This is the interview I gave Raven Kaldera for the second edition of Hermaphrodities Raven’s works are utterly fascinating and well worth a read.  Crossposted at Telling My Stories

1) Tell us about your gender identity.

My gender identity is woman/female. Sounds simple doesn’t it? It is far from so. I’ve been told by both intersexed people and trans people I don’t exist, that the conditions of my birth are impossible or at least impossibly rare enough I could not possibly be who I am…..and yet I am. Up to now I have mostly kept these things private to myself and those who came to study with me for this reason. I was born a tetragametic chimera which means in simpler terms, born during the sign of Gemini, I am, literally, twins in a single person with two different sets of genetics in one body, in my case fraternal twins, one male, one female that combined around the second or third cellular split. At my birth I embodied Agdistis. I was born at a “cottage” hospital in 1949 and presented with both an apparent penis and labia, the doctor sewed up my labia and declared me male. From the time I was first able to grasp the concept of male and female, I knew I was female and the circumstances of my birth having been kept from me, when I ran across the concept of “transsexual”, I thus assumed that was what I was and “transitioned” as an adult within that context. It was only after I first transitioned that I learned of my own nature although I had suspected so my entire life. Today my body reflects the Divine Feminine.

2) Tell us about your spiritual path. How did you get to where you are now?

Again, simply put, I was called from my earliest memories. Once again that sounds simpler than the reality. Around the same time, age three to four, I became aware I was not the boy everyone said I was, I was also having very vivid dreams, many of which I remember to this day as if I had them last night instead of some 56 odd years ago. I had a lot of nightmares and quickly learned the technique of lucid dreaming to turn them around and make the “monsters” into allies instead of enemies. But the most vivid dreams that reoccurred over and over were of an enormous, much larger than life beautiful woman dressed mostly in white robes. In those dreams She comforted me, told me things I could never quite remember upon waking but those dreams were incredibly peaceful and soothing and had a profound effect on me. Today I know that is the traditional way She called Her daughters.

Up until I first was enrolled in kindergarten, my childhood was relatively free of gender policing and playing dressup with the girl from across the creek was allowed and not discouraged. By the age then that children were allowed relative freedom from constant parental oversight I was spending almost all my time in whatever wild area was nearby and thus spent most of my early childhood forests and woods. The adults I sought out to learn from were the women that today I would call crones in the best sense. My family tree on both sides is mostly old New England, my father’s side the pragmatic down to earth, my mother’s side eccentric free thinkers, spiritualists and proud as punch of our ancestors such as Susanna Martin, a Salem witch trial victim from Amesbury, Mass. and William Wood who wrote the book “New England Prospects” that launched much of the immigration to that area in the 1600’s but had his own property taken away for going too native. I grew up with spirits, ghosts, tales of witchcraft and devoured any books I could find on those subjects. I grew up a Pagan in other words hidden in plain sight for my fathers side of the family mostly rejected me and my mother’s embraced me. I had a personal feminist awaking around 1958 just as second wave feminism was in it’s birth as a reaction to my own father’s patriarchal treatment of my mother. While the world saw me as male, I was within my own head female always and made as much peace as possible with that.

At age fifteen, our family moved to India traveling leisurely throughout Rome, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, the Middle East both on the way to India and the way back. I “knew” all these ancient places we visited. My father leading the way with an outdated “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” book, we found ourselves over and over off the beaten path of the tourists. We vacationed in Kashmir, I was allowed to travel alone to places like Dehra Dun, Agra and Jaipur. I explored wild places infinitely wilder than I had before and an India which at the time was closer to the India of the British Raj era than the India of today. I met and spent long hours with “gurus” and Muslims and Hindus of all social classes. I was aware I would not have been allowed to have any of these experiences had the world seen me as female while knowing I was and the inequality of that. Strangely enough my actual gender seemed to be clear to many of the Indian people I encountered who reminded me that my auburn hair would get me in trouble in many remote villages I visited if I were seen as female as it was considered the mark of a witch woman for example. Our cook, a live-in position, never called me by my birth name but only “Jackie” after Jackie Kennedy who occupied a place in world culture then immediately after JFK’s assassination similar to the one Princess Diana later had. It was his way of telling me he knew who I was and that was fine with him. I most likely met some hijra during that time, but was unaware of who they were. Had I been aware there is little doubt in my own mind I would have gone native and joined them.

My college years were at the height of the counter culture movement of the late sixties. Paganism was coming of age at this time as well and more and more material was coming into my hands. So much so that by the mid-seventies I found myself teaching a course at the Free University at Ohio State for several years on the history of Paganism and the Occult. It was around this time I discovered a sporadic wealth of material on the Mother Goddess traditions but it was years later before the specifics about Cybele Herself came to hand due to my eventual path being the most ruthlessly suppressed of all the Pagan traditions by the early church.

Throughout my lifelong studies I was far more interested in the essence of Pagan theology than I was in the trappings and abandoned ceremonial magick as a personal dead end in favour of a gnostic approach. In 1989 I ran across a copy of Merlin Stone’s “When God was a Woman” in a flea market and suddenly things clicked into place. I started going back and re-reading the occult “classics” with new eyes. I suddenly kept seeing the name “Cybele” literally leaping from the pages for me in one semi-vague reference after another. The thing that struck me more than anything else was all the Mother Goddess traditions, presented as totally different religions, weren’t. They all shared the same symbols, the same essence and many of the exact same trappings of practice for literally thousands of years.

