Olivia Watts (1961–) police officer, naturopath, Wicca.

For 18 years Watts worked as a male police officer in Casey, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria.
In 1995 Watts retired from the police, started to transition as Olivia, and set up in business as a naturopath. She was also a practitioner of Wicca.

In 2003 Olivia ran, unsuccessfully, to be a councillor in Casey. After an exchange of opinions, a Christian Labor councillor Rob Wilson denounced Olivia as a witch, and as a Satanist. He called on Casey's church leaders to consider calling a day of prayer to hold back the occult forces. Olivia was physically assaulted, and her house and car vandalized. Her business collapsed.

"On August 16 a gentleman came to my door and asked me if I was the naturopath Cr Wilson was talking about. When I admitted I was, he grabbed me and started hitting me on the forehead saying he was driving the demons out of Casey. He just kept screaming 'Out you demon, out you demon'."

Olivia sued Cr Wilson before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). for vilification under the Victoria Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, 2001. At the trial Olivia became the first person anywhere in the world to give a legal Court Oath to the Goddess. In his submission Cr Wilson cited an evangelical Christian website called The Watchman and the Collins paperback dictionary: "Witchcraft: noun, the use of magic especially for evil purposes".

In a separate action, the Pagan Awareness Network, based in Sydney, brought a complaint against Wilson and the mayor. This was settled out of court with an apology and retraction by Wilson.

Olivia's case before the VCAT was heard in August 2004. Cr Wilson initially claimed that the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act was not breached in that, alone in Australia, witchcraft was still illegal in Victoria (this was section 13 of the Vagrancy Act 1966 which was repealed until 2005). However after the first day of hearings he agreed out-of-court to a retraction, and to financial terms which remain confidential.

More recently Olivia has suffered from MS, and became unable to work.

• Geoff Strong. “The councillor, the witch, and the tribunal”. The Age, 26 Dec 2003. www.theage.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/12/26/1072308681324.html.
  
• "Mayor does deal with Pagans – but must still face Witch Olivia". Pagan Awareness Network, 14^th May 2004. www.paganawareness.net.au/PAN/images/PDFs/caseyresultsmediarelease.pdf.
  
• Jamie Berry. "Tribunal hears claims of Satanic cult". The Age, August 13, 2004. www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/12/1092102595224.html.
  
• Jamie Berry. "Suburban mayor settles unholy row". The Age, August 14 2004. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/13/1092340469161.html.
  
• Patrick Goodenough. "Witch Sues Christians Under Controversial Hate Laws". CNSNews, July 7, 2008. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/witch-sues-christians-under-controversial-hate-laws.
  
• Patricia Della-Piana (ed). Witch Daze: a perenniel pagan calendar. Lulu.com, 2010: August 16.
  

PeaceNext

Raven Kaldera (?–) shaman

Kaldera has congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Kaldera was introduced to Wicca by a boyfriend at age 14, and wandered through various pagan and earth-centered traditions including Dianic and Umbanda.

Despite being masculine, Kaldera became a wife and the mother of a daughter, and was planning to be a science fiction writer and a folk musician, until a near-death experience while battling with lupus.

"During this drawn-out illness, I had a massive vision of the goddess who had been involved with me throughout my life.”

She revealed herself as Hela, the Norse goddess of death.

"She hung me up, tore me apart like a butchered animal and rebuilt me. When I came to, I was different. I lost some fears, I lost some memories, I lost some personality traits, and there were some new things. I’d always been able to sense ghosts but now could see them much more clearly. I’d always been able to vaguely sense the presence of gods and divine entities, but suddenly they were there, like an electric fence."

Hela told Kaldera to become a man, an option he had already been considering. He took testosterone and had chest surgery.

“It was a gamble, it was a leap in the dark, but it was absolutely wonderful. For me it was sacred shape-shifting. OK, socially it’s been very difficult, but y’know, it’s hard to be a minority. The irony was that I went through my second puberty at 30, around the same time my daughter went through normal puberty.”

Later the god Baphomet arrived and talked to Kaldera.

