Crowley’s reduction of the religious instinct to the sex drive was part of a broader countercultural movement in the early 20th century inspired by Nietzsche and earlier phallicists like Richard Payne Knight. Thelema is not the only or even the more famous representative of this movement. That place of pride probably goes to Carl Jung.
While biological reductionism was initially a tool of sexual liberation in the face of the accretions of Christian morality, the idea that God or spirit lives in “the blood” or other bodily fluids was also an essential component in the Aryan racialist revival of the late-19th and early 20th centuries that led to Nazism. The religious version of this idea lives on in Thelema, but for those who study gender, biological reductionism is better known in the form of gender essentialism, or the idea that there are certain universal, innate, biologically- or psychologically-based features of gender that are at the root of observed differences in the behavior of men and women.
The irony is that Christian churches are now in a much better theological position to support transgender clergy than EGC is, because their religious doctrine never included biological reductionism. Neither Christ nor any of the church fathers ever said, “Semen is God,” but Crowley did.
This is why I keep saying that the issue of transgender clergy in EGC is not “drama,” nor is it merely a social justice issue. It has to do with the core doctrine.