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 My last post was about autism and some of my sensory stuff: https://child-of-the-air.dreamwidth.org/6372.html

I have a couple of things to add to it:

Relationship to Circumcision Dysphoria

I think this way of relating to senses and the world is at least partly to blame for why I’ve found it so traumatic to be missing my foreskin.  Naturally enough, the model of the shape of the world that my mind makes extends to my own body, and includes the feeling that something is “wrong,” is missing there.

As usual, the model persists even if I can’t see the thing, so long as I remember it, and every time anyone mentions anything related to the topic, or I have to use the bathroom and see my scarred, incomplete genitals, it’s reinforced.

And, unfortunately, this is really something unhealthy I need to figure out a way to deal with in the long term.  It’s one thing to maintain my anger that people intentionally do this to their children, and that society refuses to acknowledge that any wrong was done to us victims.

On the other hand, focusing on the wrongness of my body does me no good and, in general, bodily wrongness isn’t due to some great societal evil.  I’m lucky that my body is largely healthy and undamaged, but it isn’t entirely so, and it is likely that it will become less so as I age.  So I really need to learn a way to deal with bodily wrongness better.

Although, it’s worth noting, the other bodily wrongnesses I have—a deviated nasal septum, ill-aligned teeth, pectus excavatum (though I mostly perceive that as normal)—mostly don’t seem to upset me nearly as much.  So perhaps the connection to what I see as a great evil is a major part of why this one bothers me so deeply.

Relationship to Place

On the other hand, it’s occurred to me that this way of processing senses is perhaps relevant to the way, or the reason, I perceive places as sacred in the way I do, and why I find visiting them important.

If interacting with things and places makes an imprint on my mind that persists afterward…wouldn’t it make sense to imagine that things that interact with a place make an imprint on it in the same way?  At least, that seems to be what my subconscious thinks.

And, in the same way that touching something with my mind again and again makes the impression more permanent, as does touching it in stressful conditions, places I’ve been a lot, or at important times...feel like something stays behind in them from my interactions.

This, I think, is what I mean when I say I’ve left part of my soul behind in a place, and I think it may be the best way to explain this bit of my spirituality.


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A note: as well as being on the autism spectrum, I have OCD.  It's hard to tell which of my sensory things come from which, and it's likely that some of what I'm describing in this post is a consequence of each.

It's really hard to know what anyone else's sensory experience is like, and honestly, I'm not at all sure I entirely know what mine is like.  However, I do get the impression that mine is rather different from the way neurotypicals experience the world, and that the ways it is different are perhaps interesting.

A lot of the time, my senses sort of feel like a penumbra of my mind is expanding to fill a space, and feeling out its edges.  I see a surface and feel its texture like I'm pushed up against it, even if it's meters away.  When I see things that aren't arranged right, or that are ajar, they push up against my mind until I fix them: I can't just ignore them once I know they're there, and just looking away doesn't make them vanish.  (To be clear, I don't think this is synthesia: I'm not experiencing other sensations as touch, "touch" is just the closest word I can find for "feel like they're pressing against my mind".)

As a consequence of this, I've had to learn to avoid looking at things that I expect to look wrong to me.  People with facial piercings--unfortunately very common in the trans community--are an example of this.  If I see the piercing I'll feel it pushing up against me for half an hour or so, so I need to avoid seeing their face so it won't hit me.  Likewise, things that I know are disordered in painful ways, but that I can't order, I'll do my best to look around, if I can.

Although I've been focusing on visual things, it's not just them; it particularly can happen with sound as well.  And I think the best way to understand sensory overload for me is that even if my mind is pressing up against my surroundings, it's still connected to a limited and fleshy brain that can't handle so much input.  Being in a familiar, closed-in, quiet environment where things don't seem to change can be a big help for this, because there's a lot less new surroundings for my mind to go exploring and keeping track of.

To be clear, this isn't always unpleasant.  It's also how stimming works for me a lot of the time: some feelings on my mind feel really good, and it's nice to be able to relax my mind by letting it bathe in them.  It also seems to be related to what it feels like to hyperfocus on some of my special interests, especially maps.  I feel like I'm reaching out with my mind and, instead of taking in sensory stimuli, taking in facts and information and spacial arrangements of things.  It can be an almost rapturous feeling of oneness with whatever I'm focusing on, which I'm not sure I can really usefully describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it.

I think that that feeling is something other autistic people experience in the context of their special interests: in particular, I'm thinking of reading John Elder Robeson's descriptions of how he looks at electronic circuits and "sees" how they will operate.  As I think I've said before, one of my dreams, which I don't think I can ever achieve--I'm not convinced it's humanly possible--but which I would love to be able to do, is to be able to "see" a whole city in that way: to just spread my mind over it and understand how it's arranged.


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Something at last night's seder made me think of "Our Lady of Simple Things" as a title for the Virgin Mary, and I decided I had to write a poem to her with this title.  I don't think anything in here is heterodox, and yet I've managed to make it come across as a very pagan poem, something I'm a bit proud of.

O Queen of Heaven, whose cloak is the sky and stars,
Mother of all things, visible and invisible:
     Are you not also Our Lady of Simple Things?

As you brought a child into the world without pain,
Bless us as we try to bring our own creations into it,
     though we sweat and cry over them.

You who were homeless in the city of your ancestors,
Bless the homes and hearths we make for our families,
     and bring those in need to join us around them.

As you fed your family and lit their lamps,
Bless the food we cook and serve and eat,
     and let us have enough to share.

You who show the way to perfection and salvation,
Bless us as we struggle with uncertainty,
     and guide us through our confusion to the right.

As your heart was sorrowed at your great loss,
Bless us as we cope with our daily griefs,
     and give us the strength to comfort others.

Though your home-spun cloak has been exchanged for the sky,
We remember that you once dwelt as we do, upon the earth:
     We ask your blessings for our ordinary lives.

Seder

Mar. 31st, 2018 04:43 pm
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I attended my first seder ever last night, as a guest of [personal profile] ashnistrike and her family. It was a wonderful experience, though I suspect that had more to do with feeling like I was part of a community and being surrounded by wonderful friends who made it a beautiful, geeky, and sometimes hilarious evening, than with the specific fact it was a seder. (As a crypto-goy who wasn't raised in the vicinity of Judaism; Passover doesn't have particular emotional resonances for me.)

