Although I have only very recently acquired the language to articulate my experiences, I have never identified comfortably with my assigned gender.\u00a0 From my earliest memories, I have struggled against the things that have been expected of me in the context of my presumed masculinity. \u00a0I was too sensitive, too passive, too interested in emotional fulfillment, in intellectual pursuits. \u00a0I had no interest in sports fandom or physical competition – a matter of great consternation to my peers and the adults who surrounded us, given my physical size. \u00a0I was drawn to darkness, but not to cruelty – I had been subject to too much of it, and could not comprehend the logic whereby it was validated by making others, in their turn, suffer as I had. \u00a0While I certainly wished destruction upon my enemies, I rarely wished them to suffer or be humiliated, and never carried through on that impulse. \u00a0I was drawn to contemplative, experiential mysticism, not the violent and muscular Christiantiy that pervaded my home town when I was growing up.<\/p>\n
My earliest spiritual practices, after rejecting both the God I found in the Bible and the one advocated by my Protestant peers, began with a pubescent and misinformed obsession with the Yin-Yang, the first non-theistic \u00a0spiritual symbol I encountered. \u00a0In a world filled with hard dichotomies of antagonistic oppositions – good versus evil; men versus women; Christians versus everyone – the notion of complimentary opposites, each containing echoes of the other, was deeply appealing to me. \u00a0It was ignorant wank-sauce Orientalism, I know that now; for what it’s worth, it was 1996 and I attended public school and I didn’t know any better. \u00a0And, more to the point, today: it was the only place in the world that I had found any context for the parts of myself I now describe as queer.\u00a0 The notion that I might be energetically yin, rather than yang, gave me a way to contextualize myself and my experiences.<\/p>\n
When I discovered Paganism, proper – not just energywork and New Age mumbojumbo – I was drawn to Goddess-worship and the effeminate undertones of witchcraft, though I was yet too contaminated by the respectability politics of the 1990s to embrace confrontational quality of the word.<\/p>\n
I have more words, now.\u00a0 Better words.\u00a0 I am bisexual.\u00a0 I am queer.\u00a0 I am genderqueer.\u00a0 I am something man-ish; something woman-ish; something neither; something both.\u00a0 “All of the above and none of the above,” I tell people when I’m being pithy.\u00a0 Sometimes, I am more sincere, and just tell people that my gender is “witch”.\u00a0 My pronouns, though I rarely insist on them, are xie\/xir<\/em>.\u00a0 Damn right I use the weird ones that got dropped from even the most inclusive lists.<\/p>\n I started coming out as bisexual in 2001.\u00a0 I embraced the witchcraft identity in 2006, at about the same time that I embraced the label queer.\u00a0 Though I recognize this is not true for everyone – or even most people who use either identifier – those two words are inextricably linked for me.\u00a0 My queer identity and experience inform my witchcraft; my witchcraft shapes my experience of gender. “Witch” is not quite as confrontational as “queer”, but it’s better than “Pagan” (though I use that word, too).<\/p>\n I’ve touched on these themes before<\/a>.\u00a0 Several<\/a> times<\/a>, actually<\/a>.\u00a0 More times than I’ve just linked.\u00a0 More times than I can remember.\u00a0 And I’ll keep talking about it until the world is a better place.\u00a0 Until admitting to those identities publicly is no longer a potential job-killer at any level of society.\u00a0 Until they no longer come with a risk of having everything you own and\/or love taken away by a hostile judge in a divorce hearing.\u00a0 Until they no longer bear the risk of being executed by police and vigilantes.<\/p>\n I’m here.\u00a0 I’m queer.\u00a0 I’m tired.\u00a0 And I’m angry.<\/p>\n I am a witch.\u00a0 I have seen visions such as are granted only to prophets of other faiths.\u00a0 I have raised my friends up and laid my enemies low.\u00a0 I have made love to monsters and screamed in the faces of gods.<\/p>\n I am an artist.\u00a0 I have a penchant for drama.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean I’m lying.\u00a0 Just that I talk about things others would rather keep quiet.<\/p>\n Today is National Coming Out Day<\/a>.\u00a0 Here I am.\u00a0 Fucking fight me.<\/p>\n Come out if you can.\u00a0 And if you can’t, know that you have friends and allies.\u00a0 You are not alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although I have only very recently acquired the language to articulate my experiences, I have never identified comfortably with my assigned gender.\u00a0 From my earliest memories, I have struggled against the things that have been expected of me in the context of my presumed masculinity. \u00a0I was too sensitive, too passive, too interested in emotional … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[83,88,90,173,215,216],"class_list":["post-3695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-witchcraft","tag-feminist-witchcraft","tag-gender","tag-genderqueer","tag-national-coming-out-day","tag-queer","tag-queer-witchcraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-XB","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5003,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions\/5003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}