As I’ve said before I think this prompt does have an underlying assumption of the Abrahamic faiths.
Paganism has its own issues, mostly surrounding the ease with which people can claim traditional gender roles are the only ones that count.
I had problems with how other people perceived my religion but never really any problems within my religion (Wicca in case you’re new here) about my sexuality..
But let’s put this question in the present tense shall we?
The culture war trolls are determined to bring the current right wing talking point into pagan spaces, by which I mean there has always been a certain flavour of (usually cis) women in paganism. They used to congregate around Dianic Wicca but to be honest my experience of those covens/groups was about them being pissed off about my being anything other than a gold star lesbian. It used to be the men, Heathens and very old school Wiccans, who would get het up (pun intended) about the gender roles of women in particular and the insistence on gender binary in a very “and never the twain shall meet” kind of way.
These days it’s the straight rad fems that are shouting the loudest about transwomen being deluded. In pagan spaces where people have being experiencing gender in a hundred different ways for really quite some time now.
Ten years ago or so I ran a pagan workshop exploring the spiritual woman accessible to everyone regardless of gender. It had a lot to blame on my growing up in the eighties and nineties and the idea everyone had a feminine and masculine side. (In some ways it would be nice for people to go back to having that in their consciousness). It also involved one of the more brutal female deities I know.
The thing is, bodies do impact gender, they do impact your physical interaction with the world and sense of self – but to say that there are TWO genders having had any experience of life is just madness. To really dig down and try to box people in because of your own trauma? Shit that’s bad. And the thing is it’s understandable – there are variations on the shapes of people but mostly they are iterations around two flavours and if one has hurt you then you generalise pretty damned hard around the other.
But to deny the right to exist of one of the subsets because a man hurt you is a gateway to your inner fascist. There’s a balance to be struck between what’s your responsibility to look after your responses and the world giving you the right kind of space to do your healing in. When that crosses into telling people how to present that’s a problem.
Anyway, that’s the problem currently in my religion, I believe there are a lot of genders and TERFs want to tell me there’s only two and that some women aren’t really women. Presumably they’d be fine with me being bisexual right up until the point I said I’d fucked some trans people and then it’d be like not being a gold star lesbian all over again.