When the excluded exclude

[thatwordgrrl]

Caveat the First: I was not at Pantheacon. Instead, I lost five pounds in 24 hours due to food poisoning.

Caveat the Second: I do not self-identify as pagan.

Apparently, there was a public ritual held there, specified as being for cis-women only. And a silent protest ensued.Oh, how this makes me itch in funny places. I know all too well about

Comments

[the_siobhan]

one of my favourite quotes from back in the days of Usenet.

"For there is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuckheads."

I'm really sorry somebody was such a jerk to you. I don't really get it either.

[alias_sqbr]

That post is remarkably clear, logical and damning. I think with a lot of these situations, people justify their hypocrisy by saying "But Christian(*)/bigoted beliefs are irrational and false, while mine are rational and true". Well, my mother has (in her opinion) rational and true reasons for thinking God opposes homosexuality, that doesn't make it ok.

I wonder what their policy would be on women who are XX but have never menstruated, or are XY but have been read as a cis woman since birth. Having a womb /= menstruating /= female /= having a vagina /= XX, and acting like they're all the same is exclusionary of more than trans women, unless you deliberately twist your words to only exclude trans women, which is what they seem to be doing. ("Penises are triggering!" "What about post op trans women?" "Real women have menstruated!" etc)

(*)No insult intended to non-bigoted Christians here, but Christianity is usually held up as "that bigoted religion my belief system is so much better than".

[thatwordgrrl]

Honestly? Once PCon publicized the ritual, it was endorsing it. Which meant it was endorsing the exclusion of non-cis women. Z Budapest could have had it privately, with no publicity by the con, and while I would have squinted sideways at it, I'd have said "Well, its separate from the con, so that's their business."

It's that the con endorsed it that bothers me.

[alias_sqbr]

*nods* That's a really good point.

[kaelstra]

Having been a part of gaming culture for a long time, which is a subset of geek culture in general, I've learned that, despite the fact geek culture purports it is all-inclusive because it is made up of people who are excluded frequently;

This is an outright lie, and most of the time, a lot of geeks are actually quite nasty to one another within the culture. It makes me sad. It also tends to rely heavily on no one talking about it, so the vicious cycle can continue. "If we don't talk about how nasty we are, and just talk about how welcoming and accepting we are, maybe everyone will believe it."

[thatwordgrrl]

Yeppers.

When I tried to explain what happened, the response I got was "Oh, I know that person would NEVER do that to anyone!"

[sarafinapekkala]

I don't think their intent is to be inclusive.

[kittysaysno]

Z Budapest did this last year, too, IIRC.

As a Neo-Pagan, this sort of thing pisses me right the fuck off because Neo-Pagans in general have this habit of... complaining about things that their previous religion did, then turning around and doing the exact same things. How is it any different? Oh, it's not the church doing it, obviously.

Everything about this act of exclusion is wrong, wrong, wrong.

[nagaina_ryuuoh]

Yes, she did, and it caused a massive explosion across the pagan blogosphere in which many of her, shall we say, less than enlightened views about trans individuals came to light and triggered a fairly substantial discussion about the pagan community's collective issues with regard to sexuality to get started. Admittedly: a good chunk of the reason why I'm a non-denominational animist pagan is because the gender essentialism of many modern pagan movements is a huge turn-off for me.

[kittysaysno]

Having read her forum post, I'm even more disgusted.

Even when I was younger, the insistence of many modern pagan movements for its members to stick to the human-made, not nature-or-Deity-made, gender binary made me uncomfortable. I did not like the obsession with reproduction and the ability to reproduce being what made a woman or a man (I did not know about or understand the existence of genders other than male and female at the time), and I still don't. Even nature dumps many of humanity's ideas of gender on its head! There is little to no acknowledgement of this in any Neo-Pagan spheres I've run across.

Z has no place running a public anything if she's going to speak the way she does about trans people. The degree of not getting it is beyond astounding and disgusting. I shouldn't be surprised, I know, I know. It's still really disgusting that a group of people that claims to be so ~accepting~ can't accept, grasp and understand that one's gender is not equivalent to their genitals