Divining New Models of Femininity from the Tarot

There are many ways to be a woman, many ways to be a mother, many ways to be a whore.

No matter how prepared you are, no matter how much you think you know about bodies and cycles and uterine lining, there’s something profoundly unsettling about the volume of blood that a human body can safely lose on a monthly basis.

Stranger still is the idea that this happens for years, decades, and we are expected to ignore the inconveniences, the pain, the frustrations, the expense, the agonies, and just carry on with our lives: maintaining our productivity, protecting our fertility, being good little soldiers of the American economy. Monthly cycles are a routine part of life, we’re told—and yet for so many of us they are wildly disruptive, even dangerous.

I’m not writing about menstruation to make you uncomfortable, to weed the squeamish readers out before we get to the bones and meat of the story. But this is an essay about blood, about the truth of what thrums and pounds under the surface of our skin. Best to be upfront about all that’s coming, even when our own bodies don’t always offer us the same courtesy.

*

You’ll change your mind. Few expressions have had such a grip on my heart as this one—the idea that one day, some shift will occur inside of me and I’ll wake up suddenly ravenous for a child. I’ve never felt any desire to be pregnant, never fantasized about children that have my eyes or freckles, never longed for a house full of kids the way so many of my friends in the church did. Yet all my life, Christian and non-Christian women alike have sneered at my decision not to bear children, to deny my womanly duty to go forth and multiply. Instead of listening to my careful and true reasons for not wanting to have biological children, these well-meaning women implied that I don’t know what I want.

The callousness of it. No doubts in their minds, even as they tried to plant some in mine.

Whether inside or outside of the church, not wanting children is too often painted as selfish, heartless, immature: a temporary affliction, a misunderstanding of the self. No matter our reasons, as women we should want to raise a family—and when we don’t, it seems incomprehensible to those who feel empowered to comment on it.

My biological clock has always been late: physically developing after my peers, entering high school flat chested and slim hipped, getting my first period years after friends the same age. I begged for a training bra that I did not need, hoping that no one would see the tissues I stuffed inside the molded cups. I carried tampons in my backpack ostensibly to be prepared, but really so that I could give them out if needed. Adults had power, agency, and I was eager to join their ranks, resenting that I would be seen as a child until my body changed—so I did everything I could to belong, hoping no one would notice that I was hopelessly behind.

But when I finally did get my period, it wasn’t the discreet drops of blood I’d imagined, quietly ushering me into some kind of holy, sacred womanhood. Instead it was as if a dam had burst. I didn’t have the cramps and pain that so many people suffered, but the blood—it couldn’t be stopped, coming for weeks at a time, staining those “5 for $25” Victoria’s Secret cotton panties that served as one of my few (and favorite) indulgences. Eventually my mother, who has a tendency to downplay even my most extreme health concerns, couldn’t ignore my discomfort any longer. She brought me to the doctor, who immediately recommended the pill, something that set me even further apart from my peers.

Whether inside or outside of the church, not wanting children is too often painted as selfish, heartless, immature.

Hard to know now if, back then, my fibroid had already started growing in the mysterious darkness of my insides. Hard to say if it developed quickly, only to have its growth stunted by birth control; if it’s been lying in wait for two decades; or if its emergence is something recent, something new. Either way, for the last few years my periods have been like those first ones—only now the cramps, the pain, take me out for weeks at a time. I go through boxes and boxes of tampons, absorbent underwear and cups no match for the seemingly endless flow. I can’t get off the couch, chained to a heating pad, so exhausted from nausea and headaches and blood loss that I weep in frustration.

I don’t want to bear children, don’t want to be a mother, don’t want to keep bleeding out every month. I never have. And after years of being told that I’ll change my mind, years in which my desire to never be pregnant has only solidified, I’m ready to double down, to end the debate once and for all. My fibroid is embedded in my uterine wall, has been surgically trimmed but cannot be removed on its own—meaning that the simplest way to get rid of my fibroid is to take my uterus with it. The hysterectomy I fantasized about in my twenties is now something that I’m actively seeking, something that I hope will happen before I reach forty.

Mail my uterus to Mitch McConnell, I’ve been joking. He would appreciate it more than I do.

I’m not really joking.

*

As the child of church planters, the granddaughter and niece of ministers, it took a long time for me to walk away from Christianity. But certain beliefs are harder to shake, particularly the ones that are introduced early on, the ones that catch your heart in a vise and never let go. My version of womanhood, of femininity, was built around the church’s vision of motherhood, nurturing, compliance. Eve’s sin, Ruth’s humility, Mary’s submission. Everything that I was taught, from skills and habits to perspectives on my body, my desires, and my fears, was shaped by the deliberately restrictive framework of white fundamentalist evangelicalism.