At the same time, my final bout with the dysphoric imperative (need to transition) was also coming to a head. Several times in my life I had managed to come to an accommodation with it short of out and out transition. I had learned I could “be” a woman and have others see me as male. At this time, that stopped working entirely and those I met were seeing me as a woman regardless of how aggressively male I tried to appear. Further, it was becoming very distasteful personally to be seen as male.

I transitioned and the Mother Goddess started knocking me around whenever I varied from Her path. I was directed to first establish a reclaiming of Her worship in the form of Cybele and then after literally throwing the missing pieces of the various puzzles in my face, move to the Catskills of upstate New York and establish a centre for that tradition. When I balked somewhat at that last, She took away my ability to not do so by handicapping me physically. When the Goddess directs you, She will prevail.

The Cybeline revival began with what Roman and Greek materials we had easy access to. Since then we have expanded that further back to the essence of all Mother Goddess traditions and then advanced our theology to reflect what we would have been today without the 1500 year interruption resulting from our wholesale murder by the early church. We are not a reconstructionist path in sticking only to Roman or Greek practice but a living extension of our own traditions throughout the world and history. As our knowledge of pre-history expands, we absorb and embrace that.

3) What’s the most important thing for trans people to know about spirituality?

Balance, the single most important thing for anyone, but especially trans/intersexed people spiritually is the concept of walking between the worlds and standing in balance. That is the position the Mother Goddess occupies and She is within all of us. “Walking between the Worlds” is so much more than just gender/sex. It is the intersection of science and magick, the living and the dead, the seen and unseen worlds, the darkness and the light. The gift of being different, and I do see it as a Divine gift and obligation, is the ability, if we only open our eyes widely and actually see that cultural impositions are not the laws of the universe, a “leg up” as it were, on understanding what it means to actually put yourself in the place of another and see through their eyes by virtue of having to see the world from a different perspective altogether ourselves.

I teach from within the concept of the Mother Goddess but often those very words are misunderstood today. “Mother” brings visions to the modern mind of stay at home moms all nurturing and devoted to children. Goddess implies a larger than life version of the christian God somewhere out of reach perhaps sitting on a cloud watching our every move. Both fail if you do this. The image of the Mother Goddess in every tradition I have studied is the Divine Feminine principle. The image is one we can grasp but She is also the Mother who never gives birth, the Goddess of wild places and of lions and birds of prey. Her essence is present in the now know fact that all higher level life starts off first as female as the default setting in fetal development. She is that within ourselves, male, female, other, that is the spark of Divine and if you do not find what you seek within, you shall never find it without because She is with us from the beginning. The word Nameste is a Hindu word now seeing wider use in the West. Literally it means “the Divine in me acknowledges the Divine in you.” Most fascinating of all to me has been the discovery that at the root of all Mother Goddess traditions you find hints She was, in the beginning, a female identified hermaphrodite and the maleness then cloned off to a “consort” later on.

Trans and intersexed people have a rich and ancient connection with the Divine as teachers throughout almost all cultures of the world. You can even find references to it in the Christian Bible in Isaiah 56 3-5. Several years ago I wrote a series of essays on the transsexual priestesses of the ancient world, I did so as a gift to those who followed me of their heritage. Today, I would write a different version given additional information, gained insight and having witnessed attempts to turn my own hard won path into a “tranny” religion when it never was any such thing. Balance is the key.

4) What do we have to teach the rest of the world, spiritually?

We have the power to challenge gender roles merely by being. This is vastly different from destroying the essences of male and female by rendering asunder all good about maleness and femaleness but rather teaching others it is possible to become fully human whatever that means to any particular individual. As a dyed in the wool feminist, my opposition the the patriarchy is a given but my beef with the Dianic movement born of Pagan radical feminism has been the desire to replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy and a rewriting of history, particularly of the Goddess cultures, to reflect that. Two thousand plus years of a totally patriarchal ascendancy over the world can make equality of men and women appear matriarchal, but my own lifelong journey into ancient history and spirituality teaches me that it was equality, not female dominance that was the hallmark of those cultures. And thus we return to the concept of balance and standing between worlds and embracing our personal Goddess natures. Once you truly accept that everyone and everything around you is also a part of yourself linked by your own Divine nature, you do not need rules to tell you harming others and all around you is harming yourself.

The violence done on the self esteem of women by the patriarchy is almost so universal it is often hard to grasp it’s full extent.  It spreads from economics to political organizational to religion and philosophy…and the underpinnings of all of those and more.

As long as feminist women use “oppression heiarchies” as the model to understanding all this, we lose.  As in total thermonuclear war, the answer is quite simple, the only way to win is not to play.  Personally I feel it is no accident that history is barely taught today in our schools and ancient history, when covered, rewritten completely to serve the political agendas of the patriarchy.

The logic of men is domination, the logic of women is cooperation.  This basic principle is clear throughout human history.  In political terms male logic yields monarchies, theocracies, dog eat dog captialism.  Female logic give us “socialized medicine”, the concept of the commons for communal raising and sharing of food resources, the idea that many hands make lighter labour.  In theological terms male logic give us gods sitting in judgement and handing out vengence and punishment while female logic gives us universal divinity, Gaia, understanding of the interdependence of all life, ecology.  Male logic gives us subdue the earth, rape it’s resources for our own immediate gain while women’s logic gives us the sense that we have an obligation to future generations and finite resources need to be preserved.

