Sadly I found my previous coven was not very accommodating to my aggressive views on LGBTQIA+ rights. As a gay man, I can be a little bit stubborn when it comes to the rights of my community and let’s say my coven wanted me a bit more mellow and apologetic. They caught me at the wrong time in my life. As I moved from Earth to Air, there were some big changes in me.
I get very hot under the collar when someone thinks they can debate LGBTQIA+ rights or even “offer a different viewpoint” or “play devil’s advocate”. When they do so they openly put out into the world ideas. Ideas would be good, but there are some ideas, which have been used to crush LGBTQIA+ rights repeatedly throughout history. Those ideas can pass to other people who can spread them further like a virus.
Even if you’re coming along and saying “I do not have a particular viewpoint” or “I’m just trying to open discussion” you invite people who ARE homophobic or who ARE transphobic to present their views. Often people like this are phobic or afraid of giving LGBTQIA+ people rights.
Homophobic and transphobic people …. that’s a mouthful. Let’s call them queerphobic people. Queerphobic people create fear scenarios. A fear scenario is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a scenario or situation which might generate fear. In this case fear of giving gay people rights. It’s an idea like well what if we gave trans people easy access to transsexual operations? If so then there might not be enough medical resources for us! See how it generates fear? Fear shuts down rational thought. We can’t then think about how difficult it would be to maintain the health of trans person without access to such operations. That rationale doesn’t come into it. So let’s just say even opening debate of the rights of community is offensive to me. It puts our rights in jeopardy. That’s scary! I mean, what if I started debating straight people’s rights. They wouldn’t immediately be scared because I am not a threat to their rights. But due to sheer numbers straight people ARE a threat to my rights. What if I started debating your rights and I represented a power that could take away your fundamental human rights. It’s quite scary and well it set me off… I created drama. I rarely create drama. In fact, I avoid it. But not this time.
This came at a bad time for it. I have come to the conclusion that people don’t decide things based on rationalistic arguments. They have a view, which is often for or against a certain group of people and then they try to justify their love or fear. Human beings are basic creates with a load of complicated icing, but at our core we are still quite basic. When we debate rights, what takes place is not an argument for sorting out who should have such rights, instead it’s a load of people who already made their mind up, trying to justify the conclusion they had already reached. Just by starting the argument you often put our rights at risk, because it gives people the opportunity to present all sorts of rationalisms, including fear scenarios. Rarely, but occasionally there are those who have not yet made up their minds, but sadly the average human is more frequently swayed by a fear scenario than a rational argument. It’s just how the brain is designed to work. So giving people the air to debate my own rights and the rights of friends, friend I call “family”, well that’s scary and dangerous.
How can a discussion be dangerous? I recently watched a Slack discussion take place in a place of work about trans rights. Someone said that her friend had not been able to access cancer treatment due to Covid-19, but that a trans person had been able to access their bottom surgery. There’s no way this anecdote, can be tested. We don’t know the full details only one side of a dubious story. She suggested that if they weren’t doing a trans person’s surgery, which she deemed “elective” then they would have had the medical resources available to treat the cancer. Fear scenario 101. This however failed to be rationalised. Firstly, this surgery is not elective. A trans person is in such a state of turmoil that they often feel that they must risk ridicule, painful surgeries, the cost of a whole new wardrobe, constantly having to explain/justify how they live their life, all sort of medical issues, the elimination of all libido and sometimes a loss of friends just to feel right again. Does that sound elective to you? A person would not risk all these things for something elective. Secondly, she did not consider that one medical resource can’t just be swapped out for another. A gender reassignment specialist and an endocrinologist will have a hard time treating cancer. Just because this resource was used up doing gender reassignment doesn’t mean that if they were free they could work on the cancer. The person continued to suggest that trans people caused a whole heap of medical issues in themselves and actually it must be the trans person’s own fault, she deemed and so trans people should not have access to other “normal” people’s medical resources such as the NHS. I was horrified. It would seem that some other people agreed. I just sat and stared at the screen from my home feeling really unsafe. They might not realise it but, these people potentially just advocated the death of some of my dearest and closest friends. Death for my friend in such a way that other people found accessible. Cut off trans people from medicine. Suddenly other people could recognise if they got on board and agreed then they too might have better access to medical resources. I decided that no good ever came from debating these things. Sometimes talking about these things IS dangerous. Are you beginning to see why I might not want to allow “healthy debate” to take place?
As time goes on I see myself becoming more and more alpha male. Or at least more accepting of the crush male inside me. I want to try and live a life where I don’t need to justify my existence. Isn’t that fair to offer to everyone? I don’t want to participate in debate about my own and my friends existence.
Logic seems like the great equaliser but frankly as I move from my earth grade to the more logical air grade I realise who much of a false idol it really is. More and more I begin to understand the section from the Book of the Law which deals with “because”.
27. There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss. He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason.
Liber Al vel Legis – Book 220 – Chapter II
28. Now a curse upon Because and his kin!
29. May Because be accursed for ever!
30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.
31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.
32. Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise.
33. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!
Logic is essentially pondering for those who are not in control, those who love logic and think it guides the universe. Sadly, as much as I like reasoning, it doesn’t get things done. Politicians don’t vote based on logic. They vote based on what keeps them popular or whatever goals they have. Those goals are often based on love and fear not on logic. When you throw logic away you often throw away the means through which you can achieve consensus with other people. People think logic is the great equaliser. Sadly it’s not. It only creates a false sense of agreement between people. Sometime it stops people being able to do what they wanted to do because they are told it is illogical. But those that do not bow to the power of logic do what they want whether logical or not.