Besides the normal confusion of participating in a new ritual and new holiday for the first time, it was an interesting feeling to not understand most of the ritual phrases and prayers because they were in Hebrew.  It reminded me a little of attending Mass at Our Lady, Queen of Apostles in Hamtramck, MI with my mom and sometimes with my grandma when my family visited my Polish grandparents for Easter.  It's not that the Masses weren't in English--there were Polish Masses, of course, but I didn't get taken to them--but just that the priest had a thick Polish accent and I couldn't understand his sing-song voice enough to make out a lot of the words.  This time, though, there was a haggadah with translations of all the Hebrew bits, so I could find out what was being said, even if I couldn't understand it.

I got there early enough to help with a bit of cooking, including making deviled eggs, though I wasn't able to help that much with the huge amount of prep that went into it. Shortly after I got there, there was a bit of panic over whether the hard-boiled eggs were leavened, because they came out of the shells falling apart, and the internet told us this was probably because they were very fresh (they were from a CSA) and still had carbon dioxide that hadn't come out of solution. Fortunately, we were able to argue that they were permissible because carbonated drinks are, and that they were in fact in the process of approaching a state of perfect flatness, unlike leavened things, which are in the process of becoming less flat with time.

During the cooking, there was a determination that it was permissible for N. to supervise her own baking of matzoh because she is a middle school teacher, and as a teacher, she is inherently a rabbi and thus qualified to supervise the dough to make sure it only is wet for eighteen minutes. On the other hand, [personal profile] ashnistrike, who has a PhD and has taught college classes, is a more senior rabbi. Later, during the seder, after she told us the story of the Oven of Akhnai, we concluded that the God of the Torah isn't a rabbi, because he is in fact not a good teacher: he just handed the Torah to the Jews and told them to figure it out without help.

During the seder, [personal profile] nineweaving told us about a seder she attended in Prague, which was held in Czech, meaning that the word "slaves" was "robotu". Later, we read a poem that Jo Walton once wrote in response to hearing about this, called "When we were robots in Egypt."

I think that everyone attending the seder who wasn't Jewish was pagan, and some people were both. This led to some interesting conversations, including an extended side discussion during the seder about the identity and cleanliness of an idol of Aphrodite that was in the kitchen sink because, when the oven was replaced, it was noted that it needed cleaning. It's probably just as well that there were apparently no Christians present, since we also got into a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth having been an arsehole.

Also during the seder, the hosts' household has a tradition in which, after describing the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians in Exodus, they list out modern plagues, and after singing about the things that were done for the Israelites when they left Egypt, they list modern things to be thankful for. The list of modern plagues included "fascism," "the patriarchy," and so forth. The modern things people were thankful for included modern medicine, librarians, memory, resistance, and so on.

A number of the readings from the seder also really spoke to me, including a short passage about Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish woman who had fled to Palestine and then returned to Hungary as a special forces paratrooper to fight the Nazis, who eventually captured and executed her. There was also a poem by her,
Blessed is the match consumed in the kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the heart's secret places.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in the kindling flame.
that I thought was beautiful.  Afterward, we read "Zog Nit Keyn Mol," a song written by a partisan in the Vilnius Ghetto after hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  There were also some beautiful readings of poems by Marge Piercy: the two I can find online are "Maggid" and "The Cup of Eliyahu."

Despite the fact that--as I mentioned at the start of this post--I'm not actually Jewish, my history of being a crypto-goy continues. Several of the attendees who I hadn't met before told me they were very surprised when I implied I wasn't Jewish, because I acted and looked very Jewish. Also, when I clarified at one point that I hadn't said I was Ashkenazi, [personal profile] ashnistrike pointed out that Ashkenazi is in fact the specific sort of Jewish that I'm not, as an ethnically Polish-Catholic American.

People also told me that I looked incredibly androgynous, and were surprised that I was able to stay closeted at work if I dressed the same way there (I do). This made me incredibly happy, though I still find it deeply hard to believe.

Finally, given Passover's significance as a beginning-of-spring festival, it struck me as very appropriate that today, I noticed for the first time that the flowering pear tress that grow all over my area had suddenly come into bloom.
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Last weekend, my girlfriend Jan visited me from Boston, and she was able to join me in a Vernal Equinox ritual I put together. I was pretty stressed out about writing the ritual, and then about leading it, because I'd never run a group ritual anything like this. I managed to get through the whole thing, but ended up making a number of small errors that hopefully bothered neither the participants nor the gods, and I got the impression that the participants though I did a really good job.

I've included the text I wrote up for the ritual below: I ended up ditching having everyone bring food as offerings, and just having a single plate of food prepared ahead of time. I still prefer the symbolism of having each person bring their own offering and add it to the communal offerings during the ritual, but logistically it just turned out to be too tricky.

Having each person present a text or story or et cetera worked well. I'd originally meant to recite Kipling's "Hymn of the Breaking Strain," but ended up deferring to a friend who could actually sing it, and instead told the story of the first cat I ever knew well, who helped me a lot when I was struggling through childhood depression. Her name was Honey and I still miss her a bit.

I don't know if I'll get to run a group ritual like this again with this group, but I hope I will, if only because I really want to have a regular cycle of high day rituals, and it doesn't seem likely that anyone else will organize such if I don't.  I still feel awkward doing it, because I don't feel a particular vocation to priesthood, and because I'm both younger and less experienced in paganism than most of these friends, and it feels very awkward to try to take charge.


Text of the Ritual )

 

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I really should manage to write here more--or at all--but I can't say I've managed much of the sort of writing that should go here lately.  The last few days' events deserve a mention, though.

Like most of the East Coast, the DC area had a massive wind storm--gusts up to 70 mph (110 km/hr)--all day Friday and into Saturday.  My apartment lost power on Friday morning, and it wasn't restored until Sunday morning.  This also means that my relatively drafty apartment had no heat.  Fortunately, some friends who live nearby have a guest bedroom and were able to take me in.  I really appreciate it, and also feel a little guilty for accepting their hospitality when I feel like I'm not capable of reciprocating: my apartment doesn't really have much space for guests.

