Talk:Gender variance in spirituality

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)