Leaving the homophobic church and my destructive faith saved my life in many ways, but it also left me lonely, confused, and lost. I missed community, missed rituals that encouraged me to explore that part of myself that craves deeper meaning. Buying my first tarot deck at the age of thirty was an act of rebellion and self-love, a way to step outside the faith of my childhood and claim something just for myself. But the women of the tarot, particularly the major arcana, confused me. They were so certain of themselves, so confident, so bold—so unlike me. And in my tarot studies I found that two specific archetypes, the Priestess and the Empress, were constantly referred to as two halves of the divine feminine: a strange concept that felt distinctly out of my reach.

The Priestess appears first in the major arcana: a quiet, solitary figure of secrets and restraint. Guarding the veil to the unknown, still and observant in a shadowed temple, this is an oracle and witch who is devoted to mystery and wisdom, who makes space for listening to the whispers swirling in the dark interior of her own heart. Emerging on her heels is the Empress, another female-coded figure who seems to be the Priestess’s polar opposite: warm, life-giving, nurturing, expressive, community oriented, surrounded by color and light, sharing all that she has with anyone in her orbit. Both are powerful energies for individual growth and transformation, and both are beautiful in their authenticity, their power. Yet the Priestess is isolated, composed, devoted only to faith in what lies beyond and her experience of the inexplicable—and the Empress is deeply present, enjoying sensual pleasures and comforts, allowing herself to be seen and loved in all of her messy, wild glory. The observer and the observed, the witch and the weaver, the madonna and the whore.

The church has its own two versions of feminine archetypes, two distinct versions of holy womanhood that are acceptable to God: the maiden and the mother, generosity to the church or children and nothing more. Two choices for devotion, which still require modesty everywhere else. Living a life centered on faith or family is considered sacred, but loyalty to the self is profane. Women are meant to serve, not to strive. Sensuality, intuition, personal desire, sovereignty, independence: These are not of God. These are forbidden, selfish, blasphemous.

The church’s two archetypes of womanhood might be familiar to me, even in their restriction—but the tarot’s versions are far more empowering, leaving room for individual expression and important questions. Maiden and mother are not the only options, not the only ways that we can be generous or faithful or content. Both the Priestess and the Empress have sacred wisdom to offer, reminding me that there are more possibilities for femininity than I was ever taught.

Perhaps it’s only right that the Priestess is my birth card; that my sun is in mysterious Scorpio while my moon is in fiery Leo; that my numerological chart indicates someone both private and generous; that I keep a hard, impenetrable line between my small group of soulmate friends and the rest of the world; that I still don’t want children in spite of the mounting pressure from my former church and my parents and my country. I constantly dance between these two archetypes in my own life, picking and choosing in order to create a version of womanhood that suits me.

I love my life, my work, my choices. This body that I have tended and nourished and tried to love as best I can, this bold and authentic Empress sexuality that I have claimed slowly and joyfully, this Priestess life of devotion to mystery that I have carved out of uncertainty: These things are mine alone, mine to treasure and shield. I don’t mind that the pleasure I chase in bed, that I give freely and joyfully to my partner, will never result in a child—I see that as a gift, a blessing, while those I grew up with see it as a curse. How dare I belong to myself? How dare I be permitted to carve my own path, to prioritize my own expansion?

Whore, indeed.

*

I’ve never been that attached to my own womanhood, never felt that swelling of girl power that friends celebrate and pop culture loves to exploit. But the more I learn about my uterus, my body, the more I want to question what else might be living within me, who else I might be if I just gave myself the room to explore without judgment. A hysterectomy doesn’t make me less of a woman—but choices, freedoms, build on one another. Open a door and a whole new path is revealed, an unknown corridor to explore. What makes a woman? What makes me a woman?

The language around gender and reproductive health care in this country is so often crafted by people who have a wildly incorrect understanding of both. These people in power want to define women as body parts, breasts and vaginas and ovaries; they want to attach specific organs and shapes to gender as if one has anything to do with the other. I resent the implication that I’m only a woman because of my broken, bleeding uterus, that keeping or removing it has implications for which genders I’m allowed to claim. It’s nonsensical, a means of diminishing and dismissing some people so that others can maintain their power.