Dinner on Friday night with the family I was staying with--a found family of six adults, three kids, and four dogs--was particularly notable.  It was the first time I'd ever been present when Shabbos candles were lit, and for some reason it touched me a bit more than I expected.  I'm still trying to put together why: my partner Jan pointed out that Christians say grace before meals, and in fact I've had to participate in that with relatives many times, and I've found it uncomfortable.  Why this seemed different, I don't know.  It may be because this time it was with people I actually really like, or because in this case it was something their family does occasionally on special occasions, and not just an everyday thing.

I think, also, that part of why I liked it is that ritual meals feel like a very important ritual practice to me.  Although I will never participate in the Mystery of the Eucharist, one thing I really appreciate about it is the idea of the whole congregation--and really, the whole Church--sharing in a meal.  I very much want to include group meals, shared both with friends and with the gods, in my ritual practice, though figuring out how to do so is harder when I still don't have a good solution for offering disposal.  But I think that seeing the Shabbos candles really hit me because of that, and I'm really glad I was offered the chance to participate in.
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Yesterday evening, I returned home after a two-and-a-half week trip to New England and New York to see friends and chosen family.  It was a long, enjoyable, and exhausting trip.  And it generated a few things I wish I'd managed to post about in real time:


Solstice Vigil

While I was in Boston, my friend Hedge invited me to a Solstice vigil at their apartment.  I cooked Innsmouth Holiday Fish Stew (from Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy books) and led a group reading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which tells the story of the abduction of Persephone and Demeter's search for her daughter.  

I'm really glad I got to attend, as it was a really good experience for me.  I really enjoyed getting to do pagan-ish things with people, even if it was a bit light on the ritual, and it makes me want to try to find a pagan community of some sort here, although I have my doubts about whether I will be able to find one I'm comfortable with.  It also makes me wonder if I should try to go  to services at my two local UU churches to see if either of them seems to work for me.

The vigil--which was almost entirely trans--was also one of several opportunities I had to meet a bunch of cool trans people on this trip, which was certainly a nice touch. 


Apparently I got a polycule for Yule?

When Jan and I started dating a bit over a year ago, we were both very clear that we wanted it to be an open relationship, even though it didn't seem plausible that we'd manage to actually be practically poly.  However, this fall, Jan met a really cool autistic trans woman named Fina (who sometimes goes by "Lemur" online, amusingly) at her trans support group and they started dating.  During my visit, I got to meet her in person twice, and we ended up cuddling a bunch each time.  And then, as I was on my way to my next stop after leaving Boston, she sent me an adorably awwwtistic email asking me to be her girlfriend, and I said yes!

That would be exciting enough news, but I also met a neat autistic trans woman (can you see a pattern here?) named Izzy Vivian at the trains trans meetup some friends and I organized while I was in Boston.  We ended up cuddling a lot and in a confusing probably-dating entanglement.  On Christmas Eve, Jan, Fina, Izzy Vivian, and I hung out for a long time in a coffeeshop talking and hugging a bunch, and it was a really wonderful experience.  Now I suppose I have even more people to bug me about visiting Boston more often than I did last year.


Anticlimactic New Year

I've never really understood the US's--or apparently the whole world's?--obsession with the ball dropping in Times Square.  I acknowledge New York City as the center of the universe, but it still seems a little silly to me.  Even when I was an epsilon, wishing I could stay up until midnight with my parents, it was the time that mattered to me, not seeing the ball drop on TV.

Given that lack of interest, I certainly never expected to actually see the ball drop in Times Square in person.  However, one of the friends I was staying with in New York City works in an office building that overlooks Times Square, and had passes to get through the police lines so we could go to a party at his office, which included watching the ball drop from the window of a nice, heated stairwell.

I'm glad I got to see this somewhat absurd tradition in person, but I still think it seemed very anti-climactic, and I really can't understand what motivates people to stand out in the cold for hours waiting for it.


Thoughts About an Orchiectomy

I seem to be thinking about getting an orchiectomy (surgical castration) more and more these days.  The fact that I found out that one of the people I met at the Solstice vigil had one last year, and that I then ended up talking to her about it for a bit may have helped bring it to the forefront of my mind. 

I ended up talking to my therapist a bit about it last night, and I don't think I'm quite mentally ready to try to schedule surgery now, but it is definitely a thing I want to work on making myself more ready for.  Not in 2018, but maybe in 2019?

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As many of you have gathered, I am--among other things--a Hellenic pagan.  However, I'm certainly not a Reconstructionist, though I do follow some of their blogs because their research is interesting.  I tend to believe that the gods are basis sets constructed by the human mind out of the incomprehensibility of the Ocean and Fire, with the implication that the gods are partly culturally constructed.

Since the ancient Greek religion--and all historical pagan religions--was an inseparable component of a deeply problematic culture that, among other things, was horribly misogynistic, I can't accept it in its historical form.  However, I do think there is merit to the myths and lore, and I've recently been thinking about alternate--largely queerer--interpretations of stories that present the goddesses in problematic ways.  It turns out I can't even manage being a non-heretical pagan.


Athena, Hera, and the Judgement of Paris


Athena's and Hera's support of the Argives in the Trojan War is usually explained as their vengeance for being spurned by Paris, who chose to give the golden apple labeled "for the fairest" to Aphrodite in exchange for the love of (or right to abduct) Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta and most beautiful woman in the world.

However, we should keep in mind that, in selecting Aphrodite's offer, Paris rejected Hera's offer of kingship and Athena's of wisdom and martial prowess for a gift that offended both their basic natures.

Hera is the guardian of marriage and the family, and of royal authority.  It is enough that she opposes Paris because he asked for a gift that would break a marriage, insult a king, and that he knew would bring all the Argives together in war against his father's kingdom.  (Recall that all the Argive kings had sworn an oath to overthrow anyone who stole Helen away from whichever husband she chose.)

Athena is the guardian of the polis--the city, but also the community--as well as the patron of victory and martial skill.  Paris's request for Helen knowingly brought war and destruction to the community that as prince he had a responsibility to protect.  Furthermore, he is shown in the Iliad to be a physical coward, and unwilling to fight while his brother Hector coordinates the city's defenses against the enemy he provoked.

Given these crimes, it is self-evident that both goddesses would have to oppose Paris.


