The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 279, titled:

Transgender Experiences in Astrology

With Chris Brennan and Michael J. Morris

Episode originally released on November 16, 2020

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2020/11/16/transgender-issues-in-astrology/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released April 15th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with astrologer Michael J. Morris about transgender experiences in astrology. And this is episode 279 of the show. Hey Michael – welcome aboard! 

MICHAEL J. MORRIS: Hi! Thanks for having me here. I’m so glad to be in this conversation with you. 

CB: Yeah, I’m excited to have it. So let me get the data down for our discussion. So it’s Sunday, November 15th, 2020, starting at 4:22-ish PM in Denver, Colorado. Like I said, this is the 279th episode of the show. 

All right. And this is your first time joining me! So welcome, and we’ve been preparing and wanting to have this discussion for a few months now and talking about it. But we finally got it together, and it’s actually somewhat timely this week, you told me earlier today, that we’re recording this right now, right? 

MJM: Indeed, yeah, because we are approaching – every November, especially in the US, I think this is true other places as well, but definitely in the United States – every November we observe Trans Day of Remembrance, which is a day for memorializing and remembering all of the trans people who have been murdered each year, which is a number that’s been steadily rising for a while now. And then preceding – and this year, that’s on November 20th – and then the week preceding Trans Day of Remembrance is Trans Awareness Week. And so it feels really appropriate that we’re recording an episode specifically looking at trans experiences, trans issues, and how they relate to astrology during the window between the 13th and the 19th where we are observing Trans Awareness Week. It feels good to be doing this during this time. 

CB: Definitely. Well, thanks for joining me to help me with that. 

So in the first part of this episode, we’re gonna talk and focus mainly on like, cultural competency for astrologers and introducing astrologers who don’t have much background in this area to it and giving them some like, basic information that they need to know in terms of be able to talk about these things well and to talk to clients in a way that’s appropriate and healing. And then later, we’re gonna get more into how the astrology relates to it from a technical standpoint and talk about some different parts of the chart that are relevant and things like that. Is that more or less – that’s roughly our outline, right? 

MJM: Yeah, I think so. I think that definitely on the front end, we’re probably gonna be giving some information that’s new to some people just in terms of how to think about gender more broadly, including trans experiences but also what we learn about how gender functions, how gender works socially that we learn from trans experiences, from transgender people’s lives. And then shifting that into looking at how does that particularly relate to us as astrologers or the field of astrology. And I think there’s a lot of different ways that transgender issues matter or should matter to the field of astrology, from things like, as you said, like, providing healing or affirming care to our clients, giving reflections of them that offer them a view of themselves that bring them into more clarity or more understanding. But also in terms of – and I guess in that sense, I’m thinking about natal astrology, but also practices like electional astrology. Setting times, picking auspicious occasions on which to, I don’t know, come out or to enter into specific significant turning points in someone’s journey, or to – I’ve heard people work with electional astrologers for scheduling surgeries or other treatments related to trans healthcare. And so those are some of the ways that astrologers might be working with trans people and specifically supporting their experience and their journey. 

Also, there’s a lot to be said for making our field more inclusive, whether it’s a question of who is speaking at conferences, whereas right now most of – the vast majority of speakers at conferences are cisgender. In fact, there are whole astrology conferences where there are few if any trans people speaking or giving workshops or being invited to speak or present at a local astrology group, or a regional astrology group – things like that. And I think for me also a big part of this is recognizing that we all – whether we’re transgender or otherwise – have so much to learn from studying transgender experiences, from understanding the lives of trans people, especially when most of this system – and by the system, I guess I mean broadly the sweeping sort of global traditions of astrology that flow together into the kinds of practices that we’re all engaged in – most of the system has been developed studying the lives of cisgender people. And that perhaps there are things about the system and about astrology that we would understand differently or understand more if we were to engage the lives of trans people and the experiences of trans people through these technical approaches that we are applying when we’re working with clients. 

CB: Yeah, that was one of the most interesting things as we were preparing for this is the way in which applying astrology to the lives to understand how it applies to the lives of transgender people actually opened up and broadened and deepened one’s understanding of astrology, because some of the principles that astrologers already know and apply were just applied in a different context, but in a context that did readily make sense in terms of how astrologers normally approach astrology, even if that’s not in like, the textbooks that we receive from the 1970s or even from the second century or what have you. 

MJM: Indeed. Well, and as you were saying that, it reminded me of something. I don’t have this text right within reach, but something that Angela Davis said in an essay called “Feminism and Abolition,” which actually you can see on YouTube – there’s a video recording of it, and it’s also in her book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle – and she’s talking about specifically the intersection of transgender people’s lives and the prison industrial complex. And late in the essay, she says that feminism compels us to interrogate and challenge the things that we have been ideologically conditioned to accept as normal. And so I feel like there’s a kind of feminist impulse in the conversation that we’re already starting to have here in terms of what have we assumed as normal within the systems of astrology because we have been applying them to people’s lives, operating within these kind of normative assumptions about those lives? So then like, the normative assumptions about people’s lives then creates or reproduces some of those same norms and I would even say like, limitations within the system because of how it’s been applied. And so then it raises questions like whose charts are we studying? Or if we’re people who teach or present at conferences, whose charts are we using as examples in our presentations? Do we consider the lives of people who have been historically marginalized transgender people? Do we consider their lives worth learning from? What can we understand more about the system through the charts and the lives that we’re studying? 

And then I also think that applies to people who do mundane astrology in terms of looking at world events. Whose world events are we looking at? Are we only looking at major events that have an impact to what we might think of as the mainstream, or could we think more about major events in marginalized communities and social movements, things like social justice movements around transgender experiences, or just more broadly the LGBTQ liberation movement of the 20th and 21st century? Like, are we giving our attention to these kind of events? And if we did, would we understand more about how some of these planets or transits signify – what they might be describing – would we understand those things differently if we directed our attention not only to the things that are considered important within mainstream society, but also looking at the particular events that unfold in marginalized communities as well? 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And some of that made me think also about how in the early 20th century, there were those groups of academic scholars in Europe who decided to go back and study the history of ancient astrology, not because they thought there was any validity to astrology, but because they thought astrology was always – that it would always reflect its culture, and that you could learn interesting things about a culture from the types of charts that astrologers were looking at and the types of like, jobs or different people that they would mention as delineations of different planets in combinations at different times. And in that way, if that’s true that’s astrology’s always an extension of culture, then one of our goals as astrologers in modern times needs to be to expand it enough to be inclusive of everybody that’s in that culture so that it’s applicable and can be used to help or study the lives of everybody, regardless of what their background is.

MJM: Indeed. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that that is – I love that you said “if it’s true” that astrology always reflects the culture that it comes from. Like, I think that’s probably true! I wouldn’t be hard-pressed to understand how astrology would not reflect the culture that it came out of, and yeah, exactly – like, so then how do we understand more about the cultures from which astrology emerged or is being practiced, especially if those cultures or those societies included some sort of class system or hierarchy around specifically for the purposes of this conversation hierarchies around gender experiences? Which gender experiences are considered normal or normalized, and which ones are excluded for whatever reasons? And that that is part of how those cultures functioned. And how do we see that reflected in the astrology that we practice? And then also as we move into the world that we are co-creating in this moment with one another, what kind of world do we wanna live in? And can astrology and who we’re directing our attention to participate in not only reflecting the culture, but in shifting the culture as well to make astrology an arena or a context in which we indeed insist that transgender lives do matter. Transgender experiences do matter. And then perhaps, you know, thousands of years from now when people are going back to study the culture of the astrology in the early 21st century, then maybe we are contributing to a culture in which trans lives matter more than they have in the past.

