Sorry to bang on, but I've just seen another self-identified witch on Twitter aligning her witchcraft and her transmisogyny as natural bedfellows. So LET ME DO THIS ONCE AGAIN FOR YOU. * rolls up sleeves * Commence thread:

Our ancestor-witches weren't witches. They were people who, among other things, committed the so-called sins of being old, disabled, single, too sexually active, not sexually active enough, and/or - yep, you guessed it - living outside or subverting social norms around gender. >

We're not the granddaughters of the witches they couldn't burn. We're either the granddaughters of the women they DID burn (or hang, or drown); OR the women who were never accused of witchcraft due to playing nice (and no disrespect to them, it was a SCARY 200 years). >

The UK executed 40 "witches" per year for AN ENTIRE CENTURY. And those are the ones we know about: we know that in remote areas there were unofficial vigilante witch 'trials' and executions, e.g. the drowning of the Shetland rock witch. They weren't all women, either.

Point is: 'witchcraft' in the olden days was actually an excuse to launch a programme of panicked eugenics. The people the witch-hunters wanted to get rid of were precisely the people who still face the most oppression in our society today: including trans/non-binary folx.

(Aside: miss me with any reply that says there were no trans/non-binary folx in Ye Olden Days or that being trans/non-binary is a contemporary phenomenon. I *know* you're not that dim.)

If you want to call yourself a witch, it's your responsibility to know your history and understand the massive baggage that comes with that label. It's your responsibility to align yourself with the "witches" of the past, to fight against the bigotry that ultimately killed them.

If you chuck around transmisogyny or go in for this gender essentialist crap about biological female WHATEVER, you are not one of the witches. You are one of the witch-hunters. You are writing a new Malleus Maleficarum when you partake in transphobia, ableism, racism, bigotry.

What's more, I believe that 21st century witches (and everyone, really) have a responsibility to use whatever power is in our hands to fight these systems of oppression. This movement will NOT just be hanging pentagrams in your house and wearing purple. Do no harm, take no shit.

The witchcraft of old was a system of oppression. Witches were born out of oppression. Bigotry does not belong in our movement. TLDR: there is NO SUCH THING as a TERF witch. Fin.