Athena and Zeus

Athena is often incorrectly described as having been born of Zeus alone, with no mother.  In fact, she was born of Metis, who Zeus impregnated before learning--from Prometheus, who delayed telling him until he had impregnated her--that she was fated to bear a son greater than his father.  Zeus devoured Metis whole--like his father Kronos, who had devoured his young to keep them from overthrowing him--but she gave birth to him inside his head, and Hephaestus had to break Zeus's head open to release her.

The fact that her birth involved the (temporary) decapitation of Zeus--Zeus's father and grandfather were deposed by decapitation and castration--as well as the fact that the Homeric hymn depicting her birth presents her as born fully armed, causing earthquakes, and causing all the gods, including Zeus, to shake where they stood, until she took off her armor, leads me to an interesting suspicion.

The common assumption is that Zeus got lucky and Metis's first and only child was a daughter, not the son who would overthrow his father.  However, I suspect that Athena is intersex and non-binary and, in a patriarchal and binarist society, able to choose either gender role as it suits her.  By taking off her armor, she announced an intent to live as a woman for now, posing no threat to Zeus and, in fact, becoming his favorite child.  However, she holds over him the threat that she could choose to live as a man and depose him, as she is fated to do, if he oversteps acceptable behavior.

This, I think, explains Zeus's favoritism toward Athena, and his willingness to trust her with the Aegis.  He knows that she alone among the gods can overthrow him, and so he wants to stay on her best side and doesn't need to fear her taking advantage of him: if she chooses to overthrow him it will be open rebellion, not deception and treason.


Athena and Hephaestus

Athena and Hephaestus have a complicated relationship in the Hellenic lore.  The Greeks certainly recognized a parallelism between them: they were both seen as patrons of the practical arts, and while Athena was seen as Hephaestus's superior (partly for ableist) reasons, they were honored together at shared shrines and festivals in many cities, including Athens.

There are a couple of stories that are usually presented as Hephaestus attempting to rape Athena, however: they involve him ejaculating on her thigh when she resists him penetrating her, possibly after they have been married and are together in their marriage bed.  The fact that the stories sometimes claim they had just been married, and the fact that she never seems to show any distrust or dislike for him in other myths, as might be expected if he was a rapist seems odd.  Furthermore, unlike the other male gods, I've never heard of Hephaestus being presented as a rapist in any other context.

This, along with my previous conclusion that Athena is non-binary and probably intersex, leads me to suspect that Athena and Hephaestus's encounter was consensual, but broke off because she had a dysphoric breakdown.  Athena is not a virgin because of an obsession with purity, but because her dysphoria is inconsistent with sex.

At the same time, this helps explain Hephaestus's rather odd marriage to Aphrodite--his proposal was "I work nights."--in which she seems to sleep with everyone but her husband, and he only objects once, when Ares makes fun of him in front of the other gods for being a cuckold and he sets a trap of an unbreakable net for the lovers so he can hold them up to be laughed at by the gods.  But his objection seems to more be Ares' public scorn than Aphrodite's unfaithfulness.

My theory is that Athena and Hephaestus are a celibate romantic couple: they don't have sex because of body image and dysphoria issues, which makes their attempted marriage invalid in the eyes of the other gods.  Hephaestus marries Aphrodite as a marriage of convenience: it allows him to appear married (and thus respectable) to the other gods, who tend to not take him seriously as a man because of his disability.  And it provides Aphrodite cover as a "married woman" to have constant affairs without her husband minding.  This only breaks down when Ares ridicules Hephaestus and forces him to do something to regain the other gods' respect.


Artemis

Artemis is also traditionally portrayed as a virgin goddess, but I think it's important to recognize that the Greeks probably wouldn't have understood sex that didn't involve putting a penis in someone.  Given her association with woman followers who she insists remain virgins, I sort of suspect her of being a radical feminist lesbian.  Her role as the goddess responsible for death in childbirth may relate to her disapproval of heterosexuality, while her role as a moon goddess suggests some potential connection to female sexuality.

That said, it is clear that Artemis doesn't hate men: she is a loving sister to Apollo, and I believe she is occasionally a patron to male heroes.


Hestia

Hestia is often not counted as an Olympian, and in some stories is said to have given up her seat at their meeting table for a place by the hearth.  She is also--like the Vedic god Agni--portrayed as the personification of the ritual and sacrificial fire, and she traditionally received the first sacrifice when offerings were made.  Though it is frequently forgotten, she is the second-oldest of the Olympians, as the oldest of Kronos's six children.  (Aphrodite was born of the sea and Oranos's severed genitals when Kronos overthrew him.)  

Hestia seems rather separate from the other gods, and from mortals as well: she cares deeply about her domain, the hearth and home.  My reading of her is as an aromantic asexual who may also be autistic: she would rather sit on a soft cotton mat by the fire alone than participate in the gods' feuding and arguments.  Meanwhile, she plays an essential role if anyone is paying attention: she keeps the essential, everyday functioning of the home and of Olympus running while the others are off having adventures and often being irresponsible.


Hera and Zeus 

Hera's marriage to Zeus is definitely strange.  They are virtually never portrayed as lovers, or even as particularly liking each other: instead, the most common stories about them involve Hera plotting to overthrow Zeus, or else Zeus taking lovers and Hera smiting them.  This is particularly interesting given that Hera is the patron of marriage and order in the family: things which Zeus seems to constantly desecrate.

Why does Hera stay with Zeus?  A traditional answer would be that she has no choice: a woman couldn't traditionally demand a divorce--especially as her father is dead, slain by Zeus--and besides, the patron of marriage wouldn't do that.  My slightly modified reading is that she stays married to Zeus because he is such a horrible husband.  Leaving him would, in a way, be letting him win.  Instead, she takes an active role in enforcing his marriage vows, providing a check on the chief of the gods, and reminding others that there will be consequences for breaking them.  (Though, unfortunately, her enforcement seems to mostly fall on the heads of his not-always-voluntary mortal partners.)

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On Saturday, for Martinmas, I went to Mass at my local Catholic church (which turned out not to make any mention of St. Martin since it was the Sunday vigil service.), and then did a ritual to Hermes, who I associate with St. Martin of Tours.  Both the Mass and my ritual--which involved reading the entirety of the nearly five-hundred-line Homeric Hymn to Hermes--went well.