You can find male logic in a lot of women and female logic in a lot of men.  The difference is in style and gross numbers.

To me, a wholistic feminism is one that rejects the entire patriarchal model for Goddess Consciousness which has been slowly reawakening for the past hundred plus years in waves. Socialism, the Suffragettes, the rise in Pagan religious models over Abrahamic ones, socialized medicine, social security, Medicare, foodstamps and Welfare, worker’s comp, green movement, ecology…..these are all reflections of a Goddess awareness, a spirit of charity and cooperation as opposed to the sink or swim, you got what you deserved, no illegal aliens, social darwinism.

It’s feminism on a total global basis.  Can you be against socialized medicine and be a feminist?  How can you embrace a religious model that promotes your own original sin for being born without a penis and be a feminist?  How can you embrace politics that reject common humanity and the obligations not to mention promote the continued raping of the planet to the point it is in peril and still be a feminist?

Wholistic feminism transcends race, social status, physical bodies.  It is an entire way of being and make no mistake, the patriarchy knows this even if we are slow to understand it ourselves.  Think about it.  Those “matriarchies” of the ancient world weren’t, they were equalitarian.  It’s no accident that liberalism is called “effete”.

The women’s studies programs can take us only so far.  The “schools” of feminism are being used to divide us.  It is time to take a wholistic viewpoint, a global one of our feminism.  It’s not part of our lives, it is our lives and that of our children and partners as well.

As I have tried in the past, I’ve refocused this blog towards Feminist issues. I’ve been criticized for that by some HBS advocates and Feminism itself attacked in the process.

Feminism isn’t something new to me. I’ve been a long time member of NOW, most of my historical research relates to the time before the rise of the patriarchy and the ancient role of women in spirituality, politics and daily lives. I live what I write about. I founded the Maetreum of Cybele, a Goddess tradition of the ancient Mystery Schools, as near as I can tell, the original one in fact. I live at the modern Phrygianum, or Goddess oriented “convent” that was started by myself and three others. We have a three + acre site with a 150 year old former Catskill Mountain Inn on the property.

My day to day activities revolve around restoring our property and Goddess Spirituality. When not online, I’m probably cutting grass, planting gardens, restoring 150 year old plaster walls or similar activities. It is a place of sanctuary, safety and renewal for spiritual women. One of our projects is establishing a late 19′th century telegraph office in our home. This is probably one of two fully functioning such offices in the world today for we have learned that even various museum projects haven’t gone as far as we have. This project is called the Women in 19′th Century Technology Project, you might be hearing more about it in the future. Oh, by the way, that other office is ours as well near Erie Penn. This was started because telegraphy was the breakthrough technology for women and dominated by them, a little known fact. Some of the most famous suffragettes were telegraph operators such as the infamous Alice Paul.

When you enter the main hallway of our Phrygianum, you enter the late 19′th, early 20′th century from a woman’s point of view. On the walls are Suffragette posters, a telegraph alarm bell and a crank wall phone.

We do all our work on an absolute shoestring budget.

My primary “activism” these days is centred around minority religious freedom. As a woman centric, Goddess minority religion we have been fighting a three year battle with our county and town for the restoration of our property tax exemption that they continue to illegally deny us. They do this in violation of Federal and State law for we are a 501 C3 religious charitable organization recognized as such by the IRS and the State of New York and incorporated under the Religious Corporation laws of New York. This is the focus of my activism these days, not tranny rights, not repeal of DOMA or DADT. Shots at my religion from a christian point of view are triggers for me these days since minority religious freedom rights of Pagans is also a battle I’ve been part of for many decades and one that is impacting my day to day life right now.

I will never understand the tranny need to confront any random bigot on issues of womanhood. I am a woman, some random rad-fem extremist or religious bigot cannot change that, I’m secure in it the same as any other woman is. Frankly I have my own doubts of the sincerity of belief in personal womanhood of those who feel the need to confront the Lisa Vogels and Germaine Greers constantly. Their opinions of my womanhood have zero effect on it…..because although it might not be a very conventional woman’s life, it is one nonetheless. And in the end I don’t give a flying fig about some TG or HBSers opinion because I’m far too busy living that life.

If you read this and have any interest in our projects, Religion or just helping us out with a donation you can visit  our website and use the donation button at the top of the first page.

In the meantime……I’m out of the tranny nonesense business. I’ve clearly stated over and over how I feel about it here on this blog.  If you want to know a bit more about me personally, I maintain another blog for those personal stories, although almost no one apparently reads it other than my facebook friends.

Feminism in America was from its inception permeated with classism and racism. Sojourner Truth’s entreaty “Ain’t I a Woman” was a plaintive cry out to a movement that had by and large overlooked women of colour, immigrant women and women trapped in sweatshops. The working poor and the unemployed poor, unwed mothers, widows not only had no place at the table in 19th century American feminism but were covertly and frequently overtly excluded from not only the benefits of the “sisterhood” but also from the “sisterhood” itself.

