About that last post; I read what the person had to say but Wicca is not transphobic, I very strongly disagree. Wicca/other magical practices using God/goddesses and masculine/feminine energies is not transphobic, it’s an ancient practice and it’s also a feminist practice. I’m sorry but you can’t enter spaces where cis females celebrate their strength, their wombs, their menstrual flow.. And call it “transphobic” just because it may exclude you. If you have a womb but don’t celebrate it, that’s fine.
If you are a woman and don’t have a womb, that’s fine, but you cannot criticize women with wombs and periods for celebrating those things, because we have been hanged, burned, raped, and treated like cattle for thousands of years because of those things, and it’s about fucking time we get to love those aspects of ourselves and celebrate them! If you can’t or don’t want to celebrate your female or male power then that’s totally cool! But don’t call ppl transphobic and even anti feminist for doing so. Witchcraft, goddess worship, and finding my power in my womb and vagina have been the most liberating things that have ever happened to me! Maybe it would be transphobic if the practice was against people feeling like or being a different gender than they were assigned, but if you look closely and understand the masculine/feminine elements, you would see that actually people are encouraged to find both types of energy within themselves, to utilize both, and to see the beauty and importance of both. This type of thinking is not transphobic at all, as energies are not tied to physical gender; Because that’s the point; they’re energies, and everyone has a fluid combination of them!
(I only posted this so that my followers know what I think about it, since I just reblogged it)Ahhhhh! I don’t feel like i have the right to talk about this and how utterly wrong this sentiment is, and I don’t want this to be a call out post, but I just saw it in the witchcraft tag (because witchcraft tag likes to post personal posts) and I just couldn’t let it go.
Okay first, Wicca is not “an ancient feminist practice.” Let’s just start with this before we go forward. Wicca was made in the late 1920s-early 1930s, and rose to popularity in the 1950s, by a man – Gerald Gardner, who was literally creating a heterosexual fertility sex witchcult. There is almost nothing feminist about his writings. He stereotypes women by their uteruses and makes their value marker on the stages of use of their uteruses. It literally is what people do today, when they basically use people’s uteruses as the marker for what they are good for.
Likewise there is some other sketchy shit that Gardner did in his structures like for example, the Five Fold Kiss and the requirement that a Man must initiate a woman and vice versa.
And because Wicca inspired so many other deviations, we have things like the Frosts who are advocating for Child Sexual Assault through this man-to-woman initiation rights and involving sex and/or Sex acts as part of their initiation processes. Likewise it inspires things like Dianic Wicca that summaries a person down to their literal genital. It’s not about these “energies” it’s about the genital.
So next, Second, when you’re pushing for “strength” in someone’s organs specifically organs that not all other people have, you’re being on purpose, exclusionary. And this may or may not be something that we should have a discussion about. But when it comes to this “celebration of the uterus” or whatever you’re going on about, we need to really discuss whether or not this is actually an appropriate thing to be doing.
For example, I don’t celebrate the fact that I have a uterus. It bothers me that because I have a uterus people think of me as a woman. My uterus doesn’t make me a woman, my lack of penis doesn’t make me a woman. What makes me a woman is a complex identification of things that make me a woman. There’s larger concepts of the social norms when it comes to being a woman, so when I am “aggressive” for example, I’m misgendered as being manly. Or because I don’t dress up femininely or wear make up, I’m associated with a manly quality. Even though I’m not associating that with a manly thing. Okay, so you see there’s a difference between social norms and my organs.
Gender identification is important when we have discussions about who is and who isn’t a woman. We cannot sum down to a particular organ arrangement because it’s not always based on an organ. There’s lots of social roles, social norms, etc etc. I’ll continue that discussion below.
I didn’t “choose” my organs.
Likewise, we need to discuss the fact that because I have a uterus, people expect me to play a particular role. Specifically “pre child birth,” “child bearer,” “post child bearer” – sound familiar? It’s the Maiden, Mother, Crone concepts that a lot of people have pulled out from Wicca and have either bastardized or otherwise converted into something else entirely. My uterus is not going to be used for childbirth ever. I’m going through mechanisms to start me up on ensuring that I never have children. Because I have to wait until I’m “older” before I can get some of the other sterilizations. Because I might “want to have children later and regret it.”
This all comes from this pushing of woman = their uterus’s job. That’s not feminism. That’s absolutely unacceptable as a form of feminism. IN GENERAL.
Let alone all the women who can’t have children via a uterus because they lack a uterus.
Because you feel empowered by celebrating your uterus, does not mean that is wrong. What is wrong is people saying that people aren’t “real women” for not having a uterus or not playing up to this child-bearer role. What is wrong is when people use the uterus as the only signifier for woman-dom and enforce that anyone else who doesn’t have it is not a woman.
I am glad for you that you feel empowered by something personal to yourself. But it’s not about “the energies” or whatever (which is an entirely different discussion on why those energies even need to be gendered to start with).
It’s about the core underlying problems that are actually transphobic and anti-feminist. By enforcing that women are their uterus (and their roles are their uterus’s jobs) you exclude people who don’t have uteruses while simultaneously including people who have uteruses but are not women.
It is not feminist to make someone’s whole life roles surrounding their uterus (or the lack there of it). Women are so much more than whether or not they menstruate or can have children. Women are not organs. I’m sorry, I’m tired of being viewed by others as a walking uterus. I’m a woman and a person. Not a fucking organ.
I don’t know if I’m explaining this exactly well because I’m really upset right now, because I don’t want this post to be looked at as me picking on you specifically. It just was so bad I had to address it. There’s a lot of this sentiment where it’s not understood what is exactly being called out when people call these things transphobic and antifeminist.
Again – It’s not the “energies” it’s the core principles. Again it’s the concepts that formed the concepts around these “energies.”
And what about those cis females for one reason or another have their womb removed. Are they disqualified? If no, then your original argument is invalid on that alone. What about women who choose to never have children? To get their “tubes tied”? To be in a relationship exclusively with those that can’t have/do not want children? Better yet “celebrate the womb that nearly kills you every month! Thanks to endometriosis or fibroids or cysts!” Like do you even hear yourself.
Secondly, Wicca was created by a cis male and included nudity as a requirement for rituals because boobies. Gardner worked with Crowley, one of the biggest womanizers and sexual deviants of his time. To say that Wicca is for cis females with wombs intact is insulting. Do you ever think that this whole female/male energies thing is bogus or antiquated? We have so much more scientific knowledge now.
I’m not sure about most initiated Wiccan sects on the topic of transphobia, but I know for a fact that Dianic Wicca is very much cis females only. They don’t want a y chromosome in their circles. Period.
And the whole Burning Times? Nearly none were witches. They simply had lands or other property a neighbor wished to acquire or they refused to convert from their native religion to Christianity. Also, they were most certainly not all women.
To accuse someone you didn’t like of witchcraft was a convenient tool to get rid of them. The total number of victims had been distorted and the period of time? Thousands of years? Christianity isn’t even 2 thousands years old. So definitely not true.
I didnt even see the burning times mention!!! Ahhh!
(Also on another note, i was hoping that I was covering these other cases with my post being generic about the lack of uterus or lack of desire for child birth. But i am glad you were explicit if the tone did not appear to be that way from my original response!!!)
Transmisogyny, genitals mention, sec has good words,
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The Carving Witch 