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rightsidenews · 6 years

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Why Do Male Feminists Rape?

Ash Sharp Editor

For what seems like forever on social media, a repeating cycle has taken place. No, not just hordes of blue checkmark verified liberals screaming into the abyss of Donald J. Trump’s mentions every hour of every day.

It goes like this. A man is a feminist. A man decries toxic masculinity, rails against Whiteness, demands that men start being real men and join #TheResistance.

The man is likely a writer for Vice. The man opposed Gamergate, wrung his hands in sympathy for feminists who, he was sure, were targeted by misogynistic basement dwellers.

He recognises his privilege. He is a good feminist male ally. He is woke.

Then: he is arrested for rape.

Why? What is the underlying connection? It has been the position of many that the male feminist is secretly a predator, who is too beta-male to acquire female attention, and so joins a cult populated by women and other beta-males in order to get laid. It is a popular and plausible theory, but I contend it is too superficial to provide a complete answer. In this article, we will explore the underlying roots of what drives someone to become the worst imaginable kind of hypocrite.

It begins with the human search for identity. We used to examine ourselves, explore our inner machinations. Codified in many religious sects is the demand to know oneself. This concept is best expressed by the Ancient Greeks. Gnothi Seauton, know thyself, is inscribed in the court of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Yet, who is the real I, where does he hide from ME? I know who he is not, but how and what and if at all HE is, I have never discovered although for more than seventy years I have been looking for him. ~ Bernard Berenson

File this with all the other headlines that aged terribly this year.

In all religions, philosophical doctrines and schools of thought, we boil down to this one fundamental question. Who am I? Without knowing who one truly is, we find ourselves adrift, searching around and paddling aimlessly on the seas of our own consciousness for something, someone, to show us the way to who we are. Charlatans, gurus and mystics have become rich by peddling the answers, as the sellers of indulgences exploited to perfection.

When we do not know ourselves we are prey for anyone that may come along with an attractive idea. We are prey for those who would sell us a cure for what ails in one moment, while informing us that we are sickening from a new invisible disease in the next. The context of our modern society is shaped so that the identity we should find within is placed within reach, without. In the process of growing from child to adult, we reshape ourselves to fit into the often conflicting demands of a society we do not understand. So detached from the inner-self have we become that external demand of what we should be takes precedence over what we are.

This is the allure of identity politics. It is a cheap fake. It tells you that you are skin colour, genitalia, class, ethnicity. Identity politics says nothing about your character. As a weapon of control, identity politics is advanced by shysters who are no more moral than the men who understood that canned laughter accompanying a bad comedy forces a laugh from the audience.

Imagine such a case, then, that some men look for identity and are told that theirs is bad. Toxic. A thing to be fought against and apologised for, forever. An eternal penance for the crime of not knowing who you really are.

In this way, the male feminist is surely one of the most tragic victims of our age.

To understand the psychological importance to feminism of checking one’s privilege and the impact on the cult victim, we must first talk about shiny toy robots.

Back in 1965, psychologist Jonathan Freedman conducted an experiment on compliance in children. He wanted to see if he could instil a particular behaviour in eight-year-old boys, just by telling them to obey. No mean feat, as I am sure anyone reading this who has spent any time with children at all can attest.

Freedman first warned the boys of dire consequences if they were to play with a toy robot after they had completed some tasks. The boys had four other toys to play with, of far lower quality. When Freedman left the room to watch the unfolding events behind a two-way mirror, he discovered that 21 out of 22 boys did not play with the robot.

He had expected this. The next phase of the experiment took place six weeks later, featuring a female assistant overseeing the same group of boys. The toys were the same also. This time though, the assistant said that the boys could play with whatever toys they liked, with no prohibition. 77% chose to play with the robot that had been forbidden to them earlier.

So, when a child is forbidden from doing something with dire consequences, the object which is forbidden becomes almost irresistible. Freedman proved his hypothesis by repeating the study with a control group, who were presented the same array of toys. This time though, Freedman merely said: “it is wrong to play with the robot” and left the room to observe.

Just as with the other sample, only 1 of the 22 boys touched the robot during the short time Freedman was gone.

The real difference between the two samples of boys came six weeks later when they had a chance to play with the toys while Freedman was no longer around. An astonishing thing happened. The boys who earlier had been given no strong threat against playing with the robot, when given the freedom to play with any toy they wished, most avoided the robot. Even though it was by far the most attractive of the five toys available (the others were a cheap plastic submarine, a child’s baseball glove without a ball, an unloaded toy rifle, and a toy tractor). When these boys played with one of the five toys, only 33 percent chose the robot.

Something dramatic had happened to both groups of boys. For the first group, it was the severe threat they heard from Freedman to back up his statement that playing with the robot was “wrong.” It had been quite effective, while Freedman could catch them violating his rule. Later, though, when he was no longer present to observe the boys’ behaviour, his threat was impotent and his rule was, consequently, ignored. It seems clear that the threat had not taught the boys that operating the robot was wrong, only that it was unwise to do so when the possibility of punishment existed.

For the other boys, the dramatic event had come from inside, not outside. Freedman had instructed them, too, that playing with the robot was wrong, but he had added no threat of punishment should they disobey him. There were two important results. First, Freedman’s instruction alone was enough to prevent the boys from operating the robot while he was briefly out of the room. Second, the boys took personal responsibility for their choices to stay away from the robot during that time. They decided that they hadn’t played with it because they didn’t want to. After all, there were no strong punishments associated with the toy to explain their behaviour otherwise. Thus, weeks later, when Freedman was nowhere around, they still ignored the robot because they had been changed inside to believe that they did not want to play with it. (Cialdini, Robert B. (2009–08–20). Influence: Science and Practice

What does Freedman tell us about the mind of the male feminist?

In simple terms, Freedman is showing us how forbidden fruit entices us all. From the Garden of Eden to a robot in a classroom in 1965, the fundamental is the same. The instruction from God to refuse the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is the reflected in the Soma of Neo-Marxist indoctrination in Feminism’s Brave New World. Women, the protected class- to interact with one in any way that might be considered remotely masculine is forbidden. Haram. Women for the male feminist have become the apple.

