Full Moon: Maidens, mothers, crones

It's Friday, and it's just a couple days after International Women's Day — or as some prefer, and as I'll meditate upon later, International Working Women's Day. I was already planning to write some thoughts about gender today, specifically on genders of the past, but I had a thought on March 8th that made this choice feel even more relevant.

As I wrote on Mastodon:

This is the first International Working Women's Day in basically my whole adult life where I actually feel like it applies to me. In my fluidity I have been just enough other genders in the past (& also struggled to own this current binary identity) that I always felt more like an outsider or a thorny complicating factor to what a "woman" is. Now that I'm in this phase of acknowledged womanhood I still have very complex feelings about the holiday itself because of my past experiences & whatever may lie in my future. But just for once, today I will let the date be what I make of it. I am a working class woman even if the path I took to get here was meandering & circuitous. Women of the working class, whether employed outside or inside the home, whether employed legally, whether employed at all: unite!

Now, as people who know me through the kink world are aware, I am very tired of writing about gender, or at least about my gender. I do it as little as possible because a) my gender history is so excruciatingly complex to rehash over and over, b) for a while I felt (and sometimes still feel) so alienated from "having a gender" that even thinking about the matter was time I no longer wanted to waste, and c) after spending so many years with genders that needed constant explanation, I would rather just exist in whatever gender I currently inhabit, and have my function in my social spheres be governed more by my actual personality than by being a token nonbinary/transgender/multitransitional figure.

So in that regard, I'm not going to spend this entire post reviewing every step of "my gender journey" in fine detail, just as I'm not going to attempt to lay out a grand unified field theory of how gender ought to work. (I have opinions about how it probably shouldn't work, which will surely filter in here, but I don't know how granular things will really get.) The thoughts I have today about my relationship to gender are very much informed by my personal history, so briefly revealing that history is in order for those who don't know it — but I'm finally ready to spend time thinking about my gender experience in a way that doesn't exhaust me, and rather in a way that feeds into the philosophical project of Salt for the Eclipse.

Ironically, however, I'm not about to look at the future of gender. I'm looking back centuries and even millennia into the past. I'm asking myself the question of whether a pre-industrial Fey (me) would have the same relationship with gender as I do in the present day. How much of my dysphoria with female gender roles — whether when I was a child/teen, when I was a young trans man, and now as a genderfluid woman — has been mediated by temporally specific expectations for working class women in the late 20th thru early 21st centuries, under a colonialist and white supremacist social paradigm? And depending on my answer, what do I see as implications for our current societal gender crisis as an outgrowth of mass gender-based violence and trauma?

The root of my answer lies in my interest surrounding the animist traditions of my ancestors, and in animism as a missing piece of many contemporary lives. Hence why I'm writing this post for the week of the full moon. Bear with me as I lay a key foundation before I can get to my real point.

My gender, truly in summary form

As mentioned, I will briefly — by my standards — go over my "unusual" gender situation for readers who are not fully informed about it.

I was assigned female at birth. I was raised not truly neutrally; that is, my family and everyone else automatically used "she/her" as my pronouns, and I was given a female-gendered name. I was given, however, a significant amount of freedom in how I could express myself and what activities I could perform. I did not grow up with a sense of wanting to do "boy things" and being told I could only do "girl things," nor did I feel like I had to present a certain way to please my family; and so I did and wore whatever I wanted until maybe age 9 or 10, right around my leadup to starting puberty. By that point I didn't perform girlhood very consistently. I was a Girl Scout who loved dolls but knew of gender stereotypes as a thing that were bad and intentionally turned my nose up at certain "feminine" things; I took dance classes but also played with Legos or (relatively) violent video games, and enjoyed wild action movies and monsters and other things that in the 90s were still basically the provenance of boys. I sometimes found it easiest to make friends with boys, while if I was close friends with a girl I usually also had some kind of crush or otherwise deeper emotional complex afoot. But I felt like an outcast not really for these reasons, and more for just being a fucking oddball by any gender metric. "Easiest to make friends with boys" was relative; I was a teacher's pet, bookworm, and uncompromisingly stubborn nitpicker who had practically no friends at all.

