The midwife who delivered me presumed me male in brain and spirit. No one could examine at birth the structures of our brains although these are intriguingly different in each gender. Thus I believe my female spirit sneaked into the male world in deep camouflage well equipped to spy on men. None could have suspected me. I was thus enabled to to become a Catholic priest and then a parent, before coming home as an investigative journalist, a priestess and a modern witch.
My experiences in descending from the Catholic priesthood have helped me understand my world as it too emerged from a patriarchal age to regain its relationship with nature. This is the story of my own and my world's transition, a tale of magic, religion, warfare and evil, sex and gender.
....
My birth was at a time of when death seemed near at hand. Land mines laid against German invasion surrounded our coastal village. It was then winter, mid-February, 1942. My mother and I were in a cottage in the hill top settlement of Winchelsea in southern England. Below us, in the marshes, the sheep were huddling around the masts and low grey huts of the radar station where my parents first met each other and conceived me. **
When my mother first saw me, my eyes were peeping between the folds of a bandage that swathed my head. The one armed doctor who delivered me warned that if I lived I might be brain- damaged. His forceps had squeezed my brain out into a cone above my fontanel and left me permanent dents in my cheekbones. My mother told me I looked like an Egyptian mummy ...She has since used this incident to explain my gender change as due to brain damage. I think her wrong - but that is her explanation for what I delight in as a divine gift that gave me a most extraordinarily rich life.
...Zulus for all the image of them in feature films as fierce strong fighting men, believed perfected souls would normally return to live as female spirits in female bodies - but sometimes these perfected souls would return to those who had previously been seen as males. They were thus compelled to speak for a female spirit. The transgendered youth would experience nervousness, insomnia and would dream that the ancestors that dwelt within need a spokesperson. Typically the ancestors are heard to say: "We are you ancestors... We have long tried to make your people understand that we want you to be our house - to speak for us." p42-3
The transgendered Zulu youth may also dream of being caught, torn to pieces and reassembled. They would leave the settlement and spend time in the wilderness where visions would continue. They may have to catch a female snake and wear it around the neck. When exhausted and starving, they went to an elder to be healed and transformed. At this stage they change gender roles.
It was not just a male to female process. Sometimes girls were magically transformed into men. Those becoming males among the Zulus were allowed to carry a shield and spear - the badges of malehood - and to enjoy beer and meat. Those becoming women had their hair plaited, their face and body painted, were given beads and their voice changed. These transformed male and female shamans worked in healing, divining, magic and performing sacrifices. N33
The Omaha, an American Indian tribe of the Plains, had a custom by which the people would recognise those who were called to change gender roles in either direction by examining the nature of their dreams. A suitable candidate was said to dream of the moon deity who would be holding in her hands a bow and a burden strap. She would ask the youth to chose between them. If the youth chose the female symbol, the burden strap, then that child was to be a girl; if the child chose a bow, that child was to be a boy. The youth who chose the burden strap would then find that a passing elder woman would stop and call out "Welcome daughter." After this she would begin instructions in the mysteries of the Moon. Such a youth was henceforth seen as female and called a mesoga, "instructed by the moon." N43
The Navaho Indians had a custom by which a youth who needed to change gender role was put at puberty into the centre of a sacred fire circle and given the choice between a spear and a digging stick. The youth would henceforth have the gender symbolised by the chosen tool. If the digging stick were chosen by a child brought up as a boy, she would now be welcomed by the women, given female garb and name - and possibly trained as a shaman. They were known as nadles and thought to have the wisdom of both genders. Their training was in healing mental and physical illnesses and aiding in childbirth through the use of magical songs. N62. They were also said to be capable of raising storms and of transforming themselves into animals, plants and stones.
Both ancient Greek and medieval Europe had their own ideas on how such transformations happened. These early scientific theories saw such children as naturally occurring. Plato in his book "Symposium" had Aristophanes say: "the male sprang from the sun and the female from the earth, while the gender of the one which was both male and female came from the moon, which partakes of the nature of both the Sun and Earth." Medieval Europe had another theory. Then many doctors thought the uterus had 7 cells: 3 cold cells for boys, 3 warm for girls and one for hermaphrodites. (Ben Stiles, "Med. Understanding of Women's Physiology" net.)