The”sisterhood” of the 19th century, those women of privilege brought into being a style of feminism that narcissistically mirrored the privileged places in American society that they occupied. Often the wives of prominent man, their feminism was aimed at attaining the privileges held by their white Anglo-Saxon Protestant husbands. But, in addition to already possessing many of the social privileges of their husbands, they tragically reflected the prejudices of the narrow segment of community that brought them forth.

Successive waves of American feminism were built upon the bedrock`of this classist and racist movement. Overt hostility gave way to arrogant neglect. From its inception, the stratified hierarchy of American feminism, motivated by an arrogant sense of noblesse oblige functioned in loco parentis, that is seemingly with the powers of a parent over the agenda of women, whose issues and lives they were wholly out of touch with and made no effort to understand except in terms of their own culture and experience. The faces remained largely Caucasian; the issues remained largely upper middle class. At a time that women of color, immigrant women and single mothers were struggling for survival, mainstream feminism continued to be preoccupied with breaking the glass ceilings, pay equality for executives and reproductive rights. With HIV sweeping through women of color, American feminism politely ignored growing epidemic.

There have been repeated demands and pleas for change; the shortcomings of the feminist movement had been pointed out not only by the Right, which delights in doing so but also by the left, whose diverse spectrum is barely represented at all in the leadership of the feminist movement.

The structure of the movement is hierarchical and therefore vertical. Its goals have been defined from the time of its inception through the modern era by a leadership that in a very real sense rules sometimes more, and sometimes less benevolently over the image, demands, and agenda that it presents to the world on behalf of a majority of women far different than itself

Spanish feminism, as opposed to this, developed as a popular and populist movement of women living with nearly feudal oppression, dispossession and disadvantage. Closely tied with it were the first women attending universities in the country in many instances. It was philosophically allied with humanism, socialism and even anarchism.

As a horizontal rather than a vertical structure, as a populist rather than an elitist movement and based on a fundamental premise of mutual support and improving the welfare of all women as opposed to attaining privileges associated with empowered white males for a select few, Spanish feminism or horizontal feminism is more egalitarian and inclusive with a heavy emphasis upon nurturing support in assisting and uplifting an entire sisterhood with close attention to the individual needs of daily life as opposed to abstract ideals and privilege.

The issues of race inequality have to be addressed for horizontal feminism to truly function; women have the obligation be cognizant of and lend themselves to the improvement of the condition of their sisters as part of the improvement of the condition of women as a whole. Healthcare, child care, safety from assault, employment equality all become issues for the entire movement. The agenda is generated from the far reaches of the community through the center to the opposite side, permeating the whole with a co-responsibility for human welfare

There is one defining feature of the group, the divine feminine, esprit feminine or woman’s spirit. To truly function, to truly reflect the nature of women as a whole, the group must be inclusive, must be diverse and must reflect both empathy and advocacy for the entire membership.

It is time to finally part with the fatally flawed structure that has been the model of American feminism and embrace a different, inclusive, co-responsible model, horizontal feminism too and the racial and class distinctions that poison the well of women’s rights

That was the final line made by the computer in the 1991 cult classic movie, “War Games”. Multiple levels of meaning are expressed in that phrase for myself right now. I’m turning my back and walking away from all things trans anything because I finally learned this lesson. My history is there but I no longer will let it or others use it to define me. And in that process I took a wider view of my own life and what I have devoted the rest of my life towards and realize it applies there as well. This is why horizontal feminism which in my own mind is nothing more or less than furthering the re-awakening in the world of Goddess Consciousness.

Goddess Consciousness has also been expressed in the idea of Gaia Ecology, Mother Nature. It is quite simply a belief in the interconnectivity of all of us and a rejection of the belief that mankind is the ultimate expression of the universe who can rape, pillage and plunder all resources at will and without cost.

Ultimately the failure of American Feminism to appeal to the majority of women has been that it “played the game”…and that only can take you so far when the deck has been stacked against you from the beginning. Despite having gained the vote, women still make 23-25% less than a man for the exact same work. The control of a woman’s own body is still a battleground. Roe v Wade is still in constant danger, contraceptives are still being withheld, the ERA never passed. We’ve played the game and gone as far as we can that way. Time to change the entire way we’ve defined our position and stop asking for “rights” within a hierarchy that in the end is nothing more than jockeying for position within that hierarchy and just toss those hierarchies out the window in our own lives altogether.

I’ll be writing in the future on the history of women from a political viewpoint and the demonization of cooperative efforts by the Patriarchy as expressions of the ultimate evil, socialism and what that implies as an answer to healing the world and ourselves as women. Hopefully I will be pointing the way to a new model of Feminism that simply refuses to play games that actually empower our continued enslavement. I invite others who wish to explore this in blog form to add their voices. These ideas are not new. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde is a title of an essay that speaks to this, not just a quote. Read it……add what you know is true, that vertical organizational models are hierarchies and tools of the patriarchy.

I’ve changed the subtitle of this blog to reflect the new direction but actually this is merely my taking the work I do in my daily life to a wider meaning in my writing as well.

If you are now coming here for future discussions on trans anything, I’m afraid you will be disappointed. When I first transitioned I was shunned by the local “transsexual community”, after years of trans activism, considerable effort was made by some to make sure I never was credited or mentioned. Now some of the sisters of transsexual purity wish my name never mentioned again. While all this was done to hurt, it was and is a great gift.

