Glauca Demersus

It was kinda surprising too, because the worst racism came from the younger women in her family, namely her younger sister and her sister in law. I expected casual homophobia and transphobia and maybe some general conservative bullshit or like even like the more "polite" bigotry I've come to associate with religious types but not getting into an argument with my GF's sister about her claiming that "all black people smell like piss" in front of her mixed-race daughter.

I traveled to a small islet southeast of Rhodes. Once a temple center, it was almost entirely leveled, only a few scattered pillars remained. Between these pillars lay a flat stone slightly ajar of an opening, that had been covering a stairway to a crypt. I pulled aside the stone and descended into the crypt, an L shaped room, with a low vaulted ceiling constructed of dark stone blocks. It was already illuminated by a single oil lamp, which cast shadows that obscured all but the remains of a wooden altar, now decomposed past the point of recognizability, and the figure of another woman, dressed in a faded red cloak with a finely patterned golden trim.

She was turned to face something I could not see, blocked by the shadows cast by her lamp. She spoke, addressing me without moving her gaze, recognizing me by providence and our shared stations in life.

Her Coptic inflected voice was low and tired sounding, bearing with it a pain that I could not hope to temper, and she related to me the story of the now nameless god that was enshrined here.

Once this goddess had been generated by generations, the faith in her surviving countless conquesta and cultural change and countless and even the loss of her original name. She bequeathed fertile fields and rains to the lands that would become Caria and Lycia, and kind succor to those in their last moments. Even when she had been treated as a strange foreign serpent by the people that would later come to inhabit these lands, she persisted on in granting them grace, even when they forgot her rituals she accepted new ones, when they castigated her traditions she sought merely to reconcile them with ones these new inhabitants would find acceptable. She asked for little in sacrifice, satisfied to breathe even the leftover smoke of those other gods so long as she was still remembered in passing.

Both me and the woman in red had been drawn here, as we were ourselves oracles of different gods with a serpent nature. For myself, Hermes with his caduceus, while she was the last priestess of the Egyptian goddess once known as Wadjet, although she no longer knew even the name of her patron, referring to her only by the Greek Uto.

The forgotten god whose temple we stood in now was more obscure to us both, but we had heard her call, even so, and been brought here together. After she had told the story granted to her by vision, I related what I knew of this place , derived from history.

"This island once served as a place of worship for several gods, most recently that of Apollo. Perhaps those who built that temple believed this nameless god to be Python? It has been mostly abandoned for many years, but some years ago it seems that this island was bequeathed by an emperor to the bishop in Rhodes as a personal gift. The bishop leveled what remained of the temples and built a manor, only for that manor to be razed and the bishop killed during the Persian invasion. It seems her temple was spared this destruction only by being hidden underneath that which was once Apollo's."

The woman in red responded "Even the gods that once forsook others are forsaken themselves, what remains anywhere but ash?"

But while her words seemed despondent, her tone belied this with a tinge of hope, as she gestures to a small creature, in one small alcove of the crypt. Scarcely larger than a mouse, she resembled a small squat adder, but with a tale ending in the shape of a diamond and eyes that were the color of the sky. The goddess of this forgotten temple, somehow still holding on. It was at this moment I knew why we were both drawn here.

I mused that this might be the last serpent god with any devotees in the whole of creation, as even Jormungander to the far north had been made into naught but a demon.

The woman in red responded "Such a wicked betrayal has it been done to all serpents, to be cast as betrayers themselves by so many. But I suppose you would know betrayal better than anyone?"

At this point I had a flash of recollection, from one of my past oracular visions: the story of how once the Romans had tried to make their gods and those of my ancestors as one, how Hermes was forced to share a divine body with Mercury, and how he was trapped within himself by the Roman god, who would betray even his fellow Dei Consentes, when he came to earth and became the man named Jesus.

The language that Gill-Peterson and Amin use is obviously a pretty terrible way to talk about nonbinary identity among people who were CAMAB, after all wtf even is a "femme"?? its used so ambiguously and multifariously in academic queer theory that its basically useless, and tbh even in casual conversation with regards to feminine gay men or lesbians it honestly lacks much if any coherency. But acknowledging their linguistic faults isn't to pretend as if their is no problem with my own language, derived as it is from the collective discourse of tumblr/ social media transfeminists.

