The Cailleach Returns: Trans Femininity, Dangerous Wisdom, and the Terror of Unwritten Womanhood

Trans women don’t distort womanhood—we reveal its scaffolding. This piece traces the mythic fear we carry, from the Cailleach to now, as sovereign femmes who unmask, endure, and return to reshape what was buried.

Introduction

She comes with the storm. Veiled, ancient, and alone—but never powerless. In the old stories, they called her the Cailleach: the Crone, the Hag of Winter, the Shaper of the Land. She walked the hills of the Highlands with a staff that froze the ground beneath her, and her breath stirred the winds that flattened armies. No man could master her. No church could silence her. She did not ask to be loved. She did not trade softness for safety. She returned each season as she pleased, not because she was welcome, but because she was inevitable. That energy lives in my bones—West Highland blood, storm-swept and stone-set. I was raised with silence around her name, but I feel her now, fierce and unbent, stirring beneath my skin. Not just a myth of winter, but a warning. A reminder that what cannot be tamed will always return.

And return she has. In this moment of collapse—of laws reshaped to exclude, of womanhood redefined by fiat, of reproductive labour repackaged as patriotic duty—her breath is in the air again. Anti-trans bills stack like cairns built to mark the passing of rights. The SAVE Act threatens to write us out of legal existence. We are watching, in real time, the reassertion of gender as property: womanhood as something to be owned, guarded, conferred—never claimed, never embodied, never lived outside its narrow script. And yet we persist. We move through these storms, not because we are welcome, but because we are real. Not because we fit the story, but because we remind the world how fragile the story has always been.

So I return to her image, the Cailleach, and I ask myself what power she holds that still haunts the ruling order. Why does her presence linger? Why does it unsettle? And then I see it: she is sovereign. She is her own definition. And in that way, she is kin. Because this is the truth they fear—not that trans women distort womanhood, but that we reveal its scaffolding. We move through its architecture and show the seams. We are dangerous because we persist, because we exist without permission, because we walk through the world not as broken copies but as living challenges to the lie that gender was ever fixed. We do not come to claim stolen ground. We come to shake the earth until it remembers its shape.

Archetypal Femininity and the Fear of the Unclassifiable

She does not fit their stories. Not the maiden, with her delicate blush and pliant promise. Not the mother, sanctified by service and sacrifice. Not the muse, ornamental and mute. The Cailleach stands outside these frames—not youthful, not nurturing, not consumable. She is the unwritten woman. The one the bards feared to name too clearly, because to describe her too closely was to admit that not all women could be placed in service of men’s desires. Her wildness was not the wildness of abandon, but of sovereignty—of land claimed not through conquest but through presence. She shaped the mountains and made her bed in the wind. And when they tried to bind womanhood in symbols they could sell, she slipped through the cracks like mist and reminded the earth of older truths.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of her, too, though she names her differently. In The Dangerous Old Woman, Estés gives voice to that same archetype: the fierce elder who no longer asks to be pleasing, who no longer waits to be understood. She speaks in riddles, in stories, in firelight. She laughs at kings and walks barefoot through the ruins of the temples built to contain her. Estés understands that this woman—this energy, this stance—is not dangerous to the soul. She is dangerous to the system. Because she cannot be bought. She cannot be made into a brand. She carries history in her spine and prophecy in her breath. She doesn’t fit the page; she tears through it.

And that, I think, is the root of it: patriarchy is not afraid of femininity. It has always known how to use that. It is afraid of femininity that cannot be controlled, owned, or consumed. The kind that is not a product of someone else’s narrative, but a truth that resists translation. The kind that lives in the crone who blesses or curses with equal ease, in the trans woman who refuses to be palatable, in the survivor who does not seek redemption through forgiveness. Femininity that bends but does not break, that yields but does not vanish. That kind is terrifying to a system built on possession.

This is where we stand—trans women, especially those of us who live at the edges of legibility. We are not dangerous because we fail the test of womanhood. We are dangerous because we expose the terms of the test itself. Because we show that the categories were never neutral. That the game was never fair. That the entire project of defining womanhood through appearance, function, or approval is a cage dressed as logic. We don’t come to pass. We come to unmask. And when we do, the fear that meets us is not really about who we are. It’s about what we reveal: that gender, like myth, has always been written by those in power—and that it can be rewritten, too.

Trans Femmeness as Sovereignty

Femmeness, for me, was never a performance. It was a quiet refusal. A rejection of the scripts I was handed, not out of defiance, but out of knowing. Not the knowing of facts or rules or roles—but the knowing that lives in the body, in the breath, in the way a reed bends to the wind without breaking. The kind of knowing that whispers: this isn’t true for you. You don’t have to wear it to survive. And in that refusal, something ancient stirred. Not rebellion as spectacle—but rebellion as stance. As softness that does not collapse. As presence that does not plead.

