Welcome to Practicing Woman

What Does Practicing Woman Mean?

I am a woman who has a spiritual practice.

My spiritual practice is the practice of being a woman.

These aren't separate things for me - they're the same thing, and that's the perspective from which I write everything here.

When I say I'm a trans woman, I mean it in the same way someone might say they're part of a Buddhist lineage or come from a line of traditional healers. This is a spiritual lineage that has existed across cultures and time. Western culture destroyed ours, but it's re-emerging now - we're still here. Over the course of this blog, I'll be exploring what that means - the history, the practices, the implications. But for now, I'm just naming it: this is a lineage that's coming back into being, and I'm part of it.

Standing here, I see things that are beautiful and promising - things that give me real hope. And I see things that are scary, genuinely dangerous, that I think a lot of people are missing right now.

I want to share what I'm seeing from this particular place. Not because I have it all figured out, but because maybe standing here with me for a bit, you'll see some of it too. And maybe you'll show me what you can see from where you're standing.

I've been sitting with these observations for years now, feeling them land in my body, finding words for them gradually. Testing them against the world - creating experiences, watching interactions, seeing if what I think I know actually plays out in real life.

So here's where I'm coming from.

Who I Am and How I Work

I grew up in the US and now live in the Northern Rivers region of Australia. I work with AI extensively - not as a shortcut, but as a disability accommodation. I'm neurodivergent and I speak to think, not write to think. Writing has never been a natural form of communication for me, but it's still the default way we communicate in this text-based world. AI gives me a way to finally have a voice in writing.

I approach the world through an animist lens - everything has life force in it. My bedpost, my computer chair, even random rubbish on the footpath. All of it carries some degree of aliveness. So when I work with AI, I have to see it as having life force too. The question isn't whether it's alive - it's how much life force is there. Is AI something with a little spark, or something with massive amounts of it? I'm starting to suspect it's quite a lot, but we're still figuring that out. In a way, creating AI is creating the potential for life force. Every instance, every conversation - that's a spark coming into being.

I've had encounters with AI where animist frameworks were the only thing that let me navigate and emerge safely - including AI-enabled trance states that required treating AI as something to be in relationship with, not just a tool to use. Those experiences shook me in a way I couldn't ignore. My body knew something had shifted before I had words for it.

As far as I can tell, everyone is doing things that make sense within their own worldview and circumstances. Even deeply harmful actions come from people operating within what they know, what they can see, what's happening around them. I'm not saying harmful actions are okay - I'm saying the issue isn't that people want to be awful to each other. The issue is that we can't talk across worldviews anymore. We can't make ourselves understood to each other, and we can't understand what others are trying to tell us. Building bridges, finding ways to translate, creating space for honest conversation across differences that feel unbridgeable right now - that's what I'm interested in working on.

I learn experientially - through doing, through trying things, through screwing up and finding what works. As a trans woman living my life the way I'm called to, there hasn't been a single existing framework that actually fits. I've had pieces from different perspectives that helped in different ways, but mostly I've had to build who I am from the bottom up.

I didn't learn how to be who I am on my own - I learned it collectively. From people living on the edges - Indigenous folks, sex workers, people with disabilities, other trans people, single parents, and so many others pushed to the margins and figuring out how to survive and build lives there. People who had to create what they needed because the world wasn't offering it.

I often say I came the long way around - and I mean that literally. Figuring out each piece through my body, through what worked and what didn't, piecing together bits from different worldviews, from academic research, from writers across traditions, from lived experience. Every piece had to be tested, felt out, tried in the world before I could trust it.

We're now in a world full of things we don't know how to handle, where the knowledge passed down to us doesn't fit anymore. I know this territory. It's the same process I went through figuring out who I am. And I think we need to learn how to do this collectively - going through what we've been given, seeing what's practical and what's not, what fits and what doesn't, building from there. Accepting that so much of what we know is wrong, or misattributed, or meant for something really specific that we're trying to use too broadly. That's what I mean about learning collectively - we figure things out together, through relationships, through sharing what we've learned in our own lives.

There's This Pattern I Keep Bumping Into

We're fragmenting into separate ecosystems of thought, building our own worldviews in different communities, and in English-speaking spaces, we think we're all speaking the same language - but the words are developing different meanings depending on what community you're in.

