Kingian non-violence that included an online lecture series featuring civil rights leader, Dr. Bernard Lafayette: "Welcome to From Freedom Rides to Ferguson: Narratives of Nonviolence in the American Civil Rights Movement.” I also explored the questions of character and conscience displayed by political leaders of the American past that informed my childhood, with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “An Unfinished Love Stroy- A Personal History of the 1960’s”, and dissected the personalities behind the rise and fall of the Nazi party in Germany as compared to the leadership being assembled for this next president’s administration, through Richard J. Evans book, “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich.”

At the same time, we welcomed a new grandchild into our family who was so eager to join us she came a week early, in time for Christmas/Hannekah/Kwanza/Holiday celebrations. It’s a humbling gift and an awe-inspiring miracle to hold hope, peace, and love in one’s open palms.

Dahron is cloaked with a clear-eyed study of our culture and political leadership, carries the experience of being “othered” in a state that questions her very right to exist, and yet remains committed to a belief in our joint ability to take on this next evolution of humanity that we are unfolding together. I hope you enjoy her insights, are tickled by her humor, and are touched by her optimism.

We got this, friends!!! So, ever onward, Michele.

BACKGROUND: Dahron Johnson was the first Trans person to address the House Chamber when she offered the House Floor Prayer, during the early days of the 2024 Session (January 29, 2024). According to an article by WKRN:

“The Tennessee Equality Project says Johnson was not only the first person who identifies as transgender to speak from the well of the Tennessee General Assembly but may be the first trans person to lead a prayer in any state legislature.”

Dahron has lived in Nashville for the past 20 years with her wife of 27 years and their child. She is a licensed Chaplain with the Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ, and over the last 5 years has been involved in advocacy work on a variety of fronts, but with a special focus on LGBTQIA+ rights, through her employment with the TN Equality Project, (the 20+ year-old leading advocacy, legislative and policy lobbying group for LGBTQIA+ folks across the state).

QUESTION 1: How do you bridge a dialogue with others of a different mindset while upholding accountability around harm?

Dahron reminds us that change is the only thing we can expect from life and thus it is important to keep ourselves open and free from feeling locked in a place “that doesn’t allow the person I am, to hear the possibility another person is offering to me, regardless of their perspective(s).”

Dahraon suggests we ditch the silos Americans have constructed and “open ourselves to the freedom, liberation, and transformation this moment calls for from our species.” While it will take courage to step forward to find each other, once we do, “we will see that there are many in the greater community who are also calling for and acting toward a positive change, bridging the divides and climbing over the walls that keep us apart while holding people accountable to ‘do no harm.’”

Dahron notes that in recent years Tennessee has been grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons and we can “…expect more of the same” from the upcoming session because we are a “testing ground for what can be gotten away with” at the state and national level. She predicts we will "see more with less foot on the brake.”

Dahron expects the issue of race will once again be a major focus of the Republican Super-majority, particularly as it relates to attacks on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). She also anticipates “anti-woke” workplace attacks as evidenced by a downtown billboard funded by a bank, advertising “100% American, 0% Woke.” And she pinpointed impending attacks on immigrant communities (follow TIRRC to learn more).

Dahron highlighted the link Legislators have made between anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation- by limiting trans healthcare access and attacking Title 9 protections for trans high school athletes- and the destruction of public education through vouchers. “The more that they can use gender issues to create separation between themselves and the Fed, then they give themselves more rationale for bringing in money through other revenue streams… They're using those things as a way to say, ‘Well, we need to stand for Tennessee values, right? And if that means rejecting Department of Education funds, then so be it.’”

QUESTION 2: How do you expect the public policy issues you’ve identified to affect the lives of individual people and special populations in the state?

Dahron first pointed to the fact that by separating state education funding from the Federal Government, Tennessee would leave a billion and a half dollars “on the table” and create “long-term deficits in the state's coffers.”

The anti-trans cultural agenda being pushed has left parents of trans children concerned about having “their children in schools, in the public sphere, or living in this state… I've had too many friends already this year leave for places elsewhere because they don't feel that a safe life for their family is viable” in Tennessee.

Dahron then addressed gendered expectations, which imprison “any of us, into certain expectations of how our life should go.” She shared that earlier in her life “It was a trap for me, from which I felt that I could not readily escape… I was using more and more energy in maintaining my own prison, maintaining my own disguise.” Today, what parents of trans children “…are trying to do is to free their children from those prisons of our culture's making.”

Dahron referenced the very first house committee hearing she attended, which focused on passing an anti-DEI measure for public universities while also exploring the establishment of an Institute of Civic Engagement. She found Legislators “push us out of their histories, push us out of public spaces, push us out of doctor's offices and bathrooms and sports fields and anywhere they possibly can, and yet, at the same time, wonder why we don't have a culture of civic engagement. Dahron surmised, “There is a paucity of the very qualities that they say they want to put forward in the very policies that they're trying to move through the legislature.”

