Sex and gender are such complex things. Hera takes me on a brief walk of the least sacrosanct part of her new gardeb on Ixxli, mostly to give quick second opinions and advice on its strings and causations. In order to walk with her, I must be female, and so I am. That should be so much clearer than it is.
"Female" here means so much and so little. You see, I exist in a straightforward interpretation of the word now that follows suit from my usual straightforward expression of maleness. Beneath my robes, cute breasts, vulvae, my usual phallic expressions trimmed and muted by femaleness. And yet, as I know Hera well - in contrast to knowing her students, once veiled they're hidden from my eyes and I would not know - I would be equally "female" for entering this garden and her Mystery cults if I had a penis beneath the robes as a transgender woman. I have changed bodies and gender to be "female" for her, as this is the arts of the Subjective-Objective.
It's also not necessarily switching my Mental gender that made me suitable. She respects who I am as a person, and hasn't changed my mind more than make my usual gender inert. Neutered, if anything, made neutral, rather than made a woman. It's my energies though, the archetype-muscles of my body, the forces I surrender to and allow to make my manifestation in Reality; all that makes up an abstract femaleness that is largely considered foreign to the Physical, that she changes. Like a dress code that comes with expected behaviours and social roleplay, if anything. You may be rough, but in black tie you are a gentleman, or you don't get in.
I could not enter if I changed my Mental gender to woman, because that would be trickery, a falsified self. I could not enter if I stayed a man and gave myself breasts and expected genitalia, that is not what is being labelled "female" here. I also could not enter without resonating with the specific type of womanhood she embodies, regardless of body and soul.
What makes it especially hard to understand, I would imagine, is the fact that men can enter. Men, and those beyond these binaries, are accepted by Hera for the Mysteries if they resonate with what im labelling "femaleness". They're not exceptions, if they resonate they are counted. It reminds me of the castration arts of older civilisations yet in energy, not in sex nor gender. While in her presence, men may be priestesses, for her divinity may be rooted in something defined as "female" but it is unbound to any body type and even gender.
Really, I'd love to simply summarise this as: "Among sex and gender, there's a third way to be (female / male / etc)." I won't though. That would grossly oversimplify what is essentially limitless ways into a false trinary of body, mind, and "some other category that is essentially many categories but we only care about the first two, which is why we speak it like this." It also wouldn't even begin to explore the ties between all these things, and how they're all tied, all separate, all unique, all cogs in the machines of Creation... and ultimately less important to muse about than to feel.
Ah, anyway, to bed with me. It passes 5am.