The way I am choosing to live my life going forward conveys an attitude that is not acceptable in my old heterosexual cis-gendered woman’s coven. It’s a bit too confident, self-righteous and self-important for them. The coven felt the need to have a chat with me about my comments concerning the rights of LGBTQIA+ people. I was too aggressive and wasn’t listening to them. I felt like I was being brought into a disciplinary meeting, despite assurances that it was not going to be like that. I still felt like it. It had happened too many times before. I will explain what I mean by that below. It would seem everyone else had had the chance to get on the same page and suddenly they needed to address my behaviour which freaked me out. At the last minute, the meeting was moved to someone’s back garden and I pulled out causing drama.
Sadly people don’t know what it is like for me. I am not just LGBTQIA+, but I’m different in other ways too. There’s a reason I write this blog semi-anonymously. My behaviour is often a result of the fact that my brain is atypical. Some people don’t accept how I behave. How I behave is different. It’s not important exactly which classifications some doctor felt they could put on my brain, but frankly, they never said there was something wrong with my brain, it’s just different.
When your brain is atypical you spend your life in a sea of neurotypical people trying to fit in and be accepted. You’re always trying to keep up with the neurotypical people around you. They do things very differently. You can feel like an alien trying to blend in.
I blended in very well. In fact, when I mention my diagnosis, there’s a number of people who try to tell me I don’t seem act that way. But part of the process of blending in is learning not to trust your own brain, but trust everyone else’s. Let them be your guide all the time. Because they know “how to be”. But it’s not “how to be”. It’s how to pass as neurotypical. They even expect me to take it as a compliment when they say “you don’t act that way” and there’s an awkward silence when I say “well I am diagnosed by a professional”. I should have said “thank you” like a neurotypical person, but it’s not a compliment. It’s just saying “you’re like us”. I am not. Life would be easier if I was.
Well, I’ve been taken into disciplinaries by people before. Yeah, it’s not a work meeting, but it’s a number of people who picked up on the fact you’re submitting to what they think is right all the time. Then they kinda expect you should be there and ready to learn what’s right from them. That has become the norm. Well, I’m not neurotypical and frankly, it’s about time I started accepting that part of me. Not living this life where everyone else can tell me how they think I should be. I needed to break these relationships where people think they can tell me how to be. This is a time and age where I am leaving home again and will not be under mum and dad’s rule and frankly it’s about time I broke from anyone else who wants to form that sort of relationship with me where they can tell me “how to be”.
One person in coven had already suggested that with my upcoming move to South London that I might be leaving the coven. So that discussion was on my mind in the week leading up to the meeting. Also, I had been around for a few years and had not received my initiations from the group. Finally, the night before the meeting I had spoken to one person in the Coven and asked for a reading when she said that “what I was doing was not working and I was going to move away from it”. I didn’t know if that came from the cards or from her. I felt like she was guiding me toward leaving. I felt like I was going to be asked to leave.
I was so angry about what felt like an impending rejection. I did not want to show up to what seemed like it would be an argument with someone who was a practised debater and a professional arguer (a lawyer) who had been around the group a lot longer than me. The meeting stank and I was full of fear. I was once again feeling an impending rejection of my atypical behaviour. Thinking now I think I need to face my fears of rejection in my CBT work. But the truth is it felt like if I had to always play by their rules then someone like me was never going to win. So sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was not going to go. I am not going to a meeting where I am outnumbered where I didn’t think anyone could really accept what was going on inside me because I had hidden it so well from everyone for soooo long.
Anyway, so I pulled out of the meeting. I was asked if I was leaving the group. I certainly didn’t want to be in a group where one person wanted to debate my communities rights and another person already felt I should move on. That only left one last person.
I tried to explain how I felt like I was the odd one out. I was a homosexual man and everyone else there was a cisgender heterosexual woman so they hadn’t faced the same things. I tried to explain that to them but the word cis-gender seemed to end my friendships. Having gone through life without having to explain what they were they had never had to accept the word cisgender and not got used to it. They saw it as a label rather than a description and felt pigeonholed.
By getting offended they displayed the only consistent characteristic that I consistently see in cisgender heterosexual people, a lack of awareness of what LGBTQIA+ people go through. The only thing that in my mind could be consistent about what that “label” might mean, in their fear of the word they displayed it.
Maybe you’re not LGBTQIA+ and you don’t know what I mean. But whatever I was there was a word for it. I mean I was someone who presented as a man, perhaps not a typical man and who didn’t identify with some of the men I met, but a man none-the-less who found men attractive sexually. I grew up with constant gay slurs. In fact, when I was in Secondary School the very word “gay” was simply used to be bad for everything. Waiting in a queue for a long time was “gay”. Characters who were queer coded on TV and film were often totally incapable of handling the difficulties of life and often preoccupied with superficial things. Sometimes they were villains. Everything I saw that was “gay” was weak, incapable, vain and stupid. Yet that one day, I had to accept that “gay” was the best word to describe the sexuality I had. Frankly, in a situation of being bullied and ostracised for acting “gay”, seeing terrible “gay” stereotypes nearly all of my life and the word “gay” being used as an all-purpose negative word, I had to come to terms with the fact it was the word that best described that small part of me that was my sexuality. If I can accept I am gay then some cis-gender people can bloody well accept that they are cis-gender and therefore have not had the experience of being trans or being queer in any other way. Therefore they can’t speak for transgender people, they can’t speak for LGBTQIA+ people.
However, the universe was not done with me. Weirdly, my future housemates who are all queer displayed a renewed interest in doing magic with me. This would seem to be where the future of my group magical practice lies. From what the universe is telling me we are due to learn energy work magic together and elemental work together. Let’s see how this goes.
I can confirm that a coven has been formed. People seem to be happy about what we are doing. It’s a work in progress. But it is coming slowly.