Getting Our Bearings,
Knowing Our Terms
All aspects of human experience and endeavor are influenced and shaped by gender and sexuality at some level.
This statement is simultaneously so obvious as to be nearly a tautology and so contentious as to start arguments almost instantly. On the one side, the vast majority of humanity got here because two people had sex, the vast majority of us identify with one gender or another, and for most of us, sexuality and gender are all tangled up in one another. Pretty obvious, right? On the other side, though, are the vast array of human endeavors which, at least on their surface, have no relation to gender or sexuality. After all, as conventional wisdom tells us, those issues are rooted in the body, and have no bearing on such cerebral, intellectually detached fields as mathematics, technology, philosophy, economics, and so on. Of course, if you delve into the histories of those endeavors, what you’ll find is that they’re all deeply rooted in sexual and gender dynamics, and they all have profound implications for how we live out our expressions of sexuality and gender, both personally and culturally.
Spirituality is no different. Whether we’re talking about religious belief and praxis or the more active, DIY applications we call mysticism or magic, gender and sexuality inform and influence the ways in which we seek to touch the numinous. Throughout history, spiritual traditions have addressed, and sometimes wrestled with, issues of gender and sexuality as central components of the human experience. In some traditions, gender is seen as a divine binary ordering—“… male and female He created them,” as Genesis 5:2 puts it—while in others, gender is a set of polarities, between which exist a wide variety of possibilities. Similarly, some traditions see sexuality is a joyous union, a consecration of oneself and one’s chosen partner, while for others it’s a necessary evil at best. The connections between gender and sexuality are likewise suffused or imbued with meaning and significance. Many spiritual traditions, ancient and modern, assign explicit social and sexual roles based on gender, rooted in theological justifications that appeal to mythic archetypes.
Outside the Charmed Circle is an exploration of the intersection of gender, sexuality, and spirituality within the context of the modern Western esoteric traditions, those spiritual movements that form a continuation, adaptation, or development from the polytheistic and numinous traditions of the pre-Christian world. This definition includes all of what author and blogger Laura Tempest Zakroff calls “p-words,” the various streams of modern magical (or occult) practice and the multiplicity of spiritual traditions falling under the headings of Paganism and polytheism.3 Practitioners who identify more strongly with one or the other branch of praxis might object to the seemingly cavalier fashion in which I’ve linked the overtly magical and the devotional, feeling that I’m conflating traditions which have nothing in common. With all respect, I humbly disagree. While on the surface, Golden Dawn–style ceremonial magic or Wicca may seem to have little in common with reconstructionist polytheism or grimoiric sorcery, my contention is that they share far more in common with one another than they do with more mainstream spiritual traditions, or even with other outsider faiths and New Religious Movements, and that a substantial part of that commonality derives from their shared ancestry, which includes shared history and shared cosmological assumptions.
An extensive study of the history of theological and magical views on gender and sexuality isn’t really within the purview of this book, but there’s a certain amount of historical background that’s not only relevant but required as a foundation for the work we’re doing here. As an example, it’s fairly common knowledge amongst occult scholars that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was strongly influenced by the Masonic and Rosicrucian background of its three founders, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, as well as by the Victorian fondness for classical Greece and the contemporary Egyptology craze. The Golden Dawn, in turn, was a formative influence on Aleister Crowley, the progenitor and primary source for the religious and magical philosophy of Thelema. The liturgy and poetry Crowley wrote (or, in some cases, channeled), along with a healthy dose of magical ritual from a Renaissance-era grimoire called the Key of Solomon, were significant influences on the Neopagan witch-cult of Wicca formulated by Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente. While Gardner and Valiente were revisioning witchcraft as a kind of magical folk religion, Gardner also introduced his friend Ross Nichols to the indigenous British Isles magio-religious practice of Druidry. Nichols’s love for Druidry and Celtic mythology would go on to inspire him to create the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, a Druidic organization still in operation today. (The Wheel of the Year so beloved by modern Pagans owes its existence to Nichols and Gardner’s friendship, as the two developed the eight-fold schema of solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days together and promulgated it in their separate groups.4 )
For good and for ill, Wicca’s rising popularity helped bring the reality of modern Paganism as a spiritual path into public awareness, while groups like the OBOD and other neo-Druidic groups provided a model of what a historically grounded practice of polytheism might look like. Together, these traditions ushered Pagan, polytheist, and magical practice into the modern era, through a doorway formed by Renaissance sorcery, qabalistic Masonry, Egyptian hermeticism, polytheistic recreation, and imaginative extrapolations of folklore and anthropology. Of course, I’m not saying these streams of practice are identical to one another; nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, I want to suggest that all of these traditions share a kind of spiritual and intellectual DNA: a history and a lineage, both figurative and literal.
With that shared history and lineage, all of us p-words within the purview of the Western esoteric traditions are the inheritors of a dizzying wealth of lore, wisdom, and techniques for touching the numinous. We’re also, sad to say, the inheritors of a dismal tangle of misinformation masquerading as myth, bigotry disguised as truth, and charlatanry claiming to be the one, true, right, and only way to reach God. Sometimes, it’s easy to tell fool’s gold from true gold, and other times it requires painstaking discernment. In many cases, it’s not even as simple as that: the false and the true are found together, seemingly inextricable from one another. In any given spiritual tradition, one can find profound truths and insights of the highest order woven through with faulty logic, outdated science, and cultural biases, as well as with the personal foibles, flaws, and failings of the tradition’s founders and promulgators.
