I was telling a (bio) female friend about this issue last night (who actually did attend said ritual, btw) and she brought up what I thought was a good point about trans women. She said that because trans women have had some experience with "male conditioning", they tend to want to be very dominant in women-only groups, often hogging the conversation or being pushy around them. She found this particularly true in her women's tech geek group. She admitted she can be a pushy bitch herself, but that usually she feels "out-pushed" by the trans women. Based on the number of trans persons I have known and their personalities, I can actually, albeit somewhat reluctantly, concede her point...though of course, I'm sure there are exceptions allowing for individual personalities.

I have to concede that my own experience is limited in this respect. I also concede that being male, I only know what I know from hearsay and have never, and can never, actually experience working with trans women in women-only groups. I agree that my generalization is bad, tenuous at best. And I have no idea about "representative samples." I only know the people I know and what females have told me. I also know that the trans women I do know all have very strong personalities in the matter I've described, and while I cannot concede that ALL trans women behave in a manner like this, it would not be difficult to draw the parallel just for the ones I know...and yes, I could say the same for many cis-gendered people I know for other types of behaviors. My workplace, for instance, people have very similar backgrounds and work patterns, which is why the company operates the way it does.

And I sincerely apologize for conveying a bad message. I feel bad that my own experience is so limited that I have to draw such conclusions based on what is a very small sample. I know it sounds really bad, but this is the basis solely of my own limited experience. If I could but experience an example of someone that would counter my skewed views, get to know a trans person who did NOT exhibit a strong, dominating personality and who obviously DID fit in well with groups of women, or heard from a female friend who extolled a trans person's ability to fit in, or work well with, an all-female group, I would love to. But so far, unfortunately, I have not.

Or the trans day of visibility on the March 31, details forthcoming. :D

I've moved farther from the city since my last profile update (thanks for the reminder, btw), plus I'm booked on weekday evenings (including that night) doing an ongoing musical through April 10. While the rehearsals do end prior to its start time, there's no way, with traffic, that I would ever make it there in time, even if I left directly and did not eat. After April 10, however, I'd be happy to attend such a forum, with my friend. I'll bookmark the link and periodically check for updates. Thanks for the resource!

Very much this. If you aren't strong, you get eaten up by society. You become one of the invisible trans people (by some measures as many as 50%) who never was visible because you killed yourself before transitioning.

I knew there was a reason I woke up at around midnight or a little past it. . .

:P

The revolutions happen in the witching hours.

I appreciate CAYA's statement and their position here. I can totally understand that menstruation mysteries are generally specific to non-trans women. My remaining concern is that menstruation and pregnancy mysteries are sometimes the only things people think of when they think of women's mysteries, and defining women's mysteries this way leads to the exclusion of all kinds of women for whom these aren't particularly relevant to their experience of themselves as a woman. I'm glad there's space for these kinds of dialogues.

I pretty explicitly don't want to be defined in terms of my menstrual lifecycle*. And yet, and yet... in a cultural sense, these are things that have had a major effect on my life. The fear of rape and the burden of child bearing and child rearing have everything to do with the societal role of female, and however strongly I disagree with that that is something that has been imposed upon me, with and without my consent, my whole life. So I can see a useful ritual context there.

In terms of the exclusion of transgendered women... Meh. I wouldn't have done it. But then, I wouldn't have organized such a ritual in the first place, I don't think. I suppose I can see an argument that there is a basic difference in experience between people who have fought for a role, as opposed to people who acquired it unwittingly... but then, one can equally argue for a lot of commonality of experience. Or maybe it's just me. I am not a gender conformist. Reading Whipping Girl was incredibly useful for me in understanding much of my experience of Ohio - well, and the world in general, but OMG it's in my face in Ohio. Because I feel like I am constantly being misgendered by the people around me. But it's not that I feel male and look female. I'm reasonably content in my female body**. But I am vastly unahppy with the cultural construct of femininity that I feel people often try to cram down my throat. Doesn't that make me a fairly classic feminist?

I am a member of one all female organization - a mailing list that has been around since the early nineties. It's not really about being female, as such. Not anymore, anyway.

* Have you, BTW, ever read Connie Willis' short story "Even the Queen"? One of my favorite comments on menstruation ever. And yes, if I could without other adverse side effects, I would totally turn off my menstrual cycle. (Until I need it - but at this point in my life I'm pretty comfortable saying that that would be forever.)
** I could wish to be a bit more androgynous in appearance, perhaps. What I got was tall, muscular, broad shouldered and built like a German barmaid. I can imagine checking "neither" and getting "both".

I think what I'm trying to articulate is kind of a package deal - that rape is even more of a problem because of the risk of pregnancy, that unintended pregnancy, meanwhile, often leads to child-rearing under bad circumstances. (What I've seen of studies about women who intend to give children up for adoption and how many of them then don't leads me to suspect there is a pretty strong biological element here.) One's ability to control one's fertility or lack thereof, and fear and concern around these things is a pretty strong part of my experience of being female. And heavens knows it's the ground on which some pretty major political and cultural battles are being fought.

