Spring Repost of âWhy I Am Not a Paganâ
March 2017 -- Iâm 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 itâs 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 âall womenâ at a large pagan conference on the West Coast, but for âwomen-born womenâ 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 wasnât 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.Â
So, I wasnât 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 wasnât a pagan; I had less than no use for a binary divinity, a Goddess with a God. And I wasnât 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; sheâs 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 Iâd been trying to do for months. Itâs 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. Thereâs 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 wasnât aware of. Like most advice she gives me, sheâs 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 thatâs a start.]
After I wrote this piece, sort of all at once, I looked at the publisherâs 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 theyâre not going to use this because it so isnât that. [Note: In the event, it didnât even merit a rejection email. ] But itâs the most important part of What Happened to Me, how I was out for years, how in the end I couldnât keep going after 2001, and hid again, in plain sight, for a long time.Â
So Iâm 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 Iâm in maintenance mode, learning about myself and trying to love myself and waiting for it to get warm. Iâm much happier then, and itâs easier to be out, somehow. Coming out publicly caused a rebound, and a few daysâ 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). Itâs taking a while to get up off the canvas and clear my head enough to continue to fight back. I donât 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.]Â 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 wasnât constantly promising punishment as well as or instead of love (so she wasnât my mother, or G. the Father). She wasnât scaryâwell, She wasnât 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 didnât believe in magic per se (my sister kept trying spells and nothing much seemed to happen), which I understood then to be witchcraft. It wasnât 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 itâs because I was never in a Dianic coven, or any other kind, and I probably wouldâve 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 deityâthatâs Southern for âIâm an atheistââbut 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 womenâs 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 âswimming in the safe sea of women.â I just wanted to count as a âwomanâ of some sort, maybe not fully female yet, if it was a problem, but Iâd sit in the back and not get in anyoneâs wayâŠ. 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 wasnât 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 wouldâve liked to have had the option.
Around that same time, 1999-2000, I had a nasty encounter in a local institutional setting which I canât or wonât really identify here. It was with two of the people we now call TERFs: an angry ideological one, whoâd just joined the institution, to attack me viciouslyânone of my friends, no one, ever told me what sheâd said while I was out of the room, so it mustâve been awfulâand a reflexively 70s-grounded person in a position of authority to unthinkingly and unknowingly privilege TERF 1âs painful past, which was bad, over mine, which was pretty goddamn awful but which never really came up since it still wasnât 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 didnât 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 Iâd 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 Iâd 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 youâll ever do.
But that was apart from this story, and it all started just as the getting-TERFed part (for which we then still didnât 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 Iâd 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 classâit was the only way I talked with her, enthusiastically; I think she even taught me the origins of the word âenthusedââI casually let drop that not only did I want to major in Womenâs 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 mustâve 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 wasnât feasible after all. That the team I wanted to join didnât 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 didnât 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 Islandâthink âwhere suburbs were inventedââsaid of course she was âa feminist, but not the kind that goes to demonstrations.â 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 wasnât one, and that moreover she didnât date feminists because she didnât like women who donât shave their underarms. (I do. Iâm Old School. But I have to admit I was confused by all this.)
So this idea and ideal, âFeminism,â 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 wasnât nearly enough like them, and far too much like a womanâthe escape hatch was useless, it wouldnât 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 âtranssexual lesbians.â I might as well have spent years studying a dead language. Because the women who spoke it apparently wouldnât 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 Womenâs 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 rĂŽles âpermittedâ in the old order. I guess Iâm gay, Iâm just not sexually attracted to menâŠI spent years in painful solitude, rarely dating (and always women) because I didnât fit anyoneâs pattern. I was born in the Friend Zone and apparently would die there.