Especially in the past century, this dichotomy has led to a great many people becoming disenchanted with spirituality, full stop. As Neal Stephenson wrote in his satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel Snow Crash:
Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.5
It’s easy to look at the misguided parts of a tradition or the hypocrisy of its leaders and conclude that there’s nothing of value to be found in the tradition itself. It’s much harder, but can also be more rewarding, to discern what there is in a tradition that’s good and worthwhile, independent of the logical or moral failings of the human beings within it.
To bring this back around to our point, Western culture has undergone dramatic, tumultuous changes in the past century, and all of its institutions—political, economic, social, religious—have struggled to keep up and adjust to the new realities of life in the modern era. Many of those new realities have revolved around issues of gender and sexuality. Ongoing debates around the acceptance of orientations other than heterosexuality, the changing roles of women and men in society, and the overt interrogation of gender itself—as a paradigm for organizing society, or even as a legitimate psychological reality—are just a few of the arenas in which conventional wisdom has been questioned and, in many cases, found wanting.
So too with the Western esoteric traditions. Magical and devotional spiritual paths have spent much of the past century struggling with the tension between the protean nature of modern life and traditional practices rooted in ancient (and, in some cases, provably outdated) models of reality. For some paths, the challenge of adapting to the modern world has proven too difficult, and their numbers have dwindled, their lore relegated to dusty bookshelves and historical footnotes. Other paths, however, have risen to the challenge, engaging with and adopting new knowledge in a fashion that’s both exciting and reassuring. One of my favorite examples of this adaptation is the reframing of the classical Greek elements of earth, water, air, fire, and aether as the states of matter: solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasmatic, incorporating Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence to identify aether as energy.
Similarly, the Western esoteric traditions have struggled alongside the broader mainstream Western culture to reconcile their devotional, mythic, and magical traditions with changing sexual mores and concepts of gender, with varying results. Some paths have chosen to double down on their traditional paradigms, viewing those whose sexual lives and gender identities don’t fit comfortably into those paradigms as being spiritually sick, “intrinsically disordered,” or in some other way innately wrong.6 Others have engaged with the questions raised by modern understandings of sexuality and gender, entering into larger conversations around the intersection of spiritual praxis, personal identity, sexual and social interaction, and lived experience. As lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other folks become more visibly a part of the Pagan, polytheist, and occult communities, these conversations have become both increasingly common and increasingly necessary.
Of course, this discourse hasn’t come without friction. One of the common stumbling blocks is that the terminology we use to describe and define identities and experiences outside of normative cultural institutions can be unfamiliar, and therefore inaccessible, to people outside the communities where those terms originate. In some cases, these terms come from the interlinked communities of people united by their outsider status, based on their sexual or gender identities. In other cases, the terms derive from the work done within the academic world of sexual psychology, feminist studies, or gender theory. In all cases, they’re intended to help us grapple with these issues of identity and experience, and to find some way of communicating meaningfully with other people, both those who share our identities and those who don’t.
A Handle on My Cup: On Labels and Identity
Let’s take a few moments to talk about identity and the labels we use to communicate it. I know that some people are uncomfortable with labels, believing they impose an artificial concrete boundary on the free expression of sexuality, gender, and identity. Some folks will go even further and suggest that codified identities are themselves tools of oppression and division. After all, aren’t we all just human beings, no qualifiers needed?
Well, yes … and we’re also more complicated. We are indeed all human beings of equal dignity and merit, and the notion that we should be able to exist without boundaries of identity is, I think, a genuinely well-intentioned idea at its core. I would cheerfully embrace this approach if I felt the complexity of lived experience in the day-to-day world were as simple to encapsulate as that. Sadly, and happily, life and identity and behavior are deeply, deliciously complex, and sometimes we need symbols both to help us understand our own experiences and to communicate those experiences to people who might not share our frames of reference.
As an example, I once had a delightful conversation with an eleven-year-old about the power of words to shape our reality, and the labels we use to identify ourselves and others. She’d been talking with her friends at school, and she wanted my help exploring what it meant to “be” something, to identify with some label. I think she was both excited by the power of self-determination that a label can confer and nervous about the responsibility that power incurs. After all, she reasoned, if we define ourselves by some label, isn’t that a kind of commitment to always be whatever that label designates? Doesn’t that make us accountable to some outside authority which adjudicates the boundaries of that label, that identity? What if she identified with a label yesterday, but doesn’t today? Does that mean she lied to her friends, many of whom share affinities with her based on those very labels?
All this at the age of eleven, no less. Never let them tell you kids don’t think about serious issues.
We talked about labels and identity, and I shared with her my favorite explanation for the utility, power, and limitation of labels, which she seemed to find pretty helpful. Labels, I said, are like the handle on a suitcase or—relevant to my own biases—on a coffee cup: they’re things we attach to something much larger, something that’s inconvenient to simply hold and carry in our hands. Maybe the thing we’re trying to carry is too heavy, or too hot or cold, or simply awkward and unwieldy. Whatever it is, the handle gives us a convenient way to pick it up, hold it, carry it around, and set it down. A handle can be fancy or simple, but ultimately the point isn’t the aesthetics. It’s the utility. After all, a handle that doesn’t help you hold the coffee cup isn’t much of a handle, right? At the same time, the handle isn’t what’s important about the coffee cup. The cup itself isn’t even that important. What’s important is the coffee itself. You can drink your morning joe from bone china, ceramic, enamelware, or plastic, but none of the materials makes a lick of difference to whether or not you’re getting caffeine into your bloodstream.
