I speak for myself only in my response… and since I believe I initiated the discussion of gender as it can and/or cannot be applied to planet Earth, and also because I have a lot of strong feelings on this subject, I feel obligated to respond.
If you see people/God/the planet in a feminine role, then you are perfectly welcome to say so.
But it seems to me that your claims here are based on an awful lot of assumptions about the motivations, feelings, and “wrongheadedness” of people who do not see things the same way you do.
To illustrate what kind of assumptions I mean, I pose the following questions:
How does not wanting to assign a gender to A) the entire human species, B) “God”, and C) the Earth translate to misogyny and self-hate? If I said, “I don’t want to say “mankind” when referring to all people,” would you say I hated men? Would you call a man who said the same thing “self-hating”? Would you say that everyone who desired not to use the word “mankind” had the heebie-jeebies about maleness?
Have you ever asked someone who has a gender-neutral attitude towards the world how they ACTUALLY feel about femaleness? Have you asked EVERYONE with that attitude how they feel? Until you have, you have no evidence upon which to make a blanket statement about what gives those people the heebie-jeebies. You cannot infer another person’s feelings without asking first. I do not say “cannot” as a moral imperative, I say it as a fact. Let me repeat: unless you are omniscient, you cannot say how other people feel. If you go through life doing that, sooner or later you are going to make some costly mistakes.
I myself have internally consistent, self-respecting reasons upon which I construct my value system about gender, and I’m willing to use those reasons as examples to challenge your claims.
A) First of all, rejecting “mankind” and replacing it with “womankind” sounds a lot like a standard that I don’t want. I don’t want to be a “spokeswomen” for my entire species if it means that men’s voices are not included. It’s really impossible to speak for someone else, as I emphasized above. Burdened with the impossible? No thanks.
B) Secondly, I don’t know what you mean by “what is commonly understood as God”. If you mean an understanding wherein people are formed in God’s image (western monotheistic religious tradition), well, there are problems with that right off the bat for me. If you mean that the more broad conception of a Creator or Great Spirit could be seen as female, I pose the question, why limit its gender? Why can’t it be either male or female, as the situation warrants? Maybe in some situations it behooves itself to display male behavior (however it is defined by a culture), and in other situations, female behavior?
C) Lastly, who said we had to decide if the Earth was male or female? Who said we had to even consider the question? What if I would rather ask, “Is the world around me more like an accountant, or an artist? An inventor, or an explorer?” Those kind of questions are infinitely more interesting to me because they actually deal with behavior and patterns and dynamics, not a branded identity. (I could make the questions even more fluid by stating them in E-prime… but the point remains nonetheless.)
I have more to say, but I’ll stop for now.