"The reason that he, or she, liked me is that he’s a hermaphroditic god. He can shift back and forth, but he’s always mixed. I’ve lent him my body. In Afro-Caribbean terms, I’m a ‘horse’, in that I will lend my body consensually to god-possession under certain circumstances or rituals. He makes sure, while he’s using my body, to leave me a lesson of some kind.”

Raven is a northern shaman, mainly working in the Norse tradition, devoted to gods from all three pantheons: Aesir, Vanir and Rokkr, but with some input from other traditions. He sees his tribe as those who are transgender/ third gender. He is also into polyamory and the spiritual aspects of BDSM:

“If you put BDSM into a spiritual context, it’s not a question of if something deep will come up; it’s a question of when".

He is the leader or king of the Neo-Pagan First Kingdom Church of Asphodel. His wife of 13 years is Bella, a trans women. They own and run Cauldron Farm, a pagan homestead in Hubbardston in rural Massachusetts, where they live with his daughter, who still calls him 'Mum'.

Much of what he has written is controversial and is rejected by other neo-pagan groups, particularly the emphasis on ordeal, the fact that he has a boyfriend-slave, and is into domination that features pain and violence. He has written 33 books.

• Raven Kaldera. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. Xlibris, 2001.
  
• Raven Kaldera. "Do It on the Dotted Line". In Joan Nestle, Clare Howell & Riki Wilchins (eds), GENDERqUEER: voices from beyond the sexual binary. Alyson Books, 2002.
• Helen Boyd.  "Five Questions With… Raven Kaldera".   en|Gender, October 12, 2005.  www.myhusbandbetty.com/2005/10/12/five-questions-with-raven-kaldera.
  
• Raven Kaldera. Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path. Hubbardston, Mass: Asphodel Press, 2006.
  
• Raven Kaldera. Five essays in Ruth Addams (ed). A Gift Of Maggots: A Devotional For Baphomet. Lulu, 2011.
  
• George Binning. "Meeting Raven Kaldera: George Binning meets Raven Kaldera, pagan shaman, herbalist, transgender god-slave and servant of Baphomet". Fortean Times, January 2012. www.forteantimes.com/features/fbi/6211/meeting_raven_kaldera.html.
  
• Jeffery Pritchett. "Raven Kaldera on the Norse Gods and Northern Tradition Shamanism". Examiner, October 17, 2012. www.examiner.com/article/raven-kaldera-on-the-norse-gods-and-northern-tradition-shamanism.
  
• "An Audience with Raven Kaldera". The Blog of Baphomet, October 21, 2013. http://theblogofbaphomet.com/2013/10/21/an-audience-with-raven-kaldera.
  

CauldronFarm   PaganBDSM   RavenKaldera   KingdomofAsphodel   NAFPS   RunatyrKindred    LGBTran    WorldCat    Amazon

Tadhg MacCrossan (1958 - ) druid.

Cross was raised in Calgary, New Orleans and then Dallas. Cross grew up to become a woman, Teresa Cross.

In her 20s Teresa was introduced to the "Irish Literary Renaissance" of the early twentieth century, and to Irish music. She was one of the members of the founding board of the Southwest Celtic Music Association in the early 1980s.

Cross became associated with Dianic Wiccans in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but, disappointed with Wicca, she was curious to learn about the beliefs of her Celtic ancestors. While studying English at the University of Texas in Dallas, she took courses in Linguistics, Mythology and Indo-European comparative mythology. She corresponded with Emmon Bodfish in the 1980s. She started using the Gaelic form of her name: Teresa NicanChrosain.

She was persuaded to write The Sacred Cauldron:Secrets of the Druids using the pen name of Tadhg MacCrossan (which was taken by several reviewers to be a male name). This was the first Celtic Reconstructionist book. It explained the Indo-European origins of Celtic pre-Christian religion. It was criticized for not conforming to the standard feminist pagan lines, and condemned as right wing without any consideration of Cross' actual politics.

She has exchanged ideas with Hindus and Germanicists. Teresa now lives in Fort Worth and is a student of the Vedic and Vedantic literature.

• Tadhg MacCrossan. The Sacred Cauldron: Secrets of the Druids. St. Paul, Minn: Llewellyn, 1991.  Review.
  
