My Gender Identity is Witch

I have never identified comfortably with my assigned gender.  From my earliest memories, I have struggled against the things that have been expected of me in the context of my presumed masculinity. I was too sensitive, too passive, too interested in emotional fulfillment, in intellectual pursuits. I had no interest in sports fandom or physical competition – a matter of great consternation to my peers and the adults who surrounded us, given my physical size. I was drawn to darkness, but not to cruelty – I had been subject to too much of it, and could not comprehend the logic whereby it was validated by making others, in their turn, suffer as I had. While I certainly wished destruction upon my enemies, I rarely wished them to suffer or be humiliated, and never carried through on that impulse. I was drawn to contemplative, experiential mysticism, not the violent and muscular Christiantiy that pervaded my home town when I was growing up. But I had no language to describe those experiences, no framework and no peers to help me contextualize them.

My earliest spiritual practices, after rejecting both the God I found in the Bible and the one advocated by my Protestant peers, began with a pubescent and misinformed obsession with the Yin-Yang, the first non-theistic  spiritual symbol I encountered. In a world filled with hard dichotomies of antagonistic oppositions – good versus evil; men versus women; Christians versus everyone – the notion of complimentary opposites, each containing echoes of the other, was deeply appealing to me. It was ignorant wank-sauce Orientalism, I know that now; for what it’s worth, it was 1996 and I attended public school and I didn’t know any better. And, more to the point, today: it was the only place in the world that I had found any context for the parts of myself I now describe as queer. The notion that I might be energetically yin, rather than yang, gave me a way to contextualize myself and my experiences.

When I discovered Paganism, proper – not just energywork and New Age mumbojumbo – I was drawn to Goddess-worship and the effeminate undertones of witchcraft, though I was yet too contaminated by the respectability politics of the 1990s to embrace confrontational quality of the word.

I have more words, now. Better words. I am bisexual. I am queer. I am genderqueer.

I started coming out as bisexual in 2001.  I embraced the witchcraft identity in 2006, at about the same time that I embraced the label queer. Though I recognize this is not true for everyone – or even most people who use either identifier – those two words are inextricably linked for me. My queer identity and experience inform my witchcraft; my witchcraft shapes my experience of gender. “Witch” is not quite as confrontational as “queer”, but it’s better than “Pagan” (though I use that word, too).

I honestly can’t remember when I first identified with the word “genderqueer”, but it’s the only word that fits. I am something man-ish; something woman-ish; something neither; something both. “All of the above and none of the above,” I tell people when I’m being pithy. Sometimes, I am more sincere, and just tell people that my gender is “witch”. My pronouns, though I rarely insist on them, are xie/xir.  Damn right I use the weird ones that got dropped from even the most inclusive lists.

I’ve touched on these themes several times at my other blog.  More times than made it into the tag, because I’m terrible at tagging.  More times than I can remember.  And I’ll keep talking about it until the world is a better place.  Until admitting to those identities publicly is no longer a potential job-killer at any level of society.  Until they no longer come with a risk of having everything you own and/or love taken away by a hostile judge in a divorce hearing. Until they no longer bear the risk of being executed by police and vigilantes.

Gender is hard, and painful, and complicated, simultaneously destructive and empowering. Sexuality is as confusing as it is beautiful. The stories I write reflect these experiences. More importantly, they reflect these experiences through the views of people usually ignored, fridged, or buried in the genres of fantasy and horror. I write them to be seen, both for myself and those like me.

A post very much like this one was originally written for National Coming Out Day and posted to the Obsidian Dream blog in September of 2016, and I still share it on that day every year. It has been edited to better fit the style I envision for this blog. I share this story again, here, here in the spirit of exploring my primary themes of myth/ritual/identity and because there is nothing more fundamental to my art than my life experience as a queer witch.