Over the course of the last couple of years the community
has witnessed the evolution of belief among mainstream Dianics towards an ever-widening
view of inclusivity, equality and developing a tradition that will continue to empower
women to find their voices.
These changes however have not included individuals who are
acknowledged as national voices within the Dianic community. Increasingly this isolated
group of so called “leaders” have begun to engage in power over, patriarchal
and escalatory tactics and language in order to promote an extreme view of the
community that promotes discrimination, exclusivity and hate towards the
transgender community.
Their arguments boil down to the same old tactic taken by
all those that have opposed civil rights advances; namely, granting rights to
others infringes on our rights. This is the same argument that the women’s
movement opposed in establishing the rights of women. Essentially, the former
leadership of the movement has become the very thing they have opposed for over
40 years.
On the other side of the equation are the vast majority of
Dianics who are caring loving individuals who support the traditional values of
the movement and are able to embrace weaving a new thread into the diverse fabric of social justice. Individuals such as YsheRabbit Matthews and Devin Hunter are great examples of this ethic manifested. These individuals and groups represent the real leadership of the
Dianic movement. With time their voices will be acknowledged as representing
the future of this important tradition within the Pagan community.
The larger community has begun to speak about Dianics in defamatory
terms, citing their beliefs as hateful and archaic. Such statements should be viewed with caution. Painting an
entire tradition with the brush of bigotry only embraces the idea that all
Dianics hold discriminatory beliefs and ignores the evidence that many Dianics
no longer consider the traditional leading voices as relevant to the direction
of the Dianic community.
Yes, the traditional national leadership is going to evolve
or perish. All evidence seems to
indicate that they have chosen the path of self-destruction. These individuals
can be now be viewed as a sub group within the Dianic community who some are
now calling Z-Dianics. While
labels are often not helpful, in this case there is a clear need to
differentiate between those beliefs that represent discrimination and those
that embrace inclusivity.
Lets return to a place where we respect the Dianic community
for all they have achieved. It follows that it is also time to view the
minority of Z-Dianics who have become what they have traditionally fought
against as a sad relic of great ideas corrupted by extremism and power over
patriarchal leadership structures.
As someone who has been partnered to a Dianic Witch for more
than a dozen years, I am saddened by current events. I know most Dianics to be loving and supportive of social
Justice to include finding a place for transgender inclusion. It is time to
embrace these individuals in dialogue and ignore those who refuse to evolve. After
many conversations with members of the Dianic community it is clear an
evolution is taking place: Lets embrace those who will move the community
forward.
Note:
To those within the community who believe that reasonable
and open discussion and accommodation will lead to inclusiveness and equality
for the transgender community please feel free to comment here. Your concerns
are important, weaving threads into the fabric of social justice is hard and
requires open and respectful communication.
To those who wish to engage this post with name-calling,
hate or accusations. I have no more interest in providing a platform for you
than any other hate group and your comments will be deleted.
11 comments:
Thank you for posting this. It has pained me to see the amount of sheer venom that has come from the mouths of *some* of those who have now been labeled Z-Dianics. This hatred is born of fear... fear of the unknown... and as we all know too well, fear fuels hatred and when coupled with religion often becomes a form of righteousness that prevents the bearer from being able to listen to outside views. They have become fundamentalists and I find that there is little anyone can do to change their minds or soften their hearts.
Another of my concerns in this issue has been how the larger Pagan community has been rejecting the whole of Dianic Craft as hateful and bigoted, which flies in the face of what that tradition represents. We cannot allow ourselves to take the actions of a vocal minority and believe that they represent the whole tradition. Often people are quite surprised to learn that men (transgendered or otherwise) can be full, active members of the Dianic Craft, largely because the Z-Dianics have claimed a sort of fundamentalist orthodox foothold in the popular mindset. I am a gay man, born into a man's body, and while I first identity religiously as Faery, I have been a Dianic priest since I was a teenager. To be Dianic is to hold a deep relationship with the Goddess Diana, and NO ONE can tell another where they do or do not belong in regards to that.
Thank you for bringing this issue further out into the public. We need more voices so that we can have a respectful dialogue as we collectively work together toward equality and inclusion.
Indeed. Throwing the baby out with the bath water seems to be part of the human condition. We have a tendency to categorize individuals or groups in an "Us vs Them" mentality, and to some extent we can't help that, it's the way our brains are wired. You can't lump an entire group together based on the actions of their fundemental extremists, religious or otherwise.
Yes, some Dianics hate men, some Heathens are complete racists, and some Feri folk can't play well with others.
People can be total dicks.
It doesn't matter what race, creed, faith, gender, orientation or species you are. Some of your people are total assholes. Sometimes those people are the "leaders" or people who want to go back to "The Old Ways (tm)", sometimes they aren't. But to put an entire group in the "Them" category because of their assholes is to completely ignore the asshole in "Us."
