A Sense of Doubt blog post #2980 - National Treasure - Rachel Pollack - RIP - Comic Book Sunday for 2304.16
I was a fan of the Doom Patrol series she did with DC, but I have to admit that I did not know about all her other things. Quite impressive. We have lost a real great human, as one article proclaimed "a national treasure."
Thanks for tuning in.
A
Superhero on Your Own Terms: An Interview With Rachel Pollack
by Annie Mok
Talking to the Doom Patrol and Tarot
Wisdom author about just going out and living your life.
The Transcendental Love of Rachel Pollack
Patricia Highsmash
In Remembrance of Rachel Pollack
by Travis Hedge Coke
I want to tell a straightforward biography, a critical lauding, because Rachel Pollack is an important, exceptional individual. But, I also know that Rachel is more than an individual, but as a term in and of itself, poorly expresses what the word can actually denote. And, Rachel has had an important influence over my life, who I am, that I am alive today, and I am grateful to personally know that she has enjoyed my sometimes awkward literary style and sometimes offbeat approach.
Rachel Pollack will soon leave world, passing on to whatever ethereal afterlife she may or may not have subscribe to. Or not. It’s just as probable she’s become one with the cosmos, or simply ceased to be, depending on your views on the matter. Now, you and I, we don’t know what exactly death is, and we are likely not going to agree to any precise measure, but we can come to a consensus. In general.
Rachel Pollack has made art, and you – and I – may not find the same boundaries on that definition, either, but she makes it anyway. Rachel has written wonderful short fiction, extensive non-fiction, informational, evocative, explanatory, and exploratory. And, Rachel has written comics, which is the first of her work that I knew.
It would hardly be the last.
When I was in my early teens, puberty was affecting my earlier childhood genital surgeries, and I had to have more. For all the faked and irrational rage today RE: “How dare they perform surgeries on trans children!?” when I was a child, that was how the United States medical field dealt with intersex children, which continues to be popular today. That is, of course, because those enraged, crying out such things, do not give one fuck about trans children, for trans adults, or, for that matter, most other cis children and adults.
Rachel, at the time, was writing the DC comic Doom Patrol, and through a mutual friend had some comp copies sent to me.
I was new in town, new to the school, to the state, tiny for my age, disabled, queer, confused, and ethnic minority in a place which still had segregated dances, who could sometimes pass, and sometimes failed to pass; with my genitals all sliced up, mixed about, stitched without a nice colorful bow, who had to shower with the boys after gym class.
The gym class showers were notorious for pranks, people getting tripped or slapped, for rapes. Notorious enough that, at that age, one boy raping or molesting another felt, to many of us, kind of the same as being tripped coming out of the water. You were hurt. You were embarrassed. You knew it was wrong, but it was something you grudgingly lived with. One boy was raped by a group of other boys in our class, because his best friend had died the year before, and something in his grief and tiredness upset them.
I was moved from the group showering within days, called out and mocked openly by our gym teacher, and told to wash myself off with the hose used to clean the cleaning equipment. The mops, buckets, and me.
Our gym teacher made it vocally clear that some of the other boys found me sexually exciting, that many people were curious about my surgeries, about my background, and my gender, that some of the girls had suggested I use their showers, that some of the girls believed I was a girl, that some of the boys believed I was a girl, that some of the girls believed I was a lesbian. Our gym teacher made it vocally clear that this was my fault.
At the time, I do not think that Rachel Pollack knew half of this, in specifics, but she knew how it goes. Rachel understood being trans, she understood what it was to grow up in America, and she understood human beings. So, Rachel arranged for me, the kid with the non-conforming genitalia, to be able to read her Doom Patrol.
And, in Rachel’s Doom Patrol issues, she and others wrote little side notes to me, as they also did in some other comics’ commentary: further reading recommendations, humorous anecdotes; anecdotes which would make you cry. With her gift, she not only educated and entertained me, she reaffirmed that I had a place not only in the world, but specifically in a white peoples’ world, and what I thought of then as a rich, white peoples’ world.
I thought Rachel Pollack was rich. I had a child’s idea of finances and class. I had a child’s assumptions. She wasn’t wealthy in the financial sense, but she was embarrassingly so in generosity, understanding, good humor, kindness, and love.
