Palenville, NY, USA. I am a deeply spiritual person who feels an obligation to change the world by doing my part to awaken Goddess Consciousness in others in a spiritual awakening of humanity as that spreads. [N1]

I am a lifelong Pagan who has studied the occult and Paganism my entire life. That has been combined with an absolute passion for ancient history.




Up to now I have told stories of my past. Few read my blog at Telling My Stories, but I think it is time to talk about my present and how I got here.

It is no secret to anyone who reads me here or on my blog that I was born intersexed and surgically made transsexed at birth.

That I lived the first part of my life as someone others saw mostly as male while I felt myself an alien to the world around me.

And finally I came to a crisis and “fixed” my body and life to reflect who I always felt myself to be … yawn, typical tranny stuff in many ways.

But now I am will talk about how I live my spirituality on a day to day basis.

I have been reluctant to do so because there is a demented lawyer for the Town of Catskill that seeks out every word I write and attempts to twist them in order to “prove” we are not who we are.

Screw him, he’ll do it anyway and since he recently suborned perjury and perjured himself about us, his career is going to take a turn for the worse soon. [N2]The Great Serpent Mound

In the spring of 1999 I decided to formalize the religious practices I was conducting for myself and a few others and start holding public rituals on the four solar holidays at the ancient Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio. [N3] I was living in Ohio at the time, involved in trans-activism and working with Susan Davis on the recovery of the ancient Cybeline traditions. [N4] The main source of material we were working with at that time was from the Roman period. We called this new religious reclaiming the First Church of the Goddess and I renewed my clergy certification with the State of Ohio under my now changed name. Susan Davis also registered as Ohio clergy at this time.

We conducted the Solar quarter rituals together while separately (she lived in Cleveland and I lived in Delaware Ohio) gathering groups together for full and new moon rituals. I was passionate about recovering the role of transsexual priestesses in the Goddess traditions myself in order to let transsexual women know they had a history, an honoured one and a place outside medicine.

When I registered an internet domain, I chose gallae.com for this reason. In Roman times, the gallae were the transsexual (post op) priestesses of Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess.

When I transitioned I had lost my family and my business and bought an older mobile home in an older mobile home park in Delaware, Ohio. I had set up a circle in my back yard with permanent concrete altar.

After an extended period of trying to find employment, I finally settled on getting certified as a nursing assistant having been a psychiatric aide in the mid seventies and loving that kind of work. It was extremely hard work that paid little but I found that if I worked for an agency rather than an individual nursing home or hospital I could somewhat set my own hours and increase my pay to roughly that of an LPN.

I was also active at the Unitarian Universalist church in Columbus and even led, along with two other women, a Pagan lay service restoring the idea of celebration of Cronehood that remains the best attended lay service in the history of that UU church with over 200 people taking part.

Having experienced first hand the extreme financial hit many newly transitioned transsexual women experience I also started thinking seriously about setting up a housing collective for newly transitioned women along the lines of either buying up one of the mostly abandoned towns in southern Ohio or a “trailer park” with a community centre building for common activities and food preparation.

At one of our Solar holidays I discussed this idea with two transsexual women who lived in the Catskills of upstate New York. They were taken with the idea as well and eventually a fourth woman not involved in our religious activities also expressed a desire to work towards this goal.

I took a vacation trip to spend time with the Catskill women and we started to actively look for a place to set up our “transie trailer park” concept. I also fell absolutely in love with the Catskills. Around this time Susan Davis moved to Rochester, New York so it seemed our focus was about to change from Ohio to New York on all levels.

As a lifelong Goddess Pagan I had always known that if I trusted in Her, I would always have what I needed if not always what I wanted. The price of this was to do Her work since I had been called in the ancient fashion in my dreams when I was only around three and four years old. I knew I was to pursue this housing collective and eventually restore the ancient Goddess traditions as well. I knew this on a level that words cannot express. But being human, I also had a comfortable, if not prosperous life going with my little mobile home and a career I wished to pursue. So I set about enrolling in LPN classes with an eye towards converting that eventually to a Registered Nurse.

The Goddess will not be ignored and as soon as I did this, She decided to knock the pins from under me so I would do what I was supposed to. She did this in the form of disabling me.