One thing that particularly struck me during Mass was the second verse of one of the hymns we sung, "The Church's One Foundation," which went:

She is from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one Holy Food,
And to one Hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

Although the hymn was written by an Anglican, it certainly seems Catholic in spirit, with its focus on the universality of the Church and the centrality of the Eucharist as a unifying factor for all Christians.  By eating the body and blood of their god in common, they are symbolically and perhaps literally united by the unity of this god. 

I have never taken Communion, and never will--I am not a baptized Christian and do not intend to ever become so, given my deep theological differences with Christianity--but this image speaks to me strongly, and the absence of anything similar is, I think, one of the difficulties I have with many pagan theologies and practices.

How to implement something similar in my own theology and ritual practice is something I'm not quite certain of, but it's something I've been thinking about and would appreciate anyone's thoughts on.  One thing I've been trying to focus on in both is the Ocean as an eternal and universal that links humanity.  After all "everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin" or, as I put it in my liturgy, "From broth we came, and to brine we shall return."  Optimally, I might pray with one hand in seawater, but since that's not practical where I live, I decided to buy sea salt and dissolve it in tap water to produce reconstituted seawater for ritual purposes.
 
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While I should have been sleeping, I came up with what I think is an interesting--but deeply heretical--interpretation of some bits of Catholic theology.  The basic premise is that Mary, not Jesus, is the Messiah, but neither of them is God.

This interpretation begins with a significant reinterpretation of the nature of the Fall.  Traditionally, the Fall is understood as solely a matter of sin and punishment: Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and so they were cast out of Eden, became mortal, and cursed to reproduce but have this sin and its consequences passed on to their offspring.  At the same time, though, the nature of the universe seems to have been changed by the Fall: the post-Eden world is harsher, even for animals, than Eden was, and predation and other sources of pain enter the world universally.

My theory is that the Fall had two components, only one of which was punishment.  As shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with my theological tastes, I have my doubts about a personal God being a universal creator.  However, it is more reasonable to imagine him as the creator of humanity.  God was constrained to act in--and created intelligent life in--a universe in which entropy and natural selection had already established that life would be a painful struggle.  Eden can be understood as a sort of benevolent hallucination: a false consciousness God created to allow Adam and Eve to remain innocent of the pain of life.

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they did sin and that sin was heritable, but the appearance of mortality and a more painful universe were not punishment.  Rather, they came to know the true nature of the universe in which they had been created, and could no longer be kept in the nursery of Eden.  Their entry into the real world brought with it the consequences we associate with Original Sin, which may be thought of as a sort of adolescent rebellion, caused by a desire to return to the comfort of Eden without giving up their new freedom to exist within the real world.

This means that humanity's sinful nature was in part psychological damage that needed healing, but the fundamental impermanence and pain of life are not things God has the power to repeal, as they are part of the nature of a universe that predates God's creation, which we--and God--are powerless to completely eliminate.

Where does the New Testament drama come into this, then?  In my interpretation, its fundamental event--its crux of history--is neither the Incarnation (which is denied) nor the Crucifixion (which is reinterpreted), but rather the Immaculate Conception.  Mary was a human being, born of human parents, just like all of us.  However, she was miraculously conceived without Original Sin; without the fundamental angst over the loss of Eden that humanity inherited from Adam and Eve.

Why does Mary's Immaculate Conception matter?  Because she fills a role as a foster-mother for all of humanity, acting as a substitute for the corrupted inheritance of sin and an unresolvable sense of loss over an Eden we cannot return to that humanity inherited from Adam and Eve.  Although she is fully human in nature, she is conceived without this inherent sin and sense of loss, but instead with an acceptance and understanding of the knowledge Adam and Eve gained from the fruit of the Tree inherent in her soul.  By accepting her as their spiritual parent, all humans can receive this gift.

What role does Jesus and the virgin birth have, then?  Jesus is not God any more than--and if anything, is less God than--Mary is.  He is instead a prophet and a symbolic everyman figure.  If Mary is humanity's spiritual foster-mother, then Jesus is a symbol of what we can be.  Mary's parentage of humanity is adoptive and spiritual, not physical, thus her perpetual virginity.  However, her miraculous conception and birth of Jesus allows him to be her descendant alone, and a representative of what humans can be if they accept her lineage in place of the corrupted lineage of Adam and Eve.

Jesus's life and teachings, then, are intended to be understood as a model of how humans should live under the new dispensation.  The message of the Crucifixion is not a blood sacrifice, or a victory over death.  Instead, it is a reminder and a warning that the world as it actually is is still a place of pain and, inevitably, death.  Even a true son of Mary Immaculate must face and accept that he will die, and that the consequences of his efforts to live a good life may be an unpleasant and ignominious death.

This theology rejects the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven in favor of an Assumption in the manner of his mother's eventual Assumption.  Both Mary and Jesus are human, and fated to die but, after their deaths, they are bodily Assumed into Heaven to be Queen and Prince of Heaven, that they may continue to serve as moral guides and sources of strength for humanity.

Naturally, this interpretation contradicts a number of things in the New Testament; the best explanation of this that I can give is that the New Testament was written by men entrenched in the Patriarchy and in their culture who misinterpreted much of what they were seeing and hearing.

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http://dcist.com/2017/10/peace_cross_unconstitutional.php

Apparently the Peace Cross--an American Legion World War I monument near where I live--has been ruled unconstitutional by state courts here. It's not really clear what will happen next, other than more litigation, but it's a little strange to think it might actually be coming down eventually. It certainly does seem to me that it's a First Amendment violation that shouldn't exist, but it's also deeply embedded in my mental geography of the area. I'm not sure I have much else to say, except that I kind of hope the space gets some sort of other notable public art or monument to provide a name for the intersection, since the only way I've been able to successfully describe it to people is "the intersection where the Peace Cross is".
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Some of you know that I've occasionally described my parents as "living several social classes below their income".  This isn't entirely accurate, but it definitely feel like they don't fit into any of the "standard" American social classes that the media likes to talk about and portray.  Figuring out what my class background growing up was has been tricky for me, because it seems like my family didn't have much in common with those of people I knew in high school, or in college, or in grad school.

