I was planning to write more this week about the Northern Goshawk, but I’ve been sidetracked once again by the patriarchally-minded Pagans, Witches this time, who no-platform feminists for disagreeing with them. I don’t even blog about this every time it happens, or they would effectively silence my voice by giving me nothing else to write about. But this week the entry in the no-platforming hall of shame is especially egregious: Max Dashu was disinvited from an event in San Francisco entitled “Modern Witches Confluence” per objections by trans activists.
As someone noted in a (still undeleted at the time of this writing) comment, there could be no such confluence without the scholarship of Max Dashu. Amidst many decades of concerted misinformation and specious attacks from the academy on the legacy of Witchcraft, Max has been a persistent voice on the side of truth, with meticulous research backing up her conclusions. She is the best scholarly resource Pagans have had since Robert Graves.
By parsing her work, those with “a shared vision of inclusion” (whatever that means) have revealed Max as having thought crimes, of not believing every part of the trans narrative. Not believing, in current Orwellian parlance, is “non-inclusive,” and the punishment for this heresy is…wait for it…non-inclusion.
Max’s book Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion 700-1100 can be purchased here. Here is my review of the book. You can also support her work with a donation here.