Talk:Gender variance in spirituality

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Revision as of 17:04, 29 May 2020 by imported>TXJ (→‎Unitarian Universalist: new section)
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For posterity, I would like to record my decisions in my lengthy edit of this page.

  • Though many deities are seen to posses both male and female aspects, I chose to only include those who are either explicitly genderless/androgynous by nature, or those whose transness is blatantly seen. For example, Enki's male-and-female aspect is only seen through ideas of fertility, and not through cult or myth. Therefore he is not inherently gender divergent. On the other hand Hapi is seen with breasts and a fake beard, both codifying transness.
  • Castration, while historically an event which can lead to a person being seen as a different gender, is not the same in deities. Divine castration can mean many things, and this is not inherently a marker for gender variance.
  • A lot of deities were marked as androgynous simply due to their nature as a creator. Being a creation deity does not make you inherently androgynous.
  • If a deity blessed a trans person by being able to live as their correct gender, that does not make the deity gender variant
  • Simply being a personification or archetype is not being gender variant

--MorningSparrow (talk) 04:42, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining your reasoning. I generally agree with your decisions, as expressed here. I agree that a deity who blesses a trans person does not make that deity trans themself, but it does make that deity a patron of trans people, and therefore they are of interest to trans people. I agree that creation deities are not inherently androgynous, but if a source does say that that creation deity is andrognyous, then they should be included here.
May I ask your reasoning for changing the title of the article? It had previously been established as "spirituality" rather than "religion," because the paths in question aren't necessarily centrally organized so as to be defined as "religions" per se. I'm also curious as to your reasoning to changing "variance" to "divergence" in the title. "Variance" seems to be the more consistently used term, of the two, in the wiki, and in its sources. Personally, I feel that gender divergence is a less respectful term than gender variance. -Sekhet (talk) 05:33, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
I've reverted the article title, for the reasons explained in the page's edit history notes. -Sekhet (talk) 02:02, 11 May 2019 (UTC)


I have included androgynous creation deities, however I deleted a few creation deities with no explicit gender variance. And I disagree with the idea that a deity making a person trans makes them a patron to trans people when there are trans deities that make a lot more sense as a patron. However I would not be opposed to a separate article/section on deities who are kind to trans people!

As for the title, because these are deities, and because the list has little to do with spiritual practice and more to do with religion, deities, and their stories. I'm ok with "variance", but I feel strongly about "religion". Also, I appreciate your edits! I'm glad to see specified tribes in the americas section. --MorningSparrow (talk) 22:26, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

As a note on the capitalization of the title, since it is a title I have used title case, as can be seen in this short page. Whether we change it to "religion", I would like to use title case on our titles.
@MorningSparrow: re: capitalization of wiki titles. Although some situations call for capitalizing titles of certain types of media, such as in 'certain types' of bibliographies, Wiki article titles are not to be capitalized as though they were titles of books or other stand-alone media. You'll see that Wikipedia's article titles are only capitalized if they are proper names. Because wikis are a specific type of media that have their own formatting conventions unique from those of, say, an MLA-style essay, Chicago-style essay, or newspaper article, please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style for any situation where this wiki doesn't have a special cause to deviate from the standard style of wikis. In this particular case, see Wikipedia's Manual of Style article naming conventions (capitalization), which says "Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name." -Sekhet (talk) 14:17, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Unitarian UniversalistEdit

Unitarian Universalists are welcoming of trans & nonbinary people in their churches, but I don't know where that would fall on this page (If it belongs on this page at all, since this page is more about gender variance in religious texts/saints/etc than in worshippers). See https://www.uua.org/lgbtq/identity/adding-pronouns-matter and https://www.uua.org/lgbtq/identity/transgender and https://www.uuworld.org/articles/apology-spring-2019 --TXJ (talk) 17:04, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Return to "Gender variance in spirituality" page.