CB: Yeah. And just in a culture where we’ve been going through a cultural shift of attempting to make some marginal communities less marginalized, that is also a process that’s ongoing in astrology as an extension of culture. So anyway, so that’s part of what we’re trying to do here today. 

One of the other things that you said that could be a side effect of astrologers doing this, though, or making some of these pushes of just like, awareness are things like making astrology websites more inclusive, for example. 

MJM: Yeah, indeed. And that’s like, a shout-out to I think it’s Petr at Astro-Seek for integrating more inclusive gender and pronoun options into the birth chart calculator on the site! And so what I’m hoping that we’re demonstrating here is that it is about taking care of our clients. It is about creating spaces that are affirming and healing and safer for the people with whom we’re working. But also I feel like there’s all these ways within our field that astrology can take up responsibility for holding and affirming trans experiences as part of the work that we’re doing. That it is about the care that we can provide our clients, but also hopefully just in this little introduction, thinking about all the ways – and this isn’t even all the ways! Hopefully people feel inspired to think about, reflect on their own practices, whether they’re researching astrologers or consulting astrologers or whether they’re writing books or websites or podcasts or however it is that they are contributing to this field to ask, “What could I be doing in my work to affirm more inclusion, more representation, of trans experiences,” and you know, by extension, other marginalized populations as well? Yeah. 

CB: Right. Okay. And let’s see. And then the final thing was just the idea of the more complexity and nuance we bring into our understanding of gender, the more equipped we’re gonna be to seeing and affirming the complexity in all of our clients or even ourselves. I think that’s one of the points that you made that you wanted to emphasize as well, which I thought was a really good point. 

MJM: Indeed. I mean, that is really at the heart of astrology for me. It’s one of the reasons that I was drawn into this field and one of the reasons I love the practice of it is I think that astrology is well-equipped to initiate us into an understanding of our own complexity, that we are not – none of us, whether we’re trans or cisgender or otherwise – none of us are reducible to binary identities – “you’re either this or that!” We’re not even reducible to 12 identities and the kind of like, popular Sun sign model of “you’re one of these 12 archetypes.” In fact, every single chart is so full of nuance and complexity. In fact, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that astrology is inherently queer or anything like that, but to say that astrology is already well-equipped to introduce to our own complexity, or to introduce our clients to complexity. And so the more that we can think about introducing nuance and complexity into our understanding of gender, the more that we can actually draw on the resources of these traditions to understand more of our ourselves if you are a person who primarily uses astrology for something like self-study or self-actualization, or for affirming and recognizing more of the complexity of the people that we’re working with if we are astrologers who are working with clients or interacting with other astrologers, things like that. And so yeah, exactly. I think the more that we can bring complexity and nuance into our understanding of gender, the more we will be capable of affirming the complexity of all of our beings, our selves, and others as well. 

CB: That makes sense. And it makes me think of – it’s getting a little ahead in our discussion, but something I think about regularly and have been formulating over the past few years that I call the Hermetic nature of astrology and how in traditional astrology for the first 2,000 years of its practice, astrologers were usually associated with the planet Mercury. And Mercury itself had this interesting role in astrology of being a go-between and a sort of indeterminate factor that could straddle the lines between opposites or seemingly extremes, and sometimes go either way – that it had this sort of neutral factor to it. And so that comes up, for example, in technical doctrines like in sect where Mercury can join either the diurnal team or the nocturnal team, depending on how it’s situated in the chart. And astrologers developing that ability or having that ability to see or straddle the line on both things is like, an asset in some ways rather than something that’s a negative thing or something like that.

MJM: Absolutely. I mean, I think in a lot of contexts there’s an association of Mercury – not a lot of contexts. In certain queer astrological communities, there’s an association of Mercury with a kind of queerness because of those aspects of the tradition. Thinking of Mercury not only rejoicing in the first house at this place between the above and the below, but also mythologically the ways that Mercury was a psychopomp and the messenger of the gods and moving between the upper world and the underworld and occupying these in-between spaces. So yeah, like, in terms of sect, being able to move between – as you said – like, the extremes of either the day sect or the night sect. But also I think in other ways, we could look at how Mercury occupies the in-between spaces. The liminal spaces where it’s actually not only this or that and the ability to be either one, but also the ability to move between what might otherwise seem as polarities or discrete positions and to show that there’s actually something in between these spaces and defined and articulate in a very kind of mercurial way what exists in these spaces in between what we might otherwise position as polar opposites or distinct positions. I think that that indeed – so I love that you’re bringing in this kind of Hermetic history of the tradition, because one of the ways part of what I think it does is points to some of the ways that the tradition has been equipped to think well about these qualities of human experience that maybe we haven’t fully developed or actualized in our practices yet. But in fact, that there are traces or remnants of being able to do this even back into the Hellenistic doctrines. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. Definitely from a technical perspective that it’s been there, even if it hasn’t been emphasized as much as it could or should be. But then also that it just points to almost an advantage that one has in being able to transgress those boundaries and those lines and sometimes not come down, you know, on one side or another in terms of one’s vantage point. And I think that’s gonna be something we come back to, and that actually is interesting, because then it leads into our very definition of what we need to define at the top of this, which is what do we mean by transgender, which is the primary word that we’re gonna be using. So we can either jump into that right now headlong, or I think you said you might want to situate ourselves first. Which do you feel like doing first at this stage?

MJM: Yeah, I think it’s useful to situate ourselves in relation to the conversation just so people who are listening know who we are and where we’re coming from, and recognizing that we are speaking from our particular locations in relation to these topics. And so I’m – I mean, you already introduced me – Michael J. Morris. My pronouns are they/them. I’m a white, genderqueer, nonbinary trans astrologer and an educator. I have a PhD in dance studies with a focus on gender and sexuality, and I am currently a visiting assistant professor at Denison University where I teach in the Women’s and Gender Studies program, the Queer Studies program, and the Environment Studies program, including courses on feminism, queer theory, and transgender studies and transgender issue. And then I also teach gender theory at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. And so I’m coming from that personal experience of my own ways of moving through gender, my own ways of occupying or participating in trans communities, but also a very academic perspective as well, specifically grounded in the writings and the contributions of trans scholars, trans academics, and then other queer and feminist scholars and academics as well. And so that’s my location in terms of where I’m gonna be speaking from. 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: Where are you coming from, Chris? 

CB: Brilliant. Well, I usually use just he/him pronouns. I am white, pretty straight, astrologer. I specialize in Hellenistic astrology and that’s what I’m known for. I wrote a book on the subject, and the study of the history of astrology in general, and I think that’s pretty much it in terms of my credentials and stuff. 

MJM: You’re also an amazing teacher! And yes, you did write a brilliant book on Hellenistic astrology. I don’t know what “pretty straight” means, and I don’t think that’s a tangent we’re gonna go down at this moment, but I love that you said that. 