I trust that most of you can follow this metaphor to its logical conclusion, but just to make it unavoidably clear: those of us in the Pagan, polytheist, and magical communities spend an awful lot of time arguing about labels. As exhibit A, I’ll offer the fact that I needed to specify “Pagan, polytheist, and magical communities” in order to circumscribe the subcultural groups I wanted to identify. As exhibit B, I’ll point to those communities’ extensive histories of infighting and ongoing disputes over what words mean and who has a right to use them, as exemplified by words like Wicca, witch, Pagan, Heathen, and magic. The same holds true in the LGBTQIA+ community, where we savage one another pretty ruthlessly over the increasing granularity of queer and trans identity.
To be clear, I think this granularity of identity is a good thing. I love the power of words to shape the world, and I love how we’re developing a language for expressing the shape and nuance of our lived experiences of gender, sexuality, and spirituality. It’s fantastic that LGBTQIA+ folks and the Pagan, polytheist, and magical practitioner communities are working through their own self-creation and self-naming, claiming and owning their own experiences and power. What’s less fantastic is the tendency for embracing labels to turn into gatekeeping, policing, and ostracizing. After all, the point of a label is to give you a handle on something, a means by which you can carry something much larger, heavier, hotter, more awkward. When you make the cup all about the handle, you miss out on the entire point of the handle in the first place: to hold your cup so you can drink your damn coffee.
The cliché that it’s what’s inside that matters really is true here, and what’s inside is what we’re all about. Words like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and asexual are labels we put on a set of lived experiences, as are words like transgender, cisgender, and nonbinary. Similarly, words like witch, magician, druid, and priest are labels for collated sets of actions, practices, beliefs, and experiences. These labels are meant to serve us, to communicate something about our experiences and lives to other people. What they’re not meant to do is serve as a choke-chain or a set of handcuffs binding us to some particular interpretation of what those experiences mean. We are the only ones who can interpret the meanings of our experiences with any accuracy, and the only ones who can say which labels are the best handles for those experiences.
I told my tween-age interlocutor that our lives grow and change, that she might grow out of or away from any label she adopts today … and that’s okay. The point of life isn’t the labels, but the experiences we use those labels to express and share with others.
Words Mean Things: A Quick Lexicon
At the risk of waxing overly academic, I want to define some of the terms I’ll be using before we get well and truly under way, terms that many of us use to express our lived experiences. The terms themselves aren’t particularly esoteric, but my usage of them might be non-standard, idiosyncratic, or simply unfamiliar to you. These definitions are intended to give you a sense of how I’m using these terms, rather than being prescriptive in any way, and other folks will have their own interpretations and definitions for these terms. I don’t mind if people disagree with me, but I want to clarify my meanings as much as possible, so they’re based on legitimate differences of opinion rather than simple misunderstandings. So, I hope you’ll bear with me as I make use of both my gender studies degree and my religious studies background to offer this resource as a starting point for discussions, with the caveat that these are my interpretations of these identifiers, as colored by my experiences, background, and education.
Please note that these definitions have been written for the broadest audience possible, some of whom may be encountering these terms for the first time. Also, some of these definitions refer to deprecated terms and slang words used as slurs, many of which can be deeply hurtful to people against whom those terms are used. These terms are included solely to educate people unfamiliar with the context and nuance surrounding them, so they don’t use them carelessly or, in some cases, at all. If you are sensitive to such terms, please exercise caution and self-care.
Gender, Sex, Sexuality, and Magic
So, let’s start with the hardest task. After all, we can’t really have a conversation about gender, sex, sexuality, or magic if we don’t understand what those words mean, right?
Of course, one of the major problems we’re going to have in coming up with definitions for those words is that the English language is a hot mess. As the science fiction television show Babylon 5 accurately summed up the issue, the trouble with English is that we define all our words by reference to other words, which means that none of our words have their own meanings.7 Gender seems like it would be fairly easy to define, but even the most basic dictionary definition practically constitutes a 1001-level gender studies class syllabus, and will have you wandering off into discussions of biological, social, and cultural notions of sex and behavior in short order. Most definitions of gender make some reference to the concept of non-physical traits which are nevertheless associated with the biological sexes as a category. Of course, sex also refers to things that have little-to-nothing to do with gender or biological sex, which just makes things even more complicated.
Instead of a concrete category, then, what I’ll offer you as a working definition is the following set of ideas: cultures have a notion of intangible characteristics—identities, behaviors, and social roles—that exist on a continuum between two poles we call femininity and masculinity. Gender can be conceived as the range of characteristics found between these two poles of categorization, which have been equated in many cultures (in many cases, arbitrarily) with our traditional understandings of the biological sexes found in humans, female and male.