That said, while I was at MIT, I started to recognize that my childhood environment wasn't sui generis: there were certainly other people in Cambridge who seemed to be rather similar.  I think I first came to this realization the one time I attended Christmas Revels' "Riversing" event: a vaguely "civic pagan" folksinging Fall Equinox gathering on the Charles in Cambridge.  I am coming to believe that my mother's social class---and to a large degree, the background I was raised in---is a small but broadly distributed subculture/subclass that exists among roughly-middle-class (and some poorer), largely white Americans.

I don't have a name for this class, and don't know if it has one, but I'd very much appreciate suggestions, and comments from anyone who thinks they recognize it among people they know, particularly themselves and their families.  For now, I'm attempting to extrapolate it from my mother and a few other people of her generation I know or know of: Jane, the mother of my best friend growing up; Barbara, the mother of my friend The Bird; possibly the mothers of my friends Jan and Niphada, and Betsy, who I know through the Medieval Grad Student.  

Traits that seem to be correlated with this class, at least in my mind:
  • A very strong focus on education and being well-read for their own sake, rather than seeing education as primarily a means to social status or a higher income.
    • Tendency to have lots of books around, and perhaps limiting both their kids' and their own use of TV and video games because they "rot the brain".
    • Not playing the "college admissions game" of the upper-middle class.  I never took any sort of SAT prep classes or went through the other rituals of trying to impress colleges that most of my classmates at Caltech and MIT went through if their families could afford them.
    • Being more fine with academic outside interests / tending to want to read about everything, rather than focusing on knowledge that's useful or professionally relevant.
    • All but one of my mom and her five siblings ended up being teachers or librarians.
  • If religious, they're religious in non-traditional, generally more eclectic/liberal/ecumenical ways.  A certain sort of what I call "civic paganism" is at least tolerated by them.
    • The "civic paganism" I have in mind includes the town May Day festivals my mom took me to in towns we otherwise never visited, the Greenbelt "Green Man" festival, and Riversing and Revels in general in Boston.  It's often tied to environmentalism.
    • This group does seem to have an over-representative number of people from Jewish or Catholic backgrounds.  Jan suggests there may be an immigrant connection.
    • If not religious, tend to still care about some of the ritual/festival trappings of their childhood religious background.
  • Identify as politically liberal, though usually not far-left-radical: more likely to identify as liberal democrats or socialists, but unlikely to be communists or anarchists.
    • Likely to go to protests / participate in boycotts / etc.
    • Particularly anti-big-corporation stance, and likely to be pro-union even if they aren't in a union or at a job level that is usually unionized.
    • Think the world has serious problems that need to be fixed, but also comfortable with a number of things they don't want to change, unlike the more "burn it all down" positions of some of my more left-wing friends.
  • Relatively gender-non-conforming, but not ostentatiously so.
    • Ignore gender norms they don't care for, but not enough so to be read as visibly queer.
    • Women tend to not wear makeup much, and wear little jewelry, usually things with symbolic significance, either personal or political/religious.
    • Men don't seem to care that strongly about sports / don't fit into standard American masculinity in other ways.
  • Despite the above, a noticeable tendency toward stay-at-home mothers.
    • I think this is related to the strong focus on education.  "Education is so important I want to be sure I have the time to make sure my kids' are educated properly."  Examples of this include my mom's spending a huge amount of time focusing on my schoolwork when I was in grade school, and her insistently teaching me phonics (well after I learned to read) because she thought it was the "right way to learn" and the school wasn't using it.  Also, Jane homeschooling bother her kids, after having sent them to a Montessori school for a couple of years.
    • A tendency to return to the workforce, in ways that don't necessarily make economic sense / seem economically necessary after kids grow up.  My mom substitute-teaches (see, teaching!) even though it leaves her exhausted and my parents don't need the money.  Barbara went back to college for a BS in civil engineering (her first was in physics) and became an environmental engineer.
  • Very community-involved, though not necessarily that interested in leadership roles, other than "well, if absolutely no one else is willing to do things."
    • My mom and Jane are involved in a bunch of community organizations that otherwise consist of women a generation older than them, and have ended up helping run them (Garden Club, Friends of the Library).
    • Go to civic events, and attend debates in municipal elections that almost no one attends.
  • I think there's also a bit of a tendency towards selective old-fashionedness, whether about cooking (not owning a microwave, doing things from scratch no one else does), communications (not owning a TV or cell phone, not having cable), or something else.
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The Greek myth that everyone knows about the seasons is the story of the abduction of Persephone to the underworld, and her mother Demeter's long search for her daughter.  Demeter arranges her daughter's release, but only after Persephone has caved in and eaten six pomegranate seeds, condemning her to stay in the underworld forever.  As a compromise, Zeus allows her to live six months of the year with her mother and requires her to live six months of the year in the underworld.  

This myth isn't just well-known among Americans: it was central to, among other things, the Eleusisian Mysteries, the most important of the Greek mystery initiations.  These were more about the underworld and life after death than about the seasons: Persephone isn't just a nature goddess, but also the Queen of the Underworld, and strongly associated with Hades, her abductor and sometimes husband.

My own pagan practice, however, isn't built on a traditionalist reconstruction of Ancient Greek religion.  I do read the writings of some Hellenic Reconstructionists, and I am often informed by their understandings but, aside from the practical difficulties--I have no way of making the burnt offerings so central to Ancient Greek religious practice--historic reconstruction doesn't feel right to me.  Instead, what I practice is a sort of bastardized Hellenism, and is, as much as anything, an attempt to use Greek names as labels for the gods I worship because I don't have any other names for them.

In any case, my own association with the turn of the seasons--and specifically with the equinoxes, though weather here doesn't really get fall-like for another month--is with a duality of Persephone and Prometheus.  Prometheus brought fire to humanity, and was bound and tortured for a time on Zeus's orders in punishment, until Hercules broke his chains and freed him.  Besides the fact that they are both gods who are associated with a form of captivity, they are both gods who are associated with bringing humanity something associated with warmth and light: fire in Prometheus's case, and the warm growing season in Persephone's case.

I've come to think of winter as the season of human-made fire just as summer is the season of warmth from the sun, and so treat Persephone and Prometheus as a pair: in summer, Prometheus is bound while Persephone walks the earth, while in winter, Prometheus returns to give us fire, but Persephone returns to the underworld.  This leads to the equinoxes being a sort of changing-of-the guard observance, greeting one of them and saying farewell to the other.