This was the time in my life, when life involved touchstones such as knowing the faces of most of my rapists in your eighth grade class; being castigated for your down there by teachers; hearing doctors giggle when they try to discuss your gender and sexual characteristics; and being an Indigenous person unsure of how white people use words like tribe or tribal, Rachel and her art helped me stay afloat, and to navigate myself.
She did all this for a kid she had never even met.
All of my work, then and since, is influenced by Rachel Pollack. The way I navigate myself and communities I was not born into relies significantly on tactics I derived from Rachel’s work, from knowing her as a person. There might not be two days which go by without me thinking about Rachel Pollack.
Some of the most important things I had reaffirmed for me in Rachel’s work are that being goofy or awkward or silly or naïve or clumsy, did not make you less right or real; that we are individual and we are group; that interpreting is sometimes healthier than interpretation; that not only do we need a transsexual in charge, many cultures and nations already have one, which some can admit, and some cannot; that they may like your powers, but not know how to handle you.
Thank you, Rachel Pollack.
Remembering Rachel Pollack and what she meant to the trans community
Remembering a "national treasure."
Rachel Pollack has finally transcended to another plane of existence at the age of 77, according to a public Facebook post from Pollack’s wife, Zoe Matoff. An icon in the comics, science fiction, Tarot and trans communities, Pollack is best known for in comics her Doom Patrol run, which introduced the first openly transgender mainstream superhero, a lesbian sex worker who gains powers after having sex with a super-powered client, Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, who was named after trans writer Kate Bornstein and Transy House founder Chelsea Goodwin. Pollack was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in July 2022, and in March 2023, her good friend Neil Gaiman announced that she’d been moved to a hospice facility.
Matoff posted on Facebook on April 7, 2023, “I am sad to tell you that our beloved Rachel Pollack passed so peacefully and beautifully today at about 12:45 p.m. after a touching ceremony called Hand to Heart. Several of us stood in a circle. I had my hand on her heart. I began the circle by saying how much I love her and what she means to me. Each took their turn after me sharing their own feelings and appreciation of Rachel. I know that Rachel will continue to be a Light in this world and in the next. She will continue to inspire so many of our beloved Tarot community, the Science Fiction and Fantasy community, the Comics community, and the Transgender community for whom she shared so much respect and care. We have felt and cherished your love and prayers over the past months and years as Rachel experienced so many health challenges. We are One.”
Rachel Pollack’s Body Politics
Pollack is a renowned author and artist, having worked on DC’s The New Gods, issues #1-11, DC’s Time Breakers, DC’s Tomahawk, and most recently, ComiXology Original’s The Never Ending Party, which was the creator’s first comic book project in 25 years. However, among fans today, especially queer, trans fans like myself, the creator is best known for her first-ever comics project, DC’s Doom Patrol, issues #64-87, because that book changed the course of history, giving trans folx a voice in mainstream comics for the first time. Coagula was a badarse trans lesbian sex worker, a character archetype that would make an unlikely debut today.
“I came up with this wild idea—my ideas are often very daring, particularly around sexuality, usually in a comical way,” Pollack told The Nib cartoonist Annie Mok in 2019 about coming up with the idea to create Coagula. “I decided to do this transsexual lesbian character. It was basically like, my friends, you know?”
Pollack continued, “[Coagula] came to represent the struggle over people’s bodies. People’s shame, fear, over ridiculing them. […] Kate was the person who had it together, who had gone through that, dealt with it, so she was able to help the others.”
Even in areas of Pollack’s life other than comics, she refused to lend superiority to the opinions of cisgender people about trans bodies. In the 1970s, when she got involved with the UK Gay Liberation Front, a group demanding “absolute freedom for all,” except Along with trans poet-writer-activist Roz Kaveny (More Tales from the Forbidden Planet), Pollack formed the GLF’s Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group. In January 1972, the group collectively penned a piece about transphobia and the trans experience in issue #11, the “Lesbian Issue,” of GLF’s Come Together newsletter. “Certainly one thing becomes more and more clear as we come together; pass or not pass, we can’t let anybody tell us what we are,” the article concluded.