Imagine my shock

They are the shiny red robot, for which the male feminist is subjected to an eternal mental loop- do not touch do not think do not look do not talk do not do do not do not not not no no no no. Much further than the societal constraints that assist in the function of civilisation goes this conditioning. The male feminist is reduced to little more than an obedient drone- while he maintains his un-natural composure, of course.

The simple solution to achieving the proclaimed aim of ending rape culture is the exact opposite of what feminists have been demanding for decades. Rape culture is, in reality, a construct of feminism itself- at least in the developed western world.

So, in the programmed mind of the male feminist, when [any-flirt-action = crime] and [malesexdrive = rape] just as Dworkin prophesied, then our poor chaps are living on borrowed time. While I obviously make no apology for rapists or those who commit sex crime (I advocate for much harsher sentencing for any individual who rapes than currently prescribed in the west) we must acknowledge that many of the crimes we prosecute in the court of public opinion are not crimes at all. I briefly touched on this when discussing Rupert Myers, late of GQ, who fell foul of feminist social media by saying that we would rather have sexual congress with a woman than be her friend and tried to kiss her after an evening consuming alcohol.

For this crime, he lost his job. Feminist online mobs wield shame-powerover even large institutions, once the employees of those institutions transgress the laws of the FemCult. This example is merely the extreme of the Far Left power play that shackles the entirety of the English-speaking world. We can laugh and call these men cucks and soyboys and betas, and feel good about ourselves and our red-pilled ways. That is dangerous, however true it may be.

You, dear reader, are under imminent threat of losing your livelihood for speaking in the wrong way. Just as these male feminists have. They are the canaries in the coal mine, who are so sensitive and so close to the face that they are first to be asphyxiated by toxic gas.

Weaponised Neo-Marxist ideology has you all in its terrible grip. The toxic fumes that kill the canary will eventually kill all the miners too, unless someone spots that the bird is twitching at the bottom of his cage. You can see this for yourself. Take out your Union Jack and walk with it through any street in Britain. Write a sign saying #AllLivesMatter and stand on the streets of Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco. Mock Hitler using a cute dog, while living in Scotland.

This is the true and secret intersectionality that is causing our world to corrode.

But why do these feminist men adopt these impossible rules in the first place?

“L’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs.”

Hell is full of good wishes or desires. ~Bernard of Clairvaux, 1150 AD.

It begins for most men with the simple desire to be liked by women. It is a simple thing that we all crave, from the attention of our mothers in childhood through to adolescent yearning for the coolest girl in school who doesn’t know you exist. Then, at some point, a young man may be talking to a young woman and she will say the fateful words;

“You believe in equality for womyn- don’t you?”

This is the first fateful step. It is unanswerable in any way that will produce a positive outcome for the young man, and so, poof a new male feminist is born. Quickly he learns from his new Mystress of the terrible legacy of his sex, how his very penis is an oppressive weapon. And so, he must confess his sins.

Publicly acknowledging one’s privilege is a social signal. It is as powerful for the freshly radicalised Neo-Marxist as it is for the saved Christian who accepts Christ. Anyone who has left a faith will tell you of the internal struggle to renounce pledges you have spoken. Psychologically speaking, it is far harder to go back on your word if it is written down, or spoken in public.

The Chinese knew this during the Korean War. With American POWs, they asked the prisoners to write down everything. In interrogation, to win small bonuses like a few cigarettes, written testimonies were gathered. Over time, prisoners would confess that, perhaps, the United States was not perfect. Perhaps also there were things to be said for the Communist way of doing things. Once these words were written down and signed, it becomes much more difficult for the prisoner to recant them later.

Consider the male feminist to be a prisoner of war, and their behaviour makes a lot more sense.

A person who checks their privilege in such a manner assigns greater value to the ideological cause because they have made the decision to publicly ally with it. Just as a prisoner of war can be encouraged to betray his own nation. This process comes with conflicts to be overcome; parental/filial disapproval, being a gigantic cuck forever, public scorn, and so on. The further you go into the ideological framework, the more affirmations you must make. Black Lives Matter. Trans Bathrooms Now. #TheResistance. Putting a little rose in your twitter bio, next to the snowflake and rainbow flag emojis. This is an initiation ceremony.

Without an initiation ceremony, groups are less worthwhile to us. We value groups for whom we have sacrificed. The USMC understands this. Greek letter fraternities understand this. Tribal societies in the Amazon understand this. English rugby teams understand this. Neo-Marxists understand this. When the squad performs press-ups while Private Pyle eats a jelly doughnut, this is the formation of a strong group bond within the squad, against Pyle. When the male feminist signals his virtue, he is participating in this same act.

Look how many press-ups I am doing for you, Dryll Sergeant.

Look how virtuous I am, not like these Gomer Pyles who are not woke. God, look how they bully me online when I stand up for womyn. I watch The Young Turks. I re-tweet Shaun King. I read bell hooks, because her books are short, easy to understand and even easier to repeat for even more virtue points.

This ‘good boy’ feminism is at the root of the problem for our future sex criminal. The reality is that in the end it is the male feminist who metaphorically splatters his brains all over the wall, and the men he sees as neanderthal schlubs who fly off to ‘Nam to participate in the great struggle of procreation and survival.

Shifting the self-image of a person directly affects how a person behaves. For example, I am affecting my own behaviour exactly in this way, right now. I adopt the persona of Ash Sharp, the writer. For now, that is the aspect of my personality construct which is present, in charge- the focus is on writing well. Therefore, I write these words for you to read. In this persona, I am sure that I am correct, or at least making a good argument, and so I overcome the self-doubt that concerns ‘me’ when putting work on public display. I gather this is a common technique.

And yet male feminists still exist, for some reason.

The male feminist adopts a far more uncomfortable mask, one that is impossible to maintain perfectly. The demands of feminist ideology are so high that no man can transcend his biological reality and become a true feminist. Failure under such circumstances is guaranteed, and, as we see so often, the penalty for failure is harsh.

Whether it is social shame for speaking over a woman, or taking a job that a woman should have had, or any transgression from simply being a white person to actual criminal behaviour, the male feminist is utterly doomed.

Should we then pity the male feminist? I don’t think so. While any of us can fall victim to seductive ideologies that claim to answer everything, we are also responsible for freeing ourselves. It is our individual responsibility to seek out learning, to ensure that we are men of character. A man of character is never a rapist because such behaviour is beneath him- it is for those who cannot control themselves, or who are genuinely evil.

