The Kybalion opens its treatment of the seventh principle by trying to head off a misreading, and the attempt is worth recording. Gender here is meant as a pair of functions, one that projects and directs and one that receives, gestates and forms. The book states flatly that this has nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the sexual theories then circulating in occult publishing. The disclaimer is aimed at real contemporaries and at material its author wanted no association with.
The functions are given as the Masculine and Feminine principles, and applied to mind under the names the I and the Me. The I wills and directs; the Me receives, holds and brings forth. Every act of thought, on this account, uses both, which is why the book denies that any person or thing is of one gender only.
The vocabulary has aged badly and its critics say so plainly. Assigning direction to a masculine principle and reception to a feminine one imports exactly the associations the disclaimer disowns, and later writers in the tradition have proposed renaming the pair rather than defending it. Others hold that the terms carry the alchemical inheritance of sulphur and mercury and cannot be swapped without losing what they were carrying. The atlas records the principle in the book's own terms, records what the book says it does not mean, and records the objection alongside.