This definition acknowledges the mutable, contextual nature of gender, and delineates both the connections and distinctions between gender and biological sex. For me, it falters a bit with its insistence on defining gender in simple male/female terms. In her groundbreaking 1990 book Gender Trouble, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler utterly dismantled the notion of woman or man as concrete categories of lived experience, demonstrating that these words are instead merely labels, socially constructed with the expectation that the people to whom they’re affixed will perform the roles demanded of them by the label. In other words, our ideas of what it means to be a woman or a man are defined by the cultures into which we were born, and in which we were raised. We’ll delve further into this in Chapter 4. For now, let’s go with the idea of gender as a range of characteristics and behaviors which tend to be grouped into the binary poles of femininity and masculinity, most (if not all) of the parameters of which are socially constructed.
Having established a working definition of gender, let’s take a moment to talk about biological sex as its own distinct category. Human beings are sexually dimorphic, meaning that we tend toward having certain anatomical configurations and characteristics derived from our chromosomal makeup, many of which relate to our particular form of sexual reproduction, which we divide into two categories, male and female. These biological categories are frequently ascribed cultural significance—rights, responsibilities, roles, meanings—which are both conflated with and contribute to the social construction of gender as a role we’re expected to play.
Again, though, it behooves us to remember that biological sex is just a schema of categories, invented by humans to help us understand reproductive science. While this schema can be a useful model as far as it goes, it’s not an immutable concrete reality even in our own bodies, as recent developments in science have demonstrated. In particular, the increasing awareness of the existence of intersex people and the implications of their lived realities underscores the fact that neither gender nor biological sex are as cut-and-dried, nor as simplistic, as some pundits would like to have us believe.
That brings us, of course, to sexuality. We’ll talk a lot more about this in Chapter 6, but here’s a sneak preview: as far as I’m concerned, sexuality refers to our capacity for experiencing erotic sensation, physically or mentally, and sex includes any activity we undertake for the express purpose of stimulating erotic sensation in ourselves or in others. That includes all kinds of stuff: solitary, coupled, or multi-partnered acts, involving any configuration of bodies who want to be in intimate contact with one another, generating pleasure, generating eros.
Last of course, is magic. If you’ve made it this far in the book, I’m going to assume you have your own definition of magic, and possibly your own forms of practice … but you wanted to know my definition. So, not to be coy: I define magic as the act of exercising one’s will to change reality in a way that isn’t easily explained by a clear chain of cause-and-effect. We’ll spend much of the rest of the book talking about how that works, most notably in Chapter 6.
Queer
I know this word often comes across as confrontational, even offensive, but I’m going to push back on that idea. After all, it’s one of the key concepts around which this book was written, and I think it’s worth taking a little time to unpack it.
Queer was initially coined as a slur in Victorian England to describe people whose gender performance or sexuality are seen as non-normative, unhealthy, or strange in some other way, and spread throughout Anglophone countries by the early twentieth century. This is especially well documented in A Very Queer Family Indeed, Simon Goldhill’s biographical overview of one extraordinary Victorian family’s literary struggle with the fluidity of their own gendered and sexual identities.8
In the 1980s and 1990s, the word was reclaimed by some within what we now call the LGBTQIA+ community as a self-identifying descriptor, a generalized term for a variety of expressions of sexuality and gender which share in common their outsider status in relation to culturally normative gender and sexuality. The exact definition and contents of these sexual and gender norms are a moving target, determined as they are by the mores of a given culture in a given place at a given point in time, all of which change and adapt to the needs of the moment. Queer has also found traction within the academic community, where queer studies and queer theory have developed as fields of study interrogating those cultural norms. Here, queer has come to mean something which challenges the normative assumptions our culture makes about gender and sexuality, and queering has come to refer to the act of adapting something—a practice, an artifact, an idea, or a text—to meet the needs of marginalized queer groups.
This can all be pretty confusing. However, we can find a useful lens to view queerness in the work of cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin. In her seminal 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” Rubin posits that within any given culture, there exists both a set of sexual attributes to which positive values are ascribed, and their antitheses, to which negative values are ascribed. The positively valued attributes form the hegemonic norms or sexual ideals of a culture, which she calls the “charmed circle” of sexuality, while their antitheses form what she calls “the outer limits,” the shadow-self of culturally normative sexuality. In the post-Christian Western world, the charmed circle encompasses attributes like being heterosexual and cisgender, and practices like monogamy, missionary-position sex, sex solely for reproductive purposes, and non-kinky (or “vanilla”) sex. Any alternative to these attributes and practices is excluded from the charmed circle. Homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality, being transgender, or failing to conform to expected gender norms are all consigned to the outer limits, alongside practices like polyamory, non-missionary sex, sex solely for pleasure, sex work, kinky sex, and so on.
Within the confines of this book, and in my own life, I use queer as an umbrella covering all of us whose gender and sexual identities exist outside the charmed circle of hegemonically normative cisgender heterosexuality, and whose lived experiences challenge those social norms. I’ll have a lot more to say about queerness and its relationship with sexuality and magic in later chapters, especially Chapter 5. (You’ll also note that the title of both the chapter and the book itself references this concept!)
It’s worth reiterating that queer is far from being a universally accepted term, one which many LGBTQIA+ people find distasteful or contentious. Some of the word’s problematic nature comes from its history as a slur, while others feel the use of queer as an umbrella term erases individual gender and sexual identities. As ever, when dealing with a particular person or institution, it’s always best to call them what they wish to be called.
Straight
This generally refers to people of a binary gender, male or female, who are sexually and/or romantically attracted to people they perceive as being of the opposite gender. The technical term is heterosexual, sometimes abbreviated as “hetero” or “het” in certain circles.