Unfortunately, I haven't managed to come up with a well-considered ritual practice for the equinoxes, though I have some ideas.  If anyone wants to make suggestions, I would appreciate them.
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This essay, titled "The Revolutionary Art of Hearth-Keeping," was brought to my attention about a month ago by a blog I occasionally follow.  I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on it for some time, but I've had a very busy month, between travel and the start of a new semester, and I haven't managed to get writing done.  So here's a rather overdue response:

Parts of this post certainly spoke to me.  In particular, the idea that cooking and providing emotional support for the people on the front lines can be  an important part of activism, too.  A lot of my friends have been really involved in activism since the catastrophe last November, but it's something that I'm mostly just not able to do.  I don't have a personality that can handle it: I find the very idea of going to protests stressful, and rarely have any spoons to spare these days as it is.

My friends have been trying to emphasize to me that I shouldn't feel guilty, because I'm providing emotional support for people who actually are going out and doing things and, well, maybe my role is to make pierogi for the revolution.  Which, honestly, appeals to me a lot more, even if it's hard for me to find time or energy to actively do things of that nature rather than just being there for my friends in general.

At the same time, though, I'm kind of put off by the author's focus on tribalism and inherited community traditions.  For me, at least, this sort of strength has always come from developing my own traditions, and creating my own community: I'm a bit distrustful of inherited family and community, and I certainly don't have one of my own that I fit in.  But, as a friend recently told me, when I was commenting as usual that I'm not really part of the queer community, "Don't worry about it: you've made your own queer community, and it's the best."

I may not have an inherited community, but my efforts to build one by inviting friends over for Polish food, and by trying to introduce people who I think should know each other haven't been in vain and, to some degree, I've managed to build some communities in which I have a bit of a hearth-keeper role.  If only I had the time and energy to actually do what it would take to keep them as strong and sturdy as I wish they were: that, unfortunately, is probably a full-time job.

Keeping this in mind, and recognizing that there is at least some connection between this part of my identity and my strong feelings about the sacredness of place, I should maybe make more of an effort to incorporate deities of the hearth into my practice.  Given my largely Hellenic-inspired practice, Hestia would be an obvious focus for this.  She is traditionally understood as the sacrificial fire itself, and when burnt offerings are made, the first is always to her.  However, I've never found a practical way to do burnt offerings--a problem for Hellenic-inspired practice in general--and so I perhaps need to think of a different way to honor her.
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I've been thinking a little about short discussion of the Aeonist gods, or some of them, on pages 191-192 of Winter Tide.  

The most obviously notable---because Aphra ruminates on it, is Shub-Nigaroth, with her epithet of "Mother of Fear."  Aphra says that she'd always assumed it was a joke when her Mother explained that "children are terrifying," but that seeing her Grandfather's grief at her mother's death helped her understand it more seriously.  Given that the creation myth given on page 343 seems to particularly associate Shub-Nigaroth with the creation of the first life, I feel like the best interpretation of this epithet may be as a dark mirror of her as being the "Mother of Hope" as well.  Because the two are tied: if she created life, and thus the hope of a future for living things, she also created fear of the loss of that future...

Cthulhu's epithets of "bringer of life and death" and "ever patient" seem worth thinking about in part because of Aphra's short description of Cthulhu as always listening and never promising.  This seems to fit well with a concept that has found its way deep into my psyche, even if I don't have a clear place for it in my theology: the Universal Observer.  Some property of the universe that simply observes everything, and by observing makes it real.  

This role for Cthulhu, I think, might also explain why eir rising from the sea would drive humanity mad.  Not because ey is destructive, or horrible to behold, or because ey eats souls, but because releasing the awareness of humanity's own memories would simply be too much for us.  Our survival and sanity depends on our ability to forget, and to not know the horrors we ourselves have made.  I am less sure what to make of the "bringer of life and death" title, other than in the sense that the universe exists because it is observed, and Cthulhu is there, sleeping and observing?'

It strikes me as odd that Aphra refers to Nyarlathotep, "herald of knowledge," as a psychopomp, given that Aeonists don't believe in an afterlife.  I suppose she means it in a symbolic sense, if he guides souls to hidden knowledge?  I would be interested to know more about him...


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For reasons that were largely (okay, entirely) [personal profile] ashnistrike's doing, I got to be on a panel on speculative fiction "Beyond the Binary" at Outwrite, a convention-ish thing about LGBT writing at the DC LGBT center along with her and [personal profile] wolby. I was fairly terrified beforehand, given that I haven't read that much SF compared to other people, and given that I'm not a writer and it was a panel full of writers, but it seems to have gone quite well. I got the impression that my comments were useful and reasonably coherent (even the attempt to explain Charlie Stross' novel Glasshouse really quickly so I could explain my complicated feels about it and gender), though I'm sad that I afterward realized I failed to give my pronouns as "'she' in the Radchii sense" and to mention the short story "Revolution in 1950," by Stanley Weinbaum, which might be the first science fiction story ever to deal with the issue of medical transition.

Other cool things at Outwrite included that I managed to write a poem---my first that didn't feel horribly cliched in nearly a year---during the panel before the one I was on. I've posted it on Facebook; if you don't follow me there but are interested, let me know and I can send a link. And after my panel, someone from the audience came up and introduced themselves as a high school acquaintance who had also turned out to be trans, so that was cool. The weird consequences of being back in the DC area, I suppose.

And, after the convention was over, I had dinner with [personal profile]wolby, [personal profile]ashnistrike, and their families.  That was really cool and involved discussions of transit, religion, science fiction and fantasy, dinosaurs (and people who identify as such), and kitties.

Finally, I came up with the phrase "From broth we came, and to brine we shall return," and now need to figure out how to use it somehow. Possibly in a liturgy for something. Or a poem, though my chances of ever making "Cape Ann" (my most recent horribly cliched poem, which it could almost fit the theme of) into anything tolerable feel pretty low.
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 This article by Lydia X. Z. Brown was really worth reading, but I can't help coming back to one minor point they make: "I was painfully slow on the uptake when figuring out that people I thought were nice to me or were my friends were actually treating me like shit." 