A man of character is also not subjugated by ideology, as such ideas have been assessed, considered and found wanting. It is not so difficult a thing to achieve. It is far easier to accept the dominant paradigm pushed by feminism and Neo-Marxists. It is easier by far to accept that your penis is evil, and you must say sorry, and keep saying sorry, and grovel on your knees.

This is why weak men become male feminists. This is why male feminists rape.

http://bit.ly/2pCnZLO

#RSN #Why Do Male Feminists Rape?#Ash Sharp

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kivablog3 · 7 years

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Spring Repost of “Why I Am Not a Pagan”

March 2017 -- I’m reposting this since the Spring Equinox is coming up, along with the festival of the goddess Eostre, whence derives our word for it: Easter. Along with the eggs, and bunnies too, I think. Fertility, at any rate. In wicca it’s the winter solstice which starts the new year, but for me it was Spring when the light truly came back: Daylight Saving Magic. So I think of it as the start of my own year. Also, I attended an open Dianic Goddess circle for the first time in my life. So I may even have to change the title. Maybe put the predicate in the past tense. Idk, maybe nothing will come of it, but I want to try. Happy Eostre, everyone.

Fall 2016 -- I wrote this for an anthology, about trans wicca and paganism, which was triggered by a conflict between terfy witches who wanted to have a ceremony for “all women” at a large pagan conference on the West Coast, but for “women-born women” only, and everyone else was appalled, not just us, and a conflict resulted over whether this was right or even acceptable behavior anymore. At the time I was convinced this was a hopeless cause, transfolx and Dianic Wicca, and thus wasn’t sure there was any point in arguing about it. That may be changing too, there are a lot of changes I am still unaware of.

So, I wasn’t even a pagan, and kind of relieved about that when I heard that this conflict was still going on in the pagan community, fifteen years after it helped convince me I had failed, because I was just born wrong, and that was that. The Goddess did not see me. It certainly helped convince me I wasn’t a pagan; I had less than no use for a binary divinity, a Goddess with a God. And I wasn’t allowed to just follow the Goddess, so that was that. It was a long time ago.

But I had a story to tell that might be interesting to a few other people, since this still seemed to be a raging conflict ffs. Somehow this conflict at the pagan conference on the Coast resulted in a trans pagan anthology being planned by way of response in the UK, which my friend in Boston tipped me off to; she’s written books which have actually been published, some of them on paganism, and is just generally networked with everyone fun, queer, kinky and/or just interesting in New England and a lot of other places. So I just started writing this, which I’d been trying to do for months. It’s about an important turning point in my life, but the ending is mushy and incomplete because I was afraid of writing my own truth and not caring if someone else was upset by it. This is why the ending is sort of abrupt. It has to be revised and extended and tied together with other stuff that happened then. (And is happening now. There’s a bad case of abrupt going around lately. Alyssa Harley told me I should just write from the heart, and not worry about who else might or might not read it and how they might react. That my writing is first of all for me, explaining myself to myself; and it turns out I learn a lot of things about myself that I wasn’t aware of. Like most advice she gives me, she’s right about this.) [note: This all helped me see that what I really love doing is writing and then editing what I wrote. Some effort will be involved in figuring out things like where to submit finished work and how to write brief, informative cover letters which might get the submission passed up to an editor. Where to do open-mic readings, and which six minutes and forty-five seconds of my work did I want to read? This may all turn out to be very interesting and unexpected things may happen. But I love writing now, I do it most nearly every day So that’s a start.]

After I wrote this piece, sort of all at once, I looked at the publisher’s site, and saw that their catalog runs toward books which have lots of footnotes and a scholarly approach toward the subject at hand, and I have a feeling they’re not going to use this because it so isn’t that. [Note: In the event, it didn’t even merit a rejection email. ] But it’s the most important part of What Happened to Me, how I was out for years, how in the end I couldn’t keep going after 2001, and hid again, in plain sight, for a long time.

So I’m going to keep working on it. I have a printout of Parts 2-3 I want to mark up and then incorporate those changes into the new version. But right now I’m in maintenance mode, learning about myself and trying to love myself and waiting for it to get warm. I’m much happier then, and it’s easier to be out, somehow. Coming out publicly caused a rebound, and a few days’ worth of migraines (tension + pollen + dry air = M, where M is any migraine bad enough that you have to turn all the lights off and you throw up). It’s taking a while to get up off the canvas and clear my head enough to continue to fight back. I don’t feel like fixing the paragraph breaks right now, sorry for any confusion. Anyway, here it is:

