Goddess under fire

[Firebird]

This is pretty controversial. Not even sure if I should post, but a friend who is a Dianic Priestess is under fire for having a view that would label her a TERF (trans erasure radical feminist). Her group is Goddess oriented and celebrates women who were born women.
To me it is just another group who has a feminine focus. I can see both sides though.
Trans women (and men for that matter) have created a realm that has yet to be clearly defined. One identifies with the other gender yet is born with the wrong parts.

How do you all feel about this, should one be able to celebrate their exclusivity or should everyone be admitted to anything?

The Boy Scouts recently began admitting girls. In my opinion that could undermine the bonding that young boys do at that age. You got a girl there, oh heck, the whole focus is going to change.

Bb, FF

[Siona]

Yeah... TERFs basically say I do not exist, that they know my experiences and my feelings better than I know them myself (and the same for other trans folks), and a lot of them often go well out of their way to actually make life harder and less safe for a lot of trans folks. They don't see trans woman as women, they don't see trans men as men, full stop. Let alone anything outside of the binary. I mean, you kinda hit the nail on the head, although perhaps unintentionally. TERF actually stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. But erasure is, well, that's it, right? Erasure of a group of people, their experiences, because they feel they know better. And for what it's worth, I'm not trying to make assumptions on what your specific friend does or does not think in particular, but these are things I personally have been told by TERFs and what their general 'movement' is about.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm not real wild on them or their whole thing. To them, we're just some new fad, not real, etc, despite the fact that trans folks have always existed. And perhaps I'm reading too much into your title, but that trans folks are even seen as some sort of attack by TERFs - and now, on the goddess, of all things? Reminds me of, oh, about 20 years ago when gay folks were the attack on the more civil, good, Christian society... I see a whole lot of the same style of arguments that were being used then. Funny how it goes.

Because it comes down to, well, what makes a woman a woman? A lot of their ideas boil down to a woman = her parts, and I kinda always felt like feminism was supposed to be, well, the opposite. A woman is more than her body. I'm just reminded of a book on traditional witchcraft I read several years back (Cochrane, or one of his students, if I remember right), saying that women's mysteries were limited to her womb and men's mysteries were of their mind, and a woman would never be able to understand the ~special thinking~ that a man was capable of. Yeah, no thanks.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the idea of having women or men only ritual spaces at times. But, a trans woman is a woman. Of course, a TERF will say they're not. So again, what makes a woman? Womb! Trans women don't have a womb! Well, cool. Me either (thanks to a whole mess of tumors), and I'm what they'd call a 'woman born woman.' But I still have a vulva! So, a trans woman who's had bottom surgery does, too... but they don't have a womb! It gets way too circular for me. And I'm not trying to be flippant there, those are the exact conversations I've had with TERFs and it never seems to make it past that. (Okay, once it went into experiences being raised, but even those aren't exactly a monolith among women.) Like, having a uterus, or being fertile, or having a period, or being pregnant or whatever, it just seems to get so much emphasis as the experience of a woman! Except, for a lot of women, it's not - and some people having those experiences, they aren't women.

And to be clear, I'm not saying women can't or shouldn't celebrate those physical things. But one can do that without stomping on women (cis or trans) who cannot or simply do not connect with those things, denying the womanhood of others because it doesn't fit one narrow view...

And currently, even within the Dianic movement there's a growing rift. Many Dianic circles are happy to take in trans women. They do so without issue. Leading me to think that maybe it's not actually trans women themselves that are the problem. Exclusivity is not inherently a bad thing, but the motives behind it, that there can be underlying prejudices behind it, that's what needs to be examined.

[SpiritTalker]

I'm not into elitist gated community lifestyles nor foisting one Supreme Way over another on anyone or any kind of one size fits all thinking. I believe in live and let live & share the necessities. Sorry for the cliches but I haven't had coffee yet. Like Siona concluded, motivation matters.