Once I did come close to puberty, as my classmates and I all started to get educated about what was going to happen to us — and then as puberty actually got underway — I finally stopped having absolute self-assurance about my gender, and I started to internalize that something was off. As a young dancer I was quite technically gifted in certain styles, but I was criticized by my teachers for not smiling or doing other female-coded flourishes, and I felt miserable in costumes where I had to look pretty instead of regal or tough. I caved to pressure to dress more consistently feminine in most of my life, but I at least insisted on only wearing feminine clothes that I actually liked. I managed to acquire female friends who were "just" friends in my head (and I still didn't know what was going on with liking some female friends so much) but I didn't stop wanting to hang out with boys a lot. I also still found myself a fifth wheel most of the time, and I could not get a date for the life of me. And I developed an utter hatred for my body: I found a scant few of my newly developing features to be rather attractive, but I felt fat and ashamed of it, and even worse, I felt like all my most masculine physical features were undermining my dating prospects.

Over the course of just one long-distance boyfriend, a few unrealized or rejected crushes of varying genders that led to some very intense teenage sturm und drang, and increasing experimentation with inhabiting a male identity in online forums and chat rooms, I came to wonder if my life would be easier as a boy. Eventually I became entirely convinced of this, and I say this with some cynicism now not because I "wasn't" a boy — but because being a boy would ultimately not prove any easier for me. As I finally came to grips with being queer, I simultaneously discovered the existence of trans men and trans women and nonbinary folks (not just the "transvestites" I was familiar with from talk shows and sketch comedy), and here was my answer: I was a boy. A guy. A young man. I interpreted my parents' choice to raise me in a very flexible gender environment as being less an influence on my nonconforming gender expression so much as a pathway to realizing the essential truth that I was male.

In keeping with that upbringing, I certainly had no interest in performing stereotypical masculinity. I was fine wearing skirts for a while, and even as I started to bind and match certain male clothing standards more closely — even as I came out in college and changed my name and adopted "he/him" as pronouns — I felt ambivalent about actually getting surgery or hormones. I had a trans college friend who had never physically transitioned — who to my knowledge has never physically transitioned — but who was strictly, 100%, a guy, and everyone knew this and respected this. I considered him a role model and I still do.

Now here is a major point I need to emphasize. This story has begun much like the detransition narratives you now hear trotted out by people who want to erase transmasculinity in favor of saving "lost lesbians" or "undiagnosed autistic girls."

I loathe those people.

Because yes, in my specific case it turned out that many of my gender challenges connect more with my autism, which was undiagnosed and unrecognized until several years ago[1]. And yes, in my specific case I've realized that it is most authentic for me to currently live as a gender-nonconforming woman of sorts. But my experience is not the universal experience. I have known so many trans men whose experiences were clearly not like mine. They are clearly more fully and perpetually men than I am now. And even though I came to decide I wasn't happy on testosterone and didn't want to be gendered male by other people anymore and so on, there is no way I can look back on my cumulative experience of living as a young man and think to myself, "I was not really a man then." Of course I was. My gender is simply fluid. There are all kinds of things that have caused my gender to shift — things that push my psychology and personality into some new framework where inhabiting x gender makes more sense for me to try out than y — and I've given up trying to pretend I'm in control. I'm just along for the ride.

By any conceivable metric of manhood that makes sense to me, I was a man for as long as I identified as one. Both when I was on testosterone and when I hadn't started it yet. In fact, about a year after I first came out to everyone I knew, before I had a chance to try any kinds of medical transition, I had to go back in the closet as I got into an abusive relationship with a girl who was essentially a lesbian but thought she could demasculinize me and save me from a life of toxic maleness. She manipulated, castigated, exploited, and sexually assaulted me just enough times to be the winner of that argument for a couple years. I escaped her before I knew the term "TERF" at all, but that's more or less what she was.[2] I have nothing but contempt for people with such a mindset.