In my childhood, I had no such knowledgeable elders around me and so was only able to transform myself into the equivalent of a boy. I can remember very little of whatever happened in my first three years between 1942 and 1945. Perhaps this was due to my brain censoring out the horror I experienced while living in heavily bombed towns. But in 1945 I said I wanted to become my childhood world's poor equivalent of a shaman, a Christian priest dressed in fine long skirts.
... I looked at a priest dressed splendidly in long skirts in the sanctuary of a church and said: "I want to be like him." She immediately knew, with the inbuilt Geiger sense of the devout Irish, that I had a vocation to the Catholic priesthood (the possibility that I might like to dress up like that man did not apparently occur to her). She later told me that she had wanted as a youth to become a priest - but could not as she was female. If the Roman Catholic hierarchy had permitted it, she would have made a fine priestess within that church and my life would have been highly different, if it had occurred at all.
...It was in this redbrick house where I played a game when I was very little in which I first tentatively explored my sexual feelings. I huddled with the next-door girl behind a redbrick wall in the front porch and secretly swopped clothes. I split her dress struggling to get it over my head. She never told on me - and I wanted to never stop playing this game.
Nowadays, my childhood seems to me a dream of a previous incarnation or perhaps a caterpillar existence. Looking back with the eyes of a woman, after spending most of my adult life as a woman, how else can I see my experience of "boyhood"?
Although adult males never suspected me of being an "undercover" infiltrator, when I started at St. Francis, the Catholic primary school, young males were not so blinded by expectations. As soon as I arrived in their playground some juvenile gender police ambushed me, said I was a girl and tried to purge me violently from their midst
I don't know how I betrayed myself. Perhaps it was because I lacked male instincts and my body language betrayed me. Whatever it was, the teasing boys had clearly learnt a set of rules of which I was ignorant. The gender police were the more violent on the playground. Their leaders were the highest in aggression. I had no wish to compete but soon a battlefield leader approached to demand that I took part in their wars or else depart from their gender-tribe to the separate girls' playground.
He confronted me by the school door where I was waiting for the bell to ring so I might escape his aggressive realm. "You goin'fight me. You yellow or somethin'?" Of course I did not want to fight. I knew it would be a massacre...
"No", I replied pragmatically. "Y'll beat me up."
Frustrated the bully said. "Yer fight me - or - or - yer let me punch yer"
"All right." I replied - quickly calculating that a single punch delivered cold would not hurt me as much as a full scale battle. He pulled back his fist. Quizzed me once "You sure?" and when I nodded , I received just one surprised and lukewarm punch before the school bell rang and I escaped inside. My Mother later told me she approved of this as a wise survival strategy. My Father's reactions to my un-macho behaviour I do not remember - but I do not remember him as aggressive either..
From then on I was teased mercilessly at school. The boys cruelly (and I now know accurately called me "Patricia" instead of Pat, leaving me flummoxed, angry and confused. I protested loudly at their attempt to gender change me - while looking longingly over the wall that divided us from the girls with whom I wanted to play. It seemed every bit as cruel a divide for me as that which later divided Berlin.
... But at that time I was puzzled why this boy in a scruffy fight-torn jacket should taunt me by changing my name into a female form. I felt compelled to deny the truth of his assertion in order to protect my social standing - and my sanity. I had learnt that if one had a penis, one was a boy. I then thought my inner voice telling me this was wrong was a minor form of insanity. As for going to play with the girls. I would have loved to be able to do so. At home during my primary school days my playmate was the girl next door. We played much more interesting games than those I saw played in the boys' playground.
......There is naturally anger in me at being ostracised, marginalised - not simply recognised as different. I would have loved it if boys had not been so aggressive towards me and not typed me as a weakling. I would have loved it if I could have explored my strange girlish feelings without fear of being taunted. The phantom that has haunted me ever since is the fear of being rejected. In my childhood I was rejected for Irishness, for being of a different religion, for girlishness, for asthma, for religiousness. This was the demon that my lioness has to conquer in my short story (page.). This is the demon that I am attacking by writing this book in the hope that it will vanish in daylight.