QUESTION 3: Please respond to a recent teaching of Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbess of Upaya Zen Center that, “open fluidity is deeply liberating" and thereby LGBTQIA+ individuals are helping our culture by breaking the boxes within which people have been living uncomfortably for so long.

Dahron began by saying that as a 54-year-old trans person, her “own thinking is probably a lot more binary than folks that are younger than me.” She compared her choice to wear a “cozy femme sweater” to the interview rather than the “old guy drag gender presentation” of her past and my choice to wear a “comfortable sort of blue velour shirt and some tights” exemplify clothing choices that would have been confusing and unacceptable during earlier times in our culture. Thus, “the binary itself is something of our own construction (intended) to make our world easier, but really in sort of the laziest possible way to navigate.”

Instead, when we have to look more deeply beyond, “are you a guy or a gal” to questions about “how a person understands themselves and lives in themselves and carries themselves… that is maybe a little bit more of an intentional practice that we're not accustomed to.” However, it is “more liberating in the end, because we all have a fuller understanding of each other for having done that extra work.”

Dahron shared that this sense of fluidity made her think of her longtime academic hero, psychologist and philosopher William James, who believed, “We are constantly engaging with a person in the moment that we find them, and if we don't lock ourselves into a preconceived notion of who they are or how they're supposed to be, we free ourselves to understand them as we meet them in that moment… It's up to us to find out who each of us is now, and how we can best connect with each other now, and how we build out from this moment into the next one, where we get to know each other all over again.

Dahron concluded “The breaking down of gender binaries” and “freeing ourselves to think of each other in those ways allows us to gain, even if it requires swimming in new streams constantly.”

QUESTION 4: How do you bridge a dialog with others of a different mind while, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggested, upholding accountability around harm?

First Dahron addressed those who have been on the receiving end of hurt by referencing the book written by her friend, Maria Mayo, entitled “The Limits of Forgiveness” in which she questions the amount of work “placed on the person who's been hurt to be the one who is forgiving of harms that are done to them.” Dahron agrees with Mayo that “There has to be one who's willing to…step forward into the breach that they've caused, to help bridge it from their side, since they may be the one who cut out the piers on the bridge in the first place…by the harms they caused.” There is also a question about whether “we want to repair that bridge, even if the other person hasn't been willing to come to the table.

Dahron added “It's not as straightforward as ‘go and forgive,’ when you have been part of a community that has been attacked for political ends that have nothing to do with you as actual people…I don't know that we need to put all the responsibility on those folks for healing those hurts…We should not assume or make incumbent upon the aggrieved party to be the one that does that work all the time.”

Regarding how we talk across the divide, Dahron offered her experience of canvassing “in eight or nine different campaigns over the last few months for a bunch of different candidates” and while it might be assumed by some that she would have been harassed, “In none of those instances did I come away with a black eye.” She indicated this was because of her willingness to engage in “story-listening as much as story-telling.” When someone appeared hesitant to talk about the candidate or their vote, Dahron asked, “Help me understand, just before I go, what are those top three issues that you're really thinking about” and then just let them talk. This approach allowed for “an exchange of ideas back and forth, and an opportunity to meet each other in the stream of our lives and … try to find ways to move forward from there.”

Dahron paraphrased a quote from Angela Davis, “When you look at a wall, if you turn it sideways, it's a bridge” and then offered, “It’s about meeting someone, person to person; shifting for a moment and deepening the person-to-person conversation.” Dahron believes this is the human connection “…we rob ourselves of when we assume that our worlds are so separate that they can't be bridged, when that is just walls and not bridges. There's more bridges there than we expect.”

Dahron commented on her experience as a Chaplain in health care settings during a time when people may have been hesitant to connect with “his old guy drag” that included a shaved head and multiple earrings, but she found, “ It's probably a little more work for the other person, but we end up so much richer for giving ourselves that opportunity.”

QUESTION 5: Will you respond to the value of “meditating on beauty, joy, and abundance” during these times?

Dahron began by saying, “I want to be able to see those qualities in other folks” and “find ways to help folks feel comfortable enough to reveal themselves to me” so “we can all put down our disguises- or make fun of the disguises we're wearing in the moment.”

She then shared the question she asks: “How can I help the self that you are to be a better self?” When working with a patient, Dahrhon is looking for “How can I help a person get past a moment in which they're feeling existential uncertainty?”

Dahron advanced the premise that we should create “more moments in which we allow ourselves…glimpses into the fullness of each other.” However, current politics have pushed so many folks to not be able to “see the me that I am now.” Dahron is looking forward to a “grander vision of creation” in which “we are constantly becoming” and we “find ways to allow each other to become as much as each of us wants to or feels driven to, whether that's more of who they are in any one moment or to be something different in the next moment than they are right now.”

To Dahron, this is a deeply American sentiment. “We talk about how America is a place that allows folks to reinvent themselves, except politics has tried more and more to lock us into very specific and siloed versions of ourselves…Trans and gender-diverse folks really put the fine point to it by asking, ‘Why should we constrict ourselves to other’s expectations of what we should be in this world?”