Even when someone's convictions about their gender turn out to be ephemeral, as mine did, I believe very highly that it is their responsibility, and nobody else's, to figure that out. I will always resent my ex not simply because she denied my real gender at the time, but because she was out of line in trying to change my gender faster than my brain was ready for it. I know in my bones that I needed to be a guy for a while in order to discover all the ways in which guyness wasn't for me. When I did stop taking hormones and allowed my body to revert to what its self-made hormones made it look like, I also needed many years to inhabit several shifting nonbinary genders, including using neopronouns, in order to see whether that could work better.

Somehow I have circled all the way back around to being a woman for now, insofar as I still don't feel completely like a woman, preferring terms that I'll come back to later in this post, but for so many practical purposes it makes the most sense to say I am a woman and meanwhile I don't feel dysphoric about people relating to me as they relate to women (even though I think women ought to be related to differently than they usually are). I feel obliged to reveal my gender history at certain points because I don't want to simply be "mistaken" for a cis woman, and then I need to give all this detail because I don't want my narrative to be conflated with the burgeoning meme about "detransitioners" — I am a retransitioner. But yes. I am basically a woman in this particular stage of my life.

So with that background established, let me return to the actual focus of this post.

Much of my womanhood feels disquietingly primordial

When I've previously written on other platforms about why I didn't feel completely comfortable identifying as a woman at that time, and even when I've more recently written there about my considered choice to inhabit some flavor of womanhood, I think I've always looked at the matter from the angle that feels safest:

"Here are all the gender tokens I exhibit that do not feel like womanhood to me, but nevertheless I resonate with enough things that I describe as tokens of womanhood to feel like it's convenient and appropriate for other people to gender me accordingly."

I then spend exactly no time talking about what so-called tokens of womanhood actually resonate with me.

This is tricky territory, because I know exactly what those tokens are but I normally don't feel comfortable discussing some of them in a public forum. As referenced in an earlier post here, I want to become pregnant; the "twist" in a gender context is that I feel like my investment is in specifically becoming a mother, not just in becoming a parent. Obviously not all women want to or can become pregnant and not all people who want to or can become pregnant are women; but in my own case, these are not thoughts I had when I was a man, and I realized my desire to become pregnant concurrently with realizing my feelings that I wasn't interested in being a man anymore. To make matters worse for myself, I also realized a desire to finally experience vaginal penetration in a positive, consensual way; and as a kinkster I realized I didn't just like being a submissive male-coded partner, I liked being a submissive female-coded partner even more. And oh, christ almighty, I was finding myself especially fulfilled by domestic work, and I experience gender euphoria doing it. Now I've taken up fiber arts by knitting and the gender euphoria has only deepened.

Womanhood as reproductive labor, as a vessel, and as a homemaker. Outside of with my owner and a few very trusted friends, it can feel nightmarish to acknowledge these sorts of things in any direct way. I can feel consumed by a certain embarrassment: that to feel this way is to let down every past iteration of myself who was abused by a TERF and who wanted to give the middle finger to conservative gender traditionalists. Is this all an overgrown kink? I mentioned tradwives last week; can I really roll my eyes at them if I'm perilously close to becoming one? And how can I offer feminist support for other women (trans or cis) or for people of other genders (including men, especially trans men) if the parts of womanhood that mean anything to me are hung with enormous baggage for so many other people? Maybe I am still not 100% "woman," but for whatever percentage of me that is, it feels very reliant on primordially ancient tropes about what womanhood constitutes.

What I have learned through many private conversations and meditations is that messy or not, gender really does mean whatever you want it to mean. There is actually no way of describing gender — on a binary, trinary, spectrum, two-, three-, or four-dimensional graph — that doesn't carry some loaded assumption that someone will feel contradicts their own experience. So there is no correct, universally safe way to describe gender. It is okay for various tokens and traits to be arrayed across a field of genders in my head, according to delineations that are completely personal.

The crime is not in how you conceive of gender. As with the example of my ex, the crime is in how you tell people to gender themselves — in imposing your gender framework on other people as though it should be universal. TERFs and gender traditionalists both make this crucial mistake. The TERF believes in gender with a strictly anatomical basis of "uterus vs. penis," wants to liberate people who are oppressed for having a uterus, and thinks that every single person with a penis is morally inferior to every person with a uterus; I would say they're wrong, but the real problem is not what exactly the TERF believes but that the TERF thinks this is the only way to frame gender and gender oppression. A conservative gender traditionalist meanwhile uses a similar gender framing while also going so far as to say that the people they define as women are not oppressed at all and that it's correct for women to occupy only certain roles and defer morally to men; to me this is obviously wrong again, but the worst part is still that these people can't just have this govern their private lives, they feel obliged to impose that framework on people who see gender differently.