When I first wrote about femmeness, I spoke of softness—not as comfort, not as compliance, but as discipline. The discipline of flow. Of martial practice. Of the internal root that allows movement to be both yielding and unyielding. I wrote:

“Femmeness is not performative. It’s a quiet refusal. A rejection of the scripts I was handed.”

This refusal is not loud. It does not shout its difference. It does not seek to win. It simply does not comply. It redirects force instead of returning it. It listens before it moves. It endures—not because it is fragile, but because it knows when to bend and when to root. In Tai Qi, you are taught to feel the intention of your opponent—not to resist it directly, but to sense its trajectory, and to guide it elsewhere. You do not become what you oppose. You become the space it cannot conquer.

This is what my femmeness has become. Not a costume, not a petition, not a proof of belonging. It is how I live inside my own skin. How I teach, how I write, how I dress—not to please, but to stay whole. In a world that wants to harden me, to flatten me, to reduce me to something legible, my softness is not absence. It is presence. It is resistance in a different register.

And in this, there is sovereignty. Not the kind bestowed by crown or law. Not the kind validated by passability or recognition. This is sovereignty that emerges from the ground up. From the knowing that you belong to yourself. From the certainty that you are not a performance for others to consume. From the marrow-deep understanding that to be unreadable by a system built to erase you is not a failure—it is a form of freedom.

It’s the same kind of sovereignty I wrote of in The Quiet Rebellion—the wildness of whimsy, the sacredness of ungoverned joy. The kind found in moss-covered rocks and creatures with no names. That rebellion doesn’t organise marches. It plants flowers in forbidden places. It writes stories that don’t resolve. It wears silly hats on solemn days. It refuses usefulness and, in doing so, reclaims meaning.

That is what this softness is. That is what this femmeness is. A way of being that does not need to prove itself because it already is. Sovereign. Rooted. Living beyond the reach of those who would try to define it.

Dworkin’s Scream and the Administrative Weaponisation of Gender

There was a time I thought the harm was personal. That the blank stares, the misgenderings, the administrative errors that erased my name or replaced it with another were individual acts of ignorance or malice. But I know better now. I know what Andrea Dworkin knew—that the violence isn’t random. It’s not a glitch in the system. It is the system. And whilst her scream named it in the starkest of terms—rape, battering, possession—I have come to understand how that same structure adapts, evolves, wears new faces. What she saw in male entitlement, I now see mirrored in legal codes and biometric databases. In bathroom bills and passport denials. In bureaucratic language that renders you fictional in the eyes of the state.

Today’s patriarchy doesn’t always scream. It whispers in the language of policy. It smiles through legislation written by men who have never had to prove their existence. It calls itself safety, tradition, even fairness. But its aim is the same as it ever was: to contain womanhood. To define it so narrowly that anything outside the frame becomes not just illegible, but punishable. That’s what the SAVE Act would do—draw the boundaries of federal womanhood so tightly that trans women are erased not with bullets, but with amendments. It’s the old violence, now wearing a suit. A violence that doesn’t need to strike you down. It only needs to make you disappear.

In Screams and Softness, I wrote of Dworkin’s power—not as a model to mimic, but as a voice that refuses to be domesticated. Her scream was not misdirected rage. It was diagnostic. She showed us the shape of power: how it moves through laws, through customs, through the lie of neutrality. She made it impossible to pretend we didn’t know. And yet the temptation now is to believe we’ve evolved. That we’re beyond the brutal clarity of her language. But we haven’t. We’ve only buried the tools deeper in code—legislative code, algorithmic code, linguistic code. And in doing so, we’ve made them harder to name.

But still, we name them.

To exist visibly as a trans woman is to reveal that gender is not essence, but enforcement. It is to show that gender, as most people know it, is not an identity but a credential—conferred by others, monitored by systems, enforced through threat. It is to walk into the world and unsettle its architecture by simply being real. And this is why we are feared. Not because we are deluded, but because we are disobedient. Because we do not wait for permission to exist.

The patriarchy we face now is no less vicious for being procedural. Its tools are paperwork and policy, but its aim is still obedience. It wants womanhood to remain bound to service—reproductive, aesthetic, emotional. It offers medals for motherhood and punishment for variance. It funds nostalgia whilst stripping away autonomy. And above all, it wants to preserve the myth that gender is a truth rather than a territory—defined, fenced, and guarded.

