Transgender
The term gender is now generally used in the social and health sciences to denote the socially constructed rôles, behaviours, expressions and identities associated with being male, female, or gender-diverse; the term sex usually refers to biological characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy, and is today often described more precisely as sex assigned at birth. In occult discourse around sex-magic the word sex also continues to carry its older connotations of semen, spermatozoa and reproductive fluids.
Increasing awareness of the often clichéd occult tropes of sexuality, gender, male, female (and indeed the entire esoteric topography of the sexes and their various representations, together with spermo-gnosticism and sex-magic) has recently come under closer scrutiny in connection with transgender and gender-diverse practitioners. In contemporary clinical and sociological terminology, transgender functions as an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned to them at birth; older labels such as transsexual or transident survive mainly in medical or regional usage and are now used — if at all — only for those individuals who explicitly adopt them for themselves. The contrasting term cisgender denotes people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth.
Besides the various O.T.O. groups getting more public attention in new media, new mindsets and internal guidelines on gender-specific issues have emerged to affect the traditionally rigid rôles still often inherent in occultism. Within contemporary Thelemic milieus, debates over gender identity, pronouns and ritual functions now intersect with discussions of non-binary identities, queer occultism and so-called gender modality (the relation between gender identity and sex assigned at birth). Here the O.T.O. stands out, because on the one hand it propagates a type of religious transcendence and proclaims that all are welcome, while on the other it still mimics traditional gender clichés in its rituals.
The Mass, polarity, and the sperm question
In some O.T.O. jurisdictions diversity statements and educational material explicitly emphasise that participation is open to all people — trans, cis and gender-non-conforming — regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. At the same time, the official rubric of Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass (Liber XV — Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae) continues to presuppose a male Priest and a female Priestess, with non-binary members and some transgender people being steered towards intermediate rôles (Deacon, children, congregation). This tension between inclusive self-presentation and binary liturgical structure is one of the more visible current fault-lines in Thelemic practice.
Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass poses some knotty questions over the status of sperm and transgender people precisely because it dramatises a sacramental polarity between Solar Phallus and Goddess. For those who read the ritual in a strictly gender-essentialist way, the transmission of the sacrament seems to require a body coded as male (and at least in principle sperm-producing) in the rôle of Priest and a body coded as female in the rôle of Priestess. Others, including many queer and trans participants, simply transfer the biological aspect of semen and sperm, as well as the question of gender, to the symbolical level, where everything can — theoretically — be easily resolved.
Whether the semen contains spermatozoa or not, whether the Priest or Priestess is cisgender or transgender, certain modern-day participants in the Gnostic Catholic Mass maintain that the only thing that really matters is what the congregation — regardless of their sexual organs and gender identity — actually experiences (or wants to experience) during Mass. From this perspective, sacral efficacy depends on consent, intention and embodiment, not on reproductive biology. Critics counter that a purely symbolic Mass ceases to be a catholic one in Crowley’s sense, because it dissolves the very sexual polarity the ritual was designed to stage. There are numerous discussions, conference papers and online polemics in progress on this thorny subject, with no sign yet of a resolution in sight.