I have somewhat gotten over my guilt at my relation to womanhood by reminding myself that other women's way of "doing" womanhood does not feel threatening to me. Connecting with extremely old, primordial tokens of womanhood can help me feel like I'm living the life I want, but besides the fact that I can still derive gender euphoria from certain things that I don't associate with womanhood, I really couldn't care less whether other women are doing the same things as me. I'm also still not an anatomical essentialist — I couldn't be, not after everything I've gone through. I still feel kinship with trans men and with other people who are female-assigned but have no interest in pregnancy, because I was once in that boat; and I feel kinship with such folks who do still choose pregnancy even as they preserve a non-woman identity. Likewise I see no reason why trans women couldn't connect with female-coded reproductive imagery if they felt like it; on hormone therapy trans women also experience periods in all respects besides actual uterine bleeding, and trans women can be mothers whether through adoption or through just the right biological circumstances, and if they may not connect with "fertile womb" themes in the same way as a woman who literally has a fertile womb, in this respect how are trans women any different from child-desiring cis women who experience infertility or have entered menopause? If I don't manage to have a child from my own body as I hope to do, then I will feel just as much in common with trans women (in a reproductive respect anyway) as with cis women. Meanwhile, just because I feel a kind of fascination with old-fashioned "women's work," that doesn't mean I actually think that only women should do it, or that doing it is a prerequisite for being a woman.

Ritually, I've coalesced this thinking by establishing these tenets of my cosmology:

1. that there are many people in this world who walk a special magical path connected to their combined reproductive capacity & willingness
2. that there are other special magical paths available to people who do not share that capacity or willingness
3. that these paths are not to be named by universal gender terms, only by whatever terms make sense personally for a given individual

As in all other parts of my rites, fertility and ecstasy must be revered together. Not just one thing or the other.

Hopefully all of this has been laid out clearly enough that I can now look more directly back into the past: not just at the primordial tokens of womanhood that happen to hold resonance for me, but rather at the relationship I feel with my female ancestors and how this informs my developing animist worldview as a healing practice.

Gender & wages

Many arguments about contemporary gender issues, whether offered by feminists or career misogynists, rightfully bring up the distinct paradox of the last few decades wherein so-called Western society has shifted to let women hold many more jobs outside the home, while women also still remain responsible for the home and childrearing... and while wages for women are rising gradually, wages for neither women nor men are now enough to allow the lauded heterosexual nuclear family unit to generally subsist on just the man's income anymore. Men are expected to be providers, but the class barrier for actually functioning in that role is somewhere higher than it's ever been before. Similarly, women must necessarily provide for the family as well, but this interferes with their expected goal of having children, especially since more children require the family to have even more money. Hence declining birth rates, and arguably hence the crisis of modern masculinity and the crisis of women being expected to "do it all" and only get compensated for less than half of what they're doing.

All of that is a very interesting topic, but I think it would be an oversimplication to sum it up as the past few decades being distinct due to women suddenly "having wage-paid jobs." A 1950s-style household setup isn't the last vestige of how things always used to be; it's the conclusion of a paradigm that got established only as far back as the Industrial Revolution. What's changed since then is less the ability of women to work outside the home, and more the exact types of non-domestic wage work that women have been expected to do. Industrialized labor cemented the wage labor that had been in development since the development of earlier capitalism; women were immediately tossed the kinds of wage labor that were the worst compensated, the kinds that required more than a child's skill set but that men were least willing to do when they could convince women to do it instead, or when they already saw it as women's work from days gone by. Women became textile and garment factory workers, situated in an industry no less dangerous or unhealthy than certain types of work for men, but paid less because it was "just" women doing it. With the advent of typewriters, women became typists and proofreaders because it was "menial" and didn't require a genius masculine brain or what have you. Likewise for doing arithmetic-heavy work (remember how the Victorian wife who acted as "angel of the house" was also the household accountant) and eventually holding job titles that were literally "computers" before digital computers had been invented. Programming itself could have stayed a female-dominated activity if no men eventually got it into their heads that it was actually very difficult and thus something meant for men to excel at.