CB: Yeah. So you know, I don’t wanna make this about me or center my experience in this — 

MJM: Sure. 

CB: So and before we get into it, you know, a lot of this has been a learning process for me, because I spent so much of – I spent 10 years working on my book and studying ancient history and trying to reconstruct the history of ancient astrology. And one of the things that’s been nice for me as soon as the book came out in 2017 over the past few years is just getting back to doing the podcast full time and getting to research contemporary things, including social things that I had been falling behind on during that 10-year period of just intense study of the history of astrology. So this is one area that I’ve always wanted to focus on more. And you recommended this amazing book to me that I read in preparation for this titled Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution by Susan Stryker. And I just thought this was a really good book that I wanted to mention to anybody who is interested in learning more about transgender history. And it seems like this is one of your favorite reference books, right?

MJM: It is. It’s one that I use pretty extensively in my teaching specifically – I mean, Susan Stryker is one of the progenitors of the field of transgender study, and not the first but one of the kind of really driving forces behind trans people writing about trans experiences, which was specifically in response to decades of trans people being written about by cisgender doctors and psychologists and like, all this literature trying to explain transgender phenomena, but coming from mostly or almost entirely cisgender male perspective. And so then in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, trans people starting to write about their own experiences and to write critically about trans experiences in the world, we start to see the development of a field called transgender studies. And Susan Stryker is one of the real guiding forces in that field and trans issues historian. And Transgender History she wrote specifically for a general audience. So while she is an academic, it is not a text that is heavily laden with academic jargon; it’s something that anyone could pick up. And it is a history book, but it’s also getting – situating ourselves, locating ourselves within a broader context. Understanding where did these ideas come from? Where did these words come from? How have they changed over time? What are the kinds of community in which gender was being, has been, and is continuing to be explored and subverted and innovated and understood in new ways? And so yeah, it’s one of my favorite texts. There’s a long list of favorite texts, though, so that’s a hard thing to narrow down, but definitely it’s one of them. And part of —

CB: Okay. 

MJM: — what she gives us in the book – oh yeah? 

CB: Yeah, I wanna use your definition here in a minute. Can I give a shout out to the other book, though, just really briefly — 

MJM: Sure, yeah. 

CB: — because I found it useful as somebody that was somewhat new. But it was – it’s titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans But Were Too Afraid to Ask by Brynn Tannehill. There’s the cover for people watching the video version. And especially just the first chapter was a really good concise breakdown of some basic competency things, a little of which we’re about to do, but that I found useful. 

But just going back and sort of starting to define our terms, one of the things we meant to say at the beginning was that transgender and trans are being used as umbrella terms here for many different experiences of gender variance. And there is a definition from Susan Stryker’s book that we were gonna use, right?

MJM: Yeah. I mean, this is the definition that has been the most useful and functional to me in terms of well, I mean, understanding my own gender, but also like, teaching gender and gender theory and teaching about trans experiences to other people as well. And she gives the definition of transgender people as people who – this is a quote – “people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over.” The prefix “trans” means to cross. “People who cross over the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender.” And then further in the text, she says, “It is the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place, rather than any particular destination or mode of transition, that best characterizes the concept of transgender.” And part of what that opens up for us is that trans is not about where you’re going. And for some people, it is. Some people start with a very clear idea of “this was the gender that I was assigned at birth, and I identify more with this other gender and I am moving toward that other gender.” But increasingly, there’s more accounts of more experiences of people who feel really clear that they do not identify with the gender that they were assigned, and they are moving away from that gender. And I do so – as we do so – we encounter all of these socially imposed boundaries that try to keep us in the gender that we were assigned. And so Stryker’s really emphasizing in this definition the movement away from this unchosen starting place, the crossing of socially imposed boundaries that try to keep us in the gender that we were assigned at birth, and less emphasis on any particular destination as the defining quality or characteristic of what it means for all people to be trans, for example. 

CB: Okay. But so built into that is the starting point or at least a basic definition emphasize that – of an unchosen starting place, that the starting place itself that there was something about it that felt out of alignment or inauthentic to the person and their actual experience. 

MJM: Indeed. And part of what we learned from that is – and I think actually this isn’t a conversation that we probably won’t spend much time on, but an important conversation that we as a society need to be thinking about is that gender assignment for all of us is not consensual. None of us consent to be told at birth or even before birth – for many people it’s at that first sonogram or ultrasound where they make out some parts of a body, and they say, “This is a boy,” or “This is a girl.” And soon as that is uttered, we are initiated into a whole series of life expectations. Of what it means for this person to be a girl or what it means for this person to be a boy. And all the life decisions that are expected of them for that, and that whether you’re transgender or cisgender, none of us chose that. We become aware of that because of the ways that trans experiences, trans people move away from that unchosen starting point, but in fact, for all of us it is unchosen. And in this moment in our culture when there is so much conversation about consent and bodily autonomy, it is a question that we need to deal with at a certain point of why is it that we are so okay with inscribing signification or cultural significance onto a body without consent at birth? At the start of a life? Why are we okay with that when in so many other ways, we are advocated for bodily autonomy and consent as a cultural ethos? And trans experiences bring that to our attention, bring awareness to that, because of all of the social apparatuses with which trans people have to struggle or through which trans people have to struggle in order to move away from that unchosen starting point. We become more aware of just how much social labor is exerted to keep people in this space, even cisgender people – people who are not trans – having the experience of being regulated in their genders, whether it’s little boys being told that you’re not manly enough or doing that’s not something that boys do, or little girls being told like, this is what ladylike means, and to do that means you’re not fulfilling the expectations of your gender – things like that that we write off as just like, I don’t know, growing up or socialization. These processes we go through. But in fact – and this is something that happens a lot with my students or the students that I get to work with in 101 courses is starting to reflect on whether we’re trans or otherwise, we all have memories of being told how to be or how to do our genders. And we become more aware of all of those forces of social regulation. And by social regulation, I just mean interpersonal situations in which we tell one another what to do. Social regulation – we become more aware of that, and maybe more attenuated to the ways in which we have experienced those things as well. And maybe then that can be a source of some empathy or compassion for people who experience even more of those forms of social regulation – folks like trans people. Does that make sense? 

CB: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think one of the points that Brynn Tannehill made in their book that I just – I thought it was a good point. I mean, to respond to something you were saying, which was just why isn’t that something that we care about as a society more, and I think it’s because – I don’t know if it’s most people or many people, because they are born into a situation where that isn’t something where they feel out of place, even if they experience that at different points in their life as temporary inconveniences or annoyances or maybe setbacks, that it’s not an immediate, constant thing for the entirety of their life, versus Tannehill’s recommendation for cis people was to just imagine that you woke up tomorrow in the opposite of the gender that you are now, and if you would feel uncomfortable in that or if there would be something uncomfortable for you in that way. But that being the central almost issue that many trans people struggle with. I mean, is that —

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: — accurate? Do you feel – is that an okay way to frame it? Or how do you feel about that? Because I wanted to — 

MJM: It is. The one thing —

CB: — make sure we’re centering trans people’s experiences more than, you know, too much cis people that they struggle with some things related to that as well, which while true – I don’t know if I wanna focus on that too much. 