My positions on women and trans remain the same as always: If you are a woman, be one. If you come to women’s space as anything other than a woman, you don’t belong. If you seek women’s space as a form of validation of your womanhood, you are not a woman and should examine why you need that validation for you thus came to take, not share. At any rate, I won’t play in that playground any longer.

Another guest blog and I am opening this blog up to others who also wish to guest blog in the hopes this might become yet another community nexus of those of us who wish to promote this new (old) vision of feminism. It should be apparent that Maura and I share a similar vision here.

“It was a true sisterhood. What bound us together was the spirit within, the spirit of the feminine. Equals.”

We were walking together on the grounds of the Complutense University in Madrid when my mentor and former profesora spoke those words to me. We were discussing the feminist movement of the last years of the Spanish Republic, known as “feminismo.” Feminismo gave rise to the Mujeres Libres, the Free Women of the Civil War.

“The Americans are crazy, Maureen. They will replace the Patriarchy of men with a Patriarchy of women. Who speaks for the poor or for the Moors(her word for African)? No one. It is a vertical feminism, and it will oppress and marginalise in the name of liberation, and I tell you Chica that no greater abomination exists than women denying their spirit of sisterhood and instead becoming the oppressor. They will, you watch.” Her lesson of the day to me had begun.

The feminism of 1930’s Spain had its roots in Existentialism and in Humanism. It was pro-active rather than reactive. Women advocated for each other and on behalf of each other. It was not exclusive to any class or race, or even sex; its nature would not permit that. “You find the feminine within all willing to recognise it, Maureen. Some people more than others, for they have been taught to shut it away or that it is weakness rather than strength.”

It was a horizontal feminism, as she expained to me, rather than a vertical feminism. Vertical implies a power structure, horizontal implies equality. Sisterhood demands equality and therefore a horizontal feminism was the trademark of the Feminismo and the later Anarcho-Feminism of the Civil War and the Mujeres Libres.

Horizontal feminism was born eight thousand years before Christ, two thousand years before the beginning of the chronology of the Bible. It began in rooms of women sifting grain or weaving, and was given voice by the singing of the women and by their drumming, using the grain sieves. Women lent their skills and time to each other for the benefit of all.

As a sisterhood, horizontal feminism demands responsibility for the welfare of all of the members of the community. That which women have in common, the divine feminine which marks us as sisters, is precious and is to be nurtured and cherished whatever the form it takes and in whomsoever it appears. By its nature defining us as women, it would therefore be that force which brings our sisters of unique journeys such as our trans sisters to the table of the Espirit Feminine.

Horizontal, not vertical. Therefore there is no superior position, no special privilege recognised. No racial preference, no class distinction. Women function as a family, as a community and by consensus.

During the Civil War, with the disappearance of services and resources, Femisimo and horizontal feminism was put to its most practical test. Communities of women created schools, hospitals, established militias and brigades, raised each other’s children as a communal family, worked as doctors, soldiers, teachers, engineers, writers, nursemaids cooks, and succeeded in sustaining an idea of equality while under attack from the Falanagist/Franquistas/Nationalists and the Luftwaffe. The women, Las Mujeres, yielded to no control but their own.

Horizontal feminism reaches across all lines and distinctions. It is not exclusory, it thrives by inclusion and what each sister brings into it. The sisters of the community are defined by a force within, a flame that each member, each sister, each woman has an obligation to nurture, cherish and to protect in one another.

The Lesbian must bear responsibility for, cherish and nurture the feminine spirit within her straight sister, her trans sister, her “moorish” sister, her poor sister, her Islamic sister; in short, the totality of womankind. The others are moved from within to do the same.

“We are one or we will be none, Maureen” she told me in English to emphasise the point with the alliterative accents.

Equality merely begins with horizontal feminism; a first step if you will, but without this step there is no possibilility of equality at all.

Owning one’s womanhood. I wrote to that theme in part 1, now it’s time to take that idea into a worldview beyond “cis” and trans and power dynamics.

I’ve always believed that women with trans histories had a lot to bring to the Feminist table and I still do but in the process something else happened as well. The re-emergence of old battles and wounds within Feminism itself tied to the whole concept of “power” and privilege dynamics…and this is actually the essence of patriarchal thinking that places everything and everyone on a vertical relationship rather than the revolutionary Feminist ideas of the European “anarchist” feminists of the thirties and then the fifties and sixties.

This is utterly consistent with my own religious viewpoints as well. That we are all part of the Goddess knowing Herself and therefore we are all equally part of Her. No power dynamics, no hierarchies, no dominance of one group over another. It is not an easy thing to switch one’s essential basis of being to this idea because we all hold on to and cherish our oppressions real or imagined. But you don’t have to. And if you are willing simply to own your own personhood (however you see it), then others cannot take it away from you unless you let them. Don’t think in terms of vertical relationships, think horizontal. Don’t allow others to exercise “power” over you by granting it to them, approach life and others as an equal. Let go of the idea you are oppressed and suddenly it becomes much much more difficult to be oppressed in the first place.

Feminism needs most of all to learn this because the oppression discussions among ourselves are a trap. One that leads to those claiming to be oppressed actually seeking a weird form of power over those they claim are oppressing them via guilt. The whole Jewish Mother syndrome.

