The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Same for all deities. To apply sex and gender to them is ultimately futile.

 
I'm not really sure what you mean by this? If you're approaching the gods from a soft polytheistic stance, where they're all aspects of One, it might hold true, but in my experience as a hard polytheist, sex and gender still apply to deities, even though the gods are just as varied in their expressions of it as humans - if not more so.

In deities more closely associated with civilisation and human experience, perhaps, though even these have been switched around (for instance, Ishtar and Attar are the same deity, their genders just swapped as the cultural norms of the mesopotamians and canaanites differed).

 
I don't know anything about Canaanite polytheism, but Ishtar is a very interesting and gender fluid deity in that she has both male and female aspects. As the morning star, she is a war deity in male form, and as the evening star, she is the feminine goddess of fertility and sexuality. I've heard this was due to the Babylonians identifying their male war deity with the Sumerian Inanna, a feminine deity of both sex and war, so Ishtar became bisexed (is that a word?) as a result. There was also an aspect of Aphrodite on Cyprus who was portrayed with a beard, or as a female with a phallus, so it wasn't that uncommon for ancient deities to cross gender lines.

This reminds me of the Anderson Feri Tradition, which as Darkhawk mentioned earlier has a queer and gender-fluid understanding of the gods. Since gods are spiritual beings, it makes sense to me that they wouldn't have hard male or female sexes, but can manifest in a variety of ways, even when it comes to gender. That's why I think extreme "hard" polytheism can be very simple-minded and superficial, understanding gods on a surface level and not noticing the fluidity of them.

Well, here's the thing....being queer or gender fluid isn't any less of a physical state than being straight and cis. There are flesh and blood human beings who don't fit the gender binary. For me, I assume that if a deity shows up as a female deity, she wants to be seen as female. Misgendering human beings is pretty damn rude; I'm not going to do it to a god.

 
Yeah, this.  Deities don't do sex and gender the way we do, necessarily, but unless you don't believe they have individual identities--which I guess is implied by saying the Sun is a deity that's just represented imperfectly by all the various deities associated with the sun, etc.--those identities include gender.  A God may or may not have a body, a sexed body, a body I understand, any of that, but if a God chooses to present as a given gender, I'm going to respect that.