MJM: Sure. Yeah. I mean, the only thing that pinged that I was like, hmm, I don’t know what I think about that – or I do know what I think about that – is I don’t know if I think of genders as being opposite to one another, because that kind of re-implies that there’s two in some sort of opposition. And in fact, there are kind of rich constellation of gender possibilities. So then opposition isn’t usually – that word kind of brings the binary back into it. But I think it’s a useful exercise to ask people to think through what if you woke up tomorrow in an experience that was entirely different than the one that you’re in now, and what kind of discomfort might that bring up? I also think an interesting potential effect of that exercise is what opportunities or what new parts of yourself might you become aware of in that experiment? And I agree – like, I don’t wanna center cisgender experiences, and also part of what I’ve seen int he work that I do with students is that the more that we come to understand how gender is functioning specifically in and through the lives of trans people, the more we see that trans people are experiencing – some trans people; I’m not gonna speak for all trans people. But some trans people are experiencing things that, as you said, that cisgender people have also experienced in perhaps fleeting ways or temporary ways I think is the word that you used. And I think that that is important to distinguish between something that is persistent, that it feels like you cannot get away from that feeling, and something that feels like you can escape that. But the more work I’ve done with students who are mostly cisgender, when we start to peel back the layers, it turns out that even for cisgender people, there’s a lot of harm and woundedness that they are also carrying. Hearing young women talking through all the ways in which they were shamed for being the wrong kind of girl growing up, for example. That even though they identify with the gender they were assigned, that gender category still – and its social regulations – still caused them harm. And hearing young men talk about having no access to their feelings. Feeling totally shut off because of the number of times they were told, “You can’t cry,” or “Real men don’t cry,” for example. And so in fact, these gender norms that are harmful to trans people may in fact potentially be harmful to all people. And that’s part of the work that we then get to do as astrologers, as educators, as all of the roles that we might occupy, is where can we create more space for – as we were saying – more nuance and more complexity for all of us? And then specifically, as the focus of this conversation, how do trans people’s experiences and lives give us resources or offer us resources with which to think about how to explore or move into more of that complexity for trans people? And then also for all people. Does that make sense? 

CB: Yeah, definitely. 

All right. So I’m just looking at our outline and — 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: — since we’re 35 minutes in, let’s start hitting some of our early basic definition points for people that are new to this topic. So one of the things was defining what it means – or the difference between – transexual versus transgender. 

MJM: Yeah. And that’s… I’ll offer an explanation of how those terms are distinguished, and also to say that some of it is historical or chronological, and some of it is overlapping. But broadly, transexual is a term that came into use earlier in the 20th century, specifically to describe people who were seeking medical reassignment. People who were seeking hormone replacement therapy or surgeries in order to affirm their experience of their own genders. 

And then the term transgender was kind of being used in different ways by different people throughout the 20th century. It came into more widespread usage in the 1990s specifically to give a word to people who were gender variant, who were trans, in the way that Susan Stryker is using it who were moving away from the gender that they had been assigned at birth, but not seeking medical reassignment. So in the ‘90s, there was a bit of a contrast – that transexual people were people who were seeking medical reassignment, and transgender people were people who had not and maybe would not seek medical reassignment for any number of reason. And then the term transgender starts to become a little bit more of an umbrella term. In the last couple of decades, the word “transexual” has become less common as transgender has become more inclusive to include experiences like including transexual experiences, including nonbinary experiences or genderqueer experiences or agender experiences as well as binary trans experiences – people who were assigned female at birth and transition to male, or people who were assigned male at birth transitioning to female. And transgender has come to – sorry, my thoughts got ahead of me! Transgender has come to function as an umbrella possibly for strategic or even like, political reasons in order to create more solidarity between people who have similar experiences and suffer similar oppressions. Like, that might be – it’s hard to say – how or why language evolves the way it does, but there is a utility to having a word with which many different gender variant experiences can identify. And transgender has become more like that over the last couple of decades. 

That said, I think it’s really important to name that this is gonna be different for different people. That there are some transexual people who do not identify as transgender! Who see those as two very different categories. There are other transexual people who understand that as a transgender identity, that this is more like an overlapping like, Venn diagram. There are nonbinary people who do identify as trans; there are also nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. And so as we’re talking through this, I think our intention is not to dictate how anyone is going to identify or even to explain how everyone is identifying or why they’re identifying those ways, but rather to offer some ways in to thinking about gender, to thinking about how has transgender functioned terminologically, how is it being used now and how might we think with this term as it continues to evolve? Because it’s probably gonna change again – that’s the nature of language. But can we think with this in this moment in 2020 – can we think with the term “transgender” and how it functions now in order to think more critically about how we do our work as astrologers? 

CB: Yeah. And like you said, some terminology is still fluid and may shift in time, so apologies to those who prefer different terms, either now or in the future. One of the things Tannehill wrote or mentioned was that not all people that consider themselves to be transgender get gender reassignment surgery or either can afford to or choose to, and that transexual at this stage tends to be used more often to refer to those that have had some sort of surgery, whereas transgender just refers to people whose gender is fluid in some way but doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve done anything necessarily in a medical sense to change it. Is that okay? 

MJM: That’s definitely the history. That’s definitely how those terms have historically been distinguished. There are people who undergo medical reassignment or seek out medical reassignment in some way who don’t like the word “transexual” because it is – and so there is like, some – I don’t wanna make too many generalizations, but there are some generational differences around identifying with certain terminology. And there’s a younger generation of trans folks who, even if seeking medical reassignment, may prefer the term transgender because “transexual” was a term that was primarily used by doctors and psychologists to diagnose trans people. So some trans people feel a kind of pathologization around that term and don’t identify with it for those reasons, even if they do seek out medical reassignment. And then there are other people who don’t have those feelings about that word. And so I think in general, maybe this is a good – this feels like a useful blanket statement to make is that when approaching people about their gender, to ask what words they use and to respect the words that they use, and to not police one another’s language in terms of “That’s not the way you should be using that word” or “That’s not the way I use that word.” That people are gonna have different experiences and different understandings of these words. Some of that’s regional. Some of that’s geographic. Some of that even depends on what country you grew up in and the ways that these words have circulated globally. There’s just so much variation in terms of how these terms come to take on meaning or how they signify or how they name different experiences. And some of it is intensely personal, even though we still have some sort of social understanding about how these words mean, how they take on meaning. So I think in general, yeah, terms are gonna change. They have changed so much even in the last like, 50, 60 years. They’re gonna change again. And hopefully we’re gonna find more language for articulating – maybe new language, but also older language for understanding gender experiences that exist beyond a binary framework. 

CB: Sure. I’m just a little nervous that in trying to capture all the different nuances, we may not have clarity here if we’re trying to introduce any new people to some of these basic terminologies if we’re not drawing any distinctions so far. So what distinctions – another distinction, again, and I’m not sure – maybe there are just differences, because I know I was more into the Tannehill book and you were a little less enamored with it or at least less – because it was more of an intro 101 book instead of a strict history book it was like, less necessary. But one of the distinctions they drew was saying that I think it was like, sex is something that – is what is between your legs but gender is what is between your ears, and drawing a distinction like that. Is that a distinction you would endorse in any way, or is that another one where there’s gonna be too many problems running into that? 