... Then these white coated men decided I had asthma because I was mentally hyperactive (I think this meant "thinking too much"), and this, my parents were told, had to be stopped. It was true I spoke too fast. I had not learnt how slowly people heard. So my brain was put under suspension orders. I was doped with phenobarbitone - a drug more suitable for epileptics if for anyone at all. For two or more key years I could not learn to read or write. Haze enveloped my life.
But thank God parental ambition impeded these fiendish white coats. My Mother's ambition was fine-tuned by her memory of how I had said at three that I wanted to be in the priesthood. Anyhow, I soon really did want to be one of this spiritual elite. Catholic priests were for me androgynous beings of high prestige. Best of all, my parents highly approved.
... In my first years I did not put up my nose at maledom. I did not run wild as a young boy who disdained girls and then later decides I was bored and wanted a change. I accepted at my conscious level that I was a boy as my world told me. I believed that my secret inner being was a fantasy to which I was mysteriously addicted.
I had escaped from female conditioning but male conditioning did affect me. Looking back, I think it made me more centred on fulfilment through work than through relationships and more insensitive socially. I remember with shame sometimes being more concerned to teach others lessons rather than to understand them. Emotions were to be controlled. I was not to cry in public. I had to be tougher towards myself. War also entered my fantasies. I dreamt of commanding artillery and other weapons and putting to a quick end enemies that threatened our land. I learnt men fight to protect the weak. The supposed heroism of war justified my dreaming of violence. Bitter experience had taught me that to be feminine in public was to be considered weak and soppy and to be derided - so it was a wonder that my wish to become a girl survived.
As a child I dreamed with pleasure of fighting evil. I would snuggle myself into the dugouts and old machine gun nests overlooking the English Channel, and dream of how I defeated the evil ones. I would explore the Martello Towers built against Napoleon, one of which stood across the road from my home at 9 White Cliff Way in Folkestone. I played in the ruins of a Roman mansion a hundred yards from my home, as well as in the ramparts of a prehistoric hill fort. Later, when I sought to cross the gender divide, I felt sheepish about admitting these fantasies to the psychologist who had to assess my suitability for treatment since I had believed for years that girls don't have such warlike fantasies.
On the way to school in our black jackets and mandatory caps crowned with a red star, we were abused as "grammar bugs", as members of a selected elite school, by other children, who went to "secondary modern" schools after failing the entrance "eleven plus" exam. This teasing made me walk faster. My school had been founded by William Harvey who had discovered, so we were told, that blood went round in circles within our bodies. Our school song did not celebrate this. Rather it picked some obscure relative of his whom stopped French blood circulating at Trafalgar. The names of French ship after French ship, victims to his iron balls, resounded from our lips as we "sung of the name and the fame of our time honoured school" on prize giving days at Leas Cliff Hall in sight of the cliffs of France, a very British roar of defiance made in total disregard to the many French tourists in our town, part of the love-hate relationship between these two sibling races.
Despite my secret wish to fight ogres, I still felt myself imprisoned among boys. I wanted female mates. My parents saw this wish as originating from my pubescent hormones. They gently (but very persuasively) told me I had either the choice of female company or of membership of the highest spiritual elite. Since I wanted to please my parents and had no phallic sexual drive, I gave up the opportunity to go to school dances and to mix with girls. My own secret desire to be a girl was further buried in a corner of my mind.
...So what of my own sexuality? How did I deal with puberty? In my male body, would not a flood of testosterone overwhelm my hesitations? No, this did not happen. I was excluded from this flood perhaps by some hormonal element, physically mature but unawakened sexually, a Peter Pan preserved in pre-puberty until I was nearly 30 years of age. Masturbation remained a totally foreign concept to me. However I was not so entirely neutered that my penis could not occasionally embarrass me by getting up to unordered manoeuvres, an unruly younger brother that I had boringly had to look after.