Fifty+ years ago, before the Civil Rights Movement took off, a man named John Griffin decided he wanted to really understand what it was like to be black in America. So he dyed his skin, immersed himself in black society, and then traveled through the South as a black man. His journey was chronicled in a powerful book called "Black Like Me"
During the early years of the CRM, many white people, most -- but not all of them -- young, threw themselves heart and soul into civil rights activism. Some were killed fighting for the civil rights of African-Americans. In the late 60s, early 70s, as the Black Power movement grew and strengthened, many black civil rights activists wanted white people to take a less active role, demanding black self-determination, and "black only" spaces. There were few objections. After all, we white activists could not possibly understand what it was like to be raised black in America, not even John Griffin, as he himself admitted, could understand the effect on a child's psyche of being born into and raised through unrelenting prejudice.
This attitude was echoed, not many years later, in the Women's movement. Women-only groups and women-only spaces became refuges for many women who felt that the mere presence of a man, even one sympathetic to the cause, changed the dynamic of the interaction between women and made them uncomfortable. The men who supported the movement did not object. They realized they could not fully understand what it was like to be born and raised a woman and women's need for woman-only spaces went largely unchallenged.
About 20 years ago, I met a transgendered person, a man who was in the process of going through considerable pain and expense to make his body more like a woman's. I owned a bookstore at the time, and we became friends -- she'd come in the store and we would talk at length. I thought she was an amazing person, tremendously intelligent, creative, and courageous. She told me she thought of herself as "berdache", a "Two-Spirit Person", and recommended some books to me on that subject which I began to carry in the store.
Since then, of course, I have met many more transgendered folks -- some of whom I liked, some of whom I didn't, but I have always admired their courage, and their willingness to walk a knife-edge between the gendered worlds. I approach trans-gendered people just like I approach any other human being, and have no problems circling with any gender. However, I do not believe that men who have changed their bodies to become more like a woman's, are a woman -- or vice-versa. They are neither men nor women, they are transgendered, and that in itself is an amazing thing, a courageous choice and something I can never understand because I have not experienced it. Nor would I ever try to join a transgendered-only circle. Why would I? I am not transgendered. I respect people's right to circle or just gather with others with whom they share some definable characteristics, be it race, gender, or stamp collecting.
In my opinion, any body that did not at some point have a womb is not a woman's body. I don't think someone who was born and raised male can fully understand what it is to be a woman, any more than I can understand what it is to be a male, or a transgendered person. I realize that not everyone agrees with me, and I have no problem with that. To quote Jefferson, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I consider trans women and men to be every bit the equal of any other woman or man. They are neither women nor men, they are transgendered -- something different and wonderful, but a transgendered woman is not, to my mind, a woman. If a transgendered woman wants to believe she is a woman, or call herself a woman, I have no problem with that. I simply don't agree. (This comment is continued in the next one…)
…I am not Dianic, but sometimes, as someone who has been subject to considerable trauma at the hands of men, I do enjoy a woman-only space or circle. This does not make me a hateful person, a bigot, or someone who denies others their rights. My desire to occasionally circle with other women who share my experience of being raised female is neither trans-phobic or hateful, nor do I understand how the choices of some women to circle only with other "women-born-women" as we are now classified, is unjust or discriminatory, any more than men's circles or women's circles are unjust or discriminatory.
I deplore the defamatory rhetoric, but to deny my experience of what it is like to be in a woman-only space and demand that I include anyone who wants to be there is to deny my rights and my reality. I can imagine what would have been said if John Griffin had walked into a Black Power meeting and said that he had a right to be there, he should have a vote and a voice in the movement because he knew what it was like to be black. He would have been roundly denounced, and rightfully so, as someone who was clearly drowning in his own sense of white privilege.
For someone who was born male to demand to be included in a circle of women who want to be only with other women strikes me as simply another manifestation of male privilege, and once again, the women are the ones who are supposed to change their feelings and their experience of men and male energy to accommodate the feelings of someone born and raised male. I don't think, frankly, that I'm the one who needs to evolve.
At the very base of your position is an untruth that you do not see. Transgendered women were born women. They are not men who choose to become women. They have known since they became aware that they are women. This re framing of the issue as "real women" vs, transgendered women is where bigotry enters the issue. Who are you or any one else to judge the authenticity of their exerience?
"experience"
Yes, Peter, thank you!
