Witch ‘thrown off druid training course’ in trans row

[OhBuggerandArse]

This is a story with a bit of everything (not making light of it, sounds like Angela had the usual gruelling time in the face of typical TRA shenanigans, but the range of incidental detail is.... pretty extra).

https://archive.is/6goQB

They really have, you’re right. Wonderful books. I have many on my shelves!

@TeiTetua From memory, there’s the account of Julius Caesar de bello Gallic (‘on the Gallic Wars’) from his military jaunts to Britain in 55 and 54 BC.

He described and interpreted British society through his Roman lens - so he writes of people he calls slaves, serfs, knights and druids. It’s a fascinating though problematic narrative, in Latin, written contemporaneously.

Just to say I think you have an epic username.

Hello @SwordOfOmens from a fellow pagan 👋

I’m sorry this has happened to you. I’ve not been involved with the likes of the Pagan Federation as it’s not for me but I’ve known a few types that call themselves pagans for the “performative specialness” of it all - there’s a MASSIVE crossover between the “Look at me, I’m a WITCH!!1” crowd and the glittery gender woo people. All of whom are equally annoying.

I know everyone has their own approach (which is why it’s especially hard to swallow that GC views are being stamped on) but for me one of the central tenets of my belief is the duality of deity in the form of the God and Goddess and, while they take different forms throughout the natural year, they are male and female.

The binary of male and female is stamped through the natural world like the letters in Blackpool rock so I’d say gender ideology is far more of an urban thing than a country thing, @OuterSpaceCadet . Find a farmer or a farm vet and ask them if animals can be anything other than male and female and I’d be amazed if they can stop laughing long enough to say “no”

I used to know a tarot reader, one of the few men in a very female scene, and like almost all men in the tarot scene he was gay.

He bought a gay-themed deck of cards with all male imagery, but then he said that, though he liked the images, he couldn't read with those cards. He'd tried, but he said he needed both male and female energy, and the one couldn't substitute for the other.

I just mention that as an example of someone who may or may not have been sympathetic to trans political claims - I never discussed it with him - but found that he couldn't honestly base his spiritual practice on gender identity. He had to conclude that the two sexes were a thing.

This is a large part of how gender identity ideology got such a hold on people, IMO - because the online world can be distorted by mods, admins and tech bros at woke companies to give the impression that “everyone thinks this”, and any dissenters can simply be deleted.

You don’t even need to bully and threaten dissenters on a platform you control - you can simply delete their objections and pretend they don’t even exist.

Purely out of interest, what were the Christian bits?

@SwordOfOmens I admire your bravery and determination. I'm not at all surprised the founder has a son who thinks he's a woman. To paraphrase PP, trans turns everything it touches to ash.

I'm adjacent to the pagan community in my work and have found most of them the most lovely people. However, since around 2018 or so, some of these same people (usually younger) became quite rigid around TWAW...it was so disappointing to watch and I pulled away from some people as I didn't want to work with them if they would be so stringent about ignoring women's rights (and rites!) I'm in the states and watched the witch hunt of Ruth Barrett and Z Budapest. It was ugly.

haha this reminds me of a book I tried to read recently

the basic premise is that witches are real and have been a secret part of the government for centuries. There are also men (warlocks) that can do magic but women are much more powerful. Suddenly everyone is all in a tizzy because they find a teenage boy who is the Most Powerful Ever. But how can that be if he's male?....You guessed it.

Any of the characters who are of colour or gay/bi etc accept "her" immediately whereas those who are white/straight react at best with well-meaning kindness (but are patronisingly told off the moment they accidentally use the wrong pronouns and are told to educate themselves for going off appearances like a silly "mundane" (why yes that does sound like a complete rip-off of "muggle") and not using their inner eye to see the wunderkid's inner femaleness) or, in the case of the leader witch, immediately goes full on Terf and tries to murder the trans character.

I gave up reading at that point because it was just so poorly written - I was reading it as a bit of trashy escapism but you'd get better plotting and characterisation in one direction fanfic on wattpad...but skipped to the end and, lo and behold the evil Terf character is shunned for her crimes and sentenced by her peers to be ritually burned alive. So that's nice.

I mean, people can write whatever they want, but consider the absolute outrage about JKR's alleged trans discrimination in one of the Strike books, which when I got round to reading it consisted solely of a completely male murderer with no trans identification who, on ONE occasion briefly used a woman's coat to escape from the crime scene without being detected , it's a bit ironic!

Oh and the audiobook was read by Nicola Coughlan....

Including the likes of St Patrick in the rituals! St Patrick who according to the hymn Dóchas linn Naomh Pádraig:

'S é do chloigh na draoithe, He defeated the druids -
Croíthe dúra gan aon mhaith. Hardhearted and no good.

Patrick's whole USP was crushing the Druids, so it was inexplicable that the BDO celebrated him. It was one of the things that made me think they hadn't quite 'got' this whole druid business...🙄

I still love the hymn, by the way, despite those lines, and happily sing it to myself if I'm sure no-one is listening

What a load of baloney. A super-special Chosen One male main character. Groundbreaking!

What book is it, so I can avoid it?

Modern publishing must always push The Message. No wonder Coughlan is involved, she loves the Omnicause.

Publishing is so fad prone, and YA publishing is the worst. Currently the optimum pitch for a YA novel is a coming of age story set in school, where the protagonist is a black girl, all of whose friends are gay or trans, standing up to white/straight bullies.

Eventually you'd hope there would a turn back to entertaining stories, but it doesn't look imminent.

Gap in the market, there.

That's interesting, thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm a churchgoer and some years ago I met an odd man who described himself as part of the Celtic Orthodox Church. He had a beard and while I would say I thought he'd "put on his robe and wizard's hat" he had no sense of humour at all and took himself very, very seriously. He was a kind of pan-Celticist and and very, very anti-English, though not born in Britain or Ireland. I remain curious about the attempt to meld Celtic Christianity with Paganism.