Why I Am Not a Pagan by Kiva Offenholley (The section letters/numbers are placeholders and not meant to be consecutive or even logical.) Part One A. So how do I tell this story? Where do I start? When I was poring over books on lesbian feminism in the library? [note: upon reflection, this is probably the point at which I lost the attention of the editor of the anthology. I assume it will get published at some point.] In the 1970s while I was in high school, reading everything I could find at the branch library and then becoming a page at the central library, when did I first run across witches? Who first mentioned the Goddess? I remember how powerful that particular idea felt when I first ran across it: that God was a woman, that there was another way. She wasn’t constantly promising punishment as well as or instead of love (so she wasn’t my mother, or G. the Father). She wasn’t scary—well, She wasn’t male, for one thing, and males scared me to death. I was supposed to be one, and I was really, really, really bad at it, and in Texas that still matters even now, a lot more than it should. It was worse then. I read some books that involved witches, even though I didn’t believe in magic per se (my sister kept trying spells and nothing much seemed to happen), which I understood then to be witchcraft. It wasn’t clear to me why belief in the Goddess necessitated not just ritual activities for their own sake, but ones which enable or prevent the use of invisible forces (the existence of which I have yet to be convinced of) to cause or prevent change in the real world, summoning spirits (see above) or even magic defined as creating change inside yourself using a Jungian approach to archetypes and ritual actions to focus intentionality and release energy. Maybe it’s because I was never in a Dianic coven, or any other kind, and I probably would’ve changed as I learned more. But possibly not. As it was, I just wanted to experience rituals because they are beautiful, and they are for Her. Ritual for its own sake. I may not believe in a deity—that’s Southern for “I’m an atheist”—but I have loved Her instinctively and completely, from the moment I learned of Her, and the idea of Her. And I hoped that maybe I could learn why I was made this way, why in my soul I felt like a girl. And it seemed to me that, if I tried, I could feel loved. Because I love the Goddess. B. It was clear even to me that one thing I definitely could not be was a lesbian separatist, which was a shame because I needed that too: I had nothing but rage and fear from men and for them, and wanted to live in or at least envision a world where we were in women’s space. I had only ever felt safe when I was with other women, or some of them at least. Most of them. Someone once called it “swimming in the safe sea of women.” I just wanted to count as a “woman” of some sort, maybe not fully female yet, if it was a problem, but I’d sit in the back and not get in anyone’s way…. They had somehow gotten undisputed custody of the real-world carrying into concrete action of the idea of the Goddess, and despite having read histories like The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, or Starhawk or Merlin Stone, of course, anything I could find, my only connection to the other universe, I wasn’t supposed to feel like I belonged. Avidly reading, and thinking and feeling all this stuff that made me feel like I not only belonged inside the circle, that it was the place I would be safe, but that it was the only place outside a classroom that I could ever discuss Gerda Lerner with someone else. I just kept reading, and tried to understand why some radical feminists hated us so much. We were less than or other than women, according to the women who hated us; we were less than or other than human. We were used for ideological target practice. It was like the inverse of being hated by Southern Baptists, the result was the same. It was a part of why I finally skidded to a halt, and detransitioned in 2001, after the period described here. It seemed that Goddess-centered religion was destined to be controlled by those unknown women, like the music festival in Michigan: my spouse, having attended once, assured me that I would consider it close to hell on Earth, between the mud and the rain and the bugs and the heat and the mud, given that my idea of roughing it is a hotel room with no minifridge. But I would’ve liked to have had the option. Around that same time, 1999-2000, I had a nasty encounter in a local institutional setting which I can’t or won’t really identify here. It was with two of the people we now call TERFs: an angry ideological one, who’d just joined the institution, to attack me viciously—none of my friends, no one, ever told me what she’d said while I was out of the room, so it must’ve been awful—and a reflexively 70s-grounded person in a position of authority to unthinkingly and unknowingly privilege TERF 1’s painful past, which was bad, over mine, which was pretty goddamn awful but which never really came up since it still wasn’t really clear to TERF 2 what the hell exactly I was, anyway, even though I had been around for nearly ten years. For a long time it seemed like she could barely greet me civilly when we on occasion ran into her on the street. But she never turned up at parties, which was what mattered, and so it really didn’t seem to matter, at the time. Years of work, living out as a woman among women who loved women in our wonderful little neighborhood: making and deepening friendships, learning to love our little world especially after our son was born, since we still had large lunches on Saturdays then, and he was so darned cute, and everyone loved him. And then I began the estrogen, and it was like I’d had my finger in a light socket for decades, had sort of learned to put up with it, like chronic pain, but it felt so good when I got to take my finger out finally, I felt so relieved when it stopped. All this time I’d been preparing myself, learning to not be afraid, not afraid to let myself Be. To do what someone has described as the most difficult thing you’ll ever do. But that was apart from this story, and it all started just as the getting-TERFed part (for which we then still didn’t have a term) was getting truly awful, so I truly needed something good to happen. And I thought I could finally use all this learning, all that reading I’d done for decades. And I was looking for a spiritual guide, too, it turned out. B. I took a class called Women & Religion in 1987, at Hunter College (from Dr. Serinity Young, who is now at Queens College CUNY and is still a wonderful teacher and human being), and one day while I was enthusiastically talking with the professor after class—it was the only way I talked with her, enthusiastically; I think she even taught me the origins of the word “enthused”—I casually let drop that not only did I want to major in Women’s Studies, I actually would really kind of like to become one someday. Like, medically, you know? And so she had the sad duty of letting me down as gently as humanly possible, but clearly someone had to tell me, I think she must’ve thought, and so: not only would I not be welcomed by a Dianic coven, any of them, she explained, I would face open hostility from radical feminists in general. That what I really wanted wasn’t feasible after all. That the team I wanted to join didn’t want someone like me as a member. That it was genuinely impossible, apparently; some of them hated us. At least I learned this from one of the gentlest souls I have ever known, it hurt less that way. I used to read a lot of those expensive little scholarly/theoretical radical feminist quarterlies they sold in the 80s for like $7, in the newsstand in the Pan Am Building back in the day. I had run across this hatred toward trans folks before; I just didn’t realize that it was so prevalent. That it was widespread, for some people it was an ideological litmus test. What Serinity told me did not completely surprise me, but the extent of what she described did. My best friend back then, who was from Long Island—think “where suburbs were invented”—said of course she was “a feminist, but not the kind that goes to demonstrations.” She may have even used that old saw about being in favor of equal pay, everyone said that back then if you asked if they were feminists. Her girlfriend at the time said that she wasn’t one, and that moreover she didn’t date feminists because she didn’t like women who don’t shave their underarms. (I do. I’m Old School. But I have to admit I was confused by all this.) So this idea and ideal, “Feminism,” had given me hope of a kind for years, feminist thealogy providing a Great Mother figure which I really needed when my own mother was beating me, sometimes unconscious, but never quite killing me; and I never quite killed myself either. I wrote stories and drew sketches and imagined a science-fiction future where there was a Lesbian Nation, a refuge for women of any orientation and a force in the world fighting for women. I had this belief that the world could be different or we could build a new one even, a better one, this escape hatch from the hatred of a world full of men, and most of them had hated me practically since I was born, it seemed to me. Because I wasn’t nearly enough like them, and far too much like a woman—the escape hatch was useless, it wouldn’t work for me because under the rules I could never ever be a woman. I would have to live the remainder of my life as a man because there was no such thing as “transsexual lesbians.” I might as well have spent years studying a dead language. Because the women who spoke it apparently wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to not care, but it involved a lot of nights of crying, and after that one class I gave up on Women’s Studies, on the idea of finishing my degree, and on the idea that I could even possibly not be male. I must be some kind of a gay man, then, I thought yet again, dejectedly, struggling with the limited rôles “permitted” in the old order. I guess I’m gay, I’m just not sexually attracted to men…I spent years in painful solitude, rarely dating (and always women) because I didn’t fit anyone’s pattern. I was born in the Friend Zone and apparently would die there. I just kept wishing I’d been born a girl, not a boy, like always: the existential mistake that felt like grief, that I wore like a suit of armor you can never take off, like walking in sunlight in a darkness that would never lift. Again, I didn’t quite kill myself. I wrote some simple performance art pieces, just monologues really, about how much I hated it all, and delivered them on open mic night at the old Dixon Place, Ellie Covan’s apartment on First Street. Maybe I could express this misery through art, squeeze some of the pain out onstage, writing monologues I wouldn’t have been able to sit through if I hadn’t written them myself. And then, in 1991, when I was 33, I met my future spouse. I invited her to come see my performance at Dixon, and we suddenly fell for each other, and everything changed. C. When I officially finally came out as trans—or “transsexual” as we used to say—it surprised absolutely no one. My wife identified as lesbian when we first got together in 1991, and being part of the lesbian/bi women’s community in the Slope in the 90s gave me a context and a place to want to be, since unlike most trans folks I was “transitioning in place.” Meaning that coming out as trans didn’t automatically destroy my personal relationships, as happens to so many of us then and now, and so I didn’t have to start over somewhere else, creating a new identity as if you’re in a Gender Relocation Program. It also meant (and now it means, again) that people who knew me as male before, not friends but deli clerks, auto mechanics, the bagel store staff, everyone, will have to adjust. It was the hardest thing I’d ever try to do. But it finally seemed doable. It seemed perfect, not just doable. We lived in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, which was a wonderfully diverse and welcoming lesbian community in the 1990s, and the Slope was still a place young lesbians starting a career in New York could move to and find an apartment at a reasonable price. All that new energy kept the neighborhood interesting. The lesbian social universe was arrayed around the karate school, and my wife had been at the school since before we met. I saw people I knew every day, just walking down Seventh Avenue. We had a baby, then I started taking estrogen. We were so happy. Then, as it happened, in the Spring of 2000 I met a cis woman who was already a witch and we tried to start what she assured me was indeed the First Trans-Friendly Dianic Goddess Circle, which ended up being the Last Trans-Friendly Dianic Goddess Circle, sort of. There are others now, I am told, who don’t even care what gender you are or aren’t, but this was the turn of the century, and it was still well-nigh unheard of.