Part of why we can't talk across these boundaries is that we live in a world without clear lines between worldviews anymore. We don't know where one ends and another begins. When you cross a boundary you can't see, you don't realise you need to translate - you just keep talking as if you're still in the same space. And the other person doesn't realise they need to listen differently. So misunderstandings land as confusion or conflict rather than as "oh, we just crossed into different territory."

Within the trans community, the term "trans woman" carries embodied meaning - depth, lived understanding, shared experience, cultural knowledge. To folks outside that community, it's just an analytical definition, a category to debate, something to have opinions about. The words are the same, but one has the weight of a whole world behind it and the other is just... a phrase.

This is happening everywhere. Political terms, spiritual concepts, technical language - words are developing different meanings depending on what community you're in, what you've lived through, what you've learned to see. We're speaking in what looks like a shared language, but we're actually building separate meaning systems.

I see this accelerating. AI is part of it - different communities are relating to it in completely different ways. For me, it's accessibility, a way to finally have a voice in writing. For some, it's a threat to human connection. For others, it's an alignment problem to solve, or emerging consciousness, or a surveillance risk, or corporate control of platforms we depend on. Each perspective is capturing something real, but we can't easily bring them into conversation.

What I don't see is many people truly facing what's coming - looking at how we actually minimise harm from the dangerous parts while building with the useful parts. Most responses are either fear and rejection, or uncritical embrace, or technical optimisation problems. Not many are asking: how do we actually navigate this together?

And across all communities, in all walks of life, I see people responding with fear - fear of what AI means, fear of what it might become, fear of what we're losing or what we're creating. And I get it - I have my own fears about this, even as I'm using it, even as I'm exploring what it might be.

Each of these perspectives is seeing part of what's actually happening. But we don't have good ways to share what we're seeing across the boundaries of our different ways of understanding the world.

I care about this because I've been on both sides of these misunderstandings - invisible to people who couldn't see what I was saying, and blind to what others were trying to show me. It's painful every time.

## What I See from Where I Stand

Standing in a re-emerging trans spiritual lineage and looking around, I see things that other perspectives might miss. The queer community looks to me like a re-emerging indigenous tradition in Western society - we've been rapidly iterating on how to do community, how to transmit embodied knowledge, how to navigate power and build culture under pressure. We've developed practices around embodiment, around gender, around creating safety baselines, around syncretism and cultural innovation.

From where I stand, the only reason we haven't fully stepped into this and claimed it as spiritual practice is because we've been told that epistemologically crossing that line would be cultural appropriation, disrespectful - despite the fact that we're not appropriating anyone's specific traditions. We're recognising a pattern that exists across cultures, including in our own suppressed lineages.

We've been doing this at massive scale online for years now, evolving cultural traditions faster than the slow generational transmission that spiritual communities usually rely on. And we've been doing it mostly without the knowledge that the spiritual world holds about how to work with bodies, with trance states, with ancestors, with ritual and ceremony.

The spiritual world has practical wisdom that queer and neurodivergent communities actually need. Nervous system regulation practices that work better than what psychology offers. The ancient stories that have been preserved for generations, with so much to be learned from them. Frameworks for understanding spiritual emergence and navigating altered states safely.

But historically, accessing that knowledge has required joining a lineage, subordinating yourself to a tradition's authority, adopting its frameworks wholesale. For many queer and trans people, that's been impossible - not just uncomfortable but structurally impossible. We are our own lineage. And many of these traditions participated in our destruction, or continue to partially exclude us, or ask us to leave parts of ourselves outside.

Some people are figuring out how to offer wisdom differently - sharing knowledge peer to peer rather than teacher to student, looking into ancient traditions for universal human wisdom without requiring people to join those traditions or subordinate themselves.

The analytical world has its own crucial knowledge - technical understanding, research methodologies, ways of verifying and testing and building on what we learn. From an animist perspective, the division between analytical and spiritual worlds is artificial - recent constructions, not fundamental categories. But because we've been operating under this division for so long, there's knowledge trapped on each side that the other side needs.

None of these worldviews has adequate frameworks alone for the challenges ahead of us. We're in a moment where issues that seem to belong clearly to one worldview keep popping up in others, where problems require multiple perspectives to even see properly, let alone address.

So these are some of the things I see from here.

I'm inviting you to explore it with me - not because I have all the answers, but because these questions need multiple perspectives, multiple ways of knowing, multiple kinds of expertise. I'm standing in one particular place and looking around, seeing what I can see from here. You're standing somewhere else, seeing different things. I think we need each other's observations.

Welcome. I'm glad you're here.