LGBTQIA+
An acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual/Aromantic, with the plus sign standing in for other identities not addressed by those terms. The acronym has changed and grown over the years, from LGBT to LGBTQ to its present state, in response both to the need for an umbrella term covering the whole of the community and to the perception that queer was an undesirable term due to its history as a slur.
Gay
For such a small word, this term covers a lot of ground. Initially, gay was a loan word from French, and meant joyful, happy, light-hearted, and carefree. While it still holds on to these meanings in some contexts, gay began to acquire the more lascivious connotation of sexually indulgent roughly around the time Shakespeare was writing plays. By the early twentieth century, gayness had begun to be associated specifically with same-sex liaisons. Today, it commonly refers to people who are primarily or exclusively sexually and/or romantically attracted to people perceived as having the same binary gender, also known as homosexuality. (While “homo” is sometimes used as an abbreviation, be advised that this has highly negative connotations in most circles, equivalent to other homophobic slurs, and should really be avoided unless you yourself are gay.)
Another, perhaps equally common usage refers specifically to men who are primarily or exclusively sexually and/or romantically attracted to other men, though this isn’t universal.
Curiously, it’s also used as a blanket term to refer to anyone who isn’t straight. This usage is both historical (as with the Gay Liberation Front of the late 1960s and 1970s) and contemporary, especially among some younger LGBTQIA+ people. This usage is not dissimilar to “queer,” as mentioned earlier.
(I know it’s confusing. I wish I could say it gets less so, but …well, let’s move on.)
Lesbian
The term lesbian refers to women who are primarily or exclusively attracted to other women, sexually and/or romantically. Lesbians are also called gay women at times, though this usage is somewhat less common. The word itself derives from the Greek isle of Lesbos, famously the home of the poet Sappho, whose “Ode to Aphrodite” is a prayer for divine aid in securing the love of another woman. The term Sapphic, derived from the poet’s name, is sometimes used as an adjective referring to women who love women. (It’s worth noting, however, that Sappho wrote love poetry addressed to both women and men; in today’s terms, she may have been what we would call bisexual.)
Bisexual and Pansexual
These terms are sometimes seen as interchangeable, and other times as distinct orientations. Bisexuality refers to people of any gender who are sexually and/or romantically attracted both to people who share their gender and to those who don’t. The term pansexuality was coined in response to the perception that bisexual reinforced a binary gender paradigm of being attracted to “both men and women,” thus excluding people outside that binary. Many people have strong feelings about one or the other. When in doubt, ask the person how they’d like to be described. (As a personal aside, I refer to myself by both terms, depending on context.)
Asexual, Demisexual, and Aromantic
Simply put, people who are asexual don’t experience sexual attraction. Some have no sexual inclination or arousal whatsoever, while others may experience arousal, but have no concomitant desire to have partnered sex. A common misconception is that asexuals suffer from some past trauma that has rendered them phobic about sex. In reality, most asexuality has no causal link to trauma, and most asexuals are perfectly well-adjusted people who just happen not to have any interest in sexuality, and in my experience, tend to find the whole thing somewhat amusing or perplexing.
Demisexuality, sometimes seen as a subset of asexuality, refers to folks whose sexuality is only engaged in the context of an emotional bond or relationship. This orientation isn’t derived from a save-it-for-marriage sort of morality; demisexuals don’t feel sexual attraction to a person unless they feel something emotionally for them first.
Aromantic folks don’t experience what we tend to think of as “romantic” love. Mind you, this doesn’t mean they don’t love! Like asexuality, aromanticism exists on a spectrum, and aromantic people can have a wide range and variety of loving relationships.
I’ve grouped these folks together in part because their orientations share in common an absence of certain qualities or feelings which some folks seem to believe think are mandatory for esoteric praxis. I’ve seen it said that it’s simply impossible for asexuals to practice sex magic, for instance, a statement which flies in the face of the number of asexual practitioners of sex magic I’ve known. While I agree that the notion can seem a little contradictory, I can also see how asexuality, demisexuality, and aromanticism could actually be beneficial to the practice of sexual magic. In any event, I find it’s best to assume that other people have a better understanding of how their lives and practice work than I do.
Transgender
If you don’t identify with the gender you were assigned at birth, you’re transgender, sometimes abbreviated as trans. Some people define transgender in specifically binary terms, i.e., as referring to a transition from male to female or female to male, while others see transgender as a broader umbrella term referring to anyone not of their birth-assigned gender. There’s no slur, criticism, or judgment inherent in the term, either in full or abbreviated, but colloquial abbreviations (“tranny,” “transie,” and so on) are often used as highly offensive slurs and should be avoided by anyone who isn’t themselves transgender.
Though less common than in previous years, the term transsexual is used by some trans people to reflect their personal experience of being transgender, especially by those who’ve opted to pursue medical transition. Again, I’d suggest avoiding this term unless either you are trans yourself, or you’ve been explicitly asked by a particular person to use this term to refer to them.
Cisgender
If, on the other hand, you do identify as the gender you were assigned at birth, you’re cisgender, sometimes abbreviated as cis. As with transgender or trans, this is a technical term utterly devoid of inherent criticism, judgment, or insult. (We’ll talk more about the meaning of cisgender, and why I give such short shrift to the idea that it’s in any way an insult, in Chapter 4.)
