Considering Gender in Practice

Following the discussion around the role of sexuality in Wiccan practice at Beltane, I wanted to briefly tackle the topic of gender in Wiccan practice overall.

When Gerald Gardner was developing Wicca in the 1940s, there was no public discourse about gender being on a spectrum, and the ideas around gender polarity as we think of it today were also not available.

Instead, the goal was to find balance between men and women in ritual, in part to move away from the solitary, masculine-coded God of the major religions. Honestly, simply adding women who were encouraged to lead their Covens as High Priestesses must have felt very progressive at the time.

British Traditional and other Wiccan practioners spent many of the following years gendering every last tool, herb, ritual role, crystal, etc., associated with their practice, and they eagerly passed these thoughts along to the next generations of Wiccans and pagans.

While many modern Wiccan sects and practitioners have evolved away from the gender essentialism of these original philosophies, it's taken time and filtering for us to get to this point, and there are still a number of Traditions that prefer and promote traditional gendered concepts.

Some gendered language is necessary in relation to some Wiccan beliefs, of course. In addition to wanting all practioners (of all genders) to be considered equals in a spiritual setting, Wiccans view the intermingling of feminine/masculine aspects as a necessary constant in Nature; separating the two would be destructive and counter-intuitive. Additionally, most modern practioners believe in the "divine" - "divine femininity" and "divine masculinity" included - existing harmoniously in all things.

Ultimately, gender essentialism is something we need to be aware of so we can be on the look-out for it in our own biases and practice. The best we can hope for is that we are always open to change and social evolution as new voices and theories are introduced into the fray.

For its part, Blue Star Wicca is a fertility tradition that celebrates the changing of the seasons, with the birth and death of plants and animals as intrinsic to the turning the Wheel and the cycle of life. We believe in the balance of the God/Goddess and Priest/Priestess in theology, in ritual, in the Wheel of the Year, and in every aspect of Blue Star. Of note, "Priest/Priestess" are ritual role titles with no gendered expectations attached.

Haven Song was founded with the Priestess calling a Goddess in the West quadrant of our Circle and the Priest calling a God in the East. The original reasoning was that these directions are respectively associated with the Moon, wisdom, endings, birth/death dichotomy, and emotions; and the Sun, intellect, beginnings, hunted/hunter dichotomy, and the mind.

However, there's nothing about these associations that are intrinsically intertwined with the human concept of gender identity - for example, the idea that the Moon can only be associated with a Goddess and the Sun with a God blatantly ignores pantheons with Sun Goddesses and Moon Gods (like the Nordic Sunna and Mani).

The God Dionysus holding a chalice of wine in His left hand and a thyrsus staff in His right hand.

Embracing gender chaos is what has led to Haven Song's traditional Litha practice of calling Dionysus in the East (Greek God of fertility and wine) and Loki in the West (affectionately nicknamed "Uncle Lucky" in our Trad; the Norse Trickster God and mother of the horse Sleipnir). Any Deity that gives birth may be represented in the West!

There would also be an easy argument to make to swap these two, since Dio has been subject to much gender chaos of His own - He was born fatally premature when His mother, Semele, was killed, forcing His father, Zeus, to carry Him to term within Zeus' thigh. This special relationship with being twice-born may have been enough to tangent this God into the West, but wait, there's more! Dio wasn't safe after His second birth and Zeus gave Him to King Athamas and Queen Ino to keep Him safe from Hera as He continued to grow. This was done by disguising and raising the young God as a girl. These themes of having to be saved by transforming Himself return over and over to the God as He ages into His final form.

As academic Catherine Rae describes in her argument that Dio would identify as gender-fluid, "Dionysus is frequently represented on Greek pottery as a youth with shoulder length hair, looking like an unmarried girl and frequently wearing the same clothing as their female worshippers," ("Dionysus: the gender fluid god" 2025).

Finally, I'll leave this discussion on a note written by Misha Magdalene (they/them, initiate of the Anderson Feri tradition with a background in Gardnerian Wicca), "If esoteric spiritual traditions are to have any place in the 21st century, we need to be able to approach them with both reverence and rationality, cherishing and developing their strengths while also acknowledging and working on their weaknesses. To do any less would be dishonest and avoidant, neither of which—last I checked—were considered virtues in any tradition of Paganism, polytheism, or magic of which I’m aware." ("Tracing the Thread: Critiquing Gender Essentialism in Paganism, Polytheism, and Magic" 2018)

Blessed Be!

By Acorn, 1°

Uncited resources largely included a variety of Patheos articles, which I used to confirm that I hit all the high points. I'd recommend doing a search there, yourself, to continue down the rabbit hole - I'll get you started with this link!

Let's define some concepts!

Cisgender (cis): A person whose experience of their own gender corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth (cis- is the Latin prefix for “same”).

Gender: The cultural and societal division of humans into categories that serve as the basis of a person’s social identity. Historically, European-derived societies have defined gender as either male or female, and these categories have been assumed to match up to the categorization of a person’s sex (e.g., people with penises identify as men and people with vulvas as women).

Genderfluid/queer, Nonbinary (NB): A person whose experience of their own gender does not fit neatly into the male/female binary. Genderqueer people may experience their gender along a spectrum between male and female, or they may experience their gender as not fitting onto that spectrum at all.

Gender essentialism: theory that there are certain universal, innate, and biologically-based features of gender that are at the root of many of the differences observed in the behavior of people born producing testosterone vs estrogen.

Gender polarity: a concept created by American psychologist Sandra Bem which states that societies tend to define femininity and masculinity as polar opposite genders, such that male-acceptable behaviors and attitudes are not seen as appropriate for women, and vice versa.

Oppositional Sexism: the belief that male and female are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, leading to polarizing males and females into their respective gender expression and transphobia.

Queer: A catch-all, umbrella term for people who are in the sexual and/or gender minority.

Sex: Historically, humans have been divided into two categories, “male” and “female,” based on physical attributes of the human reproductive system (e.g., penis, vagina, etc.) and secondary sexual characteristics associated with testosterone and estrogen (e.g., facial and body hair, breast tissue formation, etc.). Modern science has come to recognize that there are many more than just two variations based on these characteristics, from easily recognized variations such as intersex (individuals born with ambiguous genitalia) to more invisible variations such as chromosomal and hormonal differences that extend beyond a simple division into XX or XY chromosomes.

Transgender (trans): A person whose experience of their own gender is different than the sex they were assigned at birth (trans- is the Latin prefix for “across”).