Taboo, Tabou, Tabu: Introducing Lydia Rosell
My Friday Conversation about things others might whisper about. 6/28/2024
As my regular readers know, Friday posts to Writing in the New York Finger Lakes share my thoughts on things other people don’t talk about. I call these posts Taboo, Tabou, Tabu, not because they are unspeakable to me, but because I like to break things open and help people realize these ideas are what ordinary life is made of. You have also likely noticed I’m often a day late. I blame that on my firm belief that time is an illusion.
Today I have the privilege of writing about my friend, mentor and teacher Lydia Rosell who was recently featured in an article in published June 24,2024 in Youth Journalism International written by Holly Hostettler-Davies and Sreehitha Gandluri which you can find here: ‘Trans pioneer shares her journey of trauma, abuse and finally, ‘a pretty good life’. That good life has climbed the barricades set up around some major taboos: transgendered rights and witchcraft.
I met Lydia in the 1970’s. Our lives connected around the local Harriet Tubman chapter of the National Organization for Women in Auburn NY where we created the newsletter together and the Auburn Human Rights Commission where she worked and I served as Chair. Naïve as I was, I didn’t tumble to the fact that she was not only a witch but also had been born a boy and had the courage to become a woman. I have only ever known and thought of her as Lydia. That’s who she is. By the time I moved to Auburn she had lived through a family that rejected her identity, a school that allowed people to bully her and a community where she was a target for men who thought they could assault her as they wished. As she puts it, “A lot of men thought I was put on this Earth to be their personal sex toy.” They were wrong.
At 16 she escaped and went to live with the Beaumonts, Ralph and Kitty. She calls Kitty the most liberated woman she ever met. Together with the Whipples who hired Lydia to babysit, Lydia had some champions to help her find herself and live who she was. What she was was beautiful.
Photo courtesy of Lydia Rosell
Make no mistake those two families as well as Lydia were targeted by dangerous small-minded people, even to the point of losing friends, being evicted, and having men in pickup trucks yelling outside the house. Once they even shot at them.
Lydia connected with the Janus Foundation which provided information on how to make the public transformation work, what to do and when to do it. Other than that she was on her own. No LGBTQ+ advocate, no support group, no legislation. Only the media example of Renee Richards who showed her being who she was, was possible. That was the 70’s.
In 1975 she investigated her options for gender affirmation surgery. She was about to set some appointments when she contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized in one of those places that quarantined the patients. Later, she met with a job training counselor who connected her to beauty school. Hair, make up, nails. That was personally useful, but she felt like somebody in a witness protection program. She was bullied into dropping out. So far in America there was no safe place for Lydia. She worked odd jobs in nursing homes, restaurant kitchens, even a sauerkraut factory. She won’t eat that stuff to this day. She had a drag queen friend who taught her how to make a bra and underwear. She found her name in a baby book.
Finally, July 16, 1976, she became Lydia in public. Again without a community to help, gossip and speculation ran rampant because of her overnight transformation. She agreed to a newspaper interview thinking she could say it all once and be done with it. It wasn’t the human interest story she thought it would be. It turned in to how she was living on public assistance and expected Medicaid would pay for her surgery. A firestorm of conservative outrage followed. She was called obscene names by her case worker. People spit on her in the street and threw rocks and garbage at her. About that time, she was told she was not a candidate for gender affirming surgery by the medical providers. That was about as low as it could get. She contemplated suicide not for the first time. She was on her way to end her life when she stopped to say goodbye to her friends. They called her mother who never handled issues calmly, but at least Lydia was convinced to stay alive and keep trying.
Next, she enrolled in the local 2-year community college studying sociology, psychology and anthropology. The only thing that defeated her was Algebra, something I still kid her about.
About that time, she was employed at the Auburn Human Rights Commission as a secretary. There were two people working there, The part time director John McLeod and Lydia. I worked for the Cayuga County Action Program and was assigned to provide liaison and advice to the Commission as they sought full time funding. When a group of us reestablished the Harriet Tubman Chapter of NOW, she was right there ready to raise some consciousness, or trouble, however you want to call it. When HT-NOW decided to initiate a sexual assault survivors’ program she was there again. In 2010 she was one of half a dozen women honored with the Gold Award as founding mothers of the Sexual Assault Victim’s Advocacy Resource, SAVAR. That agency has been absorbed by Cayuga Counselling and continues to provide services 45 years later.
Lydia also has a passion for history. She worked for the Cayuga Museum, became the local expert on Victorian funerary customs and a noted guide of nighttime tours through the beautiful Fort Hill cemetery in Auburn NY which includes a monument to Chief Logan of the Cayuga Nation one of the 6 nations of the Haudensonee Confederacy in Central New York. On the north side of the memorial obelisk is the question that touches the heart. “Who is there to mourn for Logan?” A number of us have taken that personally and speak his name with reverence. Lydia wrote of this monument and many more in her local history book: Auburn’s Fort Hill Cemetery available here at Amazon.
In 2023 she spoke at the Equal Rights Amendment Convention in Seneca Falls NY. She’s still beautiful. (Photo courtesy of Karen Simpson)
But I have left out what was to me the most influential part of my connection to Lydia. In 1984, Eric, the man who eventually became my life partner and then husband, and I went to Lydia to ask some questions. He had been interested in witchcraft all his life beginning as a boy in England. I had been hanging out with her for several years and wondered about the same things but had been reluctant to ask. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about being a witch! So when Eric was looking for somebody who could answer those questions, I responded “I know somebody”. We made an appointment. She read our tarot, answered our questions and invited us to join her Circle. We stayed working with her for 7 or 8 years learning how to cast a circle, set an altar, call the spirits, celebrate the Wheel of the Year, and as they say lots, lots more. The first book she set me to read was Starhawk’s Spiral Dance followed by Dreaming the Dark. I had to put them down every 20 minutes muttering “this is an entirely different way to think.”
Eventually when we got our heads straightened around to dare to be the pagans we were at heart, Eric and I hived off to create an open teaching circle of our own centered in the next county northwest where we lived. We had her blessing. I was a different person than when I sat in her living room having my cards read. Nevertheless, I still go back to her as my touchstone when I need advice. I’ve told my students I learned all of what was central about the Craft from Lydia. She learned it from her grandmother. Many people sat in Lydia’s living room around her altar. Because of Lydia there are a whole lot of witches in central NY. I am one of them. I think I mentioned in last week’s essay that I think of Lydia as the iconoclast, The Hierophant reversed. Now maybe you see why.
Summer Solstice1981 photo courtesy of Lydia Rosell