Even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, becoming sterilized as an American white woman was something of an impossible task—a sharp contrast to the long and horrific history of forced sterilization on Black and Indigenous people, as well as the overwhelming efforts toward anti-trans legislation, which all comes down to the same idea: that the disenfranchised, the marginalized, cannot be trusted to make decisions about bodies, needs, desires, capabilities. That famous refrain of you’ll change your mind becomes more haunting when you’re a full legal adult who pays taxes and budgets for obscene health insurance premiums, when it comes out of the mouth of a doctor who asks what your husband thinks, when it becomes clear that everyone with the power to help you believes that your ticking time bomb of a biological clock will eventually knock you up and into line.

Not wanting children, among other things, should be reason enough to make a decision about our own bodies. Yet most of us on this path to living uterus-free go to our Reddit-researched doctors armed with information and paperwork anyway—financial records, medical reports, therapist letters, even testimonials from family members. Our word, our desire, is not enough: We have to prove that we are making informed and correct decisions about our lives and our bodies.

My ever-bleeding uterus, with its ruinous fibroid, gives me an out. As a white woman with significant privilege, I’ve been lucky that my doctors care about my excessive bleeding and severe anemia, that they take my debilitating monthly pain seriously enough to even consider the hysterectomy I’ve begged for. But how old do we have to be, how much life do we have to live, before we’re allowed to be certain about who we are? When can our choices stand alone?

*

There are many ways to be a woman, many ways to be a mother, many ways to be a whore. Rather than binaries, these archetypes can tangle and overlap, creating space for completely new models of femininity.

The Empress expands and expresses, but she’s not trying to be perfect, not concerned with how others might see her. She’s not afraid of mess and takes pride in the fact that what she pours out into the world is raw, incomplete, unrefined. In the same way, the Priestess isn’t afraid to ask impossible questions, to sit in the quiet and listen, to serve as a midwife for truth without putting pressure on the process. She doesn’t set herself apart because she believes that the world will sully her somehow: Instead, she wants to create room to let her intuition sing, so that any authenticity she finds in the shadows is fully her own.

It’s in embracing both archetypes, both expressions, that we discover the duality and the prismatic mystery within ourselves. It takes a different kind of strength to be comfortable living in the tension of questioning.

*

If I’m able to get what I want, my uterus will be removed and discarded, labeled as medical waste, a useless tangle of muscle and flesh that serves no purpose once it’s no longer taking up space in my body. My uterus only has value because of where it is, and once it’s gone, it offers nothing.

My uterus only has value because of where it is, and once it’s gone, it offers nothing.

But that loss does create capacity, room to wiggle, opportunities to reimagine myself. Who might I become once I don’t have to devote so much to an organ that is draining me dry? How might I transform, having surrendered this nonessential piece of myself? Which new cycles can I create, ones that I actually have a say in?

I don’t believe that my uterus makes me a woman because I don’t believe that gender identity is tied to anatomy. I don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell anyone else who they are, to demand that anyone perform gender in a particular way, to force anyone to conform simply because they lack imagination or empathy. Yet my own gender sometimes feels nebulous, a puff of smoke, a whisper of wind, shapeless and formless, easily molded. In the course of writing this essay I’ve asked friends to start using both she/her and they/them pronouns for me: not because I’m claiming a new label yet, not because I’m certain of where I fit under the nonbinary/genderqueer/genderfluid umbrella. Instead it’s because I want room to explore, to discover, to expand and contract as needed. I want space to wander and play, to dream, to question. I want to admit what I do not yet know, without the pressure to choose quickly, without the responsibility of making everyone else comfortable first.

Maybe I’m a woman, have always been a woman, simply because I was assigned female at birth; because people see a woman when they look at me; because it doesn’t feel inaccurate or incorrect or even uncomfortable to claim this for myself. I do feel like a woman. But I was also raised to do as I’m told, to fit myself into the mold I was given. If I take away that old evangelical framework, that very specific expectation of cis femininity, my gender spills out and evaporates. I can be a woman, and I can also be something more. I can be a midwife and deliver myself.

Without constraints, my gender feels like something that lives in space but doesn’t displace it, something that can be perceived without being contained: dappled moonlight, trails of smoke, the key of B-flat minor. It’s sulky and fluid, disappearing ink. It’s easier to think of my gender as ethereal, intangible, rather than trying to put clean, simple labels on it. It’s more comfortable to admit that I’m not yet sure of the identities I might eventually claim, to acknowledge that while I may sound confused, I feel more certain of myself than ever.