Katerina Phoenix

Photo: Katerina Phoenix

I Am Katerina

A note from Chief Editor, Bridget Snell, about meeting Katerina:

When we meet someone for the first time, initial conversations are often centered around a search for connection. What do you do for a living? What do you do for fun? Do you have kids? Are you in a relationship? Katerina and I found connection in our children (both have tween daughters) and in our love of words. Katerina also shared with me the ties that bind her voice and her narrative. Katerina had lost a couple of clients after they learned she is transgender. Katerina’s voice didn’t match her appearance, so she told me she decided to sound “more like a girl” to make the client more comfortable. She said, “But I felt like I lost my ability to write, to be creative, when I changed my voice to be more feminine.” I’m happy to note here that Katerina took her voice back again. She likes the sound of her voice, thank you very much, and she likes herself, thank you very much. What you read next is authentic Katerina. Thank you. Very much.

By Katerina Phoenix

This morning I met with a friend for a hike. Her son is about the same age as my daughter and she is also a healer in the Sacred Sexuality/Tantra world. We talked about how many of the people in this world live a nomadic lifestyle, going from one festival and retreat to another, gaining clients as they go. The call to travel has tempted me at times, yet I have decided to forego traveling to be present and watch my daughter grow up. I wasn’t there for my two older children as much as I would have liked. I was too busy working and trying to succeed in my business. I now view success very differently. My old life was very different. Today I am a queer transwoman in a polyamorous, open marriage.

Before I transitioned from male to female, I was a straight husband with a wife and three kids in a traditional monogamous marriage. Back then, I never guessed I would have the life I have today. I didn’t even know it was possible to be this happy. I hadn’t found myself (yet), and I wasn’t living authentically (yet!). It took me a few years to find my authentic self. It has been a beautiful journey of healing and exploration of self with moments of rapid growth and rejoicing as well as many long nights spent crying alone in an empty bathtub, relieving myself of years of unspent rage, sorrow, and grief. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a lot of damage done to my self-esteem and sense of identity from living “out of place” for so many years. I was pretty messed up before transition and I held a lot of secrets and lies and shame. Most of these secrets and lies were with myself. It was a survival mechanism to deny who and what I am.

About 18 months into my transition, I felt I was complete. I had undergone facial feminizing surgery and breast augmentation and decided to keep my penis and decline bottom surgery even though my gender therapist at the time told me I would never feel like a woman if I kept my penis (side note: always listen to your own higher intuition above another’s counsel). I use my penis and enjoy it, and while I would love to have a vagina I’m not willing to give it up. It was funny, but once I realized I had arrived at my journey’s destination, I fell into a depression. I had spent so long trying to get there, and when I arrived it felt very anticlimactic. I was crushed, for I had thought transitioning would be the panacea to all my problems.

After feeling into it, I realized that I felt the same after transition as I had before: I was a man repressing my feminine side and now a woman repressing my masculine side. I felt so much pressure to be “a woman” that I was denying parts of myself that had masculine traits. It was then that I realized what I wanted wasn’t so much to be a woman but to be free. Free in my expression, with myself, with others, and with the world. I wanted to be able to exist fully authentically and be okay with myself, and ideally have others be okay with me too. This introduced new layers of coming out: coming out as queer, coming out as poly, and at a deeper level being transparent with myself and those closest to me about who I really am and what my true desires and fears are. Living in a vulnerable way. This is what I wanted above all, for I had come to view that real freedom is derived from self-expression and self-acceptance of who we truly are.  In my case, I had found that I enjoyed both my male and female elements and have since learned to embrace them. I have nurtured a true union of my inner masculine and inner feminine, and they have been maturing together now that each no longer has aspects hiding in shadows. This has allowed me to feel whole and complete as a human, accessing all aspects of self.

Unfortunately, many trans people suffer from feeling out of place after transitioning. Trying to fit in is hard, for oftentimes trans people really don’t fit in. It immensely helped when one of my mentors told me that while I may never fit in, I will always belong. This helped me see that I can simply exist as myself and be accepted and loved by others while still standing out as unique. I have come to embrace and love my uniqueness instead of viewing it as something that keeps me separate from others. I really love feeling free to just be who I am and feel comfortable in my own skin. I am grateful for each day of this new life, especially given that my old life contained so much repression and denial that was slowly eating away at my soul.

Denying who I am has been a recurrent theme in my life. When I was a young kid, I remember my dad telling me that boys don’t swish when they walk and they don’t sit cross-legged as girls do. I slowly began repressing parts of myself in order to fit in. It left me feeling invalid as a person as if I needed to be something other than myself to gain acceptance. Not surprisingly there have been many times in my life when I felt like I had no personal power, no voice.

Several painful things resulted from this lack of self-esteem and power, and my life seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I was attracting people who took advantage of me in a multitude of ways. My employees at the construction company I owned were overpaid and underworked. My clients received more and paid less than they would have with other similar companies. I tended to be subservient in my marriage and make myself small. When I was younger this lack of self-esteem and power led to multiple rapes, all of which took a good amount of healing work to recover from.

After a while, I began to feel like a victim—as though no matter how hard I tried, I would never succeed or find happiness, or even feel comfortable in my own skin. It was a hard life for a long time. The days seemed to blur into each other while the skies remained dark and overcast in my world. I was simply existing, not living, and certainly not thriving.

