The Spirituality of My Gender Awakening

I realized that I wasn't cis a week before my 31st birthday, which was exactly 6 months to the day I started writing this article. I now identify as an androgynous person, both male and female. On the most basic level, it is already difficult to carve out this narrative to make it comprehensible to people who have not gone through gender journeys. What makes describing my awakening and first phase of my transition even harder is how inextricably entwined it is with my personal religion and metaphysical experiences that have resulted from it.

The mainstream narrative of queerness in general is that you realize early that that you are different from most others. You like boys when you are a boy. Or from when you are small, you are being told you are a boy and categorized with "the other boys" when, in fact, you have an inner certainty that you are a girl. Being outside the gender binary means that my queerness was not provided with such straightforward understanding.  If you tell a child from birth, "there are boys and there are girls, and you are a girl." and that seems to match up enough, how is that kid supposed to realize that they could be more than that?

Although, I did look for myself when I was younger. I strongly remember at age 10 or 11 on the family computer reading about hijra, the culturally recognized third gender in Southeast Asia, on a CNN.com article. I searched for other examples of third genders in the world, but never discovered what I was looking for. Later on, I would content myself with getting the word "transsexual" blocked as a search term on my high school's computers from reading a trans woman's pink glittery blog when I was bored in typing class.

It took another trans woman as an adult to hatch my egg.

Starting in July 2023, Venus went retrograde for several months in Leo which is an incredibly important sign in my natal chart. I was nervously anticipating this retrograde because the last one in Leo 6 years prior had brought a dark night of the soul and spiritual awakening via limerence with a slightly older bisexual cisman I had met in my journalism work. This period completely overthrew my life, ultimately for the better but in the short term for the worse.

My transition is unfortunately made inherently challenging by a transphobic world, but in the shortest term, my awakening felt euphoric in a way I have been hunting for ever since. It was prompted by the first exercise in Ariana Serpentine's incredible Sacred Gender, in which she suggests:

"Describe your gender without using the words masculine or feminine."

It did not take me longer than a few moments to come up with an answer. "My gender is the smell of freshly ground cinnamon."

I loved it. My brain immediately toyed with it, spinning it over and over like a dreidel. My gender is the smell of freshly ground cinnamon. My gender is the smell of freshly ground cinnamon. My gender is...

Wait...

Am I a woman...?

~*~

Around the same time, the Barbie movie had just entered theaters. You might remember that in relation, suddenly everyone was talking about Inanna, the beloved ancient Mesopotamian goddess. There was this article about the Barbie movie that went around, comparing the plotline to Inanna's underworld myth. The Astrology Podcast put out an episode discussing Inanna's historical association with Venus and how the Venus retrograde cycle related to that same myth.

This was so annoying to me because it meant I wasn't special. About a half year previous to all this, my reader David told me that he had felt Inanna near me, coming from an ancestral line, and that I should look into working with her. Having had no interest in her previously, I was intrigued.

I already had an established ancestor veneration practice, so I started off by adding an Inanna woodcut statue and this phallic lion menorah from Target that had rightfully gone viral online. The lion is Inanna's animal (hence why Leo in Mesopotamian astrology was considered Venus' place of secret exaltation) and she is a very sexual goddess so it made a delightful amount of sense.

I then did some research, including obtaining Diane Wolkstein's beloved translations of Inanna prayers and myths. Through that translation as well as other sources, I learned of Inanna's bearded version, how her temple servants had been trans, and how she was inherently connected to trans people and the changing of genders.

After some trial and error where I did not feel I was getting anywhere connecting with Inanna directly, Ariana suggested that I work through my Mesopotamian ancestors since that was a pre-existing relationship. I then gave my ancestors Mediterranean food—including olives by their very insistent request, which later allowed me to learn from academic sources that they were likely from northern Mesopotamia, possibly Nippur—with explicit request that they share with the goddess.

Apparently, this was acceptable. There were months of build up to this where I thought I was going to get a new patron or something. Instead, there were multiple times throughout the beginning of my gender journey where I would feel myself spiritually slammed with masculinity. As in, a straight up force, like a warm pillar of strength, felt like it was coming from the sky and hitting me on the crown. I would feel compelled to widen my stance, speak gruffer, do something, anything to express feeling more like a man in those moments. It was a weird thing to experience in the middle of my work shift, which was within a very feminine environment.

I ended up anticipating Inanna months longer than I actually ended up working with her. This ended after Venus finally finished her retrograde cycle and left Leo. I asked my Mesopotamian ancestors if I was beholden to Inanna when considering working with another trans-related goddess.

Nah, you're done, they said.

"What."

Call on us again if you feel like it, but you probably won't need to.

"Okay??? I'm going to go back to worshipping Venus again, not that I really stopped."

Okay! Bye little trans grandkid, go work with your more recent ancestors.

And so that is what I have done, to some improvement with my living family.

Oh and outside of that a few months later, I accidentally fell into a cisman I know's body through our psychic connection. Feeling how he felt, I recognized that his body contained exactly the masculinity Inanna was shooting me with. And that's how your blogger came to terms with the fact that they had to pursue HRT, particularly microdosing, which was very conveniently and rapidly introduced to me by another genderqueer Jew very early on in my transition.

As I have indicated in my cosmology post, we all do things when it is Time and we are all on our own individual timelines. Mine was to get me to do everything as quickly as possible, evidently, and also as cool as possible. Maybe this doesn't clarify anything in terms of the genderqueer journey versus the binary journey because most people regardless of gender do not get to live my very weird, magical life. But everyone's gender journey is unique and I am so thrilled that this one is mine!