I am an older Black American woman and a citizen of the United States of America.
I have two authentic names or orthonyms.
Neither of my names is a pseudonym.
Both are official, authentic, and equally important.
tree turtle (intentionally spelled lowercase even at the beginning of a sentence) is my legal name and my Buddhist ordination name. I am an Upāsikā, or a Buddhist who has taken novice and perpetual lay vows.
Given this complexity, I chose the English translation of my name when I legally changed it.
An Upāsikā (in a reformed Thervada, progressive, secular humanist tradition) pledges to adhere to the five precepts (pañcasīla), which are the following:
To learn about my Buddhist contemplative practice click here.
To learn more about Buddhist understandings of animal spirit guides and plant symbolism click here and here.
Click here for more information on Buddhist styles related to title case and lowercase (search under the word "lowercase" in the glossary). We cast titles and names in lowercase when speaking of ourselves in general. Lowercase also signals lifelong humility.
Starting in 1999, I began to use Cleis Abeni for business purposes involving my published writing and my professional editing. For over twenty-five-plus years, Cleis Abeni has been the byline for most of my written publications.
I also use Cleis Abeni for members of the public who may have trouble with (or even be hostile to) spelling my legal name lowercase or addressing me appropriately by my legal name, or people who have difficulty with names that have a spiritual cast that is not their own.
(For decades, I have encountered persistent and incalculable mistreatment, discrimination, and hostility just for having a legal first and last name of a plant and an animal.)
When I traveled to the city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ in Nigeria in 1996 to do mediations and outreach on behalf of an organization that I co-founded dedicated to ending violence against women and LGBTQ people called Genders Within, one of the women I met called me "Abeni." "Abeni" is Yoruba for "we asked for her, and behold, she came." I honor this woman and that community's naming of me by having my second name be Cleis Abeni.
"Cleïs" is the name for the child of the ancient poet Sappho. "Cleisthenes" was an ancient Greek populist leader who helped usher in a profound period of democratic egalitarian prosperity in Athens.
I fell in love with the name Cleis when I was a pre-adolescent and I would sign my private "letters to God" in my personal diaries with the name Cleis.
Thus, my second name, Cleis Abeni, brings together longtime resonances and multiplicities that have fueled my lifework.
Avoiding the trauma and violence of deadnaming, doxxing, and other forms of violent harassment is a part of the story of my names.
I am a consciously radical womanist/feminist, anti-poverty, pro-prosperity-for-all, and anti-all-forms-of-bigotry, peace/anti-war/anti-violence advocate.
Like Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012), the author of the 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (a book that I found inside a compartment in my biological mother's Singer sewing machine in 1976), I believe, as Firestone said in her book, that "Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the organization of nature."
I am especially focused on uplifting low-to-middle income Black women, men, and non-binary people as well as LGBTQ+ people who remain, despite progress, all over the world and in the United States, deeply and unjustly disenfranchised until this very day.
It is important that everyone know my politics when engaging with me.
My pronouns are she/her/ma'am.
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