The Divine Feminine

Pagans, Too, Are Divided on the Trans Question

A Goddess Festival has been held every other year for the last forty years led by feminist scholar Z Budapest long known for being a founding mother of pagan rituals and gatherings. I had no idea of its existence until my tarot practice partner sent me a flyer just in time to register. It was certainly opportune as it was just over the next hill from my tiny house homestead. Some 45 women, mostly middle-aged, gathered alongside a high school choir at this large facility with cabins housing 18 people a piece, plenty of room for an entire coven. I joined one from Oakland. Women came from as far away as Florida transforming and renaming the buildings after goddesses so we might feel more at home. 

A red tent was set up in the hall, of our camp, where we held rituals and lectures. Nearby was an amphitheater with a fire pit. On the first day, we sorted ourselves out by astrological signs to ceremonially bring in the four directions. I gathered with my fellow earth signs to plan our invocation to bring the earth energies in from the North. We spent the day dancing, singing, and drumming to be ready for the evening activities. At a self-blessing ceremony, we were to strip down to our naked selves save for some impressive tattoos, our hair wreaths, and jewelry and stand in front of a full-length mirror. We blessed our eyes, nose, mouth, breasts, womb, and feet supported by a roomful of women singing the blessing. To be so witnessed and supported by women on such a corporeal level united me with my sisters on a visceral level that made me feel both revered and vulnerable at the same time. In this era when the very existence of being a woman has become so precarious and unprotected I felt even more conflicted that we could so celebrate our very female bodies yet be so willing to give it all away. 

Z Budapest and her colleagues are now in their '80s. In their presence, it felt like I was walking back in time to the height of the second-wave feminist movement. Maybe it is old hat now to be drumming and dancing in the woods, but I was moved by the rituals, by the experiential nature of them, and the do-it-yourself, all-female operation of the festival. It made me realize how little we are honored as women in our society.

It also made me feel vulnerable in the sense that witches were once persecuted because I have, for two years now, been at the front lines of that persecution. It made me hyper-aware that these are women practicing an act of exclusion of men. They did not want to talk about it. I had to bring it up. I thought perhaps that they had no idea what was going on. Many didn't. They didn't know about the self-I.D. law in California and the law that forbade anyone to question male prisoners claiming to be women who were now housed with women. A lawsuit is in progress now for a man having allegedly raped two women.

I learned from a pro-trans inclusion participant that the pagan community was divided on this topic and Z Budapest was holding the line for women by refusing to acknowledge that trans women were women. I was relieved to hear this as I thought these women had no idea of what was going on; what would ultimately be a threat to their very female celebration. No wonder they didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. I felt I had their support when I brought it up and some would tell me privately that they were against the inclusion of men in the female category. 

A further dilemma irked me. Z Budapest was all in for Kamala despite her being from the party that doesn't know what a woman is. How could this be so overlooked? 

“Kamala doesn’t center women,” I said to one longtime participant. 

“She’s still a woman,” she responded and I felt there might be something to this. Some interesting subtle changes for women; some grace afforded women as leaders; some emerging of a new feminine paradigm under such leadership. It was a seductive and shimmering mirage in this experiential context amidst the intimacy of female bodies.

It is true that Kamala and her party have pulled back from mentioning the trans agenda at the DNC. She did not say the phrase "the right to be who you are" i.e. transexual and said only "the right to love who you want". This was not a complete recanting as Kara Dansky had demanded with her book, but I still found it encouraging. At least the party knows who it is at risk of losing—women who still think women’s rights are worth fighting for and that opting out of our sex category should not be offered to girls (and boys) as an option.

I would prefer that the Democrats win because that would allow sex realists to further rub their noses in this folly of instating gender identity as the new religion of the land. Dems need to disappear gender identity before it becomes a third rail of the party as abortion has become. I felt that that was the danger if Trump won. It would make every pro-woman push back that he initiated into a right-wing, anti-trans issue. We live in California, a trans sanctuary state. Our state would just push back harder and we would never be able to repeal SB 132 to get bad men out of women’s prisons. 

So many questions this experience at the Goddess Festival brought up. I was proud to be able to tell my new pagan friends that I had studied the way of the Goddess going back to the late ‘80s and that we had our own female-balanced tarot deck to work with.

I had a terrible vision that once these elders are gone, men will step in through the door of compassion that younger women are holding open for them and proceed to own the divine feminine, changing our rituals so that women are once again shamed into covering up their bodies for fear of offending these men who will be triggered by their inability to ever have what we have—a bonafide female body.

After watching the movie Behind The Looking Glass about the impact cross-dressing men have on their wives and family, as their demands to be validated grow but are never to be satisfied, it was clear what women are up against in the context of these men who are driving the concept of gender identity ever deeper into our laws. They have had the ear of Biden in the Democratic party. They will not stop until they take over all women's spaces. Meanwhile, girls, who are so vulnerable to hating their bodies, so vulnerable to being prey to men's eyes and men's actions, march into chemically induced facsimiles of male bodies hoping to escape their femaleness. 

At the fire circle the first night, we were invited to throw herbs into the flames and invoke a blessing. I spoke the words "May the womb remain the guardian of the divine feminine". It was the most oblique way I could think of to express my concern that men would take over this sacred path to the divine feminine. My words prompted an elder to say, when it came her turn at the fire, "I know what a woman is. Why are we mincing words here?" 

At this festival of women, women who had aged together over the last forty years keeping alive the sacred ways of the divine feminine, the hope was to pass along the wisdom to the next generation. These young twenty-year-olds were present and accounted for in our final night’s ritual. For this sharing, we sorted ourselves out by age, with each decade presenting a taste of what it was like to be us while the most elder among us cast into the caldron what they would have us know. I joined the baby crones of sixty-somethings just coming into our freedom and looking at what we might do in this last phase of our lives now that we had found self-love and our voices. I felt that I had already stepped up to my mission as a proud TERF.