
← Meaningness Podcast26 Jun 2025 · 9 min
What's the connection between gender and meta-rationality?
Rationality is stereotypically masculine. What about meta-rationality?
Transcript:
Charlie: What’s the connection between gender and meta-rationality?
David: I had never thought to ask that!
The systematic mode of being, or the rational mode of being, is male-coded, or masculine-coded. Meta-rationality involves an openness that surrounds systematicity, or rationality; or may just completely transcend it. And that is possibly feminine-coded? Or at any rate, it’s either feminine or non-gendered.
Charlie: Mm-hmm.
David: I’m thinking actually now, in Vajrayana, how there’s often a sequence of: female-coded, male-coded, non-dual.
Charlie: Mmm.
David: And meta-rationality is analogous in some ways to non-duality in Buddhism. So maybe it is also… it is a little farfetched, but could be analogized to transcending gender; or being— I really don’t like the word “non-binary,” but we haven’t got a better one.
Charlie: Mm.
David: One of the things that is important in Vajrayana is practicing a yidam of the opposite sex. Not exclusively, but that is part of the path: to step into a new alien possibility that shakes up your attachment to the fixed identity that you have.
So, female is analogized with emptiness, and you go from emptiness to form, which is analogized with male, and then to the—