What Is Orientation?

group. Many racists draw conclusions about crime only when the criminal is Black. Many sexists draw conclusions about emotionality only when the person being emotional is a woman. And I drew a conclusion about gender only because I knew the person was trans. I thought I was being insightful, but I was being a bigot. In other words, I was being gender essentialist.

Gender essentialism permeates Western culture, and indeed every culture. (While many Indigenous cultures have had broader and more inclusive understandings of gender, through colonization this nuance was often stripped away.) As we dive into history, we’ll see the ways it has been incorporated into occult thought. But modern p-word practices are influenced not just by occult history but also by social context generally and by other social movements.

In the United States particularly, Pagan spirituality developed side by side with second-wave feminism and the women’s spirituality movement, both of which could be profoundly gender essentialist. You can see this gender essentialism, for example, in ideas about a prehistoric matriarchy, where goddesses were worshiped and the world was more gentle and nurturing.22 The reverent remembrance of this time has permeated a lot of p-word thought, despite there being no archaeological evidence of such a matriarchy. While it is true that not every society in history has been patriarchal, the thrust of the “prehistoric matriarchy” belief is that rulership by women has some essential difference from rulership by men—an essential difference in gender. These ideas were the norm in many p-word communities from the 1970s through the 1990s and later.

What Is Orientation?

The word orientation is used to identify erotic or romantic inclination, such as gay or straight. Big surprise: orientation is also a spectrum! Orientation is not the same as sex or gender. You can be a gay or straight transgender person, for example. In addition to gay/lesbian or straight, orientations that exist are bisexual (attracted to more than one gender), pansexual

22. See Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, for the best analysis of this concept.