This essay talks about a recent blog post by John Michael Greer that is intensely and irredeemably transphobic. Although I don't talk much about exactly what he wrote, a warning that I summarize some of it, and extreme trigger warning for any trans person who decides to read the blog post, which I will not be linking to.
Yesterday I started writing a point by point response to John Michael Greer's essay "After The Shouting, The Silence." I got probably about halfway through the transmisogynistic diatribe before, exhausted, I realized it was actually quite useless for me to do that.
Because it's not a good faith argument. He doesn't even do a good job of pretending it is... the whole thing starts with a couple paragraphs implying that the problem is merely that "the left" is too harsh on people who aren't "the left" enough before launching into paragraph upon paragraph of extreme transphobia, particularly transmisogyny. So he's set it up in order to proclaim that people on the left are rage junkies, probably specifically to weaponize against trans people (and particularly trans women) who criticize him.
Believe me, though: If you feel rage toward him for writing this? You are in your right. Because it's a piece that's worth rage.
If you don't want to read the article--and I do not blame you--Greer presents a menagerie of different arguments pulled right from transmisogynistic feminist playbooks, including a refusal to call trans women "women" (he uses terminology like "somebody with a penis and testicles who identifies as a woman"), referencing "the cotton ceiling" (a wildly misunderstood concept that transmisogynistic feminists have used to claim trans women are trying to force cis lesbians to have sex with them), a bunch of inaccurate garbage about transgender athletics (he should have probably Googled "transgender athletics" instead of "cotton ceiling"), and eventually goes entirely off the rails suggesting that Trump could suddenly declare himself a woman and how would we like it then? Huh? And yes, he includes an obligatory "Trump in makeup" photoshop.
It is vile. And then something else happened... I started wondering "should I have suspected this?" I felt guilty. "Have there been other trans people who followed this blog and had it thrust on them, too, because I recommended Green Wizardry to them at some point and it resonated with them like it did me?" I started thinking of various things that should have tipped me off when I first learned about him at a PSG workshop a few years ago before realizing that I was blaming myself for having liked his work... in short, I was punishing myself for assuming somebody who writes about environmental issues would consider me and especially my trans woman friends human beings deserving of basic dignity rather than thought experiments to trash at will.
John Michael Greer apparently does not, and he enters the crate of Pagan oriented figures I can no longer recommend because, regardless of what "Aunt Becky" figures or "trans friends" they have in their lives, they clearly do not actually support them.