I just kept wishing Iâd 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 didnât 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 Covanâs apartment on First Street. Maybe I could express this misery through art, squeeze some of the pain out onstage, writing monologues I wouldnât have been able to sit through if I hadnât 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 transâor âtranssexualâ as we used to sayâit surprised absolutely no one. My wife identified as lesbian when we first got together in 1991, and being part of the lesbian/bi womenâs 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 âtransitioning in place.â Meaning that coming out as trans didnât automatically destroy my personal relationships, as happens to so many of us then and now, and so I didnât have to start over somewhere else, creating a new identity as if youâre 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 Iâd 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 donât even care what gender you are or arenât, but this was the turn of the century, and it was still well-nigh unheard of.
Part Two
A.
The Centerâonce 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 theyâwhoever âtheyâ 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 hadnât happened yet, or maybe it had already happened but I sincerely didnât 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 âThe Vaultâ 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, âYou remember where The Vault used to be? You walk a block down past it, hang a rightâŠ.â
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 âTrans Dykeâ button I had onâpossibly 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. Iâd found it quite by accident among an assortment of handmade radical buttons in a cigar box, at an alternative bookstore in MontrĂ©al when Iâd visited with K. the previous winter. I couldnât 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 theyâd landed. It was cold. I love QuĂ©bec, 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, âSo you mean Iâm not the only one?â 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 wouldnât stay on my backpack, and she turned around and asked me one of those life-changing questions:
âHey! Would you like to come help me with a transsexual-friendly Goddess circle? Iâm going to hold one upstairs!â
Well. I had sort of been waiting 25 years or so for someone to ask me that. So sure, yeah, Iâd love to, I may even have said something like, âIâve waited years for someone to ask me that!â and I headed back with her into the Swing Space elevator, and up.
I helped her set up the altar furnishings. Candles (couldnât actually light them because of building regs plus sprinklers going off) and statues, I think, pretty scarves and cloths and jewelry. It wasnât 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, Iâve read about the Sumerians and their religion.
âInanna.â
âRight. The earliest written records we have of Mesopotamian religion. And they mention servants of Inanna, theyâre like two-spirited, I mean, both-gendered or somethingâŠâ
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, âpossibly since my own mother was, um, she was nuts.âŠâ She nodded to let me know she âgot it,â as far as survivor stuff, then I went on: âI hope you donât think this is weird, but Iâve always been fascinated by the temple prostitutes in Sumeria. The service of the Goddess, through the celebration of sex itself.â
She gave me one of those dazzling smiles. âNo,â she reassured me, âI donât think itâs weird at all. In fact, itâs also sort of what I had in mindâŠ.â
Wow. âWhatâs your name?â I asked, finally.
âYana.â
âIâm Kiva,â 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 sheâd 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 wasnât her primary interest.
The Black Madonnas, devotions related to marriage and a safe delivery, âchurchingâ women after a birth, implying they were impure afterwards; different beliefs from Eastern Europe, the Orthodox, from all over, but mostly sheâd 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 Ăatal HĂŒyĂŒk. 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 donât remember if we got around to the Cathars.
Iâd never met anyone before her, outside of that class at Hunter in 1987, whoâd even heard of Ăatal HĂŒyĂŒk.
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. Weâd 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 womenâs activism (and, âno,â she replied when I asked, âIâm not transgendered;â it was clearly a question she got sooner or later from each of us.) We didnât have the words âcisâ and âtransâ as such then, âcisâ still dwelled quietly as a prefix in old Latin and French dictionaries. At the time we called cis women âGGs,â genetic girls, or âbiogirls,â 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 âtranssexualâ (âss,â not âsâ, dammit) and âtransgender,â and who was and wasnât really a whatever, we called each other by this diminutive term no one outside our little world seemed to have heard of: âtranniesââŠ.
Sheâd 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 sheâd fallen in love, too, and by that point sheâd come to love us as we were.