Part Two A. The Center—once upon a time, a long, long time ago, it was the Gay Community Center, hence the venerable web address: gaycenter.org, then the Gay and Lesbian Etc., then the Lesbian and Gay But Not Bi, Definitely Not Bi Center, then the Lesbian, Gay & Alright, Already, Bi Center, then they finally went to LGBT, this was along about when they—whoever “they” were, the ones who ran The Center, and whoever they were, they seemed to arrive a tad tardily to each of these transformations. And as I recall they were still coming to terms with the whole adding-the-T part, and it hadn’t happened yet, or maybe it had already happened but I sincerely didn’t notice, I was busy: the spring of 2000, a beautiful warm spring with a lot of sunny days, at least as I remember it. The Center was in the Swing Space, the temporary building that they were operating out of around the turn of the century, so that the old school building could be turned into, in time, the space station command center-&-caffeine bar-fronted miracle of architecture and fundraising you find there now, over at 218 W. 13th Street. But this was the between-time, somewhere out near where the old “The Vault” S&M club had once been, around the corner of this triangular wedge of real estate just below 14th Street, around Ninth Avenue. I am told that there were rather a lot of directions given then that began, “You remember where The Vault used to be? You walk a block down past it, hang a right….” So I was on my way out of the Swing Space one day, after trying to do some kind of transgender networking, and I passed a woman with beautiful eyes, in warm fuzzy hippie clothes and interesting jewelry, with Tori Amos-like long wavy red hair and some kind of energy or sense of purpose about her. She had some kind of small bag or satchel with her. We passed, she smiled, I smiled. She saw the “Trans Dyke” button I had on—possibly the only such button extant at the time in the US if not all North America, unless the inspired artist/buttonmaker had made more of them. It was drawn by hand, in colored pencil, with TRANS DYKE written across it in large, friendly letters. I’d found it quite by accident among an assortment of handmade radical buttons in a cigar box, at an alternative bookstore in Montréal when I’d visited with K. the previous winter. I couldn’t quite believe my luck: I was still hesitant to say what I was aloud, but buttons were no problem. [K. had very supportively agreed to come with me to freaking Canada during hockey season so I could see a Canadiens game at the Centre Molson (now Centre Bell). I was clearly out of my mind. We lost a set of keys and came back two days later to the same parking spot on a hunch, and we found them in the snowbank, two feet down, where they’d landed. It was cold. I love Québec, but go in the summer.] That button was just perfect at the time for me, still a novel idea a decade after Kate Bornstein came out as lesbian and trans in OutWeek magazine. That was the first time I asked myself that ages-old queer question, “So you mean I’m not the only one?” So just wearing the fucking button around the Center felt somewhat defiant, improvising a sort of pronoun-sticker years before they existed, saying who I was. It mattered. I was wearing it on my jacket, all the time since it wouldn’t stay on my backpack, and she turned around and asked me one of those life-changing questions: “Hey! Would you like to come help me with a transsexual-friendly Goddess circle? I’m going to hold one upstairs!”