• Tadhg MacCrossan. The Truth About the Druids. St. Paul, MN.: Llewellyn Publications, 1993.
  
• Tadhg MacCrossan. "Neo-Druidism Since the 1700s". Llewellyn Encyclopedia, 16 Jan 2006. http://druuidiacto.forumculture.net/t50-le-neo-druidisme-par-tadhg-maccrossan.
  

AMAZON
___________________________________________________________

The biography in Amazon (quite likely submitted by MacCrossan herself) is evasive as to when she transitioned.  I assume that it must be before she joined Zsuzsanna Budapest’s Diana Wicca which rejects both men and known trans women.  (See also Ruth Barrett).

However several reviews and comments on Tadhg’s books are written as if the reviewer takes her to be male.

Ruth Rhiannan Barrett (1954–) priestess, folksinger.

Ruth Barrett was raised in Los Angeles by Reconstructionist Jewish parents. She read Robert Graves' The White Goddess while still at school, and later became a folk musician. She studied folklore at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1975-6, and joined a goddess spirituality group. 

In 1976 she met Zsuzsanna Budapest and was initiated into the Susan B. Anthony #1 Coven the next St Bridget's Day. She and her husband had a daughter the next year. She founded the feminist newspaper, Themis (later Thesmophoria). When Budapest moved to San Francisco, Barrett became the High priestess of the Susan B. Anthony #1 Coven, but later moved to the Moon Birch Coven. 

By 1985 she was lesbian, and divorced her husband. In 1988 she left Moon Birch and founded the Circle of Aradia, which became the first consecrated circle of the Reformed Congregation of the Goddess in 1993. In 1997 Ruth was honored for her contributions in the area of spirituality from the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. Ruth met her wife at an RCG conference and in 2000 they moved to Wisconsin, where they founded the Temple of Diana which continues the Dianic Wicca tradition articulated by Zsuzsanna Budapest. Ruth is still a singer and plays the dulcimer. 

The Dianic tradition is deviant within Wicca in rejecting trans women as members. As Ruth says in her description of the Dianic Traditions:

"Dianics support all people in finding their path to the Goddess. However, we do not recognize hormonally or surgically altered men as women, and therefore exclude these men, or men who self-define as women, from our tradition. Women's Mysteries cannot be understood nor experienced through chemical or surgical alterations to our human bodies(2008)."

• Ruth Rhiannan Barrett. Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries. Llewellyn Publications. 2007: 308.
• Ruth Rhiannan Barrett. "Dianic Tradition". Moondancer Drake. Feb 3, 2008. http://moondancerdrake.livejournal.com/31794.html.
• "Ruth Barrett". Religious Archives Network. www.lgbtran.org/Profile.aspx?ID=227.
• "Ruth Barrett". Temple of Diana. www.templeofdiana.org/ruth.htm.
• "Ruth Barrett". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Barrett. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

Barrett presumably named her paper, Thesmophoria, in that the ancient Greek festival was for women only, actually married women only.  However there is an extant play by Aristophanes called Thesmophoriazusae (= women celebrating the Thesmophoria) which is a play of gender reversals where men dress as women and the women appear to be the equal of men.  This makes Barrett’s position ironic at best.

There were demonstrations when Julie Bindel was honoured by Stonewall despite her transphobia.  Were there similar demonstrations at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1997?

Two of the comments on my article about Janice Raymond nominate Zsuzsanna Budapest as equally transphobic.  Budapest would appear to be one of those movement leaders who are careful about their public negativities and leave it to their followers to take the flak.  At least I cannot find any comments about trans women using the Amazon Look Inside feature on Budapest’s books.

The RCG has added International to its name, but all its circles seem to be in one country only.

Herman Slater (1935 - 1992) occult retailer.

Herman Slater was raised by Jewish parents in New York. He studied business administration at New York University, liberal arts at Hunter College, traffic management at the Traffic Management Institute in New York, and also at the US Navy Personnel School in Bainbridge, Maryland. From 1958-69 he worked in management, traffic control and insurance claims. 

In 1969 he was crippled with tuberculosis of the bone and in convalescence for three years. He experimented with psychic sciences and managed to levitate while wearing a 300 lb body cast. 