So in the industrial era, men and women have certainly been divided by what kinds of jobs they can do, but not by having wage-paid jobs or not. The primary governing factor for women having jobs in this era has been class. A woman of generational wealth and/or the employing capitalist class: she does not need to work, so of course it would be inappropriate for her to do so. But a working class woman is almost self-explanatory: she must work. Even two hundred years ago, this working class woman would be considered responsible for the home and childrearing, but even if her husband had a job (assuming she had a husband) it would often behoove her to take at least some kind of part-time job to help make ends meet. Leaving aside factory jobs, how else did maids, governesses, and wetnurses persist in the Victorian period? These women didn't necessarily live in the homes they worked at; they were the predecessors to modern housekeeping staff and nanny services. And if they did live at a grand estate, they were still typically paid a wage.

There is of course a racialized angle to this, too; in a Western paradigm, the whiter the woman, the more likely that she would not/should not have a job, because of being more likely to occupy a place in the aristocracy or bourgeoisie. And in industrial societies that continued to practice legal slavery for a while, Black womanhood was given a particularly demeaning status, forbidden from even getting to choose their menial labor at all, while also denied a domestic life of their own due to serving a white household.

Regardless of a working class woman's racial status, however, her situation under industrial capitalism is rather fundamentally differentiated from a capitalist's wife, even if the capitalist wife does face some peculiar struggles. This right here is why I choose to recognize March 8th as "International Working Women's Day" as it was in its Marxist origins. As far back as I'm aware of, all the women on my mother's side and most of the women on my father's side have all been working class, sometimes migrants and (until the past couple generations) generally from rural communities. That is the class-inflected experience of womanhood that I wish to connect with in performing ancestor work. But to think of my female ancestors with rural lifestyles, my mind unsurprisingly pushes back further than the industrial era.

Pre-industrial contrasts

I've written here before of ancestor work, combined with animism, as a focal point for healing from capitalism's traumas; for someone in my particular position this ties in with a process of unlearning and permanently rejecting whiteness. But especially because my feelings about womanhood link with common tokens of womanhood that reach back before the industrial or capitalist eras, I've started to ask myself whether my current gender feelings — and the complexities they create with my trans and queer identities — have anything to do with embracing not any sort of social conservatism but rather my longing for a land-connected animist past as a revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, environmentalist project.

What do my grandmothers and their own mothers, reaching back into deep time, have to teach me about gender? Would I still have potentially gone on the same "gender journey" if I were born many hundreds of years ago to Welsh farmers?

The answer to that second question feels oddly easy to answer at first; trans people, by some definition or another, have always existed in every culture that we know of today. Even when they've been relatively invisible. In turn, looking back to the first question, I don't think I'd assume that my ancestors would by necessity have restrictive views about gender roles. It's very telling to me when reactionaries do make that default assumption; they reveal a deeper underlying view that people in the past only thought one way, and they imagine that the way people today think about gender "traditions" is identical to what those old traditions really were.

The real story would surely have been much more complicated. For one thing, it's well documented nowadays that gender fluidity of a kind was permissible in medieval Europe under the right circumstances. That is to say, regardless of your anatomy, with the imposition of Christian modesty standards people usually were not naked most of the time; your clothes communicated your gender much more than your actual body did, and if you dressed like a man or a woman and undertook a role acceptable to the option you chose, it often seems like many people of that time wouldn't really care to find out your anatomical sex. If you transported those people into the present day, maybe they wouldn't understand medical transition, but some might understand and accept social transition pretty fast. The main exception to all of this would be if you were expected to reproduce for the sake of political alliances and land inheritance; then your genitals would matter quite a bit, but this situation was largely the provenance of nobles, which leads me to the next point.

