About three weeks ago, I wrote an editorial for The Wild Hunt in which I ran down a list of anti-trans laws going through state legislatures in the United States. The legislative season has worn on since then, and little of the news has been positive for transgender Americans. In Kansas, for example, a “women’s bill of rights” bathroom bill has passed the state house. It will likely be vetoed by the state’s governor, Laura Kelly, if it gets to her desk – she has recently vetoed another anti-trans bill passed by the legislature – but those vetoes could potentially be overturned.
According to the Kansas City Star, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Brenda Landwehr, described her bill, and sees the bill about protecting right. “We talk about rights,” she said. “What’s the rights of a woman? You’re saying I have no more rights. I can’t go into a woman’s bathroom and know that a male will not walk into that bathroom. What about my rights? What about my comfort zone?”
This language is a mockery of civil rights protections, which exist to ensure that minorities are allowed to live their lives in peace without having to cater to the “comfort zones” of the majority. The same logic – “what about my rights? what about my comfort zone?” – could easily be used to describe straight men wanting to segregate themselves from gay men, or white people from Black people.
The “comfort” of the powerful majority does not require the protection of the law. The basic ability for the minority to live in American society does.
Transgender pride flag
Most of the responses to my previous editorial were positive, but not all of them were. I have come to expect this, if not accept it. I write about controversial issues all the time here at TWH – climate change, white supremacy, colonialist artifact trafficking – and nothing attracts negative comments like my columns in support of transgender people. One of our frequent commenters bluntly stated that transgender equality was “not a Pagan issue.”
And to that, I can only say: is Luke Babb not a Pagan? Is Misha Magdalene? Amethysta Herrick? Yvonne Aburrow? Raven Kaldera? I could keep going – these are just some of the trans and nonbinary people who have directly contributed to TWH in the past few years. This is what a substantial part of our Pagan culture looks like.
I have been in the Pagan community since the day I was born, 36 years ago, and there have been out and proud trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming members of that community my entire life. Not in the San Francisco Bay, not in New York City, but in Missouri and Kansas. Trans issues are Pagan issues because there are transgender Pagans, and there have been since there has been any Pagan community to speak of in this country.
Signs at a Trans Rights protest in 2017 [Ted Eytan, Flickr, CC 2.0]
Today, as Luke wrote so beautifully about in their column this Sunday, is Transgender Day of Visibility.
“Unlike its sister holiday in October,” they wrote, “Transgender Day of Visibility is about celebrating the community that is alive now, vibrant and creative and ever-expansive.”
I am so glad that we have had opportunities to showcase that community this month, even amid all the attacks being directed at it.
If you haven’t read Luke’s piece yet, I strongly urge you to, because it opens up the world of Luke’s experience as a nonbinary trans person in a compelling and vulnerable way. Although Luke and I have been close friends for years, longer than either of us has worked for TWH, I learned so much about them and their evolving relationship with their gender from that column.
And while you’re reading, I suggest you go back and check out Erick DuPree’s wonderful interview with Misha Magdalene, a joyous conversation about gender and magic that made me immediately want a copy of Misha’s book. And while you’re there, follow through on all the other trans and nonbinary creators that Storm Faerywolf shone a spotlight on in his column this month.
These stories are important, because it is so easy to forget, in the tumult of stories about oppression and trauma, that the transgender experience is fundamentally built of joy, of people being who they always wanted to be and living the lives they always wanted to live. That joy is what the rest of us should be striving to protect.
And how? Any way we can. Annoying our representatives. Donating to mutual aid projects. Showing up to school board meetings and testifying in favor of trans kids. Marching on the state capitol. More than anything else, by listening to the trans people in our communities and showing up where they ask us to show up.
It may be a cliché at this point for Heathens to invoke stanza 127 of Hávamál when addressing injustice, but we call it “wisdom poetry” for a reason. The assault on our transgender siblings is evil, and evil we should proclaim it – and make no friendship with our trans siblings’ foes.
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