Gender and Religion: Getting in Touch with the Feminine

[fringekitty]

While doing some research on autism spectrum disorders, I happened to notice in several sources that although such conditions, which include autism, asperger's and other developmental disorders, appear more predominantly among men, women who had the disorder seemed to have some variant of the x chromosome, one of the pair was damaged or was missing

Comments

[aphenine]

I am transgender and recent experience has shown me that gender and religion seem to be very strongly linked. At least, I've had some cool religious experiences since coming to the realisation and if I was more more religiously and not scientifically minded, I'd have become a priest instead of deciding that I'd been born in the body of the wrong sex. It doesn't seem to me to be too far a leap to suppose that's where priesthood started off in the first place. Abrahamic religions are notable for their complete lack of transgendered people, despite their existence in virtually every other culture in existence. Most cultures that have a well defined priesthood seem to lack transgenderism.

Being a bit more aware of gender, I have noticed that there are general strains of gender present in religion. It's notable, for example, that in Christianity the New Testament message of forgiveness and compassion as predominant values are primarily feminine in construct, but the "God hates you because you're poor" values of power and might as practised by right wing evangelicals in the U.S. are primarily masculine values. Despite the fact that they are both Christians, their God doesn't even have the same gender. In fact, it's interesting to see how differently gendered God is in differing sects.

It also shows up a problem of monotheistic religions: that one or the other gender can come to dominate the concept of God. Given the general experience among transgender people that acting against your gender leads very quickly to severe mental illness, any such God is automatically going to cause half of the population of a society to become seriously mentally incapacitated.

As andjay says, it's such a broad topic to comment about...

[fringekitty]

Outside of the Abrahamic faiths, other religious traditions even celebrate androgyny and gender in a variety of forms.