But we’ve been to the edges of that territory. Some of us fell off it. Some were pushed. Some, like me, followed the map only to find the well at the end of the world, and there—finally—drank something true. That journey was not linear. It was recursive, gestural, full of echoes and losses. It was a language I didn’t speak at first, one I had to piece together from sensation, from silence, from memory not of words but of water and wind. That’s what The Well at the End of My World was about—the reckoning that comes when you realise the story you’ve been given will never hold you, and the courage it takes to write a new one, even if your hands are shaking.

So here we are. Writing new stories not because we want to replace the old myths, but because the old myths were never meant for us. Because we are no longer asking to be included in a structure built to exclude. We are naming the structure. And then we are walking past it.

Why Trans Women Are Feared—and Why We Must Endure

Trans women are dangerous not because we distort womanhood, but because we reveal how fragile and constructed it is. That is the truth that cannot be spoken aloud in halls of power, in courtrooms, in committee hearings that pretend to define us. That is what makes us a threat—not our bodies, not our choices, but our ability to exist outside the boundaries they swore were fixed. We do not merely break the rules. We expose them as inventions. We are the living evidence that gender, like myth, is not a fact but a frame. And once you’ve seen the scaffolding, you cannot unsee it.

This is why the fear is so deep. So visceral. So outsized. It’s not rational. It’s not even modern. It’s mythic. We carry the same charge that once surrounded the crone at the edge of the village, the witch in the forest, the woman who lived alone and spoke with the wind. The fear is ancient. The logic of transphobia is the logic of archetype: You are what we were told to fear. Not because you cause harm—but because your presence dissolves the stories that kept others compliant.

This is the Cailleach’s storm. She was never feared because she lied. She was feared because she told the truth no one wanted to hear. Because she came at the end of cycles, when things fell apart. Because her presence signalled reckoning. You didn’t summon her—you survived her. And yet, there is mercy in her frost. There is clarity in her wind. She strips away what cannot last. She shows the bones of the land. And in doing so, she makes room for something else to grow.

We carry that storm. Not always in anger. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes in how we teach, how we walk, how we refuse to explain ourselves. Our very being is an act of rupture. We are not ornaments. We are not metaphors. We are not requests. We are thresholds. Portals. Signs that the world is not as tidy as it was told to be. And that is unbearable to those who rely on the tidy world to maintain their power.

But we must endure. Not for their education, not to prove anything, but because endurance is itself a form of defiance. Survival is not just staying alive—it is staying true. It is remaining rooted in your own body, your own flow, your own sacred knowing, even when the culture tries to exile you from it. They may legislate names, define womanhood by chromosomal shorthand, threaten, erase, redefine—but they cannot make us unknow ourselves. They cannot take back what we have already claimed.

And so we endure. Like the Cailleach, we return. Not because we are invited, but because we are necessary. We come with the frost that cracks false idols. We come with the wind that whispers through old structures and reminds them they are hollow. We come with the rain that softens the ground so that new things can take root. We are feared because we carry the future. Not the one they’ve planned—but the one we remember. The one they buried. The one that begins again, with us.

Final thoughts …

The Cailleach is not gone. She never was. She’s walking still—just in different forms. Not always draped in wool or crowned in ice, but in bodies like mine. In the slow, deliberate movements of autistic trans femmes who refuse the choreography of compliance. In those who do not perform womanhood, but carry it differently—rooted, fluid, relational. You’ll find her in the teacher who whispers softness into rooms built for control. In the writer who dares to name herself without needing to be legible. In the elder who lives alone on the edge of town, speaking only when it matters most. She lives in us—not as a metaphor, but as memory.

Because we are not new. We are not anomalies. We are not deviations from some original design. We are the returning. The cyclic. The ones who remember what the world tried to forget. Our femininity was never theirs to gatekeep. Our existence was never a petition. It is the echo of something older than law, deeper than doctrine—a song hummed in bones, a rhythm in the land. We do not walk these paths to prove ourselves. We walk them because they are ours.

This is the truth that patriarchy cannot hold: that we are not distortions, but restorations. We are not mistakes, but memory. We do not mimic. We remember. We do not perform womanhood—we resurrect its truths the system tried to bury. The ones found not in compliance, but in presence. Not in permission, but in sovereignty. And when we move through the world with that knowing—quiet, unyielding, soft in stance but not in spirit—we do more than survive. We return.

Like the Cailleach, we come back not to ask, but to shape. Not to be seen, but to endure. Not to fit—but to remind the earth of its contours. The winter wind still carries her voice, but now it speaks through us. Through those who refuse to be named by someone else’s hand. Through those who flow instead of freeze. Through those who—against all odds, against all scripts—choose to remain.