Raven Kaldera speaks for the dead.  Specifically, the FTM, transgender, intersexual spiritual leader says he communicates with those memorialized November 20 on the Transgender Day of Remembrance.  “Our dead are angry,” Kaldera says.  “And they want this to stop. Being as I talk to them, I can guarantee you this: there are too many of them.”

For the last decade Kaldera has lived with his queer family on a small working farm and retreat center, Cauldron Farm, in rural New England, where he founded the neo pagan First Church of Aspedel. “Neo pagans are more tolerant than many other religious groups, trans people, [but]
when you invite some of your friends along and all of a sudden there’s a whole bunch of [unusual trans people] there, they become uncomfortable.” 

Aspedel welcomes those with multiple identities that may disturb others—including those who are queer, trans, polyamorous, disabled, mentally ill or have “anything that makes you embarrassingly different.” When some locals took to calling Aspedel the “Church of Freaks and Monsters,” Kaldera embraced the term and now gives workshops called “Lessons from the Kingdom of Freaks and Monsters: Integrating Unusual People into Your Group.”

In addition to his duties with Aspedel, Kaldera says he’s an “official” speaker for the trans dead. “What that means,” he explains, “is all those people on Remember Our Dead lists, it’s my job to speak for them, and to say, ‘Look, our people are dying.’  Matthew Shepard was [just] one guy—we’ve got one or two a month in this country.    People really need to understand that
as long as we are alone and cast out, we are at risk.  We need protection in numbers.”

“I know we’re embarrassing,” Kaldera says of the broader world’s view on trans people.  “But being as so many of us are dying, we can’t afford not to twist some arms and pressure some people.”   He says that the larger LGB community must not ostracize trans people in order to gain acceptance. “Especially when the price that [trans people] might pay is death.”

Kaldera believes that hate crimes against trans people are escalating because of increased trans visibility. “We can’t hide.  We make people uncomfortable
we pull the rug out from under people’s assumptions.  We’re catalysts
[and] most people don’t want to change.  They’d rather kill the catalyst, obliterate it, and people will continue to do that.  I don’t think we can stop the people who want to do that.  I think we can only protect ourselves.”

Kaldera, who practices a northern tradition of shamanism rooted in ancient tribes of northern Europe, says that after a near death experience, “the spirits told me to get a sex change.” 

“I knew the spirits were talking to me and the ghosts were talking to me
 and I thought I was going nuts.  I could find nothing in neo paganism and in conventional religion to explain this, so I turned to anthropology.”

There, Kaldera learned about ancient shamantic traditions and that many shamans were “gender crossing.”   “You don’t have to be, but it is the one job for which it was an advantage.  So it’s very clear to me
the powers that be [did this so] I would
do my job better.” 

The polyamorous Kaldera shares his home and life with a wife and a boyfriend—both of whom are also transgender.  He and his boyfriend were filmed having sex for Luke Woodward’s trans docu-porn Enough Man—something Kaldera supported because it provided “positive context for transgender sex.”
“There needs to be more images of us having sex and looking good, or at least looking sexual, and not creepy.” 

A prolific writer, Kaldera (www.cauldronfarm.com/books.html) edited Best Transgender Erotica, wrote Heraphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook, recently wrapped the fist installment of a Northern Tradition shamanism series, and published Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM. 

Kaldera says both pagan and BDSM publishers passed on Dark Moon because of its complex topic. “I talk about gods and prayers and serious religion and how to incorporate BDSM into a religion.  BDSM presses wouldn’t take it, oddly enough, because it had too much religion in it.  They skipped on that—you can talk about nipple clamps, but not religion, it’s just too controversial.”

Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall can be reached at at jake@trans-nation.org.