Something happened recently in the Pagan community that I initially dismissed as drama. I’ve seen enough of it over the years — the fallouts, the callouts, the online pile-ons — to recognise the shape of it, and my first instinct was to roll my eyes and scroll past.
But I kept coming back to it. And the more I sat with it, the more I thought: this isn’t actually drama. This is something we need to talk about.
I want to be clear about what I know and don’t know. I don’t know the people involved. I don’t have insider knowledge of what happened or why. My understanding comes from what I’ve gathered online, which means it’s partial and may be wrong in its details. I’m not interested in relitigating the specifics, or in naming anyone, because I don’t think the specifics are really the point.
Here is roughly what I understand happened. A presenter at a Pagan festival declined an invitation to return the following year because one of the featured speakers has a public record of making harmful comments about transgender people. She wrote about her reasons in a careful, personal blog post. It was not a callout or a demand, just an explanation of where she stood and why. A second writer situated the incident within a broader critique of how the Pagan community handles bigotry. The festival quietly removed the speaker from the lineup with no public explanation. Supporters of the removed speaker pushed back online, framing the whole thing as cancel culture and attacking those who raised concerns as troublemakers with political agendas.
Nobody is entirely satisfied. The speaker is gone, but nothing has been said, learned, or resolved. The people who raised concerns have been attacked. The community is divided, largely along the same lines as the broader culture.
My first reaction, as I said, was to dismiss it. My second reaction, sitting with it longer, was something more like: we need to do better than this. And my third is that we probably won’t do better until we understand what’s actually going on beneath the surface of these situations.
That’s what I want to explore here.
Welcome and belonging
I’ve been thinking about the difference between welcome and belonging.
Welcome is something you offer. It’s the open door, the stated intention, the paragraph on the website that says everyone is valued here. It’s not nothing; the open door matters. But welcome is something the host controls. Belonging is different. Belonging is what the guest feels, or doesn’t. It has to be cultivated, not just declared. You can’t write it into existence with a policy statement and consider the job done.
I’ve been watching the Pagan community confuse these two things for a long time. And lately I’ve been wondering how much of that confusion is wilful, and how much is simply the very human tendency to mistake good intentions for good outcomes. Most people aren’t cynically choosing optics over belonging. They genuinely believe the open door is enough.
The outsider experience
Paganism has never been mainstream. Most of us came to it because something about the mainstream didn’t fit — the theology, the body policing, the rigid categories, the refusal to make room. Many of us came specifically because we had already been told we didn’t belong somewhere else. That history of outsider identity is, for many people, inseparable from what their spirituality means to them.
Which is why it cuts in a particular way when the Pagan community reproduces the same failures it was an alternative to, when the people who once needed the open door pull it closed behind them, when a community that promised to make room turns out to have made room mainly for people who look, think, and love in familiar ways.
That gap between what a community promises and what it delivers comes down to the distinction between being present with someone and being present near them. The language of inclusion is easy. Genuine attention is harder.
The language of inclusion
Most Pagan communities I know have gotten quite good at the language of inclusion. Safe space statements, codes of conduct, carefully worded mission statements about diversity and welcome. These things have their place. But communities that lead with policy often use it as a substitute for the harder relational work of actually asking: who feels held here, and who doesn’t? Really asking, and being willing to hear the answer.
When someone says, “I don’t feel safe here,” that tends to be treated as a problem to be managed. Is the claim valid? Is it proportionate? What are the implications for the program, the lineup, the reputation? The person’s experience gets evaluated before it gets received. And something is lost in that sequence that is very hard to recover.
The feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes about this dynamic in her work on the “feminist killjoy.” When a community is organised around a certain kind of harmony — a shared sense that things are basically fine — the person who names a problem disrupts that harmony. And because the disruption is visible and the original problem often isn’t, at least not to those who aren’t experiencing it, the person who spoke ends up positioned as the source of the trouble. You didn’t create the unhappiness. You just made it impossible to ignore. But from inside a comfortable arrangement, those two things can look the same.
This is what happened in the situation I described at the start of this piece. The person who raised a concern didn’t create the tension. The tension was already there. She just made it visible. And then she was called an attention seeker with a political agenda.
Feelings are primary data. They are not the only data, but they are the first data. A report from inside a body and a life is not a rhetorical move. It is information about what is actually happening, rather than what we intended to happen or hoped was happening. Communities that can’t receive that information without immediately defending themselves against it tend to keep producing the same situations, with different names, because they never actually learn anything from them.