Nonbinary, Agender, Neutrois, Androgynous, Genderqueer,
Gender-Fluidity, Gender-Nonconforming, and More!
All of these terms refer to people whose experiences of gender don’t fit neatly within the binary male/female gender paradigm common to Western culture. Some of these folks identify as transgender, while others don’t. As ever, it’s always a good idea to find out how an individual person identifies before using that term. There’s a bit to get a handle on here, so take a deep breath and let’s dash through it!
Nonbinary refers to people who don’t identify with either of the binary gender options in Western culture, male or female, regardless of what they were assigned at birth. Related terms include agender and neutrois, which both refer to people who understand themselves as genderless, and gender-fluid, which describes people whose experience of gender can be variable, depending on mood, context, and any number of other factors.
Androgynous is a term which is sometimes used for people whose experience and expression of gender incorporates attributes commonly ascribed to both men and women. It’s less common than it used to be, and I’d avoid using it unless someone has told you directly that this is the term they use. (Are you spotting a theme here?)
Genderqueer describes people whose identities and expressions of identity play with queer notions of gender, while gender-nonconforming describes people whose outward expressions of gender identity don’t culturally conform to the gender they were ascribed at birth.
(For personal reference purposes, your humble author identifies as a nonbinary, agender androgyne, all under the transgender umbrella.)
Intersex
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights defines intersex as follows:
Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Intersex is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of natural bodily variations. In some cases, intersex traits are visible at birth while in others, they are not apparent until puberty. Some chromosomal intersex variations may not be physically apparent at all.9
The term hermaphrodite, from the Greek deity Hermaphroditus, has been used in the past to refer to intersex people, but as this term is stigmatizing and often used as something of a slur, I strongly recommend avoiding it unless the person asks you to use it. It’s also worth noting that being intersex is not the same as being transgender. While some intersex people may identify as transgender, most do not, and the issues each group faces are distinct, if sometimes related.
— Exercise —
A Pin in the Map
For this exercise, you’ll need your journal, a writing implement, and a few minutes of undisturbed time.
Having just read over this mini-lexicon of sexualities and gender identities, open your journal to a fresh page and free-write for a few minutes about your own gender and sexual identity, and your personal history of engaging with issues of gender and sexuality. Was there a period where you questioned either of those identities, or have you always just known who and what you were? Have you ever moved from one identity to another, or wondered what it would be like to identify as something other than you do? Take as much time as you need to record your thoughts.
Straight, Queer, Cis, Trans: Things We Should Know
With all of these terms and rules around which words to use when, you might be understandably confused about what to say or how to say it. If you’re finding yourself a little bewildered at this point, allow me to offer a little advice on how to engage with all of these issues of gender and sexuality. Think of the following as my attempt at being the p-word equivalent of Emily Post or Miss Manners, offering you some high-level suggestions for navigating the sort of thorny social situations that can arise when we work toward making our spaces inclusive and welcoming to people whose experiences we don’t necessarily share or understand.
What Straight and Cis People Should
Know About Queer and Trans People
Hello, straight and cis readers! To start, I’d like to thank you for being here in the first place and reading what I have to say. It’s genuinely heartening to know that there are people willing to do this work of inclusion with us, even when it gets uncomfortable … which it often does. That’s one of the biggest barriers to allyship, really: the discomfort that straight and cisgender allies feel when confronted with something about queerness or transness they don’t understand, and the fear of causing unintentional insult and injury by Doing It Wrong. The reality is that everybody does it wrong from time to time, even those of us who’ve been steeped in queerness and transness our whole lives. Doing it wrong doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, nor does it mean your mistakes are unforgivable transgressions. These things can be hard, and they’re made even harder because our culture rarely talks about them and explicitly says what doing it right looks like. So here are a few things to keep in mind that may help you feel more comfortable about not doing it wrong.
In many important ways, we’re just like you. We sleep, wake, eat, drink, bathe, and groom ourselves. We complain about our day jobs (or lack thereof), binge-watch shows on Netflix, and dream of going on vacations. We engage with our faiths, traditions, and magical practices. We work with gods, spirits, and the world around us. We’re just people.
However, in many other ways, we’re not just like you. Our experiences of our identities, our bodies, and the world around us can be fundamentally different from those of cisgender and heterosexual people, rooted in some of the qualities and characteristics that inform our identities and experiences at the deepest levels of selfhood. Those qualities and characteristics—our sexuality, our gender, and the interactions between those two—are shared with straight and cis people in many ways, but the ways they manifest in our bodies, our personalities, and our lived experiences vary widely. Life as a queer and/or trans person has a whole host of challenges that straight and cis people simply don’t have to face and of which, consequently, they’re often unaware. That statement isn’t intended as criticism; it’s just an observation of fact. Just as white people can’t know what it is to experience racism as black or brown people do, straight and cis people can’t really grasp the lived experience of homophobia and transphobia.
So, how can straight and cis people interact with queer and trans people without giving offense or, worse, causing harm? I could offer a list of dos and don’ts, but honestly, most of those rules could be boiled down to a single sentence: listen sympathetically, be friendly, and try not to be too concerned about what’s in someone’s pants, or what they do in bed.
No, really, I’m serious. Unless you’re extremely close to someone —for instance, if you’re about to have sex with them—don’t ask them what’s in their pants, or what they do in bed. If they really want you to know, they’ll tell you. (And if you’re truly dying to know how things work down there, the internet is a treasure trove of information.)