Julia Serano taught transwomen to use this with the whole concept of cis-privilege and I have witnessed this used as a weapon against other feminists to the point that accepting trans-woman came at the cost of “confessions” of cis-privilege first. I’m sorry but this is a subtle and perverse form of patriarchy power dynamics thinking. It has bothered me seeing this happen without being able to put my finger on it until recently. And it re-awoken old wounds within feminism on race and class as well. It’s time to stop it. All that is required is to simply accept we are all women, period. To embrace and celebrate our unique strengths  as women and that we are all sisters. A very simple idea but the simplest ideas are often the hardest to grasp. Take the simple idea that is at the root of almost all the world’s religions for example, to learn how to shift your thinking from outside the “me” and see the world through the eyes of another. That’s the so called “Golden Rule”. The reason it is an ancient idea is that it is the essence of the Goddess concept. That we are all part of Her and that the most sacred thing we can do is connect and honour other parts of Her in the full understanding we are all part of the Divine, Do this and you no longer need “rules” for proper behaviour.

Own your own womanhood first, accepting it in your sisters then follows naturally. Then we can discard the vertical for the horizontal way of thinking….and suddenly personal histories, race, social standing all become meaningless to divide us and simply ways in which we are each a unique part of a whole.

Can you do this? Can you reject the Patriarchal thinking for the natural Feminine? If enough of us can, we will change the entire world one person at a time. The way to “fight” the Patriarchy is to refuse to embrace it’s essence of hierarchies among ourselves first, not absorb and reflect it’s power dynamics.

Each of us is unique but also each other.

By way of introduction I will reveal that Maura Hennessey, Irish lesbian activist extraordinaire, has visited our home in the Catskills and along with a board member of HRC we shared an evening of spirited and delightful debate on feminism past and present. Her “friend of operative history” is a mutual one.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was an epoch of foolishness; it was an age of wisdom…”

In short, it was the 1970’s. A brash, angry and outspoken woman named Greer was caught up in and in fact one of the public faces of the feminist movement in the British Commonwealth. In Boston, a young graduate student was working upon expanding the ideas of her doctoral supervisor and rumoured lover. Her work on gender and feminism would be perceived as largely theoretically sound to a point, making a sudden leap to come to a conclusion nearly inconsistent with the first few chapters of her work. Her name was Janice Raymond.

“To understand what came after, it is important to know what came before.” In this case, it is important to understand the milieu in which both of these women arrived at the conclusions that are forever associated with their names.

Feminism arrived with not so much a trumpet blare as a cannon blast. Partly it was fueled by the availability of contraception, which meant that “good girls could…and did” and partly it was a reaction to the sociological experiment known as the Eisenhower years . The sexual revolution was on and with it a rapid and vertigo-inducing shift in ideas about women, women’s roles, women’s rights.

Donna Reed and June Cleaver were replaced by Angela Davis and Bernadine Dohrn(or Bernadette Devlin, if you were overseas). The stereotyped conservative, deferential housewife was exposed as a mockery of women, contrived to encourage a TV-opiated television audience to accept and to accomodate the dominance of men

Roles and stereotypes were ripped away, derided and condemned as what they were, sociological chains wrapped around women to keep them in their places serving comfortable a patriarchy deluding itself that it was exercising noblesse oblige in caring for their servant-wives and servant-daughters.

Into this age, this milieu and this sociological revolution came the higher awareness of transsexuality. The public began to hear of cases more frequently. These women now in the public eye were conventional in speech, in behaviour, in belief and in behaviour with perhaps the exception of Dr Richards. They were by and large heterosexual and socially conservative. Much as women of the fifties were shaped by the social constructs of men, the presentation of trans-women of the 1970’s was as well. Donna Reed and June Cleaver had returned, only now they emerged from the operating room. The culprit was the standards used for operative selection, permitting only women attracted to macho men, demure, feminine, attracted to frilly things. Man had become God and created woman in the image of his own fantasies and his own misogynistic desire for dominance. Man wrote the criteria for the surgery, insuring only women from the fifties languishing in the 1970’s could achieve their goal of mind-body agreement.

New women were coming into existence, it seemed, garnering public attention, and these new women were caracitures of the goals of women radicals, the antithesis of the feminist desire to shatter glass ceilings and glass walls, to end the control of men over their reproduction and thier bodies. The new women would in the end use conservative ideals, conservative life choices, and conventionalism to survive “in a man’s world.” By and large they are not to be blamed, this was the price of surgery and men had written the rules.

To women like Raymond and Greer, it seemed as if the Stepford Wives had arrived upon the scene. Worse, they seemed to have equal media access to send a decidedly anti-feminist image in nations where women were struggling for independence of men and equality to men. The anger and rage towards the men who had created post surgical Mrs. Cleavers spilled out in poisonous draughts upon their creations, whether or not they were truly ‘caricatures.’ An entire class of women was condemned in a fashion just as separatist, just as elitist and just as noxious as that of the men who Greer and Raymond were declaring their separate identity from.

