In Raven's words:
Raven Kaldera is a writer, homesteader, shaman, polyamorous pornographer, and FTM transgendered intersex activist. 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.

undie girl: I had first heard about you, Raven, in relation to your commitment to homsesteading. What made you want to get out on the farm? What were the biggest obstacles you faced in realising that vision? What surprised you along the way -- unexpected allies, or adventures?

Raven: I love homesteading; I love being a pagan in the really old sense, tracing the wheel of the year through its agricultural food-producing cycle. I use homesteading as an earth-centered spiritual discipline. It's very monastic, and I can really feel the elements up close. If you'd like to read more about that, go to Scarlet Letters and click on my essay about being a transgender pagan homesteader, "Earthbound".

I was really surprised at how quickly I took to it, and how peaceful it is... and how much I like that peace. I thought, after years in the city, that it might be boring, but it never is. There's one moment of breathtaking beauty after another... well, interspersed with lots of grubby work. That's the hardest part, the work. If I didn't love this lifestyle, the manual labor would drive me nuts. But I find that I can get into a very spiritual headspace sometimes, the way that Shinto monks can rake endless circles in their temple garden, the way that medieval monks worked the fields. Sort of a sacred-labor trance. It's also really fulfilling in that it's immediate gratification. You stand all day on an assembly line, or work in a cubicle somewhere, maybe you see the product and maybe you don't, and the only actual reward you get from it is money. You milk a goat, you get the day's dairy product, ready to drink or make into cheese or butter. It's gratifyingly immediate. You feel like you've really done something useful.

undie girl: One of your recent books is The Urban Primitive: Paganism in the Concrete Jungle. Homesteading, and urban paganism -- where’s the connections here for you? I’ve felt such a strong connection to cities as sacred. How do you find the sacred there, and under the stars?

Raven: Urban Primitive was a joint effort by myself and my dear friend Tannin Schwartzstein, and we bring two very different perspectives to it. Tannin is a dedicated city dweller. She'll probably never leave the urban area. I'm not. I lived in the city for many years, and I learned to survive through magical means, but I can never say that I enjoyed it, and I escaped as quickly as I possibly could. We felt that it was important to have both those voices in this book, because half the people in the city love it there, and the other half hate it and are only there for economic reasons. But even the ones who hate it need to learn enough about its energies to survive well until they can get out.

Anyway, my heart lies deep in the country. My body is also not able to deal with the city physically; I have a lot of allergies, and I found that my chronic lung conditions cleared up entirely after leaving the city for the wilderness. I'll never go back except as a visitor, although I do have a great appreciation for its own special energy.

undie girl: You’re a very prominent voice -- one of the only ones, maybe! -- speaking about transgender and intersex issues from the perspective of one’s spirituality and relationship to the sacred.

Raven: Well, if not the only one, then certainly the loudest! I wrote the book Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook as a way of reaching out to disillusioned transfolk and spreading the word that We Are Sacred Beings. The book started out with me researching ancient mythologies to find examples of archetypes that crossed gender boundaries... and I found tons of them! Agdistis the sacred hermaphrodite, Lilith the Hairy Goddess, Dionysus the Womanly One, Shiva the Lord Who Is Half Woman, Turquoise Boy and White Shell Girl, Ellegua the trickster, and many more.

Every one was different, but each had a specific lesson to teach us. I wrote the book with one archetype per chapter, but it ended up a workbook, with discussion questions for groups, personal and public rituals, community service projects, and interviews with transfolk of many different faiths. (Yes, it's available at Amazon.Com — [ed. and also at Booksense] — just type my name in the search engine.) It was a real lesson. We are sacred beings; our situation puts us between the worlds, in a place of different perspective, and allows us to mediate between two worlds.

undie girl: In your column at Scarlet Letters, you wrote about your daughter’s experience growing up Pagan on a rural farm in contrast to your own upbringing and her desire to be a part of mainstream life. I thought that was fascination. I’d always wished as a teenage witch that my family was Pagan, as if it’d be the solution to everything! What’s it been like raising a Pagan daughter for you?

Raven: Well, like all teenagers she is currently in rebellion, and is neither pagan nor a farm girl any more. She wants to move back to the city, and she's currently agnostic in her beliefs. People think that teens rebel because their parents are too strict, but it's not true. Teens rebel because they need to differentiate themselves from their parents, and sometimes that means they have to reject things out of hand just because "they're what Mom and Dad do". I've run into a lot of pagan parents who have tried hard to be understanding and lenient, and their kids were so desperate to find something to rebel against that they had to do hard drugs or become born-again Christians in order to differentiate themselves. Usually they settle down later and can actually think clearly about what things they really want and don't want.

I assume that my daughter will eventually get to this point. Right now she just hates the country and thinks that my faith - actually, religion in general - is ridiculous. It doesn't help her that lots of teen pagans and young queers approach her and say how much they'd love to have us as parents, how lucky she is, which just makes her steam. The funny thing is that when I would go visit the older pagan couple who were my inspiration while I was suffering through my teen years with abusive parents, I would tell their daughter how much I wished that they had been *my* parents, and she would steam and goes on about how hard it is to live with them. So I think this is a pattern that kids just need to go through, and as long as you're a reasonably fair and decent parent, it's all that can be asked for.

So the likelihood is that if you'd had pagan parents, you'd be going on
about how embarrassing their dopey hippie faith is. (grin) Unless you'd been away from them long enough to form your own independent identity, and were objective enough to decide that you wanted this faith regardless of whether or not your parents were practicing it.