We should also take a few moments to talk about the whole pronoun thing. With the increasing visibility of trans and nonbinary people within our communities, the question of what pronouns to use for a given person has become something of a hot-button topic for a lot of folks. From an etiquette standpoint, it’s really quite simple: use the pronouns you’re offered, and if you aren’t offered any, politely inquire what pronouns the person in question uses … or, better yet, offer your own pronouns: “Hi! My name is Misha, and my pronouns are they/them.” This can be a little awkward at first, but it beats guessing wrong and offending or hurting someone. As no less an authority than Miss Manners herself points out,
There is a range of gender categories, not just male and female, and a vocabulary that has been proposed to go with each, but has not been universally recognized. So guessing is, if anything, worse than asking.10
Another difficulty you might encounter is the use of pronouns other than he and she. As we’ve discussed, gender is far more complex than the binary paradigm most of us have grown up with, and linguists and other proponents of gender-neutral language have grappled with the lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun in English for over a century. As trans and nonbinary people have entered public discourse more visibly, they’ve contributed their thoughts and lived experiences to the conversation around gender-neutral language. Some folks have responded by coining and proposing nontraditional gender-neutral pronouns, or neo-pronouns, such as e, ze, xe, thon, and many others. These gender-neutral neo-pronouns have their proponents, but the clear leader for both casual and formal use as of this writing is the singular they.
Part of its advantage is historical precedent: they as a singular personal pronoun has been with us since at least the fourteenth century CE, when Geoffrey Chaucer used it in “The Pardoner’s Prologue” from The Canterbury Tales (“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, / They wol come up and offre, on Goddes name …” 11 ), and can also be found in the works of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
Another advantage is that the singular they is already built into how many people already speak. For instance, it doesn’t sound particularly odd to say, “Someone left their phone on the table.” We’re speaking about an individual, but we don’t know who they are, so we don’t know their gender. In my experience, we only feel strange using singular they about someone when we believe their gender to be something other than the gender (or absence of gender) they’ve told us they have. Working past that mental hurdle can be challenging, but for folks whose lived experiences are outside the gender binary, the efforts you make to see them as they are can be a profound demonstration of respect and inclusion.
Folks with an essentialist view of gender (see “Defining Gender Essentialism, and Why It’s a Problem”) may argue that being asked to use the pronouns they’ve been offered for certain individuals is an imposition on their convictions, that they’re being forced to participate in something with which they disagree. At the risk of offending those folks, I want to point out that the putative harm it causes people with gender-essentialist views to refer to trans and nonbinary folks by their correct pronouns is far less than the harm done by imposing gender-essentialist views on people to whom they simply don’t apply.
If you’ve read this far, allow me to encourage you to read the next section as well.
What Queer and Trans People Should
Remember About Straight and Cis People
Hello, fellow queer and trans people! You’ll notice that I didn’t say “Things Queer and Trans People Should Know About Straight Cis People,” because honestly, most of these are things that queer and trans people already know. After all, cisgender heterosexuality is normative in mainstream culture, and the assumptions built into that culture form the backdrop against which we live our lives. Still, it can be easy to forget these things sometimes and assume that, because someone is spiritually like-minded in certain ways, they’ll be sympathetic to our needs, our wishes, and our situations.
In my experience, when it comes to being inclusive of queer and trans people, most straight and cis people really are doing the best they know how. Depending on the individual person and their present context, their best might not be particularly great, but I’ve found that most people really are trying to be decent. If someone is genuinely treating you in good faith and with best intent, try to give them a break when they screw up and use the wrong words, or say something gauche. Many straight and cis people aren’t going to know the language we want them to use, and they might not understand why we feel it’s so important to use certain words over others. This stuff is hard, especially when you aren’t immersed in it 24/7. It can be hard even for those of us who are immersed in it. Yes, it’s an unfair burden to place on us, and yes, I wish it were different. Until we live in that different world, though, cutting people slack and being forgiving of their mistakes is not only gracious, but pragmatic.
No matter how nice you are, no matter how carefully you explain things, and no matter how obvious the ethical and practical reasons may seem, some people are fundamentally uninterested in being inclusive or accepting. They may feel that queerness of sexuality or gender is somehow against divine or natural law, or that the kinds of changes they would need to make in order to accept queer people are an imposition on their spiritual freedoms, or that their own conceptions of self, sexuality, and gender would be threatened by inclusivity. Some folks, you won’t be able to reach, which is unfortunate, even tragic in some cases.
It’s also a reality. All we can really do in those cases is accept that those people are unreachable and walk away. Of course, walking away is easier said than done when the people in question are connected to our lives in some way: our families, our friends, our co-religionists, our coworkers, and so on. Living with and around people who question our identities, our rights, even our existence is one of the realities of queerness that most non-queer people—especially those who are also privileged in other ways—rarely experience and can have difficulty understanding. Sometimes, the best we can do is endure and survive until we can remove ourselves to a better situation.
The following exercise is intended to help you think about the words we use to talk about ourselves—our identities, experiences, and behaviors—and about the ways in which we can use those labels to discover new insights about ourselves.
— Exercise —
For this exercise, you’ll need your journal, a writing implement, and about half an hour of undisturbed time.