Raymond and Greer condemned an entire group when their anger was at the man made social image of women carefully selected and crafted by male medical professionals. Over time, women freed themselves of the expectations of men and trans-women found medical professionals who would do likewise…

But ….the Stepford Wives, the ‘Desparate Corrected Housewives,’ these are still with us. Anti-feminist, conservative, demanding purity in their ranks, we know them by various names. Embracing a conventionality of the 1950’s, defining their group as heterosexual, frequently anti Lesbian their socialisation as women seems to be out of 1950’s and early 1960’s television; one wonders if they would appear in black and white or in colour were you to meet them.

I remark upon the socialisation because for the past 40 years women have had, unless living in a polygamous Mormon compound or a fundamentalist enclave, broader views of roles women can play, women’s sexuality and even women’s spirituality than is to be found amongst the heirs of Greer’s and Raymond’s targets. Worse, they choose, out of some desire for separatism and ‘legitamacy’ the lives, beliefs and roles of the trans-women of decades ago who had no choice but to be what their masters in the medical establishment meant them to be or they would never see the inside of an operating room.

They condemn Lesbians, they condemn radicalism, they condemn women’s spirituality which even Girl Scouts are exposed to and either overtly or covertly participate in. Though overinclusive, there remains a truth to Greer’s condemnation, though she points it in the wrong place.

There are caricatures, but in limited numbers, clinging to conventionality, defining others out of their cohort, roundly condemning women’s radicalism of spirit, spirituality, politics or sexuality. They are not amongst us, for they desire separateness of identity while claiming at the same time the title of women. While a conventionalised and more reactionary Greer points in one direction, the true anti-feminist caricature is to be found in the opposite.

As often happens these days, something I read inspired me to write. This time it was an autobiographical piece by Calpernia Addams. What caught my attention was the opening:
“Transition is never perfect, never easy and never finished. But it does get better, it does easier and it does recede into the background as time goes by.”

My problem with this is that it makes statements from a position of authority, Calpernia after all has a lot of “creds” with trans people, that I find not only not to be true, but potentially downright counter to the development of something essential to a successful transition, a decent sense of self esteem.

Almost all women struggle with the beauty trap, the tying of worth of womanhood to appearance , the feeling we’ll never quite be attractive enough no matter how attractive we may or may not be. It was a major feminist issue throughout all the various “waves”. We are too fat, too thin, our thighs are too thick, our nose too big, our breasts not perky enough or too small or too big. Our hips too wide…..you get the picture and if you are female, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you have a transsexual or intersexed history this is further complicated by feeling you will never be female enough, pre-transitioned, that you will never “pass”, that people are laughing at you behind your back. I can tell you from direct observation, the most flawless feminine have the exact same fears. And it is needless most of the time.

By telling women pre transition that it is never perfect, easy or finished Calpernia is doing a major disservice to them. I know we are supposed to warn those coming after us not to pursue this unless you have to and scare off those who should give it more thought, but really, she contradicts herself as well with the whole do it young advise that follows. And as for never finished? Don’t get me wrong, I think Callie and I would become great friends if we were to meet, but someone who’s life is being transsexual is hardly the one to address a “full” transition to womanhood. And it does finish for many, maybe most of us. And it isn’t always hard even if it looks that way to those outside. As for “perfect”…..what in life is?

So time for me to drag out some personal stories to illustrate. I was never going to be a beauty queen, even if I’d transitioned young. I have broad shoulders, large hands and overweight with a large frame. But I had one thing going for me, I always saw myself as female. I even had a morning ritual pre-transition to allow me to “pass” as male. Each morning I stood in front of a mirror and put on a Greek fishing cap as a symbol of putting on “male” for the world that day. Weird eh? Trust me, there is absolutely nothing approaching normal when you are mostly an act to the rest of the world. I grew a beard to provide an unmistakable “male” trigger for the world to see. When I had to see “me” in the mirror when I had the beard, I’d cover the beard with a cloth and the eyes looking back were a woman’s….always. I was also married and had been forced into a promise to keep my “gender weirdness”, as my ex called it, from out daughter when she was born. That is the one major regret of my life, that I made and kept that promise.

The summer between my daughter’s junior and senior year of high school she attended Band Camp and my ex went along as a helper. And I shaved off my beard… and that changed everything. In retrospect, and I am a very introspective person by nature who tries to understand all my own inner motivations and own them, I had apparently come to rely totally on the beard to provide the maleness, let my actual nature free except for saying it out loud and from the time it was gone I never again reliably passed as male regardless of how I was dressed, how “macho” the activity I was engaged in, no matter how aggressively male I tried to be.

And that scared the living crap out me.

This was my big secret, the one thing I could never ever ever let the world see or know about and perfect strangers were seeing me as female, seeing right to my soul….. And even though I had a strong feminist sensibility, even though I emulated the strong women in our family and admired them, for all that I also internalized all those “women as less than” messages I’d received my entire life mixed with the “man in a dress” is the height of absurd humour. So like almost every woman like me I was terrified to dress as the world was already seeing me, female. In that respect pre-transition was not easy. What changed that was exposure to transwomen but not in the fashion you’d think. I started to attend “support meetings” for a trans group and early on one of the “transsexuals” took me under her wing and gave me a list of 50 things women never do. I read it, thought it was joke and laughed. She was very offended at my reaction. You see there wasn’t a single item on that list I didn’t know some woman who did several of them. Right then and there I decided that if I wasn’t insane and really was a woman, then what I did was what women did. A major shift in perception. From that point on “transition” itself was nothing, nothing at all. Oh, I knew I was likely to lose family, friends, career etc. but that wasn’t transition, that wasn’t the shift. I lost all those things and I suppose that made my transition look very difficult to others. But I gained myself Once I owned my own womanhood all the shame went with it. But I seemed to be unique in that.