And then it happened. One day in 2018 I was playing with an app on my phone which had a gender-swap feature. I took a photo of myself and used the male-to-female filter. What I saw took my breath away! I saw a beautiful woman who resembled how I might have looked had I been born female. My eyes teared up and I knew then that I would stop at nothing to become who I saw looking back at me. It was what I needed right then—a little bit of hope that things could get better, and the belief that I could make myself into something new. It felt so radical at the time, this thought that I could choose my own life even though it went against the grain and the approval of others. At the time, I had no idea how to navigate the complex world of transition and coming out or even if my marriage would survive. I simply knew I was finally ready to begin living my life for me. And I began to feel I was worth it.

I started with minor changes. A little more “swish” in my walk. New clothes. And a different hairstyle. Doing the things I wanted even though I felt awkward, ridiculous, stupid, or embarrassed. I began making new friends who embraced the trans side of me. It was weird but all of a sudden I felt more me. And more alive! Happier. Ultimately, I did decide to transition and the marriage did not survive. However, we happily co-parent today and she is a wonderful mother to our children. I still love her and always will. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for many whose spouses come out as transgender.

It was shortly after my separation and I was presenting female full time (I present female, but identify as two spirit) that I began my healing journey and entered the conscious community. It came about through Tinder actually. I began dating a stunning nonbinary tantrika, and with them, I began attending Tantra and Sacred Sexuality retreats and my life began to change. It took a while to figure out if my newfound happiness was the result of my gender journey or my healing journey. I have decided it is from both—the healing journey has supported my transition in ways that I feel most queer and transgender people could really benefit from. In fact, my latest passion project is thesacredqueer.com, an online space for queer and trans people to explore the worlds of Sacred Sexuality, Tantra, and Lightworker healing modalities so they may navigate their lives with more ease, flow, acceptance, joy, and erotic current.

Today, most of my days are a pleasant mix of social activity and work. Even my work is in many ways a form of social activity as I spend a lot of my time coaching people through their own life challenges and subsequent “uplevelings.” I entered the conscious community after a lifetime of thinking that spirituality held little for me. I am amused that it has completely taken over my life. The sweet pungent smoke from sage and incense wafts through the air as slow, rhythmic music with drumbeats and chants fills my living room. How this came to pass is a precious memory.

It was during the second tantra retreat I attended that I found myself opposite a beautiful young woman. She was performing a sacred ritual with me and she was holding witness as I, in sacred space, slowly acquiesced to my higher intention of accessing deeper, previously hidden layers of self. I was crying, screaming, releasing years of rage, sorrow, and grief. I yelled and sobbed, laying on my back. Her hands gently caressed me until the ceremony concluded, at which time she draped a sarong over my face and body. As I lay there in my own chrysalis, I began to journey and had a spiritual awakening. For more than seven hours I was in a trance. I became a large being about 10 feet tall with red skin, wings, and fingers that could shapeshift into talons. I had both sets of genitals and fed off-colored streaks of energy. A streak of energy in the form of red, green, yellow, orange, or blue would drift by and I would snatch it out of the air and eat it. I astral-planed and witnessed myself in previous lives. In the end, I knew it was all love. I felt that everything is love. And most poignantly, I felt the full and complete embodiment of love.

Feeling such an immense amount of love at once permanently altered me. I began changing my priorities, placing more emphasis on the quality of time and less on getting things done. I began slowing down and started a daily practice of mindfulness and meditation. I found joy in journaling while in a state of unease and trigger, knowing it would help me find ways to pull myself out of the trigger and back into the light. I fell in love. Several times! On 11/11/22 at 1:11pm my wife and I got married in a Tantric Union Ritual of our making in a nearby magical elfin forest. It was a perfect day, a perfect union. And I have found that the majority of my connections now are somehow based on spiritualism, on moving towards the light.

I have so much to be grateful for in my life. I am lucky that all my children accept me as a transgender dad. They have been supportive since day one. In fact, my older daughter’s only reaction when I came out to her was asking if we could go shopping together! What I really love is how free I am. I used to think of freedom as having enough time or money, but now I also see that an often-overlooked form of freedom is that of expression. When I lived as a man, I felt so constricted. I couldn’t show the world who I was. Even after I transitioned, I found there were so many ways I was imprisoned by my own beliefs and fears of the judgment of myself or by others.

As I have mentioned, my wife and I are polyamorous which means we can date and even fall in love with other people. I had a lot of judgments of myself for wanting to live this way. However, I really love this lifestyle and have witnessed so much beauty and growth through and in my relationships. I have been dating a woman I really love for a year and have just started dating a man for the very first time! I never would have worked on my insecurities had I not needed to deal with jealousy issues that have arisen from this relationship style. And it has really helped me keep codependency out of my relationships.

“I used to make myself small in order to fit in with my partner, and I am done playing life small.”

Identifying as queer has been perhaps the most freeing gift I have given myself. In my previous life, I had a lot of judgments about being part of the LGBTQA quadrant. As I have allowed myself to unfold in this life, I have found that I am indeed queer all the way through. Embracing this has meant a world of freedom.

What I have learned is that life is an ever-changing process and to just let it unfold. There are sides to all of us that haven’t been discovered yet, and we can be afraid of them or openly embrace them. I tried denying who and what I am for a long time. When I finally accepted myself fully, my world opened, the colors came rushing in, and each day feels like one of the best days of my life.