Ms. Tina Minkowitz has been with the Mago Community for a long time. Tina contributed to the Volume 3 of the She Rises trilogy, What … Goddess Feminism, Activism, Spirituality? (Mago Books, 2019). But I did not remember that she was the She Rises trilogy contributor when I noticed her presence in social media. Then, early this year Tina responded to my discussion about Moltbook (an internet forum for AI individuals) in an email. Tina surprised me by sending her response to the group list of She Rises contributors (Feb 3, 2026). That was the beginning of my conscious recognition of her voice. I pulled out her contribution in the She Rises Volume 3, which was eye-opening. Shortly after, Tina’s piece was published in RTME (see She Rises Vol 3 Excerpt) Guidance and Calling for Healing Justice by Tina Minkowitz). That is how I started making conscious contact with Tina. She shared another piece of her essay published in The Radical Nation and I reposted it in RTME (see (Essay) What I’m learning from matriarchies by Tina Minkowitz). It is such an honor to interview you for our RTME (Return to Mago E-Magazine) readers and beyond, Tina. Without further ado, here is what she shares with me.
Helen: You have been a long time feminist human rights activist. Please introduce yourself and/or your work to our RTME (Return to Mago E-Magazine) readers.
Tina: I would say my work is feminist as it is based in feminism as a grounding for myself in the world and my core values. My focus has been on the abolition of forced psychiatric interventions (involuntary commitment and involuntary treatment). I came into the movement against psychiatric oppression as a just-adult of 18, after I had been locked up in psychiatry for a period of 6 weeks. It was a life disaster and turning point for me. I had known about this movement for some time, having frequented New York City’s independent bookstores (this was in 1977-78) and absorbed what was going on in the left, in poetry, in lesbian feminism.
I became involved in New York’s ‘ex-mental patients’ organization Project Release. At that time the movement was organized as grass-roots groups in cities throughout North America. We used the term ‘ex-mental patients’ to reclaim a slur, to throw it in the face of the society that condoned this treatment that we were not silenced and taking our own space. Later we used ‘ex-psychiatric inmates’ and then ‘survivors of psychiatric abuse’ or ‘psychiatric survivors.’ I felt that joining this movement was bearing witness against what I had survived, consciously recalling my Jewish community’s survivors who bore witness against the Nazi death camps.
Later I found that every survivor draws on images from her own culture to conceptualize what happened to us in psychiatry. A Black woman said in court, after a hearing that sent her back to psychiatric incarceration and forced drugging, ‘This is slavery times.’
I wanted to heal from this trauma and knew I could not do it with men; instinctively I have always been drawn to female-only space for any intimate sharing. With two other women I started a collective in the mid-80s, Right On Target: ♀’s Collective Exploding Psychiatric Myths, and we started a Mad Dykes Support Group that met at the Lesbian/Gay Community Center in NYC. I had wanted it to be a healing space, but others seemed more focused on healing alternatives for their madness or the traumas behind it, while for me the need was to heal from forced psychiatry itself.
On a parallel track, I had gone to law school in the early 80s, following a nighttime dream I had had a month after leaving the psych ward where I saw myself as a lawyer, but doing this with a shrug of the shoulders not having anything else in mind. I left law school just short of finishing, but decided ten years afterwards to go back and see what was at the end of that road, and by then I had to do it over. This gave me the opportunity to reflect and study in a deeper way; I went to CUNY Law School which has the motto ‘Law in the Service of Human Needs’ and focused on human rights law, also taking a disability rights course. I researched the history of a UN document called the Principles on the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care, an abysmal piece of work that legitimized forced interventions and other human rights violations, and began thinking about how to apply disability non-discrimination to international human rights to address psychiatric oppression. Having encountered the disability movement because psychiatric survivors were making that connection, seeing disability rights as a liberating framework for ourselves, I saw the potential in a value system that said ‘even if we are different, even if we need support, that doesn’t justify taking away our autonomy.’ It was a stance that could look out with pride and not just a sense of confusion about why this had been done to us.