After hospital he joined a coven of Welsh Traditional Witches led by Ed Buczynski, who became his lover. They opened the Warlock Shop in Brooklyn Heights. The shop became a focal point for the various occult/wicca groups in New York City.

Herman also put out a magazine, Earth Religion News, and hosted a local weekly cable television show. Herman is given credit for effecting a truce in 1975 between the various New York occult groups that had been been putting curses on each other. He persuaded them to meet in the back room of The Warlock Shop.

In 1976 Herman and Ed renamed their shop Magickal Childe and moved it to Manhattan. In 1977, he was one of the facilitators of the publication of The Necronomicon by Simon (generally taken to be a pseudonym for Peter Levenda).

Herman edited three books of Pagan Rituals, and two Magikal Formulary Spellbooks.

He was also a drag queen inclined to the outrageous.

Ed Buczynski died of Aids in 1989, and Herman also in 1992.

• Simon. The Necronomicom. Long Island City: Schlangefraft 1977.
• Herman Slater (ed). A Book Of Pagan Rituals. York Beach, Me: Samuel Weiser 1978.
• Simon. Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicom. New York: Avon 2006: 120,122,130,146-7.
• Herman Slater. Magickal Childe. www.magickalchilde.com/herman.html.
• "Herman Slater". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Slater
• 
  
  George Knowles. “Herman Slater (Horrible Herman)”. Controverscial.com. http://www.controverscial.com/Herman%20Slater.htm.
  
  

Janine Roberts (1942 - 2016) journalist.

Raised in England by a Northern Irish family. At age 17 joined a Catholic order to prepare for the priest-hood. During the eight years of training, acquired degrees in theology and philosophy, and was ordained in 1967. Then did a B.Sc. in sociology at the London School of Economics.

Afterwards resigned from the priesthood, married a woman, and they moved to Australia. They had two daughters. Started working with Australian Aboriginals.

In 1975, she became Janine, although it took her another eight years to be accepted for surgery as she was still living with her wife and raising her daughters.

In 1976 her first book (editor and co-author), The Mapoon Books, on aboriginal culture and institutional racism was published. She works with aboriginal groups in resisting mining on their territory, and researched Granada TV’s World in Action program on the issue. In the 1980s she worked as a freelance journalist and documentary maker.

In the late 1980s she was working on a documentary on the diamond industry for Australian, US and UK television. She produced a program for BBC’s Panorama on the CIA, MI6 and KGB under Gorbachov, and The Sun outed her to attack her credibility. In 1992, when The Diamond Empire was two-thirds shot, her home was invaded and she was seriously beaten and was in hospital for two months. While she was on the critical list, the BBC took control of the project away from her. However in 1994 the program was shown on the BBC and in the US with her name on it. Pressure from the diamond monopoly, De Beers, resulted in its showing on Australian Broadcasting Company being cancelled, and in the BBC not selling it abroad, especially to South Africa.

She continued to research the diamond industry, especially in South Africa and Namibia where she was a guest of the miners’ union. This resulted in the book Glitter and Greed, 2003.

In 2002 she published The Seven days of My Creation on her own gender transition, and on the status of women through the Christian centuries. She has also published on the causes of AIDS and on problems with the polio vaccine. She was also a Wicca priestess.

Janine suffered a massive stroke in 2010, and died six years later at age 74. 


*Not the family therapist.

• Janine Roberts . The Seven days of My Creation: tales of magic, sex and gender. San Jose: Writers Club Press 628 pp 2002. Liskeard, Cornwall: Exposure Publishing 384 pp 2006.
• J. P. Roberts. Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel. New York: Disinformation, 2007.  
• "Jan Roberts: Commemorating a true warrior".  MAC: Mines and Communities, 2016-03-02.  www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=13279.
  
• www.sparkle.plus.com.
• www.witch.plus.com.

WorldCat    IMDB    AIDSWiki  

_________________________________________

What an amazing woman. I came across one of her web sites while googling for something on religion.

Nobody has done a Wikipedia page on her. She is not in any of those lists of outstanding transpersons that we find on the web.

Here is an excerpt from her documentary on the Diamond Empire.