Well. I had sort of been waiting 25 years or so for someone to ask me that. So sure, yeah, I’d love to, I may even have said something like, “I’ve waited years for someone to ask me that!” and I headed back with her into the Swing Space elevator, and up. I helped her set up the altar furnishings. Candles (couldn’t actually light them because of building regs plus sprinklers going off) and statues, I think, pretty scarves and cloths and jewelry. It wasn’t anything complicated, but it was amazing to me just to be there, suddenly, seemingly by chance. Friends of hers came, a trans couple from New Jersey showed up, and we held our ceremony, greeting the Spring Equinox and thanking the Goddess for the new season. I forget details from there, just that I helped her clear up afterwards and the two of us talked. What sort of thing are you into, she asked. Going way back, really, I said, I’ve read about the Sumerians and their religion. “Inanna.” “Right. The earliest written records we have of Mesopotamian religion. And they mention servants of Inanna, they’re like two-spirited, I mean, both-gendered or something…” She knew the word for them. We talked some more, about sort of Jungian stuff, like what images spoke most powerfully to me? The Great Mother, primarily, “possibly since my own mother was, um, she was nuts.…” She nodded to let me know she “got it,” as far as survivor stuff, then I went on: “I hope you don’t think this is weird, but I’ve always been fascinated by the temple prostitutes in Sumeria. The service of the Goddess, through the celebration of sex itself.” She gave me one of those dazzling smiles. “No,” she reassured me, “I don’t think it’s weird at all. In fact, it’s also sort of what I had in mind….” Wow. “What’s your name?” I asked, finally. “Yana.” “I’m Kiva,” I said. And so it began. B. She had come to New York a few years before, and with her fascination with the Goddess already intertwined with the Marian devotion she had learned growing up in the Roman Church. She was Catholic, but not Christian, I think she said, Catholic to the extent of the Marian practices which she’d been taught and had read about. Then she became a Dianic witch and studied all sorts of other women-focussed practices across denominations that all fed into Goddess history. She felt the church was the people who turned up, all of us flawed, but it wasn’t her primary interest. The Black Madonnas, devotions related to marriage and a safe delivery, “churching” women after a birth, implying they were impure afterwards; different beliefs from Eastern Europe, the Orthodox, from all over, but mostly she’d read a lot of what I had, particularly European and Middle Eastern religious history and especially the odd or neglected corners of it, the backwaters like the three villages in Syria that still used Aramaic in their services, the witches of the mountains in their different forms, Babayaga, all this off-the-beaten-path stuff. Ishtar, Istar, Ester. Enna, Enana, Innana. Timelines, conjectures about periods without written or archaeological records, or ambiguous sites like Çatal Hüyük. It was more or less pre-Google, so any kind of conjecture could possibly be true, depending on how late at night it was. We talked about labryses, and Crete. We talked about goddesses, and witches, and magic, none of which, I explained, I really believed in, I was just sort of fascinated by it all, you see. I was just stubbornly atheistic as a default setting, since I was a recovering Southern Baptist. We touched on Bokononism when I brought it up; I don’t remember if we got around to the Cathars. I’d never met anyone before her, outside of that class at Hunter in 1987, who’d even heard of Çatal Hüyük. We talked and talked, for hours, for days and days, about all of these things, and all of them at once, it seemed like. Everything was connected. We’d read the same books. A lot of the same books. We talked about who we were, how we identified, how we got to where we were. She talked about how she got involved so deeply in trans women’s activism (and, “no,” she replied when I asked, “I’m not transgendered;” it was clearly a question she got sooner or later from each of us.) We didn’t have the words “cis” and “trans” as such then, “cis” still dwelled quietly as a prefix in old Latin and French dictionaries. At the time we called cis women “GGs,” genetic girls, or “biogirls,” both of which were self-deprecating, self-devaluing, and inferiority-reinforcing terms we came up with all on our own, as a community; as for ourselves, I learned soon that to save time and avoid arguments over changing terminology such as “transsexual” (“ss,” not “s”, dammit) and “transgender,” and who was and wasn’t really a whatever, we called each other by this diminutive term no one outside our little world seemed to have heard of: “trannies”…. She’d been homeless not all that long before, and it was trans women, sex workers out working the street in Manhattan, who kept her from starving, let her sleep on couches, nursed her to health, and I gathered that somewhere in there she’d fallen in love, too, and by that point she’d come to love us as we were. And so she was an ardent lesbian trans ally at a time when we didn’t have many (we didn’t have the term “trans ally” yet, for example) and a lover of other trans women when few cis women openly were—for a while she and K. wanted to start a support group but I think they’d have been the only ones there. Like K., she was was a gem cut in a distinct pattern. She was unique and unafraid. And she loved us. Yeah, I had sort of a crush on her. She was magical. She asked me to help her start a pagan meeting circle, a stable, ongoing Goddess-focussed Dianic circle. A Dianic circle like any other, except this one would welcome trans women. It was dedicated to lifting up trans women spiritually, meeting what in Yana’s eyes was an obvious need. I said okay, and set to work. We were going to call it Two Spirit Moon Circle but I wondered if it might be appropriating a Native American term outside its cultural context. So I kept accidentally calling it Two Moon Spirit Circle, as if we were on Mars or something, and eventually we decided to call it that. Yana had a phone list of people who were supposed to be either interested or potentially interested. It was a handful of names and numbers, some of them names you weren’t supposed to use to ask for them with because they were still closeted, as transgender or as pagan or as both even, and in the (as it transpired, extremely unlikely) event that someone answered the phone, I said something vague, some preset phrase like, “I’m calling on behalf of Yana.” Several of them had no surname, just a name and a phone number. Some of them never did answer, a couple of numbers proved to have gone out of service, two or three of them didn’t need to be called because they were close to Yana. I still have the list around here somewhere, I saw it recently stuck in a book, and I was amazed by how much of it was blank space. There was no social media, no smartphones, and the Web was still in its toddler stage. It was all we had to work with. Somehow Yana had talked the NYC Metropolitan Community Church into letting us use their basement room after their services were over on Sunday afternoons. The MCC was originally organized as a gay-friendly church because there weren’t any other ones, except the Unitarians. Yana attended services there, which may have helped. And for a few months, we held circles nearly every Sunday. Yana tried to find more members; she knew the folks at what we shall refer to here as “T-House” on 16th Street in Brooklyn, which turned out to be three blocks up from me (the Slope was like that then). It’s gone down in history as “Transy House.” We never did get many people from T-House to attend our circle, or if we did it wasn’t more than once. The circle didn’t grow. C. I happily took on the task of writing up a ritual we could use for a special occasion, like the solstice. As it happened, I was enrolled at the New School for one semester, taking some class on religious symbols. So I had access to their library, and way back on the bottom shelf, full of the dusty volumes of history which no one used for research and which hadn’t been opened in decades, there was a really old series of books with the translated Sumerian scriptures in them. It looked ancient, so I checked the indicia and it was published in 1912 or something like that. In the 1900s, but before 1914. I forget now what they were called, and don’t particularly want to try googling for 20 minutes looking for it, but they were special messengers of Inanna, and they were both female and male together in one. There was a passage where Inanna made a promise to them—and we argued, by extension, you could include us, trans people, and gender-variance of all kinds too, I believe, although we didn’t quite have the freedom to imagine all that at the time. Inanna made a promise to Her two-gendered beings, who were special to Her, that she would protect them. Nothing complicated, nothing that other divinities wouldn’t subsequently promise to their special peoples, except that it’s hard to find one where the Goddess says she will protect us. But Yana and I both knew how far back you had to go to find a strong Inanna figure: as far as possible, in early Sumerian theology, some of the first written records of a religious belief system. I think it was from reading The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner that I learned the story of how Inanna had gradually been weakened and eventually subordinated or sidelined in later Sumerian and then Akkadian theology; this weakening and subordination reflected the same thing happening to Sumerian women in reality, losing rights to buy and hold property, rights in inheritance, independent social existence gradually subordinated to the control of the father: patriarchy. This