This week’s question from the Pagan Perspective YouTube channel is about gender, as well as how gender factors into your pagan practice and beliefs.

Topic for the Week of 10/7: 

Part 1 from Jack Place: “Your thoughts on transgender people and the difference between bio sex and mental sex.”

Honestly?  I don’t really care.  I’m Pansexual and see people, not gender.  My only issue is when it comes to pronouns.  I really hate the whole pronoun thing, because there is so much room for confusion, mistake, and accidental offense.

Part 2 from MintyDandyDannie: “Supposing that there is a third gender as many believe and feel, how would you react? Would it still fit in with your current beliefs? Or would it create a need for movement? How do you feel about the concept of a third gender that is not related to male or female in any way?”

For this part of this week’s question, I think need to start out by explaining why the second part of the question is phrased as it is, and why it would even matter.

In many pagan practices (such as Wicca, for example), there is worship of the God and Goddess.  This includes mythos that follows the wheel of the year where the goddess and god are intertwined from conception to birth to growth, to adulthood and conception again, rinse and repeat.  In these religions, adding in a third gender could, I suppose, upset the balance.

Obviously, as I’ve mentioned this before, this is not my path.  My path deals with nature, the elements, and the energies of creation, evolution, and balance. There is no deity.

Yes, there is a yin and yang to the balance of all things, but although it is often “classified” as masculine and feminine, it has nothing to do with gender.  Those terms are used for in discussion of these energies more due to “stereotypical stereotypes” than accuracy. (And, isn’t that one hell of a term?)  All people and all things have both the “masculine” and “feminine” energy within them.  The terms are archaic, and yet it is because they are archaic that they are universally understood when used… and thus continue to be used.

In my tarot practice (both in reading and teaching), as well as my practice as a whole, I have moved to using the terms “projective” and “receptive” (or yin/yang depending on the situation and usage).  I think this better expresses my perceptions without confusing things with the mention of gender.   If there was a third gender?  That gender would also have projective and receptive energies within them, just as everyone and everything else does.  Therefore, it would really have no effect at all on  my beliefs or practice.