EDI in its current form has mutated so far from its intention and accelerated so quickly it was always going to attract the incoherent and illogical activist folk, especially as corporation were throwing wodges of cash at it. Anyone with integrity in the field knows it is closer to regulation and safeguarding and the job involved a proper challenge function to systemic bias.

But they chose the easy way, slap and progress flag on anything, recruit in your likeness, and censor anyone who tells you different. It was always going to store up a load of trouble in the future when people realised that it was merely corporate window dressing.

Yes, that is certainly happening now, but what I don't understand is how at some point the genderist idea went from a fringe view to something that everyone was expected to believe in to the extent that it can't be questioned.

About twenty years ago when the GRA was passed, I think anyone talking about transsexual children would have been dismissed as a nutter or a pervert. Then about 10 years later the BBC was pushing the idea of transsexual children to their child audience on CBBC with their "I am Leo" programme.

I know what's happened since then, but what was going on before 2014? How did the idea of transsexual children become acceptable to those making TV programmes for children to the extent that they thought the idea of being transsexual should be planted in the heads of the children watching their programmes?

The activists were obviously busy, but why did organisations like this fall for it? How did the switch get flipped from "He's talking about children being transsexual. He's a pervert - keep him away from your kids" to "Of course children can be transsexual"?

Sorry if this seems like a derail, but I think the recruitment of children to this cause has been a crucial factor in its growth and the reason why it can't be questioned. Once they captured the children, they also captured their parents, as seems to have happened with the leader of the BDO.

The adults were captured via Stonewall’s workplace equality index, and the children were captured via diversity training in schools (from Stonewall and many other orgs) and social media.

The parents wouldn’t see the ideas the children were talking about as alarming as they were the same kinds of ideas about trans inclusion that they were learning from Stonewall training at their council/healthcare/bank/police/corporate jobs.

It didn’t start off as TWAW or GII in 2014 - back then it was all about trans people being just like gay people and about them being marginalised and deserving the same acceptance as gay people. Which initially sounds pretty reasonable without all the gender woo stuff.

As soon as Stonewall acquiesced to the trans lobby and took up its cause in 2014, the rest of society immediately fell in line because Stonewall already had everyone else under its control via the workplace equality index and all its training programmes influencing every aspect of society.

Yes, but you're talking about post-2014. This doesn't answer my question about how everything changed before 2014 which lay the foundations for this.

I know that the activists have been working on this for a long time, which brought us the GRA in 2004, and Christine Burns talks about what they were doing back in the 90s.

But what changed between 2004 and 2014 to change transsexualism from something which only applied to a very small number of adults (as mentioned in the GRA debates in 2003) to something which should be promoted to children? Is it all down to Yogyakarta in 2007?

Because most people ugly cry, whereas weeping is graceful and involves gentle tears running silently down a soft skinned cheek, not gallons of snot pouring from a red nose.

Some of them sob. "Blue-haired sobbers" was in one of the Julie Birchill articles linked on this forum recently.

Derailing a bit here to chat with TomPinch -

I too am interested in early Celtic Christianity in Ireland, because I think it was one of the ways in which elements of druidism survived - if you filter out the orthodox Christianity, what's left is probably the remnants of Celtic/Druidic beliefs that survived. And still survive in Ireland, we never stopped marking the Celtic festivals etc.

I don't think of Celtic/Druidic beliefs as 'pagan', for some reason - maybe because some modern 'pagans' appropriate Celtic stuff without properly understanding it. Like marking some of the Celtic festivals, Samhain, for instance, but not respecting what it meant in the Celtic calendar.

I'm attracted to St Patrick as an historical figure, despite his anti-Druid campaigning

I have a soft spot for Patrick, and I wonder if it's based on me reading the Confessio as a student and discovering that he had quite a nice Latin prose style. There are some Latin writers who I just never got on with.

So I suppose I'll cut him some slack for his anti-Druid stance, the same way I forgive Asterix for his opportunist line during the Goth Wars.

I must admit though that I've never really understood neopagan Druidism, as opposed to the "those guys who run the Eisteddfod" modern druids. It seems to me to be neither one thing or the other.

I mean, if you're into Celtic antiquity you can study that, and if you're into Golden Dawn style occultism there's a literature around that, and if you want a 1970s take on British folklore there are some excellent Jethro Tull albums you can listen to.

Possibly I'm overthinking and it's just the usual New Religious Movement thing of someone being charismatic enough to win followers to their own idiosyncratic mix of interests.

In the UK it would have been GIDS who were expanding their services in response to changes in international practices, and according to their Wikipedia page, it was in 2009 that GIDS became “a nationally commissioned NHS service” and subsequently opened another branch in Leeds.

It seems they started administering puberty blockers to select children from 12 on the NHS in 2011, and then activists began pressuring the government to increase access to these ‘treatments’.

I have always been drawn to pagan-type beliefs, and in recent years tried to join local groups which purported to support a wide range of practices and beliefs.

I found them to be cliquey, snobby, and gatekeepery. There was a lot of "well, we have generational beliefs and XYZ is in our bloodline....who are you and what are your credentials?!"

I wanted to join a community that would be uplifting and where I could enjoy discussions among people with similar passions while figuring out my own path but it was just unwelcoming. There were plenty of posts and comments that made it VERY clear that unless you had "bloodlines" or some other kind of innate qualification, you'd never be accepted.

With that in mind, it's perhaps not the greatest surprise to discover that prominent sections of the community leadership has prescriptive and narrow-minded views in other ways too.

Thank you for commenting on here @SwordOfOmens - I'm sorry you experienced such unfair treatment.