Mr Muldoon steers us to a tale of colliding make-believe:
Witch ‘thrown off druid training course’ in trans row.
A very modern headline, I think you’ll agree.
A practising witch claims she was thrown off a druid training course over accusations by a member of the UK Pagan Federation that she was “transphobic” in a row about women’s rights.
They have training courses, you know, and websites, and a federation. We’re all learning things today.
Angela Howard said she became involved with paganism and joined the British Druid Order (BDO) in 2020 to find “spiritual healing” after being sexually assaulted. In 2023, she was “knighted” as a “warrior princess” at Stonehenge and began training as a student “Bard” – a division of modern druidry – defined as storytellers, poets, musicians, historians, artists and performers.
Ms Howard, it turns out, is a “second-generation witch,” following in the mystical footsteps of her mother, “a high priestess” who “ran a coven in the 1980s.”
However, Howard said the solace she sought in druidry and paganism was shattered when she was banned in April from continuing her training because of her support of the exclusion of trans women – males who identify as female – from single-sex spaces for women.
A very modern heresy. Resulting in a revoking of membership and denial of access to witchcraft course materials.
The dispute began, she said, three days after the landmark Supreme Court judgment that ruled the definition of a woman under equality laws related to biological sex, rather than “certificated gender” acquired by trans people.
The Pagan Federation, however, issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate”:
Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all non-binary genders are valid.
Validity for everyone. Just tilt your head and squint. Apparently, we’re to be told what reality is by people who think they’re witches.
Howard said she responded to this statement by commenting that there were situations in which women needed single-sex spaces, such as changing rooms, women’s refuges and prisons. She illustrated the point by citing her own experience of being sexually assaulted by a trans person, a man who identified as a woman.
Ah, that Thing That Never Happens.
Howard claimed that her comments were deleted and said that she was blocked from viewing the contents of the Facebook page, which you have to be a member to access.
As these are terribly modern, immensely caring witches, Ms Howard was banned from the organisation’s Facebook page and from the website of the British Druid Order on grounds of being “unequivocally transphobic.” Thereby denying Ms Howard access to the arcane knowledge of “seers and healers,” along with the opportunity to purchase oracle cards, audio recordings of spells and invocations, and “hymns to the divine feminine.” Oh, and guides to coping with stress by wrapping a thick blanket around your head.
No more “walking between worlds,” alas.
At which point, readers may wish to ponder the implied rules of pretending, the hierarchy of make-believe, in which some people pretending to be something that they aren’t are deemed of much greater importance than other people pretending to be something that they aren’t. A world in which pretending one thing now seems to mean that all pretences, of any kind, must be observed.
Further rumblings on the matter, and photographs of uncanny goings-on, can be found here.
By all means consider this an open thread.
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