MJM: I would have hesitation around that distinction. 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: I think that – I mean, for several reasons, not the least of which is that there is a kind of a implicit body-mind separation in there I’m not really on board with. But I do think – what I could say is that there is some usefulness in distinguishing between sex and gender, and that the distinction between them may be useful for some people for some reasons. And deconstructing the distinction between them might be useful for other people for other reasons. And I hear you in terms of like, what can we say that’s useful to people. I think that broadly —

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: — for people, especially if you don’t know anything about their experience, that I think transgender is a safe umbrella term. And also to build into our practices of asking people, “What are the words that you use for yourself?” without it being threatening in some way to – it’s actually an act of respect, I think, to ask people what words they use rather than to assume. But if we’re talking about – so if we’re talking about specific people, I think it’s great to ask what words they use. If we’re talking about a general experience of moving away from the gender one was assigned, I think that “transgender” is a really useful umbrella term for describing those kinds of experiences. Does that feel clear? 

CB: Yeah. Just transgender is moving away from the gender you were assigned at birth in some way, whatever that means without putting any restrictions or limitations on what that means. 

MJM: Right. Yes. And opening it up to does this describe your experience, and someone might say, “Yeah, that’s a word that I really identify with.” Someone might say, like, “I think that’s a word for other people; I use this word instead.” And being in those conversations with people is really part of the kinds of cultural competency that we’ll talk about at some point is yeah, just getting into the practice of being in dialogue with people about what words feel affirming to them. And maybe even why! We might learn a lot more about ourselves and our world if we actually had those conversations with one another. 

CB: Right. All right. Where do you wanna go from here in terms of – we had a lot of basic setup stuff that we were gonna do in the outline, but I feel like we’re blowing through our time a little bit faster than I anticipated. So I’m not sure if we should continue trying to define some of these terms, or if we should move onto other later discussions. Where do you feel at this point? 

MJM: I feel like there’s two things I can hit really quickly and try not to let Mercury in Sagittarius take over the way that it sometimes can! The first thing – or one of the things I wanted to mention is that many different Indigenous cultures have understandings of gender beyond a gender binary, and in fact the adoption of a binary understanding of gender has a long history in terms of imperialist colonization. That there tends to be an erasure of these Indigenous understandings of gender that are not reducible to our contemporary understanding of transgender. Like, I don’t wanna be anachronistic and impose this kind of modern western language on other cultural experiences, but just to acknowledge that the persistence of a binary understanding of gender is not the same in all cultures, and in fact many different cultures already have language and cultural practices around more varieties of gender experience and more expansive gender experiences. And someone that – there’s a great little book called Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon, and Alok has actually been on Instagram posting these amazing book reports. Like, they’re like, little multi-slide book reports on specific texts looking at the racist and colonial histories of the gender binary and the sex binary. And so if people wanna learn more about that, that would be a great account to follow. 

In terms of getting into the actual groundwork of what is gender and how does it function and how do we understand it coming from trans experiences, I think one of the most important things that I wanna emphasize is gender is not one thing. Gender is not homogenous; it’s not uniform; it’s not persistent in some sort of fixed or unchanging way. That gender is more like an aggregate of relations and relational processes through which we create a sense of self, but also a social identity, how we relate to others. And there are some great distinctions that Kate Bornstein articulates in a book called Gender Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, which is an excellent early gender theory text by a trans author. And this isn’t exactly – I’m not gonna delineate exactly the way that she does, but this is derived from almost similar, identical to the way that she talks about it. Some of the different ways, different components or what Bornstein calls the different parts of gender that we might think of is that there is gender assignment. And gender assignment is what happens at birth; it’s not something we choose for ourselves; it’s something that’s given to us. And the rest of our lives are gonna be lived in relation to that. Whatever our choices are as we grow, as we develop a sense of identity, gender assignment is always gonna be part of that journey – the gender that people – primarily doctors – assign us at birth. And it’s always gonna be part of gender. 

Then the other – or another – big component of gender, the one that actually we hear talked about the most, I think, right now is gender identity. And gender identity is one’s sense of self. How do I understand myself? How do I know myself? But identity is always a relational process. When we identify as something, we are also identifying with others. And so if someone were to say, “I identify as a woman,” part of what we hear inside of that is, “I identify with other people who I recognize and understand as women, other people who identify as women. And I identify with them for all kinds of reasons, for the ways that they move through the world, for the ways that they understand themselves, for the ways that they relate to their bodies or their desires,” or all the different things that come into shaping the particularities of human experience. Gender identity is when you have that sense that my self is like those other selves, those other people in some way. And so I identify as in order to identify with others who occupy a similar identity. Does that make sense?

CB: Yeah. And also just the notion that identity is something that changes and can grow and shift with time as well.

MJM: Indeed, yeah. That most people’s – very few people have a sense of identity from a young age that stays the same their whole lives, and for all kinds of reasons related to gender but also all these other social dynamics. One that comes to mind immediately is age. That as we age, our identities change a lot. So identity is very rarely fixed or static in some way. 

So far then the parts or the components of gender that we have in this constellation of what becomes a kind of aggregate of relations that we call gender – gender assignment, the gender you’re given or assigned at birth. 

Gender identity, your self of sense that forms along the way in relation to other people within your social field. Within your family or within your school life or people you see in the media and that sense of, “I am like that.” That sense of self that comes through identifying with others. 

Then another component is gender presentation, or what some people call gender expression. And that’s the ways in which we present ourselves to the world. That’s things like the clothes that we wear, or how we style our hair, or whether we wear makeup or don’t wear makeup. What we do with body hair – whether we remove body hair, whether we grow body hair, whether we… It’s also things like how we move through the world, like our physical gait, like how you walk. Or how you sit. All of these ways in which we present to others some form of gender. And maybe that gender presentation is consistent with our identity, how we think of ourselves, and sometimes it’s not. That there is a disconnect or a discrepancy between the gender we’re presenting and the gender that we feel ourselves to be. And so this is one of the ways in which we can learn something from trans experiences is that it is in fact possible to have a sense of oneself that is inconsistent with the gender that you are presenting to the world. And that part of many trans people’s experiences is bringing those components of gender more into alignment, such that your presentation, your expression, how you show up in the world looks like or presents how you feel about yourself so that your identity is consistent with your presentation, and your presentation is consistent with your identity. 

And then the final — 

CB: Yeah — 

MJM: — component – oh, go ahead. 

CB: There’s a keyword that connects those that runs through it that I first saw, again, not to keep mentioning it, but in the Tannehill book. But then it made me think of something. It was this term authenticity and the notion of trying to live authentically as being the goal or like, the end of, you know, the goal of many trans people to live in a way that feels authentic to them. And it made me think of Demetra George’s book, which is titled Astrology and the Authentic Self, which is one of my favorite books. And then I saw there was another person – a trans person that Chani Nicholas had done a chart delineation for, and that she had written a book that used that term “authentic” as well, and I feel like that’s gonna be a recurring theme for us that we talk about is the notion of authentically and living authentically, and that that’s also the connection point for astrology a lot as well. 

MJM: Indeed, yeah. I think that authenticity – which is actually a keyword of several places in our astrological tradition that we might get to in terms of like, I think of Uranus having strong connotations with authenticity and breaking from established traditions and norms in order to pursue what feels more authentic, even if it means rejecting what has come before in some way. But authenticity I think most of all – first I just wanna say that Demetra George’s Astrology and the Authentic Self is probably my favorite astrology book, along with Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, and they sit well next to one another technically, but also on a bookshelf. 