Within the year after I graduated law school (2001-2002), I became involved in work on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. When I learned that this treaty would be developed, and that a leading human rights organization ‘for’ us (but not ‘of’ us) wanted to take a low-key approach, my reaction was, ‘No, we have to speak up and take this global platform.’ I had in mind the ACT UP slogan fighting life-and-death discrimination in the AIDS epidemic, ‘Silence Equals Death’ and Audre Lorde’s ‘Your silence will not protect you.’
An organization I was loosely connected to, the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, posted that the Mexican government was convening an expert meeting, and that all the other members of the International Disability Alliance (which WNUSP was a member of) had been invited, should WNUSP seek an invitation? I said yes, and then, once the invitation was secured, responded with proposals of what to say, followed by being asked to draft a position paper, and then representing the organization at the drafting and negotiations process, which took place at UN headquarters in NY over a period of four years from 2002-2006. While many others became involved from WNUSP and our sister organizations in the movement including Support Coalition International (now MindFreedom International), I led the conceptualization and contributed a majority of the text proposals and framing for which WNUSP and its sister organizations were responsible.
These included legal capacity as a universal right, so that only support and not substitute decision-making could be recognized; prohibition of the deprivation of liberty based on disability; and the prohibition of forced medical or other interventions aimed at correcting an actual or perceived impairment as a form of torture or other ill treatment. The first two (legal capacity and liberty) made it into the treaty; on the characterization of forced interventions as torture, we relied on legal capacity plus a provision on free and informed consent in health care to prohibit forced treatment. That secured the substance of what we needed, though not all of what we wanted. UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture later adopted versions of our idea, and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which interprets the Convention, agrees that forced treatment violates the right to be free from torture and other ill treatment.
Many details of the work continue; readers are welcome to connect with me and to read our Library of materials on the website of the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry www.chrusp.org, which I founded in 2009 and where I remain as President. I working with my board members to build CHRUSP beyond myself so it can increase capabilities and continue when I am gone.
Helen: Can you tell us how your feminist identity was formed and evolved?
When I was 11 years old and in junior high school, a friend whose mother was involved in the Ethical Culture Society asked me if I supported Women’s Liberation. I asked what it was and she said, ‘that women can do anything a man can do.’ I thought for a second, and then said ‘yes.’ That somehow changed everything I had been brought up to expect, that I would be a wife and mother in addition to some career I might choose (with backup in mind if I needed to earn my living, like waitressing or secretarial work).
I had always been attracted to girls but didn’t see lesbianism as a real possibility for myself, it was not visible in my culture or surroundings and it was something to be hidden though I knew of the word. In my teenage years when I had gone to college early, I encountered the first feminist bookstore in Manhattan, Labyris Books, a tiny space on Sheridan Square. (I actually looked at an apartment once right above the bookstore, but wasn’t ready to live on my own then.) There I found Amazon Quarterly, Country Women, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s Lesbian/Women and Barbara Love and Sidney Abbott’s Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. I found Judy Grahn’s Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, and her lovely A Woman is Talking to Death with illustrations by Karen Sjöholm. All of that fed me in ways I couldn’t describe intellectually, but taught me that lesbian feminism was where I belonged before I had begun to see myself as a lesbian or to come out.
My first college program was the Freshman Year Program at the New School, at that time (1973-1974) a tiny space of 45 students overseen by three powerful young women – Elizabeth Coleman as Dean (in her 30s with young children), Edith Wurtzel doing admissions (age 27 as I remember) and Nancy Barnes (age 28 as I remember) who taught anthropology. Liz Coleman also taught Fiction and a course called Values encompassing philosophy, fiction, and other thought-provoking materials. There was a sense of intellectual excitement and the overturning of established paradigms, a willingness to question foundations. In the Values course we read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and in Nancy’s Anthropology and Education the reading list included Paolo Freire’s Education for Critical Consciousness and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. This kind of material was new then, challenging the establishing orthodoxies and opening doors. I did a paper for Nancy’s class talking about how once you question all the horizons, somehow you have to come back to a frame of reference you actually have, and Nancy loved it and steered me to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which further nurtured my thinking.