Sit comfortably with your writing things at hand, but don’t write anything yet. Instead, take a few minutes to think about yourself. Think about who you are to other people, the identities that make up your persona, and what you do for them, all the different hats you wear that make up the person other people know. What are the various roles you play at work or school? Who are you when you’re out with your friends, or when you’re with your family of origin? Who are you in the various online spaces you occupy, and how does that differ from who you are in physical spaces? Think about who are you when you’re unaccompanied in public. What qualities do you try to display for others? How you want to be seen … or do you want to be seen at all?
Turn to a fresh page in your journal and fold it in half down the middle, so that the right half is tucked behind the left. Now, start writing those roles on the left half. You can use whatever words capture the essential nature of that role. You may find that titles work better for roles related to specific relationships with other people—spouse, partner, parent, sibling, child, coworker, student, teacher, priest/ess/x, covener, lodge member—while more general descriptors might better describe roles that are less easily defined—leader, lover, caretaker, confidant, protector, and so on. If those roles are gendered, incorporate that language: mother, father, wife, husband, daughter, son. In the context of your spiritual life, you might find words like witch, magician, seeker, mystic, sorcerer, or devotee useful. If you’re having trouble coming up with specific terms, you might think about using adjectival phrases: the smart one, the funny one, the brave one, the strong one, the one who drinks and knows things. Whatever these words or phrases are, write them down, as many as you can come up with. As you do, you might also find that one term leads you to others.
Once you’ve got a nice long list of words, set it all aside and think about who you are when you’re by yourself, removed from the context of other people. Who are you underneath all the hats, the person beneath the persona? Who are you when you’re not being someone else for someone else? Who were you before the people around you taught you that you needed to be someone else, someone more suited to their needs or desires? What do you do solely for yourself because it pleases you or fulfills some need within yourself? What qualities do you see in yourself that, as far as you know, only you know about?
Sit with those questions for a few minutes, then pick up your writing implement again. Turn the page so that only the right half is visible, and start writing on that half. This time, write down words or phrases that reflect that sense of who you are independent of other people’s expectations, requirements, or demands. Try to avoid words that depend too heavily on outside definitions, or that identify structured institutions or movements: Pagan, Heathen, Wiccan, Thelemite, and so on. Instead, think in simpler, more essential terms: artist, musician, dancer, writer, witch, magician, maker. Because many of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves in those terms, these words may not come as easily as the first set. Give yourself time to reflect as you write and don’t push yourself too hard.
Unfold your paper and look over the two lists you’ve made. Do any words or phrases appear on both lists or have clear relationships with one another, like mother and caretaker, or teacher and the smart one? Conversely, do any of your words or phrases directly contradict others? Are some of the roles and qualities linked, joined by a causal relationship? For instance, do you hide being scared under the brave face you show the world? Do you play the role of normal or ordinary to prevent people from knowing that you’re strange, queer, or a witch? You can make notes about any connections you draw between these concepts, or your feelings about them as labels and identifiers.
Now read these lists, the external and the internal, and look at them together. Consider them like a personality profile or a character sketch … because that’s what they are. What picture do they draw, and how do you feel about the person they depict? Would you trust them? Is this someone you’d want as a friend? If they came to you afraid or in pain, how would you help them? Where are their strengths, and where could they work to be stronger?
With those thoughts in mind, turn the page and write a brief but honest assessment of the person revealed to you in the traits and roles you identified on the front of the paper. Write about the kind of person you believe them to be, and the kind of person they have the potential to be at their best. When finished, put your journal away in a safe place.
So, was this magic? No … and yes. It’s a psychological exercise, akin what Terry Pratchett’s iconic witch Granny Weatherwax might call “headology,” intended not only to help you see yourself but to help you see how you see yourself.12 It’s easy to avoid examining our own self-image, just as it’s easy to avoid looking in a mirror. We carry all these components of our identities around with us, sometimes worn for all the world to see, sometimes hidden away in our minds and hearts even from ourselves. Exercises like this are useful tools to ferret out the pieces of our senses of self we’ve hidden from our conscious minds but which influence how we see and think about ourselves all the same. We can refer to this record of our own self-image over time and see how our perception of our self (or selves) has changed, and where we might yet want to work to change it more, or even just to know ourselves better. As the Delphic priesthood of Apollo reminds us down through the ages, it’s crucial that we know ourselves both to live a fulfilled life and to do any kind of meaningful work, including magic. After all, we do magic with our minds.
However, we also do magic with our bodies—or perhaps I should say, in and through our bodies. Let’s talk about that, shall we?
3. Laura Tempest Zakroff, “What’s In A P-word?” A Modern Traditional Witch, April 5, 2017, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tempest/2017/04/whats-in-a-pword.html.
4. Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 337–341.
5. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992), 63.
6. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona Humana: Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19751229_persona-humana_en.html.
7. J. Michael Straczynski, “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place,”Babylon 5, original airdate October 14, 1996.
8. Simon Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10–15.
9. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Free & Equal Fact Sheet: Intersex, www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Discrimination/LGBT/FactSheets/UNFE_FactSheet_Intersex_EN.pdf.
10. Judith Martin, Nicholas Martin, and Jacobina Martin, “Miss Manners: A simple ‘you’ avoids any gender confusion,” The Washington Post, September 27, 2015.
11. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1900), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22120.
12. Terry Pratchett, Maskerade (London: Victor Gollancz, 1995), 17–21.