I'm not saying that all is stronger or more important than other aspects of one's experiences of femininity that are more likely to be shared. I'm certainly not saying that excluding an often already excluded group of people from a group they identify with is potentially more problematic than what might be gained by this kind of ritual. But I can certainly see an argument about how this is a certain experience that can be useful to be dealt with in a ritual context, and that perhaps there is something to be gained among people who have shared that experience. It's not something I'd be likely to do myself. (And yet... I was studying abortifacients when I was like twelve, because I was frightened of not having control over my own fertility. At times it felt like a gun pointed at my head.)

I'm also not sure how much this has to do with anyone else's idea of a menstrual lifecycle.

I go back and forth about where I am in terms of sex and gender. I don't think waking up in a male body would be a huge tragedy for me. (I think I would have been a long haired silk shirt wearing geek boy in my twenties, and probably gotten a little quieter and more chivalric - er, not in the making a show sort of way, more like the butch-ish thing I frequently do - by now.) But I am fairly happy in my female body, even if I think parts of it are more than a little ridiculous. (Why do I need these breasts if I'm not lactating? Not to mention the suck of the Q angle? And menstruation? OMFG...) When it comes to presentation... Feh. Female clearly can stretch to include me, and I don't really care one way or the other about feminine.

Thank you for the link to CAYA Coven's statement.

I was very pleased to read Lady Yeshe Rabbit's apology for the problems surrounding the Lilith ritual at Pantheacon this year. It's been fairly obvious for a couple of days (at least, it has been to me,) that the proximate cause of all of this turmoil was a failure in communication. We are human, and prone to error, and so these things do happen from time to time. Which is why we have things like Hanlon's Razor to remind us how to approach such matters.

Much of the asshattery in the pagan blogosphere about this incident is far less excusable.

Despite the genuine anguish and the impassioned rhetoric that has been generated by this incident, I continue to believe that there is nothing wrong with creating rituals or workshops at public gatherings where the intended audience is a limited subset of the membership of the gathering. The failure of the Amazon Priestess Tribe was NOT that they offered a ritual to which only women born as women were to be admitted. Rather, their failure, as Rabbit acknowledged in her apology, lay in not having clearly and unequivocally explained in advance who comprised their intended audience.

I won't presume to argue with any group which says it needs a private space in order to feel safe and secure in seeking a spiritual experience, whether it be a group of women born as women, or a group of gay men, or, for that matter, a group of left-handed Jewish jet pilots. Nor am I likely to feel deprived in any way, since a ritual focused on the needs of a group I do not belong to is unlikely to be of much benefit to me.

What has utterly appalled me in all this is the degree to which so many pagans who have been publicly commenting on this matter have presumed that one or more of the affected groups here was acting in bad faith. I makes me wonder how much of this nebulous "pagan community" we talk about so often exists only in our minds. On the other hand, it says much that the public discussion of this matter that took place at Pantheacon the day after the Lilith ritual was evidently conducted in a civil, respectful, and responsible manner, despite the high levels of emotion being experienced by all who were present.

Hopefully, we'll all learn form this, and do better in the future.

Not having been at Pantheacon myself, I very much appreciate your correcting my misapprehension as to the date of the discussion. As I've noted above, error creeps in everywhere. Thank you.

It's easy for me to be civil: none of my oxen have been gored in this mess. And I'm not trying to change anyone's mind here, nor to persuade people of the fundamental righteousness of my position and the evils of someone else's. I'm acting as a distant but not entirely disinterested observer, and distance often does lend perspective.

As to the others, well, there is no anger that is quite so pleasant to feel as righteous anger. And of course, since one is being righteous and is obviously on the side of the angels whatever one does while feeling that anger is okay and anyone thinks otherwise should just get over it...

Makes you wonder sometimes whether we homo sapiens are really all that wise.

And besides, it's not easy being that still small voice of conscience. But somebody has to do it.

First of all, I’d like to thank you personally for standing up for CAYA. I fully recognize that you have your own opinions about the whole topic, and that they may or may not agree with mine/ours, but in this week of watching the firestorm while we mustered our thoughts and feelings, yours has been one of the voices calling for calm, reasoned, discourse, and supporting CAYA when we were being vilified.

Thank you.

I'd also like to thank boyAstridgirl, who was apparently at lunch with me, for hearing what i said, and repeating it correctly. it's always so nice when you see/hear that people heard what you said, and have repeated it accurately!



In case you’re interested, there are a few blogs going up from our clergy- mine is here- http://tadrakos.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/to-whom-it-may-concern/, my fellow caya member rowan and I have a joint blog on which we’ve both discussed it- http://thewildegarden.com, another priestess has her blog here-http://theprimalheart.blogspot.com/2011/03/gender-factor.html, and another here- http://ladybugsadventures.blogspot.com/2011/03/gender-and-magic.html.

Pantheacon, Pagan, Brigid

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