Revisiting Consent in Dance and ' i'll pray for you' (CW religion and transphobia)

In January 2019 I wrote about a meeting / workshop I had attended talking about consent in dance / performance.

Today on Facebook something blew up, I'm not going to mention the group it was in as quite sensibly the admins have hidden the threads /posts involved, but it  hinged around consent. It was a dance related group with a heavily  white middle cis -het US American membership profile/


The involvement of religion and religious topics in other wise secular spaces is often  fraught,  usually down the the fact that the religious feel the need to evangelise and  prosletyse  and that the response to someone reporting  an injury or  illness to  to offer to pray for them and to encourage others to pray.  What escapes these people  is that   what they say there  is

" I am involving  you in a  religious ritual  without your consent and  do not feel i need to seek your consent before  doing so " 

this is before  considering the deeply problematic  nature of  making  secular spaces religious for those who follow other faiths or none  and for those whose particular denomination / subgroup within a faith  is inclusive of LGBTQ+ people  etc ...

If a  Roman Catholic or Salvationist says they are going to pray for me, following their doctrine, that's a death threat  because  both the Roman Catholic church and the Salvation Army do not respect or recognise me as a valid  person  and seek to 'cure' me ...   There is no cure for my condition or  situation merely  physical amelioration and the opportunity for systems and processes to correct an error of assignment.

a cisgender female born on the same date to the same parents is not me  , neither is a cisgender male born on the same date to the same parents ...  these  people, who do not exist, are no more me than my younger brother is. 

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