As my classmates moved through puberty I found myself increasingly the alien. After gym classes many of the lads would go into the communal shower. I never did. I did not want to display my body. I felt very shy about it. It was not that I had any hatred or disgust for it. I felt it was a reasonable piece of creation, all right in its own way. But it did not seem true. I did not see my face in it. I was consequently as shy with boys as if my body was a girl's.
To my classmates it must have seemed that I was an innocent walking abroad. But there was no virtue in this. I was simply a mismatch - a girl not able to relate to boys as a girl, not treated as a girl, disinterested in being a boy among boys.
...
My mother also passed onto me the knowledge of spirits, of a multitude of angels who looked after us as part of the providence of the Creator. They were constantly with us and she gave them credit for many happenings - such as preventing clothes from falling off the clothesline into the mud. In the older traditions of these islands other spirit names were given to similar guardian beings. In Donegal, part of my ancestral home, fairies were a small race of people, said by some to descend from early settlers that were displaced by a taller race. For many they were also the spirits that cared for every place,
We were taught to respect the angels and dread devils. I was told that priests had the power of throwing out devils. But for me angels and devils were of no great importance. From what my parish priest explained to me, it seemed angels were a bleached and faded effigy of spiritual power and devils were angels past their use-by date. Today I understand they represent an ancient world-view that surrounds the Creating Energy with a host of spiritual beings. This is still a very prevalent belief at least in North America. (A 1998 survey reported that 69% of Americans believed in angels with two thirds of these believing in personal guardian angels. Independent on Sunday 13/12/98).
Reading gave me other safer worlds. Jane Austin helped provide a playground for my fantasies. I buried myself in her books, set my mind with Emma and other heroines against saturnine giants. All Jane's romances I devoured. Many I read several times. Men were exciting to me in fantasy. But when not dreaming, I did not see men in any way as sexually attractive. (Later I was to find them attractive but that was only when I could experience them as a woman). This did not stop me from eventually acquiring a few male friends. Around 15 years of age I made three good male friends, gentle boys I loved to be with, Bernard, Graham, Andrew. No hint of sexuality came explicitly into these relationships.
As for my secret craving to live as a girl. I pondered this in church. Prayed half heartedly for it to go. It would not. Eventually I rationalised this seemingly indestructible fantasy as something sent by God to keep me humble. I imagined it similar to the unnamed secret the Apostle St. Paul confessed he had which to kept him humble. I could not get rid of my deeply secret craving. It made me strangely happy to imagine myself a girl. But I told no friends.
One day lying in the back garden, on the sunken lawn I had helped my Dad make, I had a sudden totally unexpected thrill of self recognition when I read in a magazine about a Christine Jorgenson in Denmark who had leapt the wall to her long dreamed gender as surgeons re-adjusted her body, freeing her from maledom and making her the woman she felt herself to be. As I read about her, lying on the grass, I remember kicking my legs with a whoop of pleasure. She was one of the first women to be so midwived by surgery. I knew then that the West had invented a technological way of achieving what I later learnt other societies did by ceremony and perhaps herbal preparations. The western way was more technically perfect perhaps, but non-western ways bestowed a far fuller social acceptance and appreciation.
.. An outsider at school, sexually neutered by my gender confusion, the only Catholic in the class and highly teased, I found my private road. I spent hours in meditation, learning from the experiences of Christian mystics. Again a traditional path for the transgendered but I did not know it then. In my mediations I married this God for in this fantasy I could be the bride. I was thus happy with a male God. Only with this God could I be female. No one else knew me. I felt a bond of love that joined us.
This is the secret love that I still treasure, that kept me sane and was as real as the hands with which I type. It was of a person I call my Lover, the person who created me. This person has always been for me beyond names. I know different religions give this person different names. This does not matter. My knowledge of this person also had little to do with the dry ascetic teachings of parish priests. They taught me a black robed love, to love God humbly on my knees while doing penance for my sins. But something I inherited, perhaps my Irish blood, kept me from such sobriety. I could not conceive that this was a God that I should fear.