Class divisions in womanhood were not simply invented by capitalism; in medieval or antiquarian Europe, the roles of a noble woman and a peasant woman overlapped in some ways but diverged in others. Whatever types of labor they shared, there were just as many other types that would have been inappropriate for them to exchange, and similarly there were ways of dressing that only one class of woman would be allowed to appear in. So would a noble woman and a peasant woman have thought about womanhood in a monolithic way? That strikes me as rather doubtful.

Meanwhile, for yet another thing, this is my own assertion more than any historians', but based on the amount of reading I've done over time around gender in at least the medieval period if not also in earlier contexts — and based on arguments that I have certainly read other people putting forward — I actually think it's reductive to describe pre-capitalist Europe as having just two genders. That's even after accounting for class divisions. Christianity tends to provide a binarist overlay, but beneath this there remain folk traditions in which "male" and "female" may exist as anatomical sex groupings but the number of genders multiplies in accordance with the varieties of gradually abandoned gods.

With what I will call male-grouped genders, look at the classical pantheons of Greece and Scandinavia. There is no "god of manhood" but rather many gods who are men, and their personalities and appearances and functions vary wildly. Ares and Thor are tough warrior figures, but they are not synonymous with patriarchal rulership, as this is given to Zeus and Odin. And then there are the more liminal, queerer, trickster masculinities of Loki or Hermes. These are all different ways to be men. Some modes would be more privileged than others depending on exact historical period, exact community, and what phase of life a man was at; nonetheless, without following a set of biblical commands for what man in general ought to do, I see enough distinct, mythic role models for animist European men that I doubt we could easily ascribe one universal "code of manhood" for all of them. And if that's the case, was a singular gender of "man" really applicable in that animist past? I leave the question open.

For women, we have that same variety in European polytheist pantheons as well, but I find it especially intriguing to examine the oft-touted metamyth of the triple goddess: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. This figure is not definitively found in any archaeological record from my ancestral continent; I find it a now fairly dated attempt to explain the preponderance of European or "Near-Eastern"[3] goddesses who occupy a maiden, mother, or crone-like role, and to simultaneously explain the preponderance of goddesses who exist in triplets (like the Fates or Norns, or the Celtic figures called Matres/Matronae that we know practically nothing about) or may be seen with literally three faces (as with Hekate). So if there is no concrete evidence for actually combining all these goddess types together, why extrapolate that combination? Why do a lot of contemporary pagans, and occultists for that matter, love the imagery of Maiden + Mother + Crone = One Goddess? From my perspective, this impulse comes from an ancestral memory not of mythic figures, but of literal people.

I think that once upon a time, my ancestors would not have just experienced gender as "women." There were prescribed roles and presentations for three different phases of female-assigned or female-perceived life — and these prescriptions were so distinctive that it almost does not make sense to talk about a universal womanhood in that regard. In a very simplified framework: an unmarried virgin girl was not to have sex or children at all, and was to wear her hair down, and was her father's possession; once this person transitioned out of girlhood through marriage (or concubinage, if we consider truly pre-Christian contexts) and reproduction, now she was a mother-figure and as such connected very much with having sex and childrearing, and was her husband's possession (though how much might vary by culture and period), and she should wear her hair up; once menopausal, this person entered a third phase, that of old age, and though still holding some childcare responsibilities, she was now storyteller, skill-teacher, wisdom-keeper, perhaps even magic-user. To me, these are three genders. And just as Christianity has offered us the Madonna vs. the Whore for a post-animist age, people of Christianized European backgrounds who look back to animism are looking for a goddess who embodies not that diptych but a suitable triptych for pre-industrial, pre-capitalist circumstances. The triple goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone — she may never have exactly existed that we know of, but that's not the point.

It's a gender lesson. It has bearing for manhood too. Even if you could argue convincingly for one universal type of masculinity in animist Europe, before a man is a man, he must first live as a boy.

What am I longing for?

I think about all of the above when I consider my female ancestors and what they would say if I asked them what they thought about gender. But while these thoughts can become very engrossing, what is my real purpose in giving them such attention? I think that in this post I've already hopefully justified feeling connected with womanhood by some surprisingly old-fashioned standards, but actually, I'm still not satisfied with what I've already said.