But yeah, authenticity. How I explain authenticity to myself – because it’s a word we throw around a lot – is I think that authenticity means living in a way that is consistent with one’s felt sense of oneself. That there’s not that disconnect with how I feel about myself is separate or in friction with the ways that I’m moving through the world. So yeah, I agree that I think that a lot of people’s trans journeys is towards more authenticity. And in fact, indeed, as you said, a lot of the work that we do with astrology, especially with clients, is also moving towards more authenticity. Moving in alignment with our felt experience of self and also in terms of astrology, the kinds of currents in which our lives are moving and situated astrologically. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. But also what you were mentioning and what got me on that tangent was the notion of there being an unalignment in the first place, that there’s some sort of disalignment in the first place. And that that can be the thing of the work that then has to be done is somehow bringing that into alignment, whether it’s like, a little thing that’s out of alignment or whether it’s a major thing. But nonetheless, there having to be some conscious effort into aligning those pieces. 

MJM: Yeah, exactly. And so we can see how these components – so right now, we have three are related to one another. So you’re assigned a gender at birth, which on some level determines your gender presentation in some ways that you don’t even have control over in that people are dressing you – making choices for your appearance, for your haircuts and your clothes and things – in alignment with the gender you are assigned. And perhaps that’s a gender with which you also identify. But perhaps it’s not! And so if the gender with which you identify is not the one that you were assigned and you are still having to present or express yourself in ways that are in alignment with the gender you were assigned but not in alignment with the gender with which you identify, that is where that internal dissonance starts to happen, this sense of how other people see me or interact with me is not – because of my presentation – is not in alignment with my sense of self, my felt sense of who I am, my identity. And that actually connects to the 4th that I’ll name – and of course gender is a complex constellation, so I think there is way more than this, but these are I think a good working premise for people to start off with – is gender attribution. And this is the one that maybe we don’t talk about nearly enough. It’s gender attribution, and that term comes from Kate Bornstein. It’s the way that we attribute gender to one another all throughout daily lives. When you’re walking down the street or, I mean, we used to walk down the streets! But when — 

CB: Yeah! 

MJM: — we’re walking down the street and we see someone, and before we’ve even processed the thought, we see them as a woman, or we see them as a man. That is gender attribution. We are – it’s not the same as gender assignment, which happens at the beginning of life. But we are still projecting our assumptions about gender onto one another. And sometimes they don’t reconcile easily. Sometimes because of the shape of someone’s body or the sound of their voice, we might get some information about gender, but how they’re presenting themselves seems a little different. And so then we have some sort of crisis around gender attribution. “What gender are you? I don’t know how to interact with you because your gender is illegible to me or irresolvable to me in some way.” And that that is actually a big part of trans experience as well is interacting with people’s constant attribution of gender to you. And of course, cis people are interacting with that all the time as well. For cis people, that experience doesn’t necessarily create so much friction, because the gender being attributed to you – so if you are a man, and I see you as a man and I talk to you as if you are a man and I use he/him pronouns and all of these and I refer to you as a man, there’s no friction because you identify with those significations, with those cultural meanings that are being projected onto you. But when those meanings are being projected onto you, and that’s not how you identify, that is where the gender attribution and the gender identity are no longer in alignment, and that can be a source of discomfort or distress or pain or anguish that is a motivation to shift something in some way and try to move towards not only more authenticity for oneself, but to be seen by other people in ways that you want to be seen. To have the gender that you identify with attributed to you in some way. 

And I think that there’s – this is speculation, but I think that like, it’s useful speculation – we could see how some of these different components of gender might show up in a chart in different places. So something like the IC/MC axis – the IC being a more private sense of self, or a more personal sense of self, and the MC being the more public recognized, visible sense of self. And perhaps those things are in alignment, but perhaps we can see places in the chart where there is some sort of challenge or distress to that particular axis. Or places in the chart where we look for the visible and the invisible. So the Ascendant being a place of visibility from which optical rays emanate out and create aspect patterns, and so we understand the Ascendant as a place of not only seeing but being seen. But then perhaps something like the 12th house or the 8th house, the houses that are in aversion to the Ascendant, perhaps these are more hidden places. There are things here that we don’t see or don’t present to other people. I think sometimes Chani Nicholas talks about the 12th house as the backstage of life or the backrooms of life where things are going on that are not in the public eye, sometimes not even in our own awareness. And so I just, I’m tossing some of those things out to say that these different components – it’s useful to think about gender, again, not as one thing, but as always a kind of system of relations between these different components of gender assignment, gender presentation, gender identity, gender attribution, and that we might actually look for these different components or information about these different components of someone’s gender in different places in the chart; it might not all be in one place, for example. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And that’s something we’ll get to a little bit later where we put out a survey asking some people on Twitter what their experiences were with this and got some interesting responses. One of the ones that came up a lot was the first house, which you can kind of understand since traditionally the first house is the house that represents the self, and it’s the sense of self but also your appearance and who you are versus other people in your life. And it’s also that interesting house where – especially in whole sign houses – where the sky meets the earth, and in ancient astrology they conceptualized that as the connecting point between the body and the mind or the spirit. And yeah, just a question of what happens sometimes when if those two are slightly out of alignment, either with yourself or with your host culture in some ways, and how are those things reconciled. 

Yeah. So astrologically – okay, so those are the basic definitions that you wanted to touch on in each of those. And then we were gonna move on either to talking about gender being complex for everybody, although we’ve kind of touched on that a lot. 

MJM: Yeah, I think so. 

CB: We haven’t defined “cis,” though. We’re using that as a keyword that hasn’t been defined yet, so you might wanna define it just very, very briefly. 

MJM: Thanks. Educator fail! That’s fine. 

CB: That’s all right. 

MJM: “Cis” is a prefix that means “on the same side as,” and it’s a term that was introduced as a way of designating people who are not transgender. We could say “people who are not transgender;” we could say “non-transgender.” Cis is following the same logic of if trans means to cross over, cis means to be on the same side as or to remain on the same side as. So people who are cisgender are people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. People who are not crossing over these socially imposed boundaries to keep them within a certain gender, because they are remaining within that. They identify with that in some way. And people have different feelings about cisgender, being called cisgender, identifying as cisgender, and I don’t feel like we can really get into that today. But just that that’s the utility of the term and what it’s useful to describe is people’s experiences who are not transgender. And I guess following after those different components of gender, part of what cisgender people have access to is a certain kind of privilege of these different parts of gender aligning in such a way that society – and also perhaps themselves – that they feel a consistency within their gender. That they also are recognized within a consistency in their gender. That there is not those disconnects between identity and presentation or identity and attribution, for example, and that that is a kind of privilege to be able to move through the world with that sense of consistency, not only within your own self but also within your social interactions. And that —

CB: Yeah.

MJM: Yeah?

CB: That’s really good. And just the notion that there’s no tension as you go through life and operate. You know, you might occasionally run into some things, but for the most part if your sense of gender internally in your mind is in alignment with what you were assigned at birth, then that’s not gonna be typically one of your primary sources of continuous tension in your life, versus if it was the opposite and if your sense of gender in your mind is different than what you were assigned at birth, then there’s an inherent tension there that you’ll run into issues both internally as well as externally in society.