And so she was an ardent lesbian trans ally at a time when we didnât have many (we didnât have the term âtrans allyâ yet, for example) and a lover of other trans women when few cis women openly wereâfor a while she and K. wanted to start a support group but I think theyâd 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 Yanaâs 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 werenât 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, âIâm calling on behalf of Yana.â
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 didnât 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 werenât 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 âT-Houseâ on 16th Street in Brooklyn, which turned out to be three blocks up from me (the Slope was like that then). Itâs gone down in history as âTransy House.â We never did get many people from T-House to attend our circle, or if we did it wasnât more than once. The circle didnât 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 hadnât 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 donât 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 themâand we argued, by extension, you could include us, trans people, and gender-variance of all kinds too, I believe, although we didnât 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 wouldnât subsequently promise to their special peoples, except that itâs 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 wasnât 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 wasnât too sure at the time. Itâs possible also, I argued, that I wasnât 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. Itâs 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 pageâa minionâlong 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 didnât 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 âall women-born women welcomeâ 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 Iâm 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 canât claim a pagan identity now, retroactively, and have it become something that provided comfort and joy over the years, because it isnât. It didnât. 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 somehowâyou donât 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 didnât matter if I didnât believe, it wasnât a matter of belief; it was a matter of trusting in Her even though you donât 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. Sheâs still there, and sheâs still scared to come outside, afraid of being slapped again.
And for a while it was better. I even tried to meditate. I canât meditate for shit, but I tried. Our little circle met until it didnât. It wasnât like herding cats so much as trying to teach kittens to march down Broadway in lockstep and chanting, âThe kittens/United/Will never be defeated!â Only you canât 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 ânot here,â 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: âwell, you know, we worked all those late nights together on the protest, and next thing you knowâŠ.â 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 wouldnât 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 didnât pass (2001), and to survive until a time when it does seem sort of possible (2016).
Without Her I wouldnât be able to come back and embrace my trans identity, a choice which saved my life. But that light mostly doesnât 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 thatâs 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. Iâve met some boring trans people, but Iâve never a monster who wanted to destroy womenspace by demanding admission even though it has a penis. Mostly, weâre just kind of reticent, afraid of sounding too femme, or not enough, or just reminding people weâre different. Like clearing my throat, always comes out sounding deep. Itâs like the current bathroom nonsense: as has been true already for decades, weâre just looking for a place to pee. Only now, everyone knows we exist.
Maybe itâs 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 menâs, theyâre longer yet there arenât very many testosterone receptors. (Sorry, I donât 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 wouldnât turn into one later, it didnât work that way, and when I grew up I wouldnât be a woman. Iâd 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 womenâs culture, because you want academic papers with footnotes and everything. But it turns out itâs as much about Yana as about the Goddess or Dianic wicca or other stuff youâd research and footnote and make a biblio out of.
Itâs all just from me; itâs 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 donât 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 didnât want to know, I turned away, shamed by what felt like my epic failure, and I didnât want to hear about it anymore. If I couldnât have it, I couldnât bear to look at others who could. Because theyâd 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 couldâve imagined. Like marriage equality isnât a Thing, itâs the law. Hating on trans folks of all stripes on modern gay/bi womenâs sites, like Autostraddle.com, isnât 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 donât believe in hate; and there isnât an exception made to that rule for trans people.
Yet it turns out this, the reason Iâm 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 isnât 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 wouldâve made a lousy pagan anyway. Thereâs the indifference to magic. I canât meditate for shit. I feel antagonistic toward religion in general. Iâm hopelessly cynical. Iâm 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 Womenâs Studies was from the 80s or 90s, when I was reading some of the same books I found there. I asked about transgender theoryâI murmured âtransâ and she thought I said âtrainsâ, so I said, âtransgenderâ in this slightly apologetic way I still do. She thought for a second and said they are largely a used book store (âacademicâ being a given) and that since the field has started growing so recently and so quickly, they didnât 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 havenât 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 Valleyâs used bookstores, particularly to Raven. Where people like me buy them. Maybe theyâre still waxing in popularity. I hope so.
But this visit I wasnât into languages or mediĂŠval history or Buddhism, I was back where I began, at LGBT and Womenâs 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 Christâs Laughter of Aphrodite, since I havenât 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 havenât read before, itâs new.) Laughter of Aphrodite came out around the time Christ (pronounced âkristâ, 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. Iâm looking forward to reading it.
But, like I said, Iâm not a pagan. Go figure.
