Day Fifteen
Prompt: What has been your experience with the magical community thus far? What was good about it, and what was bad?
I'm not gonna lie, my impression of the witchcraft community is largely pretty negative. My biggest issues have been the way you can't correct misinformation without people getting incredibly defensive like you're saying they are personally an evil person for believing it, the racism, the transphobia and just...New Age stuff kinda pisses me off and it's everyyyywhere in witchcraft spaces (for reasons I understand, but resent).
It's also impossible to criticize Gerald Gardner for being a literal colonizer and imperialist without Wiccans getting incredibly upset about it like you just called them colonizers and imperialists.
Obviously, the racism and transphobia are the most pressing issues here. The way some people treat my partner (Asian American) is actually just absurd. The way Indigenous traditions are treated is like everybody thinks they're all dead. The transphobia thing has just been pretty deeply rooted in witch and pagan spaces for decades because of the Goddess movement and Dianic Wicca. There's a lot of "magick comes from the power of your feminine female womyn womb" type shit going on and it's all very bioessentialist. I might talk about these issues on their own, I'm kind of going over them quickly for the sake of just answering the question.
I guess sometimes it's nice to talk to people who understand you and your religious/spiritual practices, but honestly, there is just not a good witchcraft community online anymore. The one on Twitter was fine for a bit, but...people just don't talk to each other anymore. Social media is somehow popular and used by everybody, but also entirely dead. People are just looking at posts and shouting into the void and people are only responding if they absolutely hate your guts. It's not a witchcraft community issue in this case, it's just a social media issue.