MJM: Yeah, exactly. And I like that you said that, like, again, that you might experience temporarily. You might have moments of being misrecognized. Like, I think about the experience of – like, sometimes when I’m at conferences and things, and someone calls you the wrong name because they, for whatever reason, thought it was something else. And it’s like, okay, the first time it’s a little irritating; the third or fourth time someone calls you the wrong name, you’re like, okay. That is not who I am! And that that is – I mean, that’s a thing that trans people experience all the time! And also that that’s something we all experience sometimes is like, being misrecognized in some sense. And again, I don’t wanna equate that those kind of fleeting moments of misrecognition are the same as the kind of continuous or concentrated experience of potential distress at being misrecognized, but that there’s enough of a similarity there to make the analogy of like, that’s what it might feel like. What might it feel like to move through the day, and people call you the wrong name all the time? The trans experience can’t be reduced to that, but that that’s a part of it is being addressed or being hailed or understood in a way that is consistent with who you know yourself to be. Like, “My name is Chris, and people call me Chris! And that’s in alignment,” rather than people keep calling me this thing, whether it’s your name or your pronouns, or just the ways that they interact with you, treating you in a way that’s not in alignment with your sense of self, and that those are some of the ways that, yeah, some of the differences between cisgender experiences and trans experiences. 

CB: Yeah. I think that’s really great. And also that’s why I’ve learned at astrology conferences to not open by referring to people with their names, because I’m terrible with remembering names, and I’ve been in some awkward situations like that with remembering the wrong name after you only see people like, once every few years or something like that. 

MJM: Well, we’re — 

CB: Anyway. 

MJM: — getting spoiled with these online conferences where we just have our little names —

CB: Yeah, the names — 

MJM: — in the boxes!

CB: — are in the bottom – no, I appreciate that. That’s helping people with terrible memories like me. 

All right, so but it’s more than just that. So that’s like, a temporary inconvenience, and that’s somebody – everybody can relate to that. Like, the idea of somebody forgetting your name or calling you the wrong name and the temporary annoyance of that, but then for those that don’t – aren’t familiar with that experience – imagine being in that situation constantly or during a large chunk of your life, and also what kind of societally – the way society is set up that it’s set up in such a way to marginalize or ignore, harass, or even punish people that have that sort of dissonance between their sense of self versus how that appears in the world or what have you. 

MJM: Yeah. And I think that sense of dissonance, but also – and I like that you brought in the social component of it, because in my mind, the failure is actually on the role of society. It’s not that someone’s gender is… Someone might experience distress around their gender, but if society continually tried to make you be a certain thing, there would be potential for less distress. There’s something about locating the responsibility of – like, it’s even in the language that we use sometimes about someone being in the closet or being out of the closet. It’s like, the only reason anyone is in the closet to begin with is because we put them there! Because we assumed that they were cisgender, or we assumed – like, if we’re talking about sexuality, we assumed that they were heterosexual or straight. So people are in a closet because we put them there in the first place. 

CB: Well —

MJM: And then we – oh, go ahead.

CB: And they’re there sometimes deliberately, though, because if they came out they would experience potentially very negative things like bodily harm or insults or other – losing family members or relationships or what have you. So there’s, like, but obviously that societally, that’s coming from society and the way that society is set up, but I just wanted to state that, because that’s a nice segue into the next section I think you wanted to talk about, which is just the way that people in society can be marginalized. 

MJM: Yeah, that these are questions of life and livability in a number of different ways. That when people, when we fail to recognize people’s genders, that often there are social consequences – like you were saying, things like bodily harm or teasing or harassment or bullying. But also we might, especially if someone is a minor, we might be sent to a psychologist of some kind in order to “fix” us. Or we might be kicked out of our homes, facing displacement or homelessness because people don’t affirm the gender with which we identify. People might face extreme forms of violence. So we’re living in a year in which so far this year in 2020, 34 reported trans people have been murdered in the US in 2020, and over 350 trans people have been reported murdered worldwide. And those numbers are always going to be less than the total number of trans people who were murdered, because many trans people are misgendered in the reporting of those crimes. That they’re not even recognized as trans in their dying. 

And so we’re facing something of epidemic proportions in terms of violence against trans people, and predominantly, many of these trans people who are murdered year after year are trans women of color, Black and Brown trans women, and so there’s racism involved here. There’s also misogyny woven into these experiences, so that we start to see the intersection of misogyny and sexism with racism with what gets called transphobia or just like, the hatred of trans people. And all of these different axes of oppression intersect or concentrate within the lives and bodies of specifically right now, I’m talking about trans women of color such that the rates of murder, the rates of homicide and killing of trans people is disproportionate to the rest of the population. And then we can also see other consequences like in terms of employment, in terms of being able to support yourself or make a living. That it was only in June 2020 – this year – that the US Supreme Court finally ruled that an employer cannot discriminate against a person for being transgender. That until now, there was no recourse; someone could refuse to hire you for being transgender; they could choose to fire you if you came out as trans. And so getting back to what you were saying about the consequences of coming out of a closet or revealing more of your authentic self to someone, that in fact there’s all of these reasons socially, and this is what I’m talking about when I say – or when even Susan Stryker says – these social boundaries that are established to keep people in their gender. It’s like, yeah, if you break away from that in some way, you might be teased. You might be bullied. You might be harassed. You might be assaulted. You might be violated in some way. You might be fired. You might be denied housing. You might be kicked out of your house. And there might be no recourse for you in any of those situations. 

And so one of the things I guess is important here is recognizing that this is not just a personal problem. That when we say that someone is moving through a trans experience or are coming to terms with their gender in ways that we recognize as transgender, that it’s not just a thing that they are going through. It’s not a personal problem or personal issue, and in fact, there’s a whole set of social factors surrounding and constituting their experience, many of which are oriented towards violence and harm. And so that – yeah. So I guess what I’m trying to articulate there is that it’s not only a personal experience; it is always a social responsibility to make the lives of trans people more livable. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. And it’s not also necessarily even a choice in the sense that the only choice is that the person is trying to live authentically in alignment with their self and their own sense of selfhood. But then as a result of that, trying to live authentically versus trying to keep their actual sense of self hidden, they may be subjected to all of these negative things. And that’s not really a choice so much in that it’s something that’s their fault, but instead it’s just a situation where the way that society is set up, it’s the one that’s more in the wrong in terms of trying to make that something that should or could be punished in the first place is kind of messed up. 

MJM: Yeah. I mean, the short way that I would reflect that back is that all agency is socially sanctioned. So any agency, the ability to take action, we can only do what other people more or less let us do. That if we face some sort of social retaliation because of our choices, it’s not – as you said, it’s not really a choice. We’re not really being given that choice if there’s some sort of retaliation for making that choice. So all agency in some sense is socially conditioned, socially sanctioned one way or another. 

CB: Yeah. And one of the things just to bring this back to the astrology is just for people to start thinking about what would it look like for somebody to, in a chart or let’s say in somebody’s transits, for somebody to experience hardship or misfortune simply as a result of them transgressing societal gender norms, and like, the gender norms of the society that they’re living in at a specific point in time and the specific society somehow being the source of running into issues, let’s say either at home with the 4th house or with their work – let’s say the 6th house – or with their relationships, the 7th house, and so on and so forth.

