Is God a "he", a "she" or an "it"? I explain here why I use a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to God.
- Biology: An all-powerful, singular creator God that is the first cause, would have no gender. It did not evolve into a God, it did not have parents and it does not have or need sexual organs. If it reproduced, it would be by the magic of miracle, not by sexual intercourse. God does not have genitals or anything similar to X and Y chromosomes: All these things are the product of the long progression of evolution, products of creation. The creator itself cannot be gendered.
- Gender Roles: To call God a "he" is a projection of human emotions and characteristics. To call it "he" or "she" is to limit God to our perceptions of gender roles as they pertain to the human species. This is simply inappropriate and weird. Some theists believe that God sometimes uses magic in order to have children. This would make it female. Others believe that it is male. Whatever the specific terminology of any tradition, it stands that it is only logical to call god "it" and not "he" or "she". Whether If God is everywhere and knows everything and can take any form, or is perhaps the entire universe itself, God must be omni-sexual. There is no pronoun for omnisexuality. Neither a "he" nor a "she" pronoun makes sense.
- Epistemology, Offensiveness and Humility: I do not know God's gender. It is not offensive to an all-knowing God to admit that you don't know what gender it is. It would be offensive to assume to call an all-powerful being by a Human gender. Nature has endowed species with various styles of sexualities and genders, and it seems that a Creator-God would be above it all. Therefore, it is most humble, least assuming and reflects its nature best if we avoid using gendered pronouns to refer to a monotheistic God.
- The Human Element: Gender Politics and the Technicalities of English. It is potentially offensive (and certainly presumptive) to womankind to call a theorized creator male, and it is offensive to mankind to call it female. It is not offensive to use gender-neutral language. It is certainly not offensive to God, who itself has no gender and, I would concede, probably has far more pressing concerns than the taxonomic systems of English linguists.
The gender of god, or the determination of which gendered pronoun we should use, is one of the major illogical assumptions that people frequently make. God has no gender. It does not reproduce. It makes no sense biologically, sexually or culturally to call the creator of all genders and species by the particular gender of a particular species. He and She are appropriate pronouns for species with two sexes, not for the God of the Universe. We have no right to assume to call God by any gender based on the characteristics of human roles. God is not a "He" or a "She", but an It.
