By Skeleton Woman, Medusa, Durga Tagore, Shakti Guhathakurta, Harrit Tubman, River Rapunzel Blavatsky, Vimala Viatrix Blavatsky, Zadi Blavatsky-Brezsny, and Rob “Rockstar” Brezsny

We did some anthropological fieldwork, researching those internet lists: “Top 100 Spiritual Teachers,” “Most Influential Spiritual Leaders,” “Wisdom Keepers Changing the World,” and six others.

We found an endless parade of men’s names, men’s faces, and men’s voices declaring themselves to be the arbiters of enlightenment.

The “best” list we found had 25 women among 100 teachers. As if the divine feminine operates at a quarter capacity. Wisdom arrives primarily through testosterone? Apparently, the people who birth humanity into existence are less qualified to guide its spiritual evolution.

Most lists had far fewer than 25 percent.

And nonbinary people? Zero mentioned. The delusional certainty seemed to be that transcending gender binaries in your lived experience doesn’t count as spiritual insight worth recognizing. It seems you need to fit neatly into the colonial categories of “man” or “woman” to be considered influential.

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What in the Actual Fuck?

This isn’t just annoying. It's not just “well, maybe women and nonbinary people need to market themselves better.” (Though let’s unpack THAT victim-blaming in a moment.) Here we detect gross symptoms of a spiritual establishment that has confused patriarchal dominance with divine authority.

Think about what these lists imply: that the men who wrote the Pāli Canon matter more than women who helped keep oral traditions alive through song and story.

They’re suggesting that the monks who wrote theology in monasteries were wiser by far than the devout mystics who couldn’t access those monasteries because they had vaginas or didn’t perform gender “correctly.”

Those undeservedly authoritative lists insinuate that the spiritual teachers with book deals and TED talks and massive platforms matter more than the curanderas, rootworkers, medicine women, herbalists, midwives, dreamers, and channels who’ve been doing this work in their communities for generations without the boost of a publicity team.



The Burning Times Never Really Ended?

Here’s a radical theory: The systematic erasure of feminine spiritual authority didn’t completely end when European phallocrats stopped burning and hanging women accused of being witches. It just got more sophisticated.

Now instead of fire and nooses, we use:

• Academic gatekeeping. You need credentials from institutions that historically excluded women and still exclude most marginalized people.

• Publishing industry bias. Male authors get bigger advances, more marketing, and better placement.

• Speaking circuit economics. Conferences book “names” that became names because previous conferences booked them.

• Media amplification. Who gets the profiles, the podcasts, and the platforms?

• The Wikipedia problem. Women’s pages get deleted for “insufficient notability” while men with equivalent credentials stay up.

The Inquisition was just more honest about what it was doing.

Thomas Berry, whose work we deeply respect, wrote about Christianity’s “barbaric attack on the spiritual qualities of Indigenous peoples.” We would add a tragic corollary: Christianity’s barbaric attack on feminine spiritual authority, on queer and trans mystics, on anyone whose body or being has threatened patriarchal religious control.

That attack continues in these lists. It persists every time “influential teacher” gets unconsciously coded as “man with large platform who wrote books and speaks at conferences.”

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Let’s Get Specific About Who’s Missing

You know who’s mostly not on these lists?

• The grandmother who tends the family altar and keeps the ancestors close.

• The disabled mystic whose hard-earned wisdom comes through chronic pain and medical trauma.

• The sex worker who understands embodiment and sacred transgression better than any celibate monk.

• The prisoner doing Buddhist practice in solitary confinement.

• The undocumented immigrant maintaining spiritual traditions in diaspora.

• The trans shaman doing ceremony for their community.

• The Indigenous land defender whose spirituality is inseparable from protecting water and earth.

• The depressed person whose dark night of the soul taught them things sunshine spirituality never could.

• The big-bodied person who had to develop radical self-love against a culture of body hatred.

• The molestation survivors who rebuilt their concept of the divine after religious abuse.

Many of these people are doing profound spiritual work. They’re influencing their communities, families, and networks. But they will never make a Top 100 list because the metrics of “influence” are designed to measure audience size, not depth.

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The “But What About Marketing?” Deflection

Inevitably, someone says: “Well, maybe women and marginalized teachers just need to be better at self-promotion!”

Our response: NO.

First, this assumes everyone has equal access to the machinery of self-promotion: book deals, agents, publicists, social media teams, conference circuits, and wealthy benefactors. They don’t.

Second, it assumes that spiritual authority SHOULD operate according to capitalist marketplace logic. It implies that whoever markets themselves most aggressively deserves the biggest platform. Since when is shameless self-promotion a spiritual virtue?

Third, it ignores the fact that women and marginalized people who DO self-promote effectively often get labeled as “inauthentic,” “aggressive,” “attention-seeking,” or “too much.”

The same confidence that makes a man seem authoritative allegedly makes a woman seem arrogant. The self-assurance that makes a cis person seem spiritual makes a trans person seem “agenda driven.”

The game is rigged, and then we blame the players for losing.

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The Real Question: Influential TO WHOM?

Here’s what these lists never ask: Influential to whom? And for what purpose?

Are we measuring who has the most followers, or who creates the deepest transformation?

Are we gauging who gets the most speaking gigs, or who shows up for their community consistently?

Are we tallying who writes the most books, or who passes wisdom through oral tradition, ceremony, and embodied practice?

Are we assessing who gets featured in mainstream media, or who holds space for the grief, rage, and healing that mainstream culture is slow or unable to acknowledge?

If we changed the metrics, the lists would look radically different.

Let’s say we evaluated spiritual influence by:
• who shows up for the dying
• who tends the land
• who maintains ancestral practices
• who creates sanctuary for the marginalized
• who speaks truth to power at personal cost
• who does the unsexy work of in-the-trenches liberation

Then we would have to acknowledge that spiritual authority looks different from what these lists suggest.

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An Immodest Proposal

We propose additional, alternative categories for “spiritual influence”:

• Most Likely to Make Patriarchy Squirm

• Best at Tending What Capitalism Tries to Kill

• Most Committed to Collective Liberation Over Personal Brand

• Deepest Understanding of Intersectional Spirituality

• Best at Holding Paradox Without Collapsing into Easy Answers

• Most Willing to Acknowledge They Don’t Have All the Answers

• Best at Listening to Nonhuman Intelligence

• Most Committed to Decolonizing Spiritual Practice

• Best at Integrating Shadow Instead of Performing Light

• Most Likely to Tell You Uncomfortable Truths You Need to Hear

Try making those lists and see who rises to the top.

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What Needs to Happen

We’re not naive. We know these lists aren’t going away. But here’s what could change:

1. Acknowledge the structural bias. Stop pretending these lists reflect objective spiritual merit. Truth: They gauge who has access to platforms, who gets amplified by existing power structures, and who fits the dominant culture’s image of what authority looks like.

2. Actively seek voices from the margins. Don’t just add a few women and call it done. Center Indigenous teachers, BIPOC teachers, queer and trans teachers, disabled teachers, poor teachers, teachers from the Global South. And not as tokens but as authorities.

3. Value different forms of influence. Not everyone writes books or gives TED talks. Some people’s influence happens in small circles, embodied practice, and sustained community care. That’s not less important. It may sometimes be more important.

4. Question the metrics. Are we measuring wisdom or wealth? Depth or reach? Transformation or entertainment? Liberation or comfort?

5. Spiritual authority doesn’t require institutional validation. The mystics, shamans, healers, and visionaries doing the deepest work often operate outside mainstream recognition. Maybe that’s where they need to be.

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For a partial list (by no means exhaustive!) of women and nonbinary spiritual leaders, GO HERE.