The paradox of tolerance
There’s a version of inclusion that is a way of avoiding hard decisions.
If everyone is welcome, if all viewpoints are valid, if we don’t endorse any particular perspective by platforming it, then nobody has to sit with the discomfort of drawing a line. The tent stays big. The numbers stay up. And the people who don’t feel safe quietly stop coming, and their absence gets read as the absence of a problem.
I understand the appeal. Lines are hard to draw, and communities have been damaged by people drawing them too quickly, too harshly, without care for complexity or history or the genuine difficulty of changing one’s mind.
But there’s a paradox at the heart of radical inclusion that doesn’t go away just because we’d prefer it to. It’s not a new idea — the philosopher Karl Popper named it decades ago — but it keeps proving itself true in practice. A community that tolerates everything, including active harm toward some of its members, is not actually a community for those members. It has made a choice about whose comfort matters more. Calling that choice neutrality doesn’t make it neutral.
And when the people being harmed are already a minority, already vulnerable, already accustomed to being told that their discomfort is less important than other people’s convenience, the message sent by institutional neutrality is not subtle. It doesn’t read as ‘we hold space for many views.’ It reads as ‘your safety is less important than our programming.’ That’s what gets lost when we frame these situations as being about free speech or intellectual diversity. Safety isn’t theoretical. It is felt, or not felt, in a body, in a room, in a community that was supposed to be yours.
The anxiety underneath
I came of age during third-wave feminism, which built on what came before it. Second-wave feminism, which peaked in the 1960s and 70s, focused on legal equality, reproductive rights, and naming the structural conditions of women’s oppression. Third-wave feminism emerged in the 1990s in response to the limitations of second-wave feminism, asking who had been left out and beginning to build a more intersectional politics that recognised gender doesn’t operate in isolation from race, class, sexuality, and disability. I carry both of those histories. The identity of ‘woman’ means something to me personally and politically. It’s not an abstract category. It’s a history, a set of experiences, a way of moving through the world.
So when women of an older generation feel threatened by the expansion of that category, I’m not observing from the outside. I get it. Second-wave feminists fought to be seen in a world that rendered them invisible under “mankind.” They built a politics out of shared, embodied experience — the body surveillance, the sexual threat, being diminished and dismissed from an early age. The fear of becoming invisible again, of having hard-won language dissolved, is real.
But the answer to that fear is to expand, not to reduce. Paganism understands this instinctively in other domains. We reject binary thinking, the hard line between good and evil, light and dark, self and other. We understand that the world is more complex than win or lose. That same instinct needs to apply here. Making room for trans women does not erase the experiences of ciswomen. It asks us to hold more than one truth at once. That’s not a threat to feminism. It’s feminism doing what it has always done at its best — expanding the circle of who gets to matter.
The view that womanhood requires a particular combination of biology and socialisation that trans women can’t claim ignores that trans women have their own experiences of gendered harm and vulnerability, including the harm caused by being told their identity is incomplete or inauthentic. Holding both of those realities doesn’t require one to cancel the other out. But the response that draws a line, that says the category must be protected by excluding people whose experience doesn’t fully match a particular template, speaks about trans women rather than with them. It decides, from the outside, what their experience is worth and whether it qualifies. And it frames two groups as being in competition when they don’t have to be.
Understanding how someone arrived at a view is not the same as the view being less harmful. And continuing to hold and amplify it, years later, is a choice.
The fractures
This brings me to the broader fractures running through Pagan communities right now, which mirror the fractures everywhere else.
It’s possible to hold a spirituality rooted in the sacred worth of every body, in reverence for the living world, and in welcome for those the mainstream has cast out, and also hold political positions that actively work against those things. To vote for policies that strip protections from the land you call sacred. To defend the right of someone to deny the humanity of people sitting in your own circle. This isn’t always hypocrisy in the conscious sense. People compartmentalise. They prioritise one value and bracket another. They’re embedded in information environments that make certain contradictions invisible. The logic holds together from the inside even when it doesn’t from the outside. Someone might genuinely love the earth and also believe, because they’ve been told repeatedly and convincingly, that the policies harming it are actually protecting something else they also love — jobs, sovereignty, a way of life. Someone might genuinely care about the people in their circle and also have absorbed, so gradually they didn’t notice it happening, a framework that places certain people outside the category of those deserving full protection. We are all, to varying degrees, shaped by the narratives we’ve grown up inside, and by what those narratives have taught us to fear, to dismiss, or to take for granted. That doesn’t absolve anyone. But it does suggest that argument alone rarely shifts anything, because the contradiction isn’t what’s holding the position in place.