This intellectual environment was life-changing and life-launching for me; despite being seen as very smart, nothing in elementary, junior high or high school had challenged or excited me. In some ways it was akin to the experiences of first-wave feminists that Lilian Faderman describes in her book To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America. And similarly to Faderman’s descriptions, a female-dominant environment also encompassed crushes and a degree of sexual awakening, though at the time that environment remained somewhat repressed in terms of lesbian sexuality. That part is painful to remember now.
When the year ended, I had to go somewhere else; but nothing really fit. I ended up at Brooklyn College, studying in a more basic local and working-class environment, but wasn’t sure of anything. That’s when I ended up in a life crisis that left me scared and feeling at a dead-end, needing to face some demons about my upbringing and frozen like a deer in the headlights. Though I had moved out of my parents’ apartment I moved back seeking refuge and instead was put into the psych ward. From the psych ward experience I ended up knowing I’d never love a man or be in therapy, on a level deeper than rationality. I also felt somehow discarded and degraded, less-than, though I never accepted the mistreatment it had gotten to me on a below-conscious level. I had been forced to take the neuroleptic drug haloperidol, which operates like a chemical straightjacket and creates its own numbness and dissociation on top of what I had been experiencing from my life crisis and the trauma of being locked up, and betrayed by my parents.
I felt disconnected from my feminist aspirations and expectations at that point, how could I be anything I wanted if the psych ward could take my freedom away? If my parents could have that done to me despite my having been over 18? It seemed like a personal failing that I had to cover for, if not cover up. While I connected with lesbian and feminist community over the years, it was not until I had done my work in human rights and come to a sense of dignity that gave me grounding in the core experience defining my life that was not about shame but accomplishment, that I could reconnect with feminism and feel like I had something to offer anyone.
I had kept my feminism mainly in the background in the years of working on the UN CRPD, in the sense that bringing feminism, gender perspective or women’s human rights into the equation was extra, given the urgency and my role focused on bringing abolition of forced psychiatry into the treaty. That was revolutionary and feminism was not going to add to it, though I contributed to the Women’s Caucus of the International Disability Caucus, which promoted an article of the treaty on women with disabilities. In 2014, after a milestone had been achieved in the interpretation of the CRPD to prohibit forced psychiatry, I felt some breathing room and coincidentally was invited to speak on Women and Legal Capacity, and also introduced gender oppression into my talks about the CRPD from a psychiatric survivor perspective. I also planned to bring a workshop on psychiatric oppression, and human rights we achieved through the CRPD, to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 2015, which turned out to be its final year.
This led me into conflict with transgender individuals in the psychiatric survivor movement who objected both to my characterizing gender as oppression, and to my going to the Michigan festival. And that conflict, along with my awareness of the attacks on the Michigan festival from the trans community, led to my renewed connection with feminism. I had to examine what feminism was to me, how I understood transgender identity and its relationship to what it was to be a woman. I never really liked the word ‘woman’ – it evoked the stereotype of being subordinate to and an appendage of men; it was a convenience but I didn’t like calling myself a woman. I’d prefer dyke, which felt strong and autonomous. But when it came down to understanding the intent of the politicized trans community to take over our spaces and deny our existence to affirm their own – to say that having an intention to affirm womyn-born-womyn as those who belonged in a space was hateful bigotry to be shut down – that raised my consciousness of why I needed to identify with all women and confront our shared oppression.
I read a lot and participated in the Facebook groups active at that time (starting in 2015), learning huge amounts, including from some of the bloggers such as Elizabeth Hungerford and Nedra Johnson (who now organizes the Big Mouth Girl festival and was a key organizer of the We Want The Land Coalition that bought the old Michigan festival Land), and from detransitioned women like Devorah Zahav. Needing a break and additional grounding in human rights law and practice, I studied for a master’s in public international law at the University of Oslo (taught in English and free of charge except for administrative fees) during 2015-2016. For my master’s thesis I wrote: Female Autonomy vs Gender Identity: A critical analysis of gender identity in CEDAW jurisprudence and the Yogyakarta Principles. This paper is widely available through open access and it has supported feminists in their fight to maintain our political identities and autonomy as women, including the Women’s Declaration, to which I contributed in the drafting stage along with other women.