... It might it might have been easier if I had been born into the Incas, Navaho or Siberian tribes. I could have been open. My parents would have noted with pride and awe that they had been given a special child. They would bring me up with love as a daughter and before puberty give me to the community Shaman for instruction. I could have become a community healer, religious teacher - without suffering nearly as much from the fear and reality of rejection
But by chance, or was it chance, my parents in helping me proceed towards the priesthood, had put me on the same path as perhaps my ancestors would have put me. My instinctual childhood belief that I was married to the Deity was part of this old way. The marriage of a Chukchi shaman in Siberia was seen by the community as a reflection of the divine marriage existing between the shaman and a deity of spirit - and thus a particularly wonderful one for any partner. The shaman also practised "en theos", working with the God within, the old meaning of the word "enthusiasm." They practised using altered states of consciousness or trance in meditation to unite themselves with divinity - this union being the original meaning of the word "ecstasy". Their experience of life in both gender roles meant that they especially symbolised for their community the Supreme Deity who was both male and female.
As a child I talked of a male God. Today I prefer to speak of a female - but this is only because a language that has only male and female singular personal pronouns limits me. For me the divine energy encompasses both genders. I also spoke as I had been taught of one God meaning intellectually the ineffable God of the Philosophers that helped shape our monotheism. My experience was of a much more personal God. It was only later that I understood that people have named as Gods or Goddesses many different and personal manifestations of this primal energy - but more about this later.
In many pre-Christian religions the Deity was depicted as encompassing both genders and shown as an hermaphrodite. Their myths were metaphors for these deeper "mysteries". The Goddess Cybele, whose temple was where the Vatican now stands, was in some of the older stories about her described as hermaphrodite....
... The oldest carved image of a person yet found in the British Isles is that of a hermaphrodite with female breasts and with penis - as once was I. Today, with the eyes of a crone, with my hair turning grey, I see my transexuality as a very real and wonderful blessing that has helped me to find some understanding of my people's ancient way.
In the societies that depicted the Deity as having both genders, having sex with one of us who worked as a priestess in a temple or sacred place was seen as a very special sacred joining with a person magically akin to the transgendered Deity. In what might be the earliest known literature, a hymn written by the priestess Enheduanna who served the Goddess Innana in Sumeria about 5000 years ago, we are told that part of her work as a priestess included both appointing homosexuals as musicians and changing men into women:
"I erected a temple;
Where I inaugurated important events:
I set up an unshakeable throne.
I gave out dagger and sword to...(? missing)
I gave tambourine and drum to homosexuals,
I changed men into women."
I do not however see myself as a male who became a woman. My instinct, my life experience, tells me that my spirit and brain were always female. Others may be androgynous. I was born with a female spirit who informed and shaped me.
One ancient and once much respected title for such people as myself was that of hermaphrodite - meaning a person born with the physical aspects of both genders. I believe that all transsexuals and wrongly assigned intersexed people are effectively hermaphrodites since they fulfil the above definition by having brains differently gendered to their reproductive organs.
....
There are several aspects to this story. One is that humans are not complete until they consciously unite in themselves both their male and female aspects. Another is that men have to yield themselves to their female side to achieve this. Another is that the magic and trickery of women is seen as dangerous to men. The Jewish gnostic mystics expressed the first of these thus:
We need the myths and legends that have been stolen from us. We need stories about transgendered heroes and heroines, spirits or divinities, that we can tell our children so they grow up with a richer understanding of the whole tapestry of human gender and sexuality. We need to make a start at reforming our mythic realities to suit a renewed world where women, gays and the transgendered have their proper place without a shadowing of fear.
I believe we will soon have again our sacred ceremonies to celebrate re-assigning gender roles as was the custom among many ancient indigenous cultures including those of the American Indian, Dyak and Siberian tribesmen. It was not a doctor or a surgeon who later made me a woman. I knew myself as female before I went to them. I could have celebrated my self-knowledge. I could have been reinforced in this by the community conducting a confirming and empowering ritual. But I was born into an impoverished twentieth century Western culture. It had no such ceremonies, no councils of elders skilled at recognising those that should change, no way of effecting such a change publicly and respectably. My parents and I were alone with no one to advise us. My girl nature went unrecognised. I had an enormous amount to learn before I could stand against my society and become myself.
Extracts taken from the First Chapter