I had been rear ended twice a year apart and had to undergo physical therapy both times for whiplash and lower back injuries. While working at a facility that was understaffed and poorly equiped, I was assigned an entire ward by myself with total care patients. As I was transferring a rather large gentleman from his bed to a shower chair, the wheel locks failed on the chair and I had to frog march him to the wall in order not to let him fall. When I did so, I felt something give in my lower back. I was in extreme pain but could not go home. Fifteen minutes later I had to transfer another man in the next room. Just as I had him in midpoint to his chair, he threw his weight backwards and I felt another major pain in my lower back. This time I was left barely able to even walk so I reported the injuries and went home.

The next day I went to the chiropractor that I was seeing regularly from the two auto accidents and he insisted I have an MRI on my back. It revealed I had blown two discs in my back and also had spurs pressing on my spinal cord at the same locations. There was no way I could work any longer as a nursing assistant or much of anything else.

The Catskills

So suddenly I found myself unable to pursue a career in nursing, disabled physically and unsure of my future other than it probably lay in New York rather than Ohio. I was disabled in July of 2001, immediately after September 11th. I was able to drive to New York (driving was difficult but not impossible) and stayed with Marina and Laura on the Mountaintop. This trip was to find “the” place to set up our dream. The physical requirements of starting a trailer park and building a community building from scratch now pretty much out of the question for me, we expanded the search to existing properties.

We saw a listing for an entire complex in Palenville then owned by the "12 Tribes" group and on a lark and basically as a break from the search, Marina and I went to look at it. [N5] Directly across the street was an old Inn with a for sale sign on it. Paint peeling, porch roof sagging at odd angles and the grounds completely grown over. It called to me. I hobbled over and went up on the porch and had the immediate sensation I just had come home. I could feel the spirits of the place welcoming me. But this was impossible! There were three acres, the huge Inn and a smaller caretaker’s house in the back. Marina didn’t want me to even call the real estate agent but I did.

The real estate agent didn’t want to bother to show the place either. According to her, the owners did not really want to sell and had turned down multiple offers. The price was 100 thousand, much much cheaper than I expected but much much more than we were looking to spend. But it was perfect for the dream! I had a flash and “saw” the third floor before we entered the first time and told Marina and Laura that it would look really bad with the plaster all falling down and peeling wallpaper on that plaster still up. I told them not to pay that any mind, what we needed to know is how solid the house was, everything else could be fixed.

Having worked the bulk of my life in the construction trades, already having restored one hundred year old farmhouse and having helped friends restore Victorian houses in Columbus, I knew what to look for. What I found surprised me. Yes, the third floor roof had leaked and the entire third floor was as I had seen it in my mind’s eye but the floors were straight and level except where a prior porch had been converted to living space. They did not creak at all. Neither did the stairs.

I inspected the basement where I could see the rafters. They were solid hickory, hard as a rock, totally free of any signs of rot and the second and first floors were messy but most of the walls covered with paneling and only needing paint. All the doors hung true. There were antique beds in all the bedrooms. And it lacked central heating. This was actually important as it made the place basically unable to be bank financed which meant the buyer would have to carry a mortgage. This was how I had bought the hundred year old farmhouse in Ohio my family lived in after I restored it.

I went back to Ohio but stayed in touch with the real estate agent via email. She told me that the seller would require we write up something about how we wanted to use the property and our plans for the Inn in particular. It seemed a strange request but I did so. I wrote that we wished to restore the Inn to as close to original as we could and use it as a womens housing collective, I left out references to transsexuals.

To my surprise, I quickly got an email back from the agent telling me the owner was interested in selling to us and how surprised she was at that. Eventually we settled on 25 thousand down and the rest financed by Olindo, the seller. Marina arranged a lawyer for our end out of Albany and the four of us set about raising our individual shares of the down payment. I put up my trailer for sale and had a buyer by December.

Christmas of 2001 Marina and Laura came out to Ohio to help me move and by the first of January I was in the Catskills in their apartment on the Mountaintop because we could not take possession of the property until the 15′th. All my belongings had to be offloaded into the caretakers house when we arrived.

You have to understand exactly how impossible this all was. Only Katie had the credit to buy anything. Me, I was disabled with only worker’s compensation for income.

And yet, it happened.

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