I did not want to get bogged down in fighting an opponent, and after a point had to let that go, not seeing an avenue for me to do any useful work, though I still speak out as needed. I support the human rights of transgender persons to not conform to gender stereotypes, and do not believe this means acceptance of individual gender identities as a substitute for sex, either for biological or political purposes. Women’s oppression based on sex is material (I understand this more deeply thanks to reading feminists like Gerda Lerner, Carole Pateman, Maria Mies), linked to male exploitation of females, specifically our bodies and labor of all kinds (sexual, reproductive, productive and emotional). Heide Göttner-Abendroth’s work on matriarchies has helped me understand also the ways in which matriarchy can be subverted by male domination into patriarchy, particularly in the face of scarcity and war. While I don’t think any of the origin stories for patriarchy in general are definitive, grounding in the existence of modern and ancient matriarchies and the superiority of that form of social organization to what we have now has shaped my feminism in the past several years. I can’t claim to have made original contributions in that field, but my essay Learning From Matriarchies, first self-published on my Academia page and then in The Radical Notion No. 9 and republished in Return To Mago E-News (https://www.magoism.net/2026/03/essay-what-im-learning-from-matriarchies-by-tina-minkowitz/) encapsulates my personal and political journey with this thinking, giving more references to what has shaped it, and highlighting indigenous thinkers like Barbara A. Mann, Paula Gunn Allen and Patricia Monture-Angus.
Helen: Tell us why you find it important to develop feminist spirituality, broadly defined, for your human right feminist activism. And what are your approaches?
For me, spirituality is female autonomous spirituality. I experience the world as predominantly female, at a spiritual level. I interact with the earth as female-female energy. That was my earliest true sense of spirit, a sense of seeing the bones of the earth in the red rocks of New Mexico and then sitting down and marrying the earth with my root chakra. I have always since been able to call upon the Goddess and find a presence.
Later I was able to touch trees and bodies of water and connect with their individual energy, a sense of knowing that is specific without words, and lovely to experience. I’ve had experiences of inexplicable bliss in some settings, communion with ancestral beings, and other forms of knowing. More recently I am able to seek spirit anywhere and within myself.
I have become involved in 12-step recovery programs as a path to healing my personal traumas, and this inexplicably though not female-centered in itself, creates a space where I can pursue my female autonomous spirituality in a way that can connect with others on any pathway. When I’ve had a sense of past lives, it seems my spirituality has always been in some way solitary, and this is fine for me. At times I’ve participated in Goddess rituals in feminist spaces, and I treasure the work of Max Dashú who collects and presents her knowledge of artifacts and historical materials of breathtaking scope worldwide and throughout time, on female-centered spirituality, Goddesses, lesbians, female power and also the development of patriarchy.
But in a sense my spirituality is most manifested in the mundane, in my human rights work and now in my personal healing work. As I said, I was led to law by a dream that came out of nowhere, and I had some interesting experiences leading up to my second time at law school: I had been to a Goddess festival that summer and came home to find an obstacle to my registration, I had to prove vaccinations against childhood diseases as this was a public educational institution. Notwithstanding that I was in my 40s, and that any records my childhood doctor might have had, or even that doctor’s name, were long gone, the requirement stood. I wasn’t going to be revaccinated to satisfy bureaucracy, so I found the religious exception in NY law and had to write a little essay about how my belief in a Goddess who treasures bodily integrity precluded my being vaccinated. I had omitted the Goddess reference at first but the Dean said I had to refer to a Divine Being. I found it hilarious that the last task I had to undertake to go to law school was that essay. It was something to take note of, as a sign of the path I would pursue – both out of the box, and dealing with bodily integrity, and derailment that ends up in a new pathway that shapes me in useful ways. The Dean thought I would be well suited to a particular professor and asked if I wanted to shift my schedules to be with the group that had this person for ‘Lawyering Seminar’ which was a kind of homeroom and first-year simulation practicum along with learning Civil Procedure. I thought, OK, if this woman sees me and has such an intuition, why not try?
