Some of the most traumatic conversion practices I experienced were religious rituals performed by transphobic Dianic witches. They really messed my head up and had a lasting negative impact. I've wanted to write about them for a while now but I'm still too raw to go into details.
There was actually a very strong religious aspect to the early radical feminist detrans community, drawing mostly on lesbian feminist paganism and goddess worship, focused especially on myths about Amazons and more aggressive or monstrous goddesses, not the soft motherly ones.
We actually weren't particularly attached to Artemis but we made connections with Dianic witches all the same because of their transphobia and female separatism. And some of us participated in some their rituals, including one meant to "heal" us from our transness/transition...
...and help us "reclaim being female". Such mixed messages, being welcomed as "sisters" and "Amazon daughters" and told we're just like them & then being offered rituals to get rid of our transness, what made us different from other lesbians, so we could become part of the group.
I have old writing where I talk about those rituals and their impact on me at the time and when I reread it now I see how I was really messed up by them. At the time, I thought they were helpful and I was honored to take part but now I'm deeply disturbed by the whole experience.
Someday I want to write the whole story out, how I met these transphobic Dianic witches and the rituals I took part in and so on, but right now it's still too intense. I'm still processing what happened and how it impacted me. It's one of the most horrifying things I experienced.
Using rituals and religious ceremonies as a form of conversion practice can create long-lasting damage. Turning people's hunger for meaning, healing, transcendence, connection with a spiritual community & so on against them, to try to destroy a part of themselves, it's horrific.
It makes no sense at all to try to end conversion practices and exempt religious groups or practices. I'm not sure whether legal bans are the best way to stop that kind of religious abuse but it should be stopped because it's destructive, dangerous & causes lasting harm.
My concern with legal bans would be that they'd be selectively enforced & tend to target religious minorities & people of color & that they could just drive groups underground. I can't see how a legal ban would be enough to end them, that would require larger cultural change.
I have no problem making it easier to hold religious groups accountable for conversion practices but I think religious communities themselves would do better at that than the state. If the religious communities don't change, conversion practices will just go on in secret.
I'd rather the pagan and lesbian communities hold those Dianic witches accountable, rather than turning to the state. Much of the pagan community already has turned against these particular Dianic pagans because of prior transphobia and kicked them out of events and spaces.
I think conversion practices survivors should be able to sue religious groups for damages but I don't think I'd pursue that route even if it was an option because it would be re-traumatizing and the people who hurt me would try to spin it to make themselves look like matyrs.
I'm much more interested in making connections with members of pagan & lesbian communities to make it even harder for this group to participate in pagan & lesbian events, make it harder for them to get a platform, etc. Work on creating more community accountability.
Using religious practices to try to "heal" someone from being trans or gay is abuse. No one is entitled to abuse anyone like that. Religious freedom doesn't include using religion as a justification to abuse people and those who do so must be held accountable, one way or another.

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More from @reclaimingtrans

Feb 11
An ecofascist antisemitic anti-trans conspiracy theorist is now calling for violence against clinics that help trans youth and is praising the fascist trucker convey in Canada for being "willing to die". This kind of talk doesn't end well. Facebook post by Jennifer B...
This comes soon after she attacked a more "moderate" group of transphobic parents and conversion therapists who are trying to infiltrate and change trans healthcare to restrict and eventually abolish pediatric transition. Their crime? Being willing to work with GC trans people.
Hardline GCs refuse to work w/ any trans people, even those who embrace GC ideology. For them, working for more gatekeeping or promoting conversion therapy doesn't go far enough. They want to destroy the "gender industry" because they see it as part of a larger conspiracy.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 11
One of the main purposes of "ROGD" isn't just to label young trans people as "mentally disordered" but to claim that their "disorder" is of a different degree and kind compared to other (adult) trans people's "disorders". That they're not as "broken" as other trans people.
It's so transphobic parents can say that their kids aren't like those "sick mutilated freaks", those adult trans people over there. No, those adults with other more severe "mental illnesses" have corrupted and confused their poor child. "ROGD" isn't as bad as other kinds of GD.
In this framework, the kind of gender dysphoria that adult trans people have is not only worse and much harder, if not impossible, to cure but it can also cause those who have it to become "groomers" who prey on youth and infect them with "ROGD".
Read 20 tweets
Feb 10
This is something I intend to write more about, how detrans rad fem narratives were very selectively quoted by other transphobes to promote their own anti-trans narratives while hiding the parts that were too fringe or didn't fit with their agenda.
The leaders of the rad fem detrans community were largely focused on promoting lesbian separatist culture and spaces. Most transphobes aren't lesbian separatists and don't give a fuck about keeping lesbian separatist culture alive. They're weirded out by that shit too.
Most "ROGD" parents don't want their kids to grow up to be lesbian separatists anymore than they want them to be trans. Pretty much the only people who want more lesbian separatists are lesbian separatists. There's a reason they're worried about dying out.
Read 19 tweets
Feb 10
In my experience, detrans people and trans people generally get along. The first detrans/retrans online space I ever participated in was trans-friendly and many members considered themselves trans. The line between trans and detrans has always been blurry.
Most de/retrans people either consider themselves trans or feel like they have a lot in common with trans people. Most continue to participate in the trans community to some extent. Many trans people likewise sympathize with de/retrans people and consider them siblings or allies.
I and another founding member of the detrans radical feminist community had previously been part of trans-friendly de/retrans groups before we converted to transphobic feminism. We deliberately tried to create something completely different from past de/retrans groups and spaces.
Read 25 tweets
Jan 29
If you claim that being trans is a "mental illness", a "disordered coping mechanism", etc, and that GNC lesbian and gay people are more susceptible to it, aren't you basically pathologizing GNC gay and lesbian people by saying they're more likely to develop this "disorder"?
That kind of thinking feeds right back into the theories behind classic "reparative therapy", that both gay and trans people have a "gender identity disorder", that our gender development was knocked off track in childhood somehow, but trans people's "disorder" is more severe.
This is why conservative Christians have no problem with the idea that trans people are "confused, self-hating gay people". It fits right in with their particular conversion therapy ideology and they see winning acceptance for anti-trans conversion therapy as a stepping stone...
Read 21 tweets
Jan 28
The damage of anti-trans conversion practices can be long-lasting. Years later, I'm still dealing with psychological wounds from engaging in conversion practices to suppress my sense of self and dysphoria. It doesn't just stop once you decide it doesn't work and stop doing it.
It's like I spent years cutting a part of myself away. I had to numb myself to what I was doing. Now I can feel the wounds in my psyche and work through my past denial. A lot of healing starts with facing what happened & learning to trust my own perceptions that my pain is real.
Part of engaging in conversion practices is normalizing and rationalizing suffering because seeing a part of yourself as "false", "wrong" or "unhealthy" is suffering. Trying to suppress or destroy part of yourself is suffering. It hurts but you learn to justify it to yourself.
Read 25 tweets

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