wasn’t the only society and time when this happened, but the Sumerians had left detailed real estate and inheritance records. I remember how exhaustively she went over and cited her source material, all those footnotes. My copy is still in the basement. I just brought up the laundry and I forgot to bring it up with me, but I guess the point is it touched on the area of ancient religions. So I looked in it for a reference which would help me find the huge old rebound-in-green volume of forgotten Sumerian scriptures that I needed: the story about Inanna trapped in the underworld. But I think in the end I just went down to the New School library, and pulled out a volume. It was one of those old-school, 2000-large-pages volumes that voluminous scriptures used to end up in. Bound volumes of Theravada Buddhist scriptures are about the same size and weight, you can probably find them in the 200s section of your public library, depending on how large it is. They have a very nice set at the Brooklyn Central Library. So I opened up the book, spine on my knee, and it more or less opened to the place I needed, the story of Inanna in the underworld and the transgender messengers she sent, and the promise she made. I took it to a table and started to make notes. Yana maintained that this was a small example of divine intervention, that She guided my hand, helped me pick the right volume, open it to the right chapter. I said I thought it was a coincidence, although I wasn’t too sure at the time. It’s possible also, I argued, that I wasn’t the first person to ever go looking for that particular story, and so the book opened to that page, more or less. Because the spine, mostly unspoiled through the decades by the routine damage inflicted by readers of books, probably had a single crack left in it from before. It’s possible that the volume, if it had been used before, was reshelved by the user sticking out slightly instead of flush with the other books, and so I unconsciously chose it (I used to be a library page—a minion—long ago). I recount this to illustrate what a stubborn subject I was and am when it comes to faith and belief. Yana knew about Jungian archetypes and self-actualization and so on, but I think deep in her heart she totally and sincerely believed in Her, that She exists, that She loves us, and that She had agency in the mundane world which she used to help us, if we but asked her. I was just never able to let go, to trust in someone I didn’t think existed. Archetypes, schmarchetypes: I needed Her to *exist*. I needed proof. 5. I read online a couple of years ago that there was some kind of all-pagan conference on the West Coast, where a group of Dianic witches held an “all women-born women welcome” Goddess ritual from which trans women were of course angrily and ostentatiously excluded. It was instructive to me, when I read about it, of something I’m trying to learn over and over until I believe it: apparently nearly everyone else had the decency to be appalled and regarded it as bigoted and ignorant of who we actually are. This book is itself one consequence of this conflict, I am told. In some parallel universe, maybe even nearby, where radical feminists and lesbian separatists of every kind had welcomed trans women into the community from the beginning, valued us, maybe even cherished us for our unique critique of masculinity, our courage in crossing the river of fire, I might be some kind of elder by now, possibly even considered wise. That, along with having transitioned, successfully, long ago. They do feel like they should go together, at least for me. It always felt logical. But I can’t claim a pagan identity now, retroactively, and have it become something that provided comfort and joy over the years, because it isn’t. It didn’t. It never happened. Just like I was never really a Christian after the Southern Baptists chewed me up and spit me out. Past age eight, I never really had the feeling that when I said my prayers, there was someone on the other end listening. By adolescence I knew that they hated people like me, even if whatever the hell it was that I was had not become clear yet. They hated just about anything related to sex that had happened after 1960. The various kinds of baptist churches were gradually taken over in the 1980s by fundamentalists, who had been kept at bay by conservatives for decades (sound familiar?) but now overran the Baptists and other evangelical churches. They voted for Reagan and gave birth to the generation which is now smitten by Trump. They are the real reason I left Texas. I tried for years to make Christianity work for me somehow—you don’t read Tillich on a whim, I spent months checking out everything I could from the library on theology. Fascinating subject, but to me it is fascinating largely as history and supposition. Yana used to say that it didn’t matter if I didn’t believe, it wasn’t a matter of belief; it was a matter of trusting in Her even though you don’t believe it will help. I tried to take the rituals into me, let out that little spark inside, let out the little kid in me. She’s still there, and she’s still scared to come outside, afraid of being slapped again. And for a while it was better. I even tried to meditate. I can’t meditate for shit, but I tried. Our little circle met until it didn’t. It wasn’t like herding cats so much as trying to teach kittens to march down Broadway in lockstep and chanting, “The kittens/United/Will never be defeated!” Only you can’t find enough kittens. And around then, Yana began to vanish into what became an opaque relationship: a glom-on girlfriend who would never give her messages or call her to the phone, she was always “not here,” who eventually closed her off from everyone, or at least everyone at T-House, which was, like, everyone, but apparently the girlfriend thought it included me for some reason; and, long story short, after a couple more times I never saw Yana again. What really kills me is, I introduced them. For political purposes; Glom-on was trans and in a position to help. But the next thing I knew, Yana was telling me the old, old story: “well, you know, we worked all those late nights together on the protest, and next thing you know….” It was the greatest unforeseeable mistake I have ever made, to this day. 3. The Goddess lives in my heart, of course, some kind of small (yet apparently inextinguishable) light, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the strength to survive growing up and getting beaten, a few times nearly to death, by my mother the psycho vodka-swilling pillhead, or to survive living in New York for years with nothing but my sheer uncrushableness and a talent for proofreading. Without Her I could never have embraced my trans identity, then somehow detransition yet not fall apart completely, in a time when it seemed impossible after all to make it through transition as an out lesbian who didn’t pass (2001), and to survive until a time when it does seem sort of possible (2016). Without Her I wouldn’t be able to come back and embrace my trans identity, a choice which saved my life. But that light mostly doesn’t sustain me or reassure me or whatever; it just is me, it feels pain, too. It feels like She put it there, subjectively; like She made me, somehow. She lives in each of us, that light is the You that you hope to find if you look inwards far enough. Maybe that’s what the argument is really about, whether She lives in us, made us the way we are, whether that light is inside us and she really did make us women. Instead of monsters. I’ve met some boring trans people, but I’ve never a monster who wanted to destroy womenspace by demanding admission even though it has a penis. Mostly, we’re just kind of reticent, afraid of sounding too femme, or not enough, or just reminding people we’re different. Like clearing my throat, always comes out sounding deep. It’s like the current bathroom nonsense: as has been true already for decades, we’re just looking for a place to pee. Only now, everyone knows we exist. Maybe it’s the estrogen-wash theory, that high E levels plus maybe really wanting a girl can prevent a fetus with a Y chromosome from fully changing into a male, at least in the brain. I read a study that suggests there are genetic signatures of some kind in some sort of brain cell, and ours differ from men’s, they’re longer yet there aren’t very many testosterone receptors. (Sorry, I don’t have a footer for that.) I have enough material from age five up for another book or two. It took them years, until around age eight, to convince me that not only was I not a girl, but I wouldn’t turn into one later, it didn’t work that way, and when I grew up I wouldn’t be a woman. I’d wear one of those suits, like Dad, not a dress. I hated those suits. I thought this would be an essay about an attempt at forming a circle in the intersection of Goddess religion and trans women’s culture, because you want academic papers with footnotes and everything. But it turns out it’s as much about Yana as about the Goddess or Dianic wicca or other stuff you’d research and footnote and make a biblio out of. It’s all just from me; it’s my story, and what it is, too. My close encounter with having a pagan religious identity, my pagan identity, the one I wanted to at least try, before that identity zoomed past me, then looped around the Sun and shot back out into space, probably all the way to the Oort Cloud. It should be back in a few thousand years. It was Yana who embodied Her for me, and made Her seem real; so once Yana was gone from my life, that sense of the numinous, of spirit in everything, went away too, leaving behind a fondness for a hill with a circle of trees on it in Prospect Park where we used to go to talk and be. I don’t believe that in any of this I was in point of fact a pagan; I was an acolyte of Yana. I trusted her, I learned from her, I believed her, I miss her.

