My father sent me a message that stopped me in my tracks. “A thought has occurred to me,” he wrote. “Help me dissect it—
Are all females wounded?
Does a wounded soul choose to incarnate in a female body in order to process the wounded-ness?”
If I’m being honest, reading that triggered me a little. I reminded him:
“ALL humans are wounded. You think men don’t carry wounds?”
We all carry echoes of pain that have travelled through lineage. The question is not if we carry wounds, but how gender roles may influence how those wounds are felt, expressed, and healed.
Across cultures and generations, pain often follows the lines of power. Where patriarchal systems dominate, women may carry the visible wounds of suppression; self-silencing, over-giving, internalised shame. In matriarchal or hierarchical inversions, men may inherit their own unseen wounds; quiet emasculation, emotional isolation, unspoken pressure to be needed but not nurtured.
But these patterns aren’t only social. They’re psychological. Carl Jung spoke of the anima and animus, the feminine and masculine energies within every psyche.
The feminine: intuitive, receptive, feeling.
The masculine: active, structuring, doing.
Both are essential, but when one dominates, imbalance (and therefore wounding) occurs. That imbalance doesn’t just exist within individuals; it plays out across societies.
When feeling is dismissed, logic becomes tyrannical. When action is feared, sensitivity becomes paralysis. Both are distortions of something originally whole.
I explained to my father, the work isn’t to heal “as a woman” or “as a man,” but to bring harmony between both energies within ourselves, a perpetual ebb and flow.
I think that’s why some people are gender-fluid or dual-gendered beings; expressing both masculine and feminine energies, as if to bridge the wounds of both lines. In many ancient cultures, such beings were revered, seen as spiritually advanced for embodying both masculine and feminine. These individuals often hold, within their lived experience, the simultaneous realities of both.
In Jungian language, they may personify the integration the rest of us are still striving for, carrying within them the conversation between anima and animus that others tend to externalise. Ancient cultures seemed to understand this instinctively.
From the Two-Spirit traditions of Indigenous America to the Hijra communities of South Asia, those who embodied both energies were often revered, not rejected. They were seen as sacred bridges, reminders that wholeness is not sameness, and that unity does not mean uniformity.
Which brings me back to my father’s question about wounding and incarnation. My father, in his usual measured way, spoke about paternalistic societies, inheritance, and how the control of lineage has long shaped our ideas of power and purity. He suggested that perhaps females, wired for species survival, process wounded-ness more intensely, while males, wired for individual pursuit, seek to distract themselves from it. That, he said, might even influence how souls choose their incarnations.
I could see where his logical thinking was coming from, but something in me resisted. If healing were a female prerogative, then we would be a largely female species. Perhaps the real work isn’t about choosing one gender over another to heal through, but recognising that every lifetime is an attempt at integration. Every generation is the psyche trying to balance itself.
The way I see it, masculine or feminine cannot exist without the other. One is the vessel. The other, the oar. A vessel without an oar drifts aimlessly. An oar without a vessel thrashes in circles. But when they move together, we find direction and depth.
The feminine may bleed openly and the masculine may break quietly. But both, when traced deep enough, point to the same fracture; A loss of inner balance between what feels and what acts.
Ultimately, healing cannot be a war between vessel and oar. It’s about remembering that within each of us is both vessel and oar, anima and animus, feeling and function. It’s time we realise we’ve always been part of the same boat.
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