So I owned my own womanhood. The self acceptance was something else. As a life long Pagan and someone who cherished Crones I had little trouble accepting myself as past the glamour girl nonsense and only had mild regrets I would never be “beautiful” knowing the majority of women my age had dealt with exactly the same issues. I have been blessed or cursed, depending on your viewpoint, to see the world pretty much as it is. I suppose my own self image as female my entire life kept me from developing blinders as to exactly how much variation there is among women in form, I saw a woman when I looked in the mirror. Maybe not a pretty one, but a woman. And I noticed that others in my situation didn’t. It is hard enough for any woman to throw off the beauty trap so I guess it should be no surprise it’s even harder for someone who saw themselves as a male to do so and I wish I knew how to tell those about to transition how to do what I did because I believe that is at the heart of transition and that it has almost nothing to do with clothes, mannerisms, voice etc. All those things help but the simple truth is, the world takes it cues on how to see us by what we reflect from within ourselves.

If you never socialize with other women, you won’t know how. If you insist on seeing a man in the mirror, that’s what others will see. If you put qualifiers on your womanhood, so will the world.

If you truly see yourself as a woman, accept you are the woman you are and that’s good enough, if you can do that then transition is easy, it’s as close to perfect as anyone gets and it most certainly has a finish.

Calpernia is wrong on this.

I have a lot more to say on all this so eventually there will be a part 2

Yes, I’m dead serious here. It’s long past time for some serious Congressional re-education efforts.

Just like Faux News, the TG activists seem to pass back and forth coordinated “talking points” when it comes to the objections by post corrected women to their colonization of our lives and identities. The latest one is “your numbers are so tiny you have to join us”. Let’s dissect this one and see what lies underneath it, shall we?

The biggie first. In order to make the claim that post corrected women’s numbers are tiny, one first has to separate us from the class “woman”, which last time I checked was 1/2 of the population of the world. Anyone surprised I have a serious problem with this? Transgendered activists have zero problem with this because they never saw us as women in the first place. If they did, they would be forced to deal with their own, extremely misogynistic treatment of us. You know, things like insults to our corrected body parts using the most graphically insulting terms possible? Telling us we’ll never be real women because of our genetics and our birth genitals  (a real hoot in my case).

What hurts however, is when these arguments are used unthinkingly by those who should be with us. Dr. Jillan Weiss for example. On a current Bilerico thread she replied to me with the following:

“This is not something that can be cured by demanding apartheid between transgender and transsexual people. In addition, the numbers of those who have surgery and are politically active are so small that it would be impossible to get any political leverage by ourselves. I respect your opinion that there is an important difference between transgender and transsexual people. However, I don’t think there are enough people of your opinion to win any political leverage.”

Let’s examine this. First is the underlying assumption of non-womanhood indicated by the references to small numbers and not enough people of “my” opinion to win any political leverage. The not enough people of my opinion is also quite interesting and contrary to all my personal experiences. Outside of genderland, most people have almost no problem at all understanding classic transsexuality. It’s an easily grasped concept that has no conflict with 99% of the worlds idea of gender, just a minor variation on it simple enough even Islamic clerics and religious bigots like Pat Robertson can “get it”, and did. When I lobbyed Congress in the past I could explain the concept to conservative Republicans in rather short order and have them on our side. This is the simple fact transgenders live in absolute terror of because they know it’s true and that’s why they go to the extremes they do to keep us from public sight. The simple fact is, my day to day life gives absolute lie to the idea I’m not considered a woman by the greater world.

The next problem with Dr. Weiss’ statement is the small number politically active part. That’s got a hidden gotcha too. It assumes we are not political active. Bad assumption. Many of us are active in the greater women’s movement and some in the greater lesbian movement. We do not get involved in the transgender movement because they do not see us as women and require us to renounce our womanhood to a third gender. Not to mention forced association with transvestic fetishism, because that is where their “greater numbers” lie. Why on earth would any woman with an ounce of self respect do this?

Most telling to me of all is here we have a lawyer, a trans-activist gathering as many disciples as she can and claims ten years of active research into gender issues……and she is totally clueless about the ERA! She had no idea it is re-introduced every year and has been since 1923. I would not necessarily expect the average woman to be aware of this because the media largely ignores it, but anyone claiming to be a political activist in gender has no excuse here. Pass the ERA and post corrected women, pre-corrected women, all actual women are given full employment rights without the exceptions that riddle ENDA plus full public accommodations, housing, you name it. The whole Magilla. And numbers?, I’m a woman, part of 1/2 of the human race. That’s a hellva lot more “numbers” than the 5% that is the gays.

Now personally, I don’t think anyone should be discriminated against for any non job related issue, but I do draw the line at “civil rights” to play dress up at work for sexual kicks and people with penises demanding the right to invade places of female nudity. I suspect those who share my opinions here number in the millions, not some tiny number with zero political leverage.

So Mr. and Ms. Congress-critters, forget the genda in ENDA and work to pass the ERA if you are serious about civil rights.