[Firebird]

Yea the title may not be good,

Exclusivity is not inherently a bad thing, but the motives behind it, that there can be underlying prejudices behind it, that's what needs to be examined.

Thank you 2 for chiming in.
The motives are indeed the issue. And that's what I'm hoping this dialog will uncover.
Blessings, Firebird

[SpiritTalker]

Well, my body parts never have behaved like a "conceiving" women's parts so would eliminate me from valid membership in your priestess friend's circle. I don't feel any less a woman or less effective as a witch because of someone else's purist concepts. I wouldn't expect to feel as if I'd belonged in girlie-girl's group so wouldn't anticipate wanting to work with a priestess with the particular beliefs you've described.

I remember at 12 vehemently proclaiming to my stunned mom that I "refused to ever conceive because I didn't want some alien child inside me." it was one of those mother/daughter sex-ed conversations. Mom actually cried at what she called my un-natural attitude. Of course neither of us knew the root of my attitude because I didn't recover memories of ET abduction experiences until my 30's. But I know now why I'd spoken so fiercely about a hypothetical scenario. I can't imagine what your friend would make of it.

As for boy scouts & girls scouts accepting opposite sex members, nature is nature so the campouts need segregating and separate loos. No matter how you approach the topic, it isn't a matter of social rights but of protecting the kids from predators.

[Shekinah]

There are those throughout human time who consider the Gods of no particular gender, a sort of amalgamation of male/female attributes. Beyond organic differences between sexes we recognize a particular function of mind. The male historically was thought to be the explorer, adventurer and hunter and the female the more stable one who built the shelter, tended the hearth fire and protected offspring. Both attributes are of equal importance for evolution and perpetuation of species. Seems to me it should matter little what genital one has or does not have it is the predisposition of mind that is a true identity.

[Crazy Cat Lady]

As for scouts, I just wanna clear this up real quick. Cause it annoys me- boy scouts learn survival skills, go camping and hiking and rafting....girl scouts sell cookies and make crafts....do they sound like the same thing? So yes, girls are joining 'boy' scouts and boys are joining 'girl' scouts.

Now, as for the anti Trans crap....if you need a uterus to be a woman, do I become a man if I get a hysterectomy? Does a man suddenly become a woman if he has a tragic garden-shears accident? Not all women are born with vaginas and uteri.... not even "biological" ones. Not all humans even come with anuses! Our body parts do not define us, we are what we are.

[Siona]

I see folks saying that a lot about boy and girl scouts, and I think I really must have lucked out for my girl scouts or something, because while we did crafts, we also went camping, learned survival, etc. I did a lot of the same stuff I watched my much younger brother do in boy scouts (they did plenty of crafting, art, etc, for badges). Unfortunately I do see a lot of women now saying they never got to do a lot of that "boy" stuff when they were girl scouts. It's really too bad. A lot of girls and women I know love camping and being out in nature, all that fun stuff!

I don't think the girl scouts are allowing boys in, though? Maybe that's something that happened recently. There was a big fuss about it a while back where people were saying that, but they were talking about trans girls being allowed in. I guess in a lot of other countries they just have scouts, and there's no gender divide in the programs, so they're just kinda baffled that it's a big deal over here. (Heck, I was a girl scout, but I remember having quite a few events with the boy scouts, same with my bro when he was in boy scouts and I would help chaperone, they went with girl scouts - like weird camp outs at the mall, or camping out at a museum, etc., and I don't recall the kids ever thinking it was an issue. Just parents!) I kinda wonder if having girls and boys sort of realize they're not all necessarily that different at younger ages wouldn't solve some of the problems we've got going in the US...

[Crazy Cat Lady]

I think it would definitely help. You would think we would have learned by now that separate is never equal.

[barker]

I am a hermaphrodite who can do Goddess work. It is about having the vagina though, penises don't think that "cleverly" . I mean it they actually don't LOL! More like "magnificently."