Your faith timeline.

[If my soul was made of stone]

0: Born into a fairly New Atheist-leaning family
4-5: Attended preschool at a Baptist church, briefly considered myself part of their faith cause it felt like the customary thing to do in that environment but never really bought into it wholesale or investigated any part of it.
6-15: Garden-variety smug suburban New Atheist with a condescending view at best of most religious folk. Developed an interest in Buddhist and Taoist thought and incorporated some of it into my personal philosophy but never felt it proper to commit to either system in full.
16-19: Became interested in various pagan traditions through my dilettante studies of ancient history, prehistory, anthropology, and the 20th-century counterculture, as well as the strange spiritual associations that I encountered in my slow and arduous journey to discover my gender identity. Briefly attempted to commit to believing in a deity or deities a few times before quitting due to lack of conviction or a suspicion that they were more like tulpas manifested from my insecurities than genuine celestial beings. Shopped around for a tradition that might suit me but was turned off by the dominance of TERFs, Neo-Nazis, and feel-good revisionist hippies in all the circles I became aware of.
20: In response to a period of extended interpersonal turmoil and an inability to crack many philosophical questions I had been wrestling with since my early teenage years, committed to my current personalized eclectic pagan path. My beliefs have evolved since then, but the core tenets remain.
21-present: Tried practicing magic for the first time with fairly ugly results. Started looking for groups of like-minded people again, still looking...

[If my soul was made of stone]

0: Born into a fairly New Atheist-leaning family
4-5: Attended preschool at a Baptist church, briefly considered myself part of their faith cause it felt like the customary thing to do in that environment but never really bought into it wholesale or investigated any part of it.
6-15: Garden-variety smug suburban New Atheist with a condescending view at best of most religious folk. Developed an interest in Buddhist and Taoist thought and incorporated some of it into my personal philosophy but never felt it proper to commit to either system in full.
16-19: Became interested in various pagan traditions through my dilettante studies of ancient history, prehistory, anthropology, and the 20th-century counterculture, as well as the strange spiritual associations that I encountered in my slow and arduous journey to discover my gender identity. Briefly attempted to commit to believing in a deity or deities a few times before quitting due to lack of conviction or a suspicion that they were more like tulpas manifested from my insecurities than genuine celestial beings. Shopped around for a tradition that might suit me but was turned off by the dominance of TERFs, Neo-Nazis, and feel-good revisionist hippies in all the circles I became aware of.
20: In response to a period of extended interpersonal turmoil and an inability to crack many philosophical questions I had been wrestling with since my early teenage years, committed to my current personalized eclectic pagan path. My beliefs have evolved since then, but the core tenets remain.
21-present: Tried practicing magic for the first time with fairly ugly results. Started looking for groups of like-minded people again, still looking...

How have you been practicing your paganism? What grounds you: is it earth and nature based, spiritually based?

It's evolved quite a bit with the evolution of my personal experiences, philosophical ideas, and exposure to various faiths, but remained grounded in nature and physicality mainly, as with what little we can know from my aesthetic touchstones in prehistory. I have yet do do much in the way of ritual because I get stuck trying to synthesize everything into a singular expression of everything I seek to convey, but I have devised a handful at various times with various influences. Mostly I attempt to commune with nature and pray semi-regularly, with other trappings being a constant work in progress or having failed for various reasons.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Shopped around for a tradition that might suit me but was turned off by the dominance of TERFs, Neo-Nazis, and feel-good revisionist hippies in all the circles I became

Ok I’m actually interested in what this looks like.

I mean, I knew beforehand that Wicca has a strong following by Radical Feminists, but I assumed that there would be several known parallel groupings accepting of/for Transgender folks like some all-gay communes I’ve heard about.

Feel-good revisionist hippies? Uh, could you explain that further?

Even in the traditions that do support queer folk I'm turned off by the emphasis on heteronormative conceptions of fertility and gender duality, which I feel is by nature exclusionary of other experiences. By "revisionist hippies" I'm mainly referring to the revisionism among some sects that they claim to be a genuine continuation of ancient traditions even though most knowledge of them is very incomplete and indirect, there are no known actual continuations of their old faiths, and Wicca et cetera are 100% recent creations. I have no problem with them lacking that historical element, but the act of pretending to have it rather turns me off. There are other general vibes that I get from that sort of person that are hard to articulate but nonetheless rub me the wrong way, but then again I've always been a highly contrarian person and skeptical of organized groups in general.