When she first came out, Dahron told her wife she wanted to bring to their relationship “an honest and truer version of me…Why should we not be trying to allow that in any and all of our relationships? I think that that allows for maybe not beauty in a classical sense, but the full beauty of us as people who are allowed to live into the richness of who they are.”

QUESTION 6: Reflecting on politics in Tennessee, how can Legislators work outside of the box that their party may be pushing them into?

Not surprisingly, Dahron approached this question from a philosophical and religious perspective, rather than a political one. She initially referenced her dear friend and mentor, Henry Levinson, for whom she was a driver, then student, and eventually an assistant teacher. Levinson, who had MS, described himself as “a pragmatic Jewish naturalist” but suggested, “You could switch the order of those things around, just depending on the context of things.” Dahron describes herself in the same manner. “First of all, our relations with each other are pragmatic” because we “work them out as we go, even when we don't realize them when we meet each other.”

As a Christian, Dahron operates out of a “specific moral understanding and existential/spiritual understandings about how we comport ourselves in the world, ethically and morally.” So even if Levinson didn't go to temple every Friday, or Dahron doesn’t t go to church every Sunday “that's still where we're drawing our ethical core from.”

Regarding the naturalism part, Levinson, “didn't really see so much of a great beyond after the end of his life…It was very much in between persons... There was no supernatural force…no capital D divinity or God that was going to come down and fix it for us. It was up to us in this space, in this world to work that out.” Dahron spoke about her sense of divinity as arising from “whatever that gap is left between our worlds and understandings,” which is also “classic American democratic politics…always interested in finding ways to embrace more of the more.”

Dahron’s ultimate goal is to “continue to find the best possible ways that we have to fully embrace the people, the world, and the community around us.” This requires leaving ourselves open to questions such as, “Who am I meeting? How am I meeting you? Who is this person and their great ideas on the other side of the camera today? And how can I help them be the fullest version of who they are?” Dahron suggests, “It is out of that self that ideas will come, that the connections will come that will help us make this a better, fuller place of flourishing for all of us.”

Dahron concluded, “I try to lead with a sense of hope, a sense of joy about the possibility of the other that is unexpected… and then make sure my feet are planted firmly on the ground.. There needs to be a type of determination to our hope… in the face of others who don't see the same type of value about allowing as many folks as possible to have lives of flourishing. If we can find ways to not feel ‘I've got to change you to move us forward,’ then we give ourselves the opportunity for something different…

“I don't want somebody else to be locked in their monster-filled, vilified perception of me. I don't want to do that for somebody else, either. So how do we open ourselves to the possibility of each other?”

QUESTION 7: Is there anything else you want to offer?

These are some of the final thoughts offered by Dahron- but be sure to listen for yourself. You will be truly inspired.

“When other folks seem closed off to the possibility of seeing us for the fullness of who we are, for the thriving gift that any and all of us can offer to the worlds around us, whether that's in our work or in our homes or in our communities, or when we're simply sitting in the legislature, or we're being witnesses in the legislature, or finding a way to climb all the fences at Legislative Plaza… Fences or no, closed off people or no, we will find each other, and if we step forward in whatever ways that each of us possibly can in our lives, that is when we see the rest of the community that we couldn't see from the places that we were before.

“There are so many amazing trans and gender-diverse folks right here in Nashville. I knew of zero of them personally before I came out. That's a recrimination of myself… I probably wasn't being as intentional about creating community across a variety of lines as I could have been. But it's also to say that sometimes…that supportive community, whether it's in policy spaces or around aspects of our identity that may have been vilified or monstrified, that there are other folks out there, and that when we have the courage to step forward for ourselves to say, ‘This is who I am,’ or ‘This is where I feel called to be, this is the witness that I feel that I need to have in this moment, in this space,” we will be able to look to the left of us, to the right of us, and find other folks who have already made that step forward and have been waiting for us to join arms and to link with them.

“Doing that work and being present and supportive of each other, no matter where in the end that happens to be… That has certainly been what I've experienced going down to the Legislature. It's what I've experienced in coming out as this fabulous trans person that I am, and I feel certain that as we find folks, whether they're black, indigenous, people of color, whether they're folks from immigrant communities, whether they're folks from queer and LGBTQIA+ communities, whether they're women who feel targeted and oppressed because of the decisions being made by government and policies across our country right now… When any and all of us step forward to claim ourselves as part of those various communities, you will not only do everyone a great favor by adding your voice…as part of the witness of the great variety of who we are, but we will also do ourselves a great gift by claiming who we are, by claiming our voice, and also finding additional community that will help support and encourage us to be that voice, to be that person that we may have otherwise hesitated to be.

“So, as we go forward into the legislature, I would say not all spaces are where each of us needs to be at all moments, but consider stepping into that space that you've been uncertain about, say that thing that you have hesitated about before but still feel strongly in your heart, in your soul. When you do that, you will start to see the other folks that feel the same way, that identify the same way, that feel in the world the same way that you do. That's how we will get through this.”