That sounds disturbingly like my experience of early childhood "friendships."  I had one really close "best friend," but most of the "friends" I made at school turned out to be bullies pretending to be my friends, and after first or second grade, I just stopped trying to make any new friends.  By middle school, I got offended when someone claimed to be my friend, because "Only popular people have friends, and popular people are bullies."

I wonder if that played a role in my developing the level of paranoia that I seem to have had fairly early on.  My therapist recently suggested that I may have paranoid personality disorder, and I certainly have a long history of paranoid thoughts (sometimes delusions) and of not being able to trust people.  And this might well be the origin of that.

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Something I've thought about a bit, and wish I had more useful things to write about, is what I've come to calling "Socrates' paradox". He supposedly asked people to define "piety" and they gave the expected answer of "that which is pleasing to the gods", pointed out that the gods feud and often openly fight, so what is pleasing to one of them will probably be offensive to another.

My vague sense of an answer, which I haven't entirely put into words, comes from my sense that the gods map in some way to ideals / causes / etc. And so one should see piety the same way one sees loyalty to a principle or cause.

You necessarily have to choose what moral principles, or causes, or so forth align with who you are. Likewise, devote yourself to gods who embody what you want the world to be. If you are self-consistent in your selection, there will not be unreconcilable differences between them...if there are, you need to try to understand where your own inconsistency or error or hypocrisy lies.

That being said, I should note that I'm not very good at implementing this reasoning myself.  For example, my faith in order and my conviction that the universe is a massive, malicious conspiracy are really not self-consistent...

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I had a number of really weird dreams last night. The weirdest might have been the one set in my late maternal grandparents' old house (which was sold a decade ago).

My mom's family was having a family reunion of some sort, which was complicated by the fact that I had three raptors (somewhere between Deinonychus and Utahraptor in size) as somewhere between pets and guests. They could speak English, but acted like very carnivorous small children, and they were weirdly featherless. They slept in a nest in the back yard, but hung around inside the house, and I was having a really hard time keeping them from eating me or any of my relatives.

I suppose this was related to my upcoming trip to a family reunion in Kentucky for the Fourth of July? It's concerning, though perhaps not surprising, that I associate the stress of seeing Trump-supporting relatives on their home turf with being at risk of being eaten alive by carnivores my size.

On a side note, I'm a little embarrassed that my subconscious still hasn't gotten the message about therapods having feathers.
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A fundamental problem with my gender identity, and related things, is that I don’t really understand what gender is. I imagine this is less of a concern for binary trans people: if you know that you’re “a man” or “a woman” and mean by it roughly what everyone else does, the details of what exactly it means to be “a man” or “a woman” may be less of a concern. But a lot of my worrying about whether I’m “really trans” or what it’s valid for me to think of my gender as seems to really come from the fact that it’s hard for me to figure out what categories I can validly put myself in.

I (think) I know my body, and what I want it to be. Basically, mostly female except no periods, and being able to pee standing is kind of useful. And very small breasts. I’m even pretty happy with how close I can get to this, except for my hair loss. And I can mostly do it without coming out and having to deal with all the risks that entails. I do have some worries about how much of my discomfort of my genitals may come from hatred of the fact that my penis is circumcised, rather than “natural” dysphoria, but the fact that taking testosterone-blockers and estrogen has helped a decent amount is encouraging.

But I have no real idea what to call this. I’ve been considering “eunuch”, given that my main plan seems to be chemical and eventually physical castration. And I used to go with “neutrois,” but besides the fact no one knows the word, I’m increasingly unconvinced I’d really be happy with no genitals, even if I wish I would be.

I don’t understand gender roles. This wouldn’t be such an issue if I also didn’t care about gender roles. The problem is that, on some level, I seem to. It makes me really uncomfortable to be thought of, or think I might be thought of, as “a man”. At the same time, though, I’m pretty worried that I might be “being a man” in terms of behavior or gender roles I participate in. This particularly bothers me because I think a lot of my discomfort with the idea of “being a man” comes from being really uncomfortable with male-coded behaviors and roles.

Basically, I know that I don’t perform femininity, or have much interest in doing so. I’d like to believe that I don’t perform either gender, but that’s obviously false. For one thing, almost everything is coded with the gender binary, and a lot of my behaviors—especially ones related to presentation and appearance—fit fairly well into society’s “male” category. It’s made worse by the fact that I am choosing to present as male professionally to avoid difficulties with employability and safety and such. Anyway, what this amounts to is that I feel like I do experience a large amount of male privilege, and probably do set off many non-male people’s discomfort-with-male-people, so I feel like it is problematic for me to identify too strongly as not-male. I appreciate the fact that my friends largely recognize me as clearly not a man, but I’m not convinced I can describe myself as such to society at large, or even to those segments of society I’d be comfortable doing so with.

I certainly don’t understand relationships or dating or sexuality. My issues with them are definitely tied into gender, given that until recently I identified as asexual for reasons that were mostly due to dysphoria about my genitals. The way I think about relationships and sex still has a concerning amount of connection to gender roles in it, and it’s really important for me to be “female” with respect to any sort of relationship or sex I might ever have. But this is really its own topic.

For all my confusing interactions with gender and sexuality, I think that it’s pretty ambiguous that I count as “queer” or “LGBT” or whatever your term of choice is. That said, I’ve never really felt like the LGBT community was something I could identify with. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Part of it is probably because, by the time I realized I was bi and trans, I’d been burnt badly enough times by identifying with things that I’ve developed an aversion to trusting any community or “official” identity.

I think there’s more to it than that, though. My life has never really followed the “standard” LGBT narratives. I’ve largely chosen to stay in closets so I can be treated as “normal” by society at large. I’ve never dated or had sex with anyone of any gender, so regardless of my theoretical bisexuality, the whole focus on “love” and sexuality that a lot of the community seems to have has never seemed relevant to me. And, well, my attempts to be involved in the LGBT groups in grad school seemed to fail because everyone was either an undergrad much younger than me or else mostly just interested in gay bars and drag shows. (I know some people find drag shows empowering; I just find them triggering.)

So, I don’t know what this means, or how much I should care about not feeling part of the community. I think I largely have enough identity other places, and I do at least feel some connection to other trans people. But I just don’t really identify with rainbows.
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