foxfetch

I’ve been spending most of my time shuttling between one medical specialist and another.

It looks like I’m not going to be able to follow through on producing that zine at the current time. Hopefully later in the year, when I know if I’m going to have to have surgery or not….

Blessings to all.

Now is the time for change. What magic are you working tonight? What dreams are you calling into being?

Sorry for radio silence, folks. Dealing with a lot of health issues at the moment, but I have a blog post in the works. Thanks for your patience.

If you don’t want to be called a bigot, don’t be one. It’s really perfectly simple.

I’m planning on doing a round-up on some of the great transcentric posts of various kinds that have come out of all this cispaganfail. Unfortunately I’m rather snowed under at the moment, so for the moment I give you this link to a post by the wonderful littlelight:

holding on

I believe in trans people.

Not because we are magically insightful. Not because we are full of arcane shapechanger wisdom. Not because we are more or less great or holy than anyone, in our way. We have among us wonderful people and people who do and say terrible things. We have our crooks and our hypocrites and our abusers and our traitors, same as anyone, right alongside our heroes and champions and grand examples of high character. We are a mixed bag, you and me and you and you and you. We don’t have any more or fewer secret Mysteries in our blood, wherever it bleeds from. We’re people, with our tiny daily mistakes and triumphs, our hopes and our hopes for forgiveness.

I believe in trans people.

Not because we have suffered, though so many of us have suffered. We have hurt in ways that have transformed us as individuals and communities, and we’ve talked about that. I’ve talked about that plenty. We all know the numbers and the statistics and the terrible stories, these days. We pass them around as something that’s a little bit heartbroken hagiography and a little bit campfire scare gossip. We know who has sneered at us, and who has shut the doors. We know all of this. You certainly know this about me, by now, where I’ve left blood to sink into the dirt, where I’ve looked into same dark you’ve looked into, where I’ve gotten lost, where we’ve all felt alone.

The thing is, we’ve defined ourselves in those terms. Justified ourselves in those terms. Believe we are here, we say, showing our scars and fresh cuts. Believe we are real. Believe we matter. Believe that we are people because what we have been through, people do not deserve, and I hope you see we didn’t deserve it. We have aligned ourselves, symbolically and narratively, with our suffering: our dysphoria and abandonment and grief and martyrdom. And all of those things are true, and they will stay true, at least until we change this society and go to the grave with it, ceding the field to happier generations. But I want to propose an alternative–and not the alternative that has been offered before, either, the carnival-glam alternative that presents us as the glitter-crusted disco-ball jesters of a new postmodernism. That’s true for some of us, too, and I won’t deny that. I just want to suggest something simpler.

I want to suggest that we believe in us because we, as a people, are marked above all by our integrity.

You choose — triggering, tokenism or erasure

Relevant to many things.

The cis Pagan world is fucking us over yet again, and I have had enough. This has been brewing in me for a while, after reading this fabulous post, and now I pour it out for you.

I demand transcentric imagery, gods and goddess with the wide variety of trans bodies, trans genitals, trans selves. I demand a Horned God with hairy breasts and the new Year sleeping in his swelling womb. I demand Artemis, wild and free, with a penis. And some pagans think that’s blasphemy.

Fuck. That. Noise.

Our bodies are sacred too. We, too, are God, are Goddess. I want a god who sings of his crescent-shaped Barge of Heaven, a Goddess at whose mighty rising the desert fills with green, like a pleasant garden. I want metaoidioplastic gods, and gods with soft, divided, fat-filled scrota, the shaft of whose penis is split into crescents like moons or bows. I want images of a goddess with her testicles pressed gently inside her body and radiant female power spilling from her dual cunts[1]; of a goddess with a long soft dangling clitoris, with fused labia gently cradling her ovaries outside her body.

I want us to take our gods back.

Gods with crescent-scarred chests, flat-breasted goddesses.

I want us to take our gods back.

