#avery edison

My book club, @libercoven​, read Becoming Dangerous back in July, but I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the essays in that anthology for a while. Luckily the first prompt for week two of @studyonderly​‘s quarantine reading challenge pushed me to do just that. 

Here is that prompt:

Week 2. A Room of One’s Own

Originally this prompt is about gender identity and women’s literature, but I’d like to expand it to include its literal words, along with other identities.

Any story that has to do with gender, or written by someone who identifies not as a cis man. Time to dig into the LGBT+ stories, gender theory, and queer/trans coded characters! Have you ever read a story about isolation or solitude? Literally or figuratively? Do you know a story that took place in a small, limited number of settings? 

With twenty-one essays in Becoming Dangerous, I didn’t want to revisit all of them for this prompt (besides not wanting this post to go one forever, I already wrote a response essay to “Unfuckable” by Cara Ellison, the first essay in the anthology), so I settled on “Before I was a Woman, I was a Witch” by Avery Edison.

Avery is a trans woman and in her essay, she talks about discovering who she was by way of looking at many of the things she realized she wasn’t (including a witch) and how she held onto piece of those things as she found a way to be confident with her identity both gender and simply as a person with interests and hobbies and a really great sense of humor (she’s a comedian). There is a lot of solitude in this piece even though we find out that what Avery was searching for was, in many ways social support from outside communities and herself. 

What I love about this piece is Avery’s honesty, not only the raw way that she approaches introducing us to the teenager who faced bullying, illness, and mental crisis while searching for who she was but also in her spiritual journey. It’s hard to admit that the things you explored weren’t for you or that you used them for appearance rather than spirituality, but she does that and goes on to share the ways that even as an atheist she understands spirituality and still has a personal practice. 

For this prompt, I originally created a Spotify playlist, but it overlapped too much and eventually ended up working better for the article I chose to read for the next prompt (stay tuned for my next post to see it!). Instead, I chose to do a collage of sorts with quotes from the essay. (A ‘/’ indicates the end of a quote fragment.)

Before I Was

I knew / you can only turn into “Bravery” / 

yet-another millennial told she has limitless potential. /

I was wrong. / Deprogramming my millennial illusions, / 

I’ve suffered; / I’ve tried to pretend. / All I needed was time, /

our local new age store, / and our past selves. /

A simple (and reductive) version, / I was never a real

witch, / but I’ve done extraordinary things in my life /

I saw this sequence and thought it was time to log off Twitter, that I had seen the day’s best post: Buddy, let me tell you bout MY family tree— Eduard Habsburg (@EduardHabsburg) April 24, 2024 Then, minutes later, this spectacular banger showed up: They fuck you up, your posting cladeYou may not know them, but they doThey fill you with bad posts they madeAnd write some new ones, just for…

This has me fucked up. Avery posted a truly mean spirited, incorrect, ignorant, and stupid hot take wherein she said that Barbie was a rich kid's toy. The internet informed her that the opposite was true, and now she's acting like the victim with her defendants saying it's not her fault she didn't know the price of Barbie bc she's trans and didn't play with them growing up.

That makes it worse. She ostensibly didn't have Barbies as a kid because she didn't ask for them. Barbies are £4-20 in the UK. She said she has "flashbacks," about kids in her class having Barbies, going on holiday, and having checking accounts and this hurting her. In reality, she most likely doesn't even have memories of these things because not only do these things have nothing in common, but because due to her own admittance by way of retweeting these weird comments about her transness having to do with it, she remained outside of the orbit in which Barbie would've affected her life insomuch as she didn't even want one.