Mr Muldoon steers us to a tale of colliding make-believe:
A very modern headline, I think you’ll agree.
They have training courses, you know, and websites, and a federation. We’re all learning things today.
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.”
A very modern heresy. Resulting in a revoking of membership and denial of access to witchcraft course materials.
The Pagan Federation, however, issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate”:
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.
Ah, that Thing That Never Happens.
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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