Transgender Magic, Tarot and Kabbalah
Pollack is also a prolific author of over 40 science fiction and fantasy novels, non-fiction works, and comics. Her work has been widely praised for its depth, insight, and imagination. In 1997, she won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for the novel that was my first introduction to her work, Godmother Night (in my opinion, this book is at the top of the list of prose novels that you must read if you enjoy the creator’s comic book work). Additionally, she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Unquenchable Fire — which trans author Charlie Jane Anders has hailed as “a breathtaking work of incredible strangeness” — and was nominated for a Nebula Award for Temporal Agency.
In addition to her work in genre, Pollack was one of the foremost authorities on the Tarot, having authored several books on the subject that are now taught at universities across the world, including 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot, Part I and II and The New Tarot Handbook. Since 1980, when the first edition of the first volume of 78 Degrees came out, she became recognized as an authority on Tarot and began teaching workshops on it. Her contributions to the field helped expand its reach and popularity, making it more accessible to people from all walks of life.
Pollack’s interest in Tarot started when she was a young girl, and she was fascinated by the symbolism and imagery of the cards. As she grew older, she began to study the Tarot more seriously, reading books and practicing readings for friends and family. She also explored various spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Kabbalah, to deepen her understanding of the Tarot and its meanings.
In studying Buddhism, Pollack gained insights into the nature of suffering and the importance of mindfulness and compassion in breaking free from negative patterns and emotions. These perspectives helped her to develop a more empathetic and intuitive approach to the Tarot and to understand the importance of being present and open to the messages of the cards.
From Hinduism, Pollack gained an appreciation for the power of symbolism and myth and a deeper understanding of the human psyche and its connection to the divine. She also learned about karma and the idea that our actions have consequences, which helped her see the Tarot as a tool for exploring our choices and potential outcomes.
Through Pollack’s exploration of Kabbalah, the Brooklyn-born Jewish author gained a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, which helped her to see the Tarot as a tool for exploring the complex web of relationships and energies that make up our world. She also learned about the mystical dimensions of the Hebrew alphabet, which helped her to see connections between the letters of the alphabet and the symbols of the Tarot. Pollack explored these concepts in The Kabbalah Tree: A Journey of Balance & Growth, an amazing book on how Tree of Life symbolism is embedded in the ten Sephiroth of Jewish Kabbalah and the Tarot.
Neil Gaiman met Pollack in 1985 while interviewing her for the now-defunct Today newspaper. He told The Guardian that the creator’s Judaism was always important to her but that she fought the religion’s sexist and transphobic elements. “Rachel and I bonded over many, many things, one of which was Jewishness, and despite being a bastion of the new age she was also incredibly Jewish. There’s an orthodox prayer that begins ‘Thank you, G-d, for not making me a woman,'” Gaiman recalled.
“I remember her telling me that after she came to following her surgery, she said, ‘Blessed to you G-d for not making me a woman, but thrice-blessed to the doctor who did.'”
Rachel Pollack: A National & Personal Treasure
With all these successes, one can see why Cat Fitzpatrick once called Pollack a “national treasure.”
Today, others are still trying to dictate “what we are,” with increasingly contradictory messages from oppressive institutional and interpersonal power systems that try to mark trans bodies as inferior. Although, in a 2022 Pew Research Center study, most people said they favored protecting trans people from discrimination, 60 percent of respondents also said they favor policies requiring trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth, showing a disparity between what Americans stated beliefs and the policies they support.
Yes. Reading these statistics makes me feel hopeless until I think about trailblazers before me. Luckily, for future generations of trans creators, Pollack’s work is there as a roadmap. It demonstrates how to engage in body politics through art and activism without losing themselves to the trauma of the battle.
Coagula is immortal, so Pollack is immortal. To me, the character represents Pollack’s ideals and strength in the face of gender discrimination. She is a role model for people dealing emotionally with the current struggle in the United States over how the government can control our bodies. Thanks to biases engrained due to centuries of oppression, trans and queer people have limited institutional power. This is defined by policymakers’ ever-changing definitions of who we are—who we are to them, anyway.
Pollack was a trailblazer.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2304.16 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2844 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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