Which Witches?

There’s a phrase the Gender Critical crowd like to use. You can find it emblazoned on T-shirts, notebooks, badges, you name it.

“We are the (grand)daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.”

So…

Do they mean the daughters of the far greater majority who were hung, then? What about the daughters of the witches who were burned? Where’s the support and respect for them? Do TERFs not care about those the patriarchy makes into scapegoats, and prefer instead those who survived by denying their truth?

The ‘witches you couldn’t burn’ speaks to me of those who hid their beliefs. Not that anybody was kissing Satan’s fiery ass for real, then flying around on broomsticks cackling, like Quadball players on speed. They weren’t cursing people’s crops, or eating babies at Sabbats. They simply stuck to the old ways, did a bit of freelance midwifery, or did something as extreme as living alone. What they didn’t do was choose to take up the right flavour of Christianity. Do you have to love Jesus to be a TERF, now? I mean, I don’t see Jesus really being in with their mindset……

Or, I dunno. Maybe they think there’s an inherited matrilineal gene for being flame retardant? Which would call into question all the ‘deaths by burning’ that occurred before we had modern stoves.

None of those women condemned by the Malleus Maleficarum called themselves ‘witches’, either. Or, not until they’d been tortured into saying it, and confessed the required sins. This was all about conformity…