Because I don't want to just seek gender liberation through the past. I don't want to offer any avenues for sneaking in some backdoor gender essentialism just because history is fascinating. And I have still not really answered what my relationship to gender would be if I lived in any of my distant ancestors' time and place.

Could I accept an available function for my assigned gender back then? Regardless of how many genders really existed in Europe before the Christianity- and capitalism-mediate binary we face today, I've skirted quite a bit around the basic fact that there were widespread universal expectations that people most typically grouped as "women" should adhere to. This was not a true multigender queer paradise. So if I feel comfortable performing some variety of womanhood now, that's all well and good, but being honest with myself I can't say I would specifically feel at home as a woman in medieval Wales for example. Not even with that ancestral connection.

I can't guarantee that back then I would necessarily turn out to be a gender rebel, but here in the now as actually-myself, gender rebellion is already in me. I have now spent a lot of words on womanhood but there is still one word that describes my gender much better than "woman" does:

Witch.

A witch is like a woman, but not in her adherence to common roles for women. She makes use of things categorized as women's things, but outside the bounds of what is considered proper for her to do. If she submits to any man at all, it is her choosing and not a matter of familial arrangement. She may be the sort of witch who bears a child, and she may also never bear any. She may derive power from beauty and from horror both together. She is self-reliant. She is ready to help community members who need it, and to poison tyrants.

As much as I am interested in old womanhood tokens, all of that is still a kind of shorthand. The gender in which I feel most at home is not womanly but witchlike. It is something that ties up maiden, mother, and crone all in one figure, and then nakedly queers such things.

In any time, in any place, I would feel dysphoric about womanhood if I could not transmute it into witchhood. And in my society's future, I do not think we will solve imbalances and injustices for women if we look back only to past conventions and not also to past subversions. Maybe there is magic in our wombs and cunts, whether those parts are with us from birth or added later; but there is also magic in our clits and cocks. Maybe some of us would benefit from re-valuing domestic work and childrearing instead of simply feeling the pressure for wage labor; but if we are to do this, let it be done with true empowerment and liberation for all, not through embracing false allies in conservatism. If we choose to wield weaving shuttles and knitting needles and spinning wheels, then let us remember that in myth this would make us shapers of destiny. If we choose to garden and work with herbs, then let us remember that what can cure can also kill. This is witch's work more than generic woman's work, because it is done with a might and purpose that patriarchs and others powers-that-be will always be of a mind to shut down. To burn, to hang, to strangle.

Those battlefronts are where I feel my gender leading me. No matter what happens, I think I will be a witch for a while because it addresses so many competing instincts at once. A couple days late: happy IWD, International Witches Day.

[1] As of this year I have finally resolved never to seek an official autism diagnosis. I am not intellectually opposed to diagnosis; but in addition to receiving warnings about how virtually none of the formal neuropsych tests for autism actually test adults accurately and none of the major social resources for autism patients are meant for adults, my biggest concern is that an official diagnosis in my medical records could be used to discriminate against me for matters like fertility treatments or immigration. My autism certainly is a disability in various contexts, but I would rather forego accommodations in some areas in order to be treated equally in other areas. All of this is to say nothing of the present US political climate in which autistic people are now being scapegoated for "manufacturing" trans identities, and in which any further slide into hard totalitarianism could see people with recognized disabilities not only forcibly sterilized at higher rates than they currently are, but flat out systematically murdered. I feel far safer owning my autism under a name that is not on my driver's license. Never mind listing autism on my driver's license, as is now being proposed in some states.

[2] My ex was kind of special about it though insofar as she really only had an issue with trans men. Trans women were fine, even hot, as far as she was concerned. Because to her, transness was not the actual enemy; masculinity was. Trans women were virtuous and attractive for having abandoned manhood. So maybe she was a TERF of sorts, but she would have gotten along wonderfully with one subsection of the transfeminist left nonetheless.

[3] This is a bad term and I don't have a better one.

Thank you for bearing with this particularly long and fraught jumble of thoughts. I tried to organize them the best I can, but I understand if they're still quite a lot to sift through. Next week, even though it's a Last Quarter post, I can virtually guarantee lighter, airier reading, as I'll be writing some thoughts for the upcoming spring equinox. I'll see you then!