You cannot have solidarity with life, honor the flow of life, honor the sacredness of Nature, honor your ancestral line, honor the evolutionary process, and at the same time be transphobic and support anti-equality for transgender people.
We are descended from a continuity of life that has no binary sexuality. We are descended, from transsexual, asexual, bisexual beings, and on and on – fill in the prefix. By the very nature of our being here, we owe a debt of honor to the gender fluidity of Nature. Gender fluidity is at the root of life on Earth. As a pagan and animist, I honor the whole of it. The whole of Nature is the foundation of my religious practices. So as someone who sees Nature itself as the highest authority, I need to understand, acknowledge, respect, accept and engage with the entire ecosystem. This is at the core of what it is to be pagan.
The procreative energies of our shared ecosystem are not simple duality!
Yvonne Aburrow in her article We Are Rising stated, “Gender is not a binary, not even a spectrum, it is a vast glittering field of possibility, many gender, many hues, many different expressions of being and love.” Such a beautiful sentence (Thank you Jim Lindenschmidt at Gods & Radicals for the link). This is the actuality of Nature, the beauty, power and wonder of Life.
So I write this to say, we as a pagan people, need to stand in solidarity with our LGBT community. To compromise on this is to say, “I only respect part of Nature. I know better than the Earth.” And that is hubris to the extreme. To not honor and respect the diversity of gender and sexuality in our community of life, is to deny and reject our own personal heritage.
In ritual this weekend, at the height of sun energy, the peak of creative energy on the planet, we will call and honor our gender fluid ancestors – those who came before and gifted us with this precious thing we call life. Perhaps we can playfully and joyfully call them our “trancestors” – not to make light but to celebrate and find the joy in the whole “glittering field of possibility“.
“Hail to the trancestors. We honor you and thank you for this gift of life. Please come share your knowledge, your stories and songs. Share with us your wisdom. Be welcomed in this circle of equals. Come dance with your children. Hail the trancestors…”
In solidarity,
Snowhawke /|\
The Animist Druid 