I want white-haired winter gods whose vagina is the gate to the underworld. I want earth goddesses whose erection is the rising of the spring. Crones with shrivelled balls, fertility gods with juicy cunts. I want gods whose fierce bright male power is spilling milk, whose solar blaze is a bleeding hole between his legs.

Is this too much for you? We. Don’t. Care. Our power is ancient, and it will not be denied.

I am tired of having to look for myself in your symbols. You throw us scraps that reflect little of our selves: bearded goddesses, castrated gods. “Transgender deities”, unwanted by you or used to teach yourself such helpful, informative lessons about yourselves.

The Earth Goddess lies stretched beneath the summer sun, drifting pollen Her shining semen. The Earth God opens like the rose, phallic vines and labial petals. (He takes it up the arse as well, from a solar god with a cock of burning gold, forged in the heart of stars.)

I want a goddess who inseminates, a god who conceives; I want a god whose hard and swollen cock, leaking precome, is nothing to do with procreation but only with ecstasy, penetrable, half within and half without, giving and receiving the fierce bliss that transforms. A vaginoplastic goddess whose clit burns like a white diamond, pure sexual light. I want the god with the rams-head in his belly, curling-horned uterus that spills fierce masculine power: horned within and without.[2]

We have mysteries you have not dreamed of. And we are taking our magic back. We are finding gods in our own image, building our own Craft. You can run scared or you can join us, but we are not going away.

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[[ADDENDUM, 3.3.11
I want to be clear: I’m not talking about third gender deities here. I’m talking about gods and goddesses who happen to be trans. About The God, and The Goddess, revealing themselves in trans forms. We need third gender, multigender, beyond-gender deities, yes, but that is not the focus of my personal work. Non-binary people are already doing that work, and have their stories and visions to share. I hope that you will seek them out.]]
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[1] muffing – the sexual act of penetrating one or both of the inguinal canals – is described by Miranda Bellweather in Fucking Trans Women #0 as a sex act enjoyed by some trans women.

[2] (Do I want also the goddess who grieves because she cannot conceive, the god whose phallus is hidden, who mourns his body’s lack of life-giving seed? I don’t know. Our griefs may also be sacred, but claiming them is hard, and hard to speak to as someone who has never desired to reproduce.)

—

POSTSCRIPT
This post speaks mainly of binary-IDed trans people, because I’m binary-IDed myself and don’t feel I have any authority to speak for non-binary people. I’m not trying to exclude or erase, and I really hope non-binary people will chip into the conversation.

—
UPDATE

I am now accepting submissions for an upcoming online publication (format still in the works – it may be a periodic online journal/zine or it may be a less formal blog) on trans-centered Paganism. If you are interested, please contact me at solarclothoid (at) gmail (dot) com.

I really liked a recent post from Intersex Roadshow – except that the author slipped into cissexist terminology, defining one set of genitalia as “male” and another as “female”. Gah. It’s a real shame, because both the educating about human genitals and the deconstructing of standard dimorphic genital diagramming (“Not only do these medical illustrations exaggerate sexual differentiation, they obscure rather than illuminate shared anatomy”) is really important.

[Disclaimer: I do have some issues about critiquing too much a piece coming from an intersex viewpoint when I’m not intersex myself, though Dr Costello has written about some of the intersections of trans and intersex experience and has gone through gender transition. Nor do I want to diminish the importance of the Intersex Roadshow blog overall, which is pretty epic. But I *do* have some problems with this particular article, and the way that it impacts on my life and experience and those of people I love, and I want to address those.]

It is really useful to have information like, “In fact, the phalloclitoris [sic] is similar in size between people at all points on the sex spectrum” (leaving aside the problematic term “sex spectrum”). It’s kind of nice to know my penis *is* actually about the same size as the average cis guy’s, just more internal and somewhat bifurcated. [NB: I wonder if anyone’s done *any* research about the effects of testosterone on the internal parts of the penile shaft in trans men? Cos anecdotally I can tell you stuff has majorly changed up in there.] And confirmation that my innate perception/sensation of what bit my scrotum is is actually scientifically “accurate” is validating, though of course people’s experience of their bodies doesn’t need scientific “proof” to be valid.