"Transfeminine" (and its derivative, transfem) as a term is inherently fraught, while its general definition lacks the overwhelming ambiguity of terms like "femme", and is useful in that regard, it nonetheless homogenizes nonbinary people, contextualizing their identity in terms of trans womanhood alone, and i think is ultimately kind of alienating for a lot of people (some people don't want to called "feminine" after all). Even a construction like "nonbinary transfeminine person" is when looking merely at the way that internal identity interacts with society is actually conflating at least four different kinds of gender identity together; people who are a comfortable being socially considered men, people who are comfortable being socially considered women, people who are comfortable being socially considered both/either, and people who are not comfortable being socially considered as either. And within each of these kinds of gender identity, exist spectra, one might be comfortable being considered a woman in some social contexts, but not others, for instance.

And this is itself still a simplification, because while social considerations are the easiest part of transness to theorize about from a sociological perspective, this shouldn't be taken as proof that they are the sole scriptura from which all other aspects of transness arise, for many people physical/medical transition is equally or more important than social considerations, and while treating transness as a medical condition is obviously a bad idea, treating the physiological aspects of transness as merely consequence of its social definition risks not only veering into "gender abolitionist" TERFy worldviews, but also making invisible those for whom the physical aspects of transition are their primary source of trans identity.

And to be fair to the people who first started using the word transfeminine to refer to all trans and nb people who were CAMAB, I think they were very aware of the vast differences among the people they were grouping under this term, and it was chosen not as a perfect solution but in light of the absence of one, a word that was "good enough", to refer to a broad collection of people who still share certain societal experiences and tend to be shoved into the same social categories regardless of personal identity, that could be specific enough to have a relatively formal definition but still naturally constructed enough such that it could be readily understood via inference. But its still frustrating that what is "good enough" or maybe even "good as can be reasonably expected, given the constraints" is still so obviously flawed as a term.

But what are the alternatives? The aforementioned Jules Gill-peterson, I believed coined the word transfeminized, and there are advantages to using this inflected form of the word. Being in the passive voice, it suggests to the reader/listener that this grouping was something done to people (by society) rather than the product of their own identity. And this is true, to a large extent, but like.... I dunnoo.... ...doesn't that kinda just seem like a copout to the problem? Sure you are conjugating the word differently, but inflections are easily undone, the actual word hasn't really changed, and i think its very easy to switch from transfeminized to transfeminine without really even meaning to. I can't help but think, from the perspective of one who has an issue with the word "transfeminine" isn't this just a bit of sophistry? Like adding a rhetorical epicycle to a model that still revolves around the trans woman as the center of its universe.

Honestly I'm not sure, I am, after all , a person quite comfortable being described as feminine, and while I recognize the problems with the term "transfeminine" I don't personally "experience those problems", so to speak. Maybe that inflectional derivation adds enough of a cushion that the term no longer stings the same way. But I have to wonder, if one concedes the definition of transfemininity to the passive voice, something that is done to people by society, doesn't this add a layer of ambiguity that the original adjective lacked? Some people that are "transfeminine" might not really perceive being transfeminized by society, nor be perceived by others as such. And while im generally of the belief that descriptive categories are necessary in this sort of discussion, of course some people that can reasonably be described as being transfeminized would see themselves as being cis men.

TMA falls into the same pitfalls, and for some reason using the terms TMA and TME seem to attract the most obnoxious kind of people to have these conversations with, in a way that is even more magnetic for bad faith arguers than almost every other term. It doesn't escape me that the reason these conversations become so difficult to have is in large part because of this history, wherein transfeminine (alas i still don't have a better word to use) transfeminists will coin terminology to refer to themselves or their experiences with all knowledge of the necessary imperfection of those terms (usually as a replacement for an earlier term they were critiqued over using), and are nonetheless interminably criticized for using those terms by bad faith arguers who are more interested in just erasing the possibility of us actually talking about our experiences than actually trying to arrive at a better solution for doing so.

This turns what is already a difficult discussion into a quagmire, and i think puts basically everyone who even tries to have these discussions in good faith on edge to the point where they retreat into reactionary defensiveness, wherein they forget the very real people that this terminology poorly serves actually exist and matter, and like idk i think transfeminine nonbinary people who aren't women get erased and ignored enough already it sucks that this dynamic ultimately contributes to that as well.

I guess the best solution would probably be if transfeminism had the cultural power to just invent a term largely a priori, like idk ""Leirurine" that has no obvious connection with current language used to describe gender, and then just get everyone to start using that term, or lacking that find some archaic reference to re-contextualize and re-use like maybe somethin from greek or like old english maybe... ...as if that would ever cause any problems right?