And now for the Proust-style undie questionaire --
undie girl: What’s you favorite thing to do in your undies?

Raven: I'm afraid I'm really boring in terms of underwear. I wear standard white cotton briefs. They're comfortable, and I'm the sort of person who will sacrifice fashion for comfort in a heartbeat. I wore them even back before my sex reassignment, when I was a really butch woman, but only when I'd have my period, because I had periods from hell and I needed the really huge horrid pads, which fit nicely in that space where the basket's supposed to be. Something I expect every butch girl has probably figured out.

OK, I'll make it a little more interesting for you. I never used to wear underwear the rest of the time, but then I went on testosterone and transitioned to male, and my genitals changed. My clitoris got much, much larger - about the size of the end joint on my thumb (and I have big hands). My labia got larger, too, but my clit basically turned into a small penis. Unlike a woman's clit, my phalloclit (that's an intersex term, most trannyboys refer to theirs as their diclit, or just their cock) was no longer protected by my vulva, as it stuck out too far, and it would rub raw on clothing. So soft cotton underwear became an absolute necessity. (And, of course, there are no more periods - whee!) There, is that just too much information? I mean, you did ask.

undie girl: Has anyone made assumptions about you because of your undies? What were they? How did that make you feel? How right were they?

Raven: Well, some people who've seen my laundry make comments about how boring my choice of underwear is. Perhaps they feel that I might be rather boring in some areas of my lifestyle as well. However, the people who actually sleep with me know better. I am totally a sick fuck in bed. There, at least, I am nothing like boring. Kinky Farmers Of America Unite!

Actually, no one has ever accused me of being boring at anything. They wouldn't dare.

undie girl: How do ever have time to put on undies? What does a day in your life look like?

Get up, throw some breakfast down my throat that my wife has cooked on our big Victorian wood cookstove, haul my ass out to the barn and milk the goats, feed the sheep, strain the milk through a coffee filter to get the goat hair out of it. Do my email while the milk filters, and then start another batch of goat cheese to curdle overnight, transferring yesterday's curds to the cheese molds and yesterday's raw cheeses to a plate of herbs and salt, and then into freezer bags.

Work on carpentry projects throughout the morning and afternoon, or fetch feed from the feed store, or hay from a neighbor's farm. Bella feeds the rabbits and poultry and collects eggs. If it's cold weather, maybe spend the day slaughtering a lamb or kid for the freezer - that's a four to six hour project. Or scrape hide for tanning. In the evening, I work on wool production - washing, carding, spinning, skeining. I'm working on renovating the weaver's shed so that I can do more weaving on my looms. Or maybe do leatherwork, or churn butter, or write. Actually, a lot of the evening is spent writing. Then I do the nighttime milking and feeding and watering, and go through the milk process again.

My wife Bella lives with me full-time; she's male-to-female transsexual and is working on her master's degree in social work. My boyfriend Joshua (who is FTM like me) lives here part-time while he does his final semester of college in Philadelphia; he'll be back here again full-time in June, shoveling manure with us once again. I firmly believe in the concept of polyamory both as a method of building an extended family and tribe, and as a spiritual discipline of radical honesty. We frequently have other disaffected queers or trannies or pagans or perverts - or, more likely, people who fall into several of those categories - who need to spend a little time in the wild greenspaces. So my farm is actually a haven and sanctuary and retreat for that.

undie girl: If you could have a soap box to stand on, what would it be? Okay, if you need two, that’s fine!

Raven: Well, I could go on about organic farming and how we need to support it in order to prevent environmental disaster, or I could talk about alternative energy methods like the methane generator that we're building, but I doubt many of your readers would be into that. My current biggest soapbox is the way that transgendered people are treated in this society. Last year we were being violently murdered at the rate of one a month, and law enforcement does little if anything to bother tracking down the killers, and juries set them free when they claim that we just made them sick, and so of course they had to kill us. This year, the rate has increased a little. It's frightening. We can't get medical care either - we get turned away by doctors who are uncomfortable with us.

undie girl: Finally -- sex, spirit, power, and freedom -- how do all of these play into your life? Do they fuse? Do they fight? Tell us a story.

Raven: They are integrated into my life. I believe that sex is sacred, assuming that it is consensual, and that includes all kinds of sex, even the rough stuff. Sex is the only urge that we absolutely can't control. Oh, we can control our actions, and we should, but the urge will come whether we want it there or not. That means that it's the place where ideas can get in, and you can't guard against them as well. I think that we should exploit this in our attempts to change the world. Don't be afraid of sex - use it! That's why I'm a pornographer.

I have two fairly exterior motives in my porn writing. First, I try to sneak spirituality into at least half of my stories, in order to get the two conflated in a positive sense in people's minds. Second, I write positive transgendered porn, because there is so little of it around. My goal in doing this is to get trannies laid, and laid well, and seen as human beings and not stereotypes. There are folks out there who might be interested in being with a tranny if they knew what the heck to do with them, if they had some example of sex with transgendered people that was hot and realistic. That's where the genesis of Best Transgender Erotica, the book that I co-edited with Hanne Blank, came from.

And that's sex and power and freedom - the ability to claim and project our own sexuality, regardless of what anyone else says. Porn is a great teaching tool. You're much more vulnerable to subtle messages when you're turned on. I think we should exploit this to the best of our ability, and use it as one tool to help change the world.

You can read Raven's collumn at Scarlet Letters.