Part Three A. I am 58 now. I used to care so very intensely about this, I was so proud to be co-organizing a Goddess circle for women like us. That was 2000, and so much else was going wrong in my personal life that year, so this was special, something I tried harder to keep hold of even as it slipped further out of my grasp. When I was forced by events to detransition in April of 2001, it hurt like I was dying. I had to cut loose a lot of things to survive, and caring so intensely about this, since I was spiritually on my own once again, became one of them. Like with anything transgender, I didn’t want to know, I turned away, shamed by what felt like my epic failure, and I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. If I couldn’t have it, I couldn’t bear to look at others who could. Because they’d learned to go out dressed without trembling. Because they were living. I felt like the kid with her nose pressed against the glass again, looking in, like before, and it started to seem normal again to feel like I was permanently wrong, or at least I was too emotionally exhausted to fight. I suspended my transition, for 15 years it turns out. A lot of things have gotten better in the meantime, a lot more than I could’ve imagined. Like marriage equality isn’t a Thing, it’s the law. Hating on trans folks of all stripes on modern gay/bi women’s sites, like Autostraddle.com, isn’t acceptable behavior anymore, or at least TERFy posts draw multiple posts from allies. This is the generation we gave birth to, and they mostly as a rule just don’t believe in hate; and there isn’t an exception made to that rule for trans people. Yet it turns out this, the reason I’m a cynical atheist instead of a somewhat less cynical witch, is still a Thing in 2016. So many awful Things, Things that seemed unchangeable for queers for so very long, have changed in the last fifteen years, but this isn’t one of them. And we do this to ourselves. Queers who obsessively hate certain other queers. It seems so wrong now, when I think about it like that. So a friend of mine who is a writer and a witch told me about the call for papers. I intended to write something more like I might have written for an academic paper, and if I were still taking college courses I probably would have, MLA format and all. This is not that story, this is the story that wanted to be told. So I have I decided to try and tell the Tale of Yana and Kiva. I would’ve made a lousy pagan anyway. There’s the indifference to magic. I can’t meditate for shit. I feel antagonistic toward religion in general. I’m hopelessly cynical. I’m an atheist, for Chrissakes. B. Last week my wife K. and I went to Massachusetts to visit old friends. We stopped at my favorite used bookstore in the world, the Raven Used Books in Northampton, on Old South Street. Most of what I found in LGBT or Women’s Studies was from the 80s or 90s, when I was reading some of the same books I found there. I asked about transgender theory—I murmured “trans” and she thought I said “trains”, so I said, “transgender” in this slightly apologetic way I still do. She thought for a second and said they are largely a used book store (“academic” being a given) and that since the field has started growing so recently and so quickly, they didn’t have them in great numbers, yet, but when they did it would be shelved in LGBT. Which makes sense to me, really, since the oldest of the new wave of major works I have read are from about 2005 on. They haven’t had time to finish the cycle: first migrate in signifigant numbers onto syllabii at Smith, Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst and UMass, to wax and wane in popularity and utility, and thence in time make their way to Happy Valley’s used bookstores, particularly to Raven. Where people like me buy them. Maybe they’re still waxing in popularity. I hope so. But this visit I wasn’t into languages or mediæval history or Buddhism, I was back where I began, at LGBT and Women’s Studies. And the future is so new here that the books I was hoping to find are still being used, rather than having been used. They have some mugs and bags for hardcore fans like me. But I already have two mugs. So I bought a nice copy of Carol Christ’s Laughter of Aphrodite, since I haven’t read it and thealogy is really sort of timeless, even if some of the people she was discussing and critiquing advocated then-current arguments which have become dim with the passage of time. (Remember, everyone: if you have a used book you haven’t read before, it’s new.) Laughter of Aphrodite came out around the time Christ (pronounced “krist”, with a short i) was co-editing the now-classic anthology which we used as our principal textbook for the Women & Religion course at Hunter College in 1987: Womanspirit Rising. I’m looking forward to reading it.

But, like I said, I’m not a pagan. Go figure.

#trans #gender #transgender #paganism #neo-Paganism #dianic wicca #wicca #trans history #transgender history #lgbtq history #queer pagan

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