Rachel Pollack has lastly transcended to one other airplane of existence at the age of 77, in accordance to a public Facebook publish from Pollack’s spouse, Zoe Matoff. An icon in the comics, science fiction, Tarot and trans communities, Pollack is greatest identified for in comics her Doom Patrol run, which launched the first overtly transgender mainstream superhero, a lesbian intercourse employee who positive factors powers after having intercourse with a super-powered consumer, Kate Godwin, a.okay.a. Coagula, who was named after trans author Kate Bornstein and Transy House founder Chelsea Goodwin. Pollack was recognized with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in July 2022, and in March 2023, her good good friend Neil Gaiman introduced 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 famend writer and artist, having labored on DC’s The New Gods, points #1-11, DC’s Time Breakers, DC’s Tomahawk, and most lately, ComiXology Original’s The Never Ending Party, which was the creator’s first comedian e book challenge in 25 years. However, amongst followers at present, particularly queer, trans followers like myself, the creator is greatest identified for her first-ever comics challenge, DC’s Doom Patrol, points #64-87, as a result of that e book modified the course of historical past, giving trans folx a voice in mainstream comics for the first time. Coagula was a badarse trans lesbian intercourse employee, a personality archetype that will make an unlikely debut at present.
“I came up with this wild idea—my ideas are often very daring, particularly around sexuality, usually in a comical way,” Pollack informed The Nib cartoonist Annie Mok in 2019 about arising with the concept 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 apart from comics, she refused to lend superiority to the opinions of cisgender folks about trans our bodies. In the Nineteen Seventies, when she acquired concerned with the UK Gay Liberation Front, a bunch demanding “absolute freedom for all,” besides Along with trans poet-writer-activist Roz Kaveny (More Tales from the Forbidden Planet), Pollack shaped the GLF’s Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group. In January 1972, the group collectively penned a bit about transphobia and the trans expertise in subject #11, the “Lesbian Issue,” of GLF’s Come Together publication. “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 can also be a prolific writer of over 40 science fiction and fantasy novels, non-fiction works, and comics. Her work has been broadly praised for its depth, perception, and creativeness. In 1997, she received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for the novel that was my first introduction to her work, Godmother Night (for my part, this e book is at the prime of the checklist of prose novels that you need to learn in case you take pleasure in the creator’s comedian e book work). Additionally, she received the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Unquenchable Fire — which trans writer 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 style, Pollack was one in all the foremost authorities on the Tarot, having authored a number of books on the topic that at the moment are taught at universities throughout the world, together with 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot, Part I and II and The New Tarot Handbook. Since 1980, when the first version of the first quantity of 78 Degrees got here out, she grew to become acknowledged as an authority on Tarot and started instructing workshops on it. Her contributions to the area helped broaden its attain and reputation, making it extra accessible to folks from all walks of life.
Pollack’s curiosity in Tarot began when she was a younger woman, and she was fascinated by the symbolism and imagery of the playing cards. As she grew older, she started to research the Tarot extra significantly, studying books and practising readings for mates and household. She additionally explored numerous non secular traditions, together with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Kabbalah, to deepen her understanding of the Tarot and its meanings.
In learning Buddhism, Pollack gained insights into the nature of struggling and the significance of mindfulness and compassion in breaking free from adverse patterns and feelings. These views helped her to develop a extra empathetic and intuitive strategy to the Tarot and to perceive the significance of being current and open to the messages of the playing cards.
From Hinduism, Pollack gained an appreciation for the energy of symbolism and fable and a deeper understanding of the human psyche and its connection to the divine. She additionally realized about karma and the concept that our actions have penalties, which helped her see the Tarot as a instrument for exploring our decisions and potential outcomes.
Through Pollack’s exploration of Kabbalah, the Brooklyn-born Jewish writer gained a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all issues, which helped her to see the Tarot as a instrument for exploring the complicated net of relationships and energies that make up our world. She additionally realized 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 ideas in The Kabbalah Tree: A Journey of Balance & Growth, a tremendous e 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 whereas interviewing her for the now-defunct Today newspaper. He informed The Guardian that the creator’s Judaism was at all times essential to her however that she fought the faith’s sexist and transphobic parts. “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 as soon as referred to as Pollack a “national treasure.”
Today, others are nonetheless attempting to dictate “what we are,” with more and more contradictory messages from oppressive institutional and interpersonal energy programs that strive to mark trans our bodies as inferior. Although, in a 2022 Pew Research Center research, most individuals stated they favored defending trans folks from discrimination, 60 p.c of respondents additionally stated they favor insurance policies requiring trans athletes to compete on groups that match their intercourse at beginning, displaying a disparity between what Americans said beliefs and the insurance policies they help.
Yes. Reading these statistics makes me really feel hopeless till I take into consideration trailblazers earlier than me. Luckily, for future generations of trans creators, Pollack’s work is there as a roadmap. It demonstrates how to have interaction in physique politics via artwork and activism with out shedding themselves to the trauma of the battle.
Coagula is immortal, so Pollack is immortal. To me, the character represents Pollack’s beliefs and power in the face of gender discrimination. She is a job mannequin for folks dealing emotionally with the present wrestle in the United States over how the authorities can management our our bodies. Thanks to biases engrained due to centuries of oppression, trans and queer folks have restricted institutional energy. This is outlined by policymakers’ ever-changing definitions of who we’re—who we’re to them, anyway.
Pollack was a trailblazer.
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