 My Thoth deck is male. Very male. Infuriatingly and endearingly so. It's probably why I'm so crazy about it to begin with.
It's no secret I've always gotten along better with men than with women. The same is also true with my Tarot decks. The ones that possess that unmistakably male energy are always those I work best with, especially when reading for myself.
I like the blunt and logical, no frills responses I get when working with the Thoth, the Revelations or the Gothic Tarot. Like my male friends, they keep all unnecessary sentimentality out of the way and dive right into the heart of the matter. There is no mistaking the message in the cards; it's always unambiguously clear and to the point. There is no time wasted with small, insignificant details; no endless analysis of why things are what they are or how they came to be and no pretense that things are not as bad as they actually are.
The usual response, most specifically from the Thoth, can be summarized this way: "THIS is the problem. THIS is the solution. Now go out there and fix it. Or don't, and watch your life get really interesting in a really ugly way. Oh, and don't bother asking me about this again, unless you want me to get really insensitive."
The more feminine decks, like the Tarot of Dreams or the Fenestra, are much more gentle and protective of my feelings. They don't get straight to the point, but sort of ease you into it slowly until they feel you're ready to hear the awful truth. And even then, the message is buried under positive talking points like: "Everything's going to be all right in the end, it's all for the best."; or it's drowned under a mountain of often unnecessary information and pointless details that are nice to know, but ultimately lead to the same exact conclusion one would have gotten by walking a more direct path. I often come out of these readings emotionally exhausted, the way I often feel after listening to my female friends rehash a situation to death.
Of course, sometimes, the direct, no frills approach is not helpful at all and when it comes to more complex situations that involve a lot of complicated feelings, my feminine decks are much better at handling it than the male ones. In cases like that, I use a male and a female deck simultaneously to get the best possible view of the situation form a "He said, She said" standpoint. It makes for extremely interesting readings and it is quite amusing to see both decks either give very similar answers, or be completely at odds with one another on how to go about dealing with the problem, all the while agreeing on the nature of the problem itself.
I still prefer the blunt approach of my Thoth deck, even when it borders on cruelty, especially since it can be surprisingly and uncharacteristically gentle when I least expect it... Just like a man.
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