But I really, really feel that the cissexist language and assumptions that permeate the post reduce its usefulness massively. Take, for example, this quote:

Anatomists call these two feminized sides of the phalloclitoris the “clitoral crura,” a term that most laypeople have never learned at school. Just like the penile shaft they are made of several inches of spongy tissue that fills with blood and erects during sexual excitement. You can see an anatomical illustration here (look at the part labeled “crus clitoris,” the singular of “crura” in Latin). As you can see, the phalloclitoris is actually quite similar in men and women. The tip bends down in women and the two sides are joined together in men, but the basic structure is the same.

See what Dr Costello did there? A particular kind of genitals are “feminized”, rather than a more objective description of their development having been affected by things such as particular hormonal influences in utero. Despite the author occasionally bothering to put “men” and “women” in quotes, here there are women who have one configuration and men who have another. At the same time as emphasising the common basic structure, Costello actually upholds the notion of a fundamental difference.

I also totally reject the term “phalloclitoris” for myself. Ugh. I am not applying that to my tackle. The application of the word “clitoris” to my penis, even as part of a term, feels hugely erasing. I also question it full stop – it’s the same kind of portmanteau word as “hermaphrodite”, implying a gluing-together of two different sexed structures: a ‘male’ ‘phallus’ and a ‘female’ ‘clitoris’. It implicitly upholds a dyadic model of sex and sexual anatomy. (I’m not sure what term would be a good replacement. Something like “genital shaft”, perhaps?)

Where this article *does* have a lot of value for me, as well as the overall education about human anatomy both intersex and otherwise and the potential for that to be used to actively deconstruct ideas of dyadic sex, is the opening-up of new, non-cissexist ways to describe our sexual anatomy. To be able to move beyond the endless lingering crap of “female-bodied”, “male genitals” and so on, into speaking about our genitals and genital development when it is necessary in accurate, specific, respectful terms. The possibility of building a new language.

It raises the possibility that I can both speak about my penis per se and, when relevant, about it having a predominantly internal bifurcated shaft [due to (at best guess) the absence of the SRY gene, the lack of endogenous testosterone in utero, the presence of Wnt-4, etc], and the subsequent development of that shaft in adulthood due to exogenous testosterone – and that we can emphasise that it is not inherently other to any other penis by virtue of its developmental process.

I really, really invite people to use this as a jumping-off point in how we talk about our genitals, both cis and trans. For too long we’ve all been using the terminology the culture handed us, some in more reclamatory and transcentered ways than others. We’ve reached the point in discourse, at least among the clueful, where we can now say that yes, trans people’s genitals are what we say they are, are what we experience them as. Information like this adds to our toolkit for resisting and refuting cissexism and cissexist arguments (“you have a clitoris, not a penis”) – so long as we don’t let it subtly mire us in the same old dyadic, trans-hating notions of what “male” and “female” genitalia are. It potentially enables us to speak of human genitals, to include nonbinary people, to liberate ourselves from cissexist dogma about binary sex whilst still supporting the realities of those of us who are binary-IDed.

To change our language use like this does something fundamental: it allows that the same structure can have different meanings depending on whose body bears it. That a given structure can be a penis, OR a clitoris, OR a phalloclitoris or clitorophallus or genital shaft or whatever the person who bears it experiences it as. And yet at the same time it allows us access to scientific and medical specificness when it’s necessary, and rebuts the tired old cissexist claims that “allowing” people to define their bodies will render it impossible to talk about bodies at all. This language is more specific and accurate than “male genitals” and “female genitals”. It is more (though not completely) value-neutral. It allows us to understand and reclaim the realities of both our physical bodies and our lived experience – if we, as a community, can take it and run with it.

I really hope that we can.