What is holding it in place is a feeling. For some people, it’s fear — economic anxiety, a sense that something is being lost, that the ground is shifting faster than they can find their footing. For others, it’s something closer to exhaustion: the weight of being asked to care about everything, all at once, in a world that keeps expanding the list of what demands our attention. And for others still, it’s a single issue that matters so much it crowds everything else out — a policy position, a personal experience, a conviction that overrides the broader picture. You can’t think your way out of something you didn’t think your way into.
And yet we still have to live together. How do we remain in community with people whose choices cause harm to others we love? I don’t have an answer to that. But I think it starts with understanding what’s actually holding the positions in place, which isn’t argument or logic, but feeling.
The gap isn’t primarily intellectual. It’s a gap in whose reality we’re able to feel. People who have never had their dignity openly questioned tend to experience debates about dignity as abstract. People who have can’t experience them as anything other than concrete. No amount of good reasoning bridges that asymmetry on its own.
What might bridge it is proximity — the experience of being in a room with someone whose life you have encountered only as a position. This is one of the things genuine community is for, not the management of difference, but the slow, uncomfortable work of making difference real to each other.
Which is why it matters so much who gets to be in the room.
Doing the work
Sometimes removing someone from a lineup is the right outcome. If a community determines that a speaker’s views cause active harm to its members, then not platforming them is a legitimate and sometimes necessary response.
The problem is when removal becomes a substitute for process, when the community gets the result without doing the work. When someone is quietly disinvited with no conversation, no acknowledgment of the actual issue, and no attempt to think it through together, the tension resolves without anything being learned. The same dynamics surface again later, wearing different clothes, because the community never developed any new capacity. It just got rid of the immediate irritant. And the person whose concern prompted the whole thing is left wondering whether anything actually changed, or whether they just made themselves a target for nothing.
Consequences without reflection are just conflict management, and conflict management is not the same as growth.
I want to be fair here. Most Pagan festivals run on very little money and a great deal of volunteer goodwill. Event organisers are not social media archaeologists. A speaker might have said something harmful years ago, been called out quietly at the time, and left no obvious trail. No vetting process, however careful, will catch everything. Even with the best intentions, things will be missed. That’s not a reason to stop trying. It’s a reason to invest in how you respond when something does surface because that’s where the real test of a community’s values lies.
What might a genuine process look like? It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Someone designated to receive concerns and take them seriously. A conversation rather than a deflection. A decision communicated with at least some transparency, even if the details remain private. And perhaps most importantly, a willingness to sit with the discomfort of the situation rather than manage it away as quickly as possible.
What would it look like for a Pagan community to actually grapple with something hard? To say not just “we have addressed the situation” but “we have been sitting with a question about our own values, and here is what we’ve found, and here is what we’re still uncertain about”? That kind of transparency feels almost unimaginable right now, when everything is subject to immediate public scrutiny and any admission of uncertainty gets weaponised. But I think it’s what genuine community requires.
The work is ongoing
I don’t have a clean ending for any of this. I’m in the middle of it, trying to hold real respect for people who built things that mattered and real concern for people who don’t feel safe in the spaces those people built. Trying to resist both the quick condemnation and the easy absolution.
And I notice that my instinct, even now, is to tidy it up. I want to arrive at a conclusion. But that instinct is exactly what this piece has been arguing against. The work isn’t in the conclusion. It’s in staying with the question.
I started by dismissing this as drama. I’m ending with the recognition that drama could be what we call it when someone else’s pain is inconvenient for us. Magic and witchcraft are arts and sciences of creation — practices that require real skill, real care, and real responsibility for what you bring into being. We know this. Words have power. What you make, you are accountable for. That applies to communities as much as it applies to anything else we craft. We keep creating the community every time we decide who gets to be in the room and who doesn’t, every time we respond to a concern or deflect one.
Absolutely amazing analysis—thoughtful, educated, and just the right amount of insistent. Thank you!