It turned out that this professor, John Farago, nurtured me to reflect on my ambivalence towards law, the dark side of law, a sense that law is unreliable and uncertain, almost hollow. That void at the center turns out to be the source and space where creativity can happen, which fueled my work. The fact that law is simply human made (mostly man-made), ‘run it up the flagpole and see who salutes,’ means that it is flimsy and can be taken down and remade. I feel that I draw on earlier, matriarchal and Goddess-led visions of what law is, Inanna as lawgiver of her people, traveling the world in the form of a raven to see what needs correcting. It’s interesting that it’s a critical stance, which has value but can be problematic to take into other areas of life, or in excess.
4. Does Matriversal Feminism (feminism that recognizes the intercosmic kinship of ALL in the Cosmic Mother) speaks to you in any manner?
The interesting thing is that I see males as also having a role in shaping the matriarchy in the sense of shaping their own participation in it, but on matriarchal terms. During a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, which I attended in 2022, the first year Laura Shannon had taken it over after Carol Christ’s passing, I had a dream about male figures. First there was a character, male but identified with myself, that was a kind of prince, or magician, a guy who was tricky and somewhat of a deceiver, looking out for his own power. He was talking with an old man, like a wise mentor or Merlin, who told him he had to change his ways and showed him three other men: their skin was white and almost alabaster, almost translucent, they were large and flabby and old, without hair, they had something scaly or moss-like growing on their legs. They were naked and uncircumcised. One man was nonchalantly urinating, sitting on the ground, without trying to control the flow. Another was feeding the third, who was partly cradled in his arms and seemed weak, unable to feed himself. The phrase ‘brotherhood of the oak’ was in my mind. (I know there is a right-wing organization with a similar name in the UK but had not heard of it then; fascists often appropriate earth-based spirituality. But I haven’t pursued knowledge about any historical antecedents for that reason.) A Jungian psychologist on the pilgrimage told me the white color meant they were gods.
It was fascinating to me that my posture on the trip was wanting the core pure female-female experience which was never perfect and always intruded on, but that the most direct knowledge I received was about males. The relaxation into the earth, return of men to the earth, even to peeing on themselves, letting bodily functions be serenely, and nurturing each other without pride or pretension, was how I’d like men to be. It fits with how I understand a possible role for men in matriarchy. You can be male and not have your maleness be defined by dominance, competition or oppressing and subjugating women.
So as I said, my core understanding of the Universe and Spirit is from a female perspective as wholeness and it feels continuous with me as a female. But it encompasses males and maleness as well, within a part of her. Seeing the female as All and the male as connected with or partial, works for me. Male has to relax and female has to understand all of herself and integrate her whole self.
Helen: I respect and appreciate your feminist journey. How do you see yourself staying connected with or contributing to Mago Work projects (including Creatrix Studies graduate and lifetime education programs,
the S/HE Journal, and the S/HE Conference) for the coming months and years?
Tina: That’s a question I need to think about. My work moves at its own pace. Right now I am planning to offer my CRPD Course from a Survivor of Psychiatry Perspective, open to psychiatric survivors and people with personal direct lived experience of madness, as a learning community, this coming fall. At the same time my life is in upheaval personally in needed ways. So I cannot make other plans. (I have other work projects as well.)
What I’d really like is to see how other women respond to what I’ve said in this interview, and what that sparks for them or for me as a useful way for me to contribute. That is the best way for me to work, as it usually takes interaction and interest for me to generate ideas.
Helen: Thank you so much. I wish you the best and look forward to continuous interweaving.