Is God male?

The feminine question cannot be raised without dealing with the question of patriarchal concepts of God in most religions. 
The human tendency to anthropomorphize and personify in terms of race and gender, comforting as it may be for many, has the inherent peril of misrepresentation. 
Personification of the energy we call God, so necessary for sense-bound humanity, is not only erroneous but dangerous without the understanding that it is only a convenient representation of the inherent mystery, awesome energy and power we sense all around and within us. 
Evidence of the dangers of such falsification is visible on the political, social, domestic, individual/ psychic arenas. This misguided and mainly unconscious tendency has taken many lives and caused much suffering throughout history.
Failure of language and the inadequacy of translation are mainly to blame for our images of ‘God’ as male. 
Language is not only an expression of thought, it influences thought, and thereby our realities, culture, social and political thought and structures. 
Gurmukhi uses far fewer words than English, which is heavily dependent on all sorts of pronouns, specifically, personal pronouns (he, she, it), possessive pronouns (his, hers), and reflexive pronouns (herself, himself). 
No gender-neutral pronouns exist for those energies that have no gender. The world awaits a coinage that will free us of these misleading divisions. Translations of Gurmukhi into English compound the problem and add to the misconception.
Sikhism’s root prayer, the Japji, contains very few pronouns. The words tis, toon, tudh, tisai, aap, sparingly used, are gender neutral, and address the Supreme Entity as ‘You,’ but 151 instances of personal, possessive and reflective pronouns of he, him, himself, are used in the online version of the Japji, translated by Singh Sahib Sant Singh Khalsa. All translators of Gurbani follow this convention. 
In the Japji alone Guru Nanak sings the universal feminine energy three times. 
In speaking of the all-encompassing guru, he says the guru includes the Hindu trinity of Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma and Mother Parvati.  In the middle of the prayer he says many gods and goddesses sing to the guru; towards the end of the prayer he again reiterates that the Great Mother generated the gods and thereby, all humanity. 
The guru, he makes clear in another shabad, is gender free: naar naa purkh, kahoo ko kaisai – neither female nor male. How shall one call it?
Beyond these gender issues, beyond the limits of language and translation, lies the greatest barrier to our comprehension of what we name ‘God.’ 
It is the failure of our imaginative powers to conceptualize that which lies outside our sense-shackled experience. The word refers to something so abstract, so all encompassing, pervading, present and transcendent, like air, that we can have no image for it. 
Guru Nanak stresses our utter inability to comprehend the Mystery: I am just a fish in the Ocean that is You; how can I know your extent?
On the human level, however, where gender perceptions matter to material beings like us, perhaps there is hope in the splintering of our concepts of gender in our own times of sex-change realities and all the possibilities between the traditional heterosexual poles. 
Hopefully it will broaden our minds and expand our hearts to include all, regardless of apparent differences. 
Hopefully it will set us on the path to transcending divisions and conflicts caused by narrow habits of thought, morality and behavior.

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