Also, Diotima, this framing of trans behavior in terms of male privilege is intensely myopic; this same basic issue is something many Radical Faerie communities have had to deal with. As our sisters have transitioned (mtf) and ftm fae have come into what was once faggot-only space, we have been having to have very dificult conversations around inclusion and what the meaningful limits of our space can be and of when and how it is important and functional to have separate space for faggots, transfolk, etc. Faggot-identified FtMs seeking inclusion in faggot-only space cannot be accused of living out their life time of learned male privilege, unless you want to turn the same logic on its head as part of a programme of blaming men and male privilege for everything (which is certainly near the heart of Z's basic dysfunction, as everything she has said in the last five years very obviously showcases). I don't personally have much interest in separatist space; if there is male-only and female-only space, I would prefer the female-only space, except that it is clear that the presence of my penis-having body would destroy the character of that space... but being around all men is almost never appealing to me. (Although my male-bodied radical faerie sisters represent the first experience I ever had of feeling safe around a group of all males.)
Part of why certain hard-line separatist groups keep getting accused of bigotry is the tendency to continue to essentialize trans folk as their birth sex, which seems like an easy mistake when you haven't known and observed many in the process of transition. Most trans folks, before as well as after their transition, don't have access to many of the kinds of privilege usually associated with their sex, making accusations of x-privilege very painful and odious for them. Also, as cis-gendered people who automatically do in fact have more comfort and privilege relative to our trans siblings, I think it is to some extent incumbent upon us to provide the healing balm of inclusion to our trans siblings when they request it, rather than being so addicted to our own comfort and ease that we continue to seek it at the expense of their well-being.
I would rather have a faggot-identified FtM present in my faggot circle bringing their fierce trans-fag mojo than some half-hearted gay boy with no queer or deeper understanding about his own sexuality and liminal nature. I do not doubt in the least that there are many MtFs who could teach any women-born-women-only separatist groups a great deal about what womanhood and femininity mean. But from where I stand, the call and opportunity to confront their privilege and our own and to expand beyond our simplistic notions of gender and sex toward a greater understanding of the full range of potentials expressed by Divine Mystery seems too rich and valuable to turn down.
I have found being in woman only spaces that include transwomen lead to some powerfully deep exchanges. It was mentioned about about the experience of growing up in a female body. I've learned from women who grew in male bodied and told they were boys a great deal about the ways privlege, gender, sex, and gender presentation work in our culture - more than I believe I would have concluded without their experience and input. I have also found the transwomen I have circled with and been in women's groups with extremely respectful of topics and rituals concerning experiences they may not experience - menses and childbirth. Their presence indicates a wholeness and says to the world that all women are more than their body parts, more than a vagina, more than the ability to bleed or birth. My identity as a woman and a femme is beyond what others can grade me on by gazing at my body. To say we have to share experiences to be in women's space isn't fair either... many biologically born women do not or cannot have children, some do not have regular menses, some bio-born women are born without a vagina... these things happen. Would we exclude them? No, because it wouldn't come up.
Perfectly said, thank you.
Peter -- Experiencing yourself as a woman born into a man's body and being born into a woman's body and having the experience of being raised female are not equivalent. A trans-woman's experience is no less or more authentic than my own, but it is demonstrably different.
People who have undergone similar experiences, particularly traumatic experiences, frequently find that being with others who share their experience, and free of any triggers for their trauma, is healing. This is true whether it is women born and raised as women in a deeply patriarchal and frequently misogynistic society, or, for example, military men who suffer from PTSD.
To call women who want to spend time in a space that is free of any triggering influences bigoted makes no more sense than calling men bigots if they want to participate in group ritual or gathering only with other men who share their experience of trauma -- or just of life. Should gay men be accused of bigotry if they want to have rituals or space that does not include women or straight men? Does anyone have the right to insist that a group of military men who gather to discuss and process their experiences with PTSD be forced to include women who also suffer from PTSD? No, and wanting to have some separate space does not make them bigots.
Bigotry is a motivation based in contempt and intolerance, and is a serious accusation. To assume you understand another's motivations is a pretty big leap -- to insist, in the face of their own, differing explanation of their motivations, that you understand them better than they do themselves, is condescending.
You state that others experiences are not equalivant, How are you able to judge the authenticity of others experiences, Who appointed you to be the judge of their experience?
I do not call women who want to be free of triggering experiences bigots. That is your framing of the issue. Your approch of exclusion being the only viable process in achieving this lack of triggering is where the bigotry resides. What about group rules, norms, behavior standards? You jump to exclusion, just as all those who have resisted civil rights in the past have.
Your example of gay men groups, is apples and oranges. The gay men groups I am aware of accept all who identify as gay men. There is no genital check at the door. Old School Dianics stand alone in their embracing of bigotry and exclusion as the answer to the issues of transgendered inclusion. Rejecing diologue, compromise, empathyand understanding and insted empracing the old and tired argument of the bigoted that granting these rights to others will infringe on our rights. Can't get much more power over than that.
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