MJM: Yeah. I think that there’s ways of looking at that in all the houses. I love that you’re asking or inviting people to start thinking about what would this look like in a chart, and the language that you were using of transgressing the social boundary – the first thing I thought, not to look too far ahead to 2021, but a series of Uranus-Saturn squares might look like transgressing social boundaries. So it would be interesting to see what that looks like socially and also how that shows up for people personally next year. But of course, it could be a lot of different things, and maybe that’s some of what we’ll get into. 

I think next we’re going to cultural competency for astrologers. How can people who are working astrologers consulting with clients, what could be useful for consulting astrologers to know or to be thinking about in terms of trans experiences? And some of it’s like, introductory things like asking someone their pronouns just so you know how to refer to them. And that could be something that you add to your intake form, just like when you’re taking in their birth data, asking them their pronouns as part of that. I actually put pronouns – it’s in my intake form, and then I just plug it in in the chart. So along with their name at the top of the chart, I have their pronouns right there. So especially if I’m booked out like, four months in advance, when I pull up their chart again, it’d be like, oh right, I already know their pronouns. So we can go into the conversation with that familiarity already in place. 

CB: Right. And that was something — 

MJM: And that could — 

CB: — Bear Ryver mentioned doing in episode 263 that you liked that they had mentioned that right at the top. 

MJM: Indeed, yeah. And there’s so much from that episode that was looking at intersectionality in astrology that would be really useful as a companion to the conversation that we’re having here. So if people have not heard that episode, definitely go back and listen to that. I also think that the episode on privilege and by extension oppression or marginalization, the conversation you had with Diana Rose Harper, is a really important counterpart to the conversation we’re having here. I don’t remember the episode number for that, but people can look it up on TheAstrologyPodcast.com. 

CB: Yeah. So —

MJM: Yeah, and if it’s not — 

CB: Asking the pronouns – and the pronouns is not just a matter of – because sometimes cis people experience it as like, a matter of inconvenience or a hassle that they have to remember all of these things. But it’s something that’s not unlike just a person’s name at that point, and it’s so connected with the identity that it might as well be considered a part of their name. And just as you would feel embarrassed or bad or you should feel bad if you misremembered a person’s name and they told you what their correct name was and you kept doing that, you really shouldn’t feel like the onus is on them to keep reminding you of their name. The onus, once they’ve said it, you know, once or twice is kind of on you. 

MJM: Exactly right. Yeah. Thinking about pronouns just as part of someone’s name. How we address them, how we talk about them. And whether that’s part of your intact work or even how you just introduce yourself once you’re in the session, whether that’s on a call like a Zoom call or in person if we ever do consults in person again in the same way that you would say, like, “My name’s Michael, and it’s so great to meet you,” I can just as easily say, “My name’s Michael; my pronouns are they/them; it’s so great to meet you. Could you tell me what your pronouns are so that I can refer to you in the ways that you want throughout our conversation?” It’s so easy. And once you do that, you’ve created more space for that person to show up in the session, which is what we’re trying to accomplish, especially with natal astrology in the first place. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. 

MJM: Yeah. One of the other things – and so then once we get into the work with people, some things that you can think about if you’re a consulting astrologer is what if you did not assume that your client was cisgender? What if, in other words, what would shift in your practice if you knew it was possible that your client was trans? Because you may not know that your client is trans. Are there things you would delineate or would not delineate if that was part of your thinking? If you were not already assuming that this person was cisgender, what might that bring forward or shift in how you’re seeing their chart or how you’re making meaning of their chart? And I think that in terms of practice, as soon as we start questioning those things, of what would shift if we weren’t making these assumption, that can include things like questioning some of our inherited traditions. What are we doing when we gender the planets, for example? Or when we assign or attribute gender to the signs? But also the kinds of qualities or the attributes that we assume aggregate within a particular gender experience. So things like, I feel like some of the work for us to do as astrologers is disaggregating topics for – this is just an example – a disaggregating or taking apart associations of things like nurturing and caretaking with femininity or qualities we associate with women. Or topics like leadership and authority, the associations we make with those qualities, to masculinity or to men. What would open up if we were disaggregating these qualities from the genders that we are conventionally or normalized to think go together in some way? So in other words, checking our biases around how we delineate a chart based on the assumptions that we’re making about the gender of our client, but also about gender more broadly. What if we made no assumptions about a person or their chart based on their gender? Based on what we assume about the gender, based on what we know about their gender. What more could we see or understand if we weren’t going in with these blinders of our biases or our assumptions around the cultural norms that we’re reproducing in those moments where we’re looking at a woman’s chart, and we immediately start looking for nurturing or caretaking qualities, or we reinforce a male client’s sense of masculinity by really emphasizing the leadership qualities we see in that exalted Mars or whatever. So like, what else would come into view if we checked our biases in these ways?

CB: Right. That makes sense. And that can only help to expand and improve, you know, what we’re doing as astrologers, because if you think about it in the past, it was probably just a lot – there were trans people who consulted with astrologers and just may have never known or may have never, the astrologer themself may have never considered or been open to talking about them with that and so it would have been something that maybe flew under the radar in the consultation, or maybe that the astrologer didn’t know how to deal with if they didn’t have any sort of cultural competency sort of training in terms of some of these things. 

MJM: Exactly. 

CB: Okay. So we’re gonna transition at this point into talking more about the astrology. There were a few questions that in the Tannehill book they addressed very briefly in their 101 chapter. And at the top, there was a few that maybe we could touch on before we move on, but I don’t know if you want to. Do any of these four sound – like, one of them is are sexual orientation and gender the same thing? 

MJM: That I can answer fairly briefly! No, sexual orientation and gender are not the same thing, but also most of us do not have a way of thinking them separate from one another. So for example, if I ask someone their sexual orientation, most people – not all people – will answer with something like, “I am gay” or lesbian or bisexual or heterosexual. And in all of these labels that we give our sexualities, our sexual orientation, we’re still referring to our own gender and someone else’s gender such that if you are heterosexual, you are – in that identification, you’re still inscribing something about your gender and your partner’s gender or the people that you desire. And so one of the ways we could distinguish between sexuality and gender is that gender is about that constellation that we were describing earlier in terms of this aggregate of relations of your sense of self, how gender is attributed to you, how gender was assigned to you, how you’re presenting yourself. And sexuality is about who you desire, who you feel attracted to, where you feel erotic excitement with someone. And those are not the same thing. And most of us feel or experience sexual orientation strongly in relation to gender, our own genders and other people’s gender, although not exclusively. There are ways of thinking about sexuality and sexual orientation that don’t depend on gender, and that’s actually quite an exciting place to explore ourselves and really do a searching examination of what is it that we want? What is it that we long for or desire that really has nothing to do with the gender of the person that we are attracted to? It might have to do with the particular kinds of sexual practices that we’re drawn to. It might have to do with the communities that we feel a part of, things like that. And so sexual orientation is not reducible to the genders that we are, that other people are, and yet most of us think of those terms in that relationship to one another. Does that make sense? 

CB: Yeah. So in other words, or another way to put it may be – hopefully correct – is that like, a transgender male could be straight or they could be gay. 

MJM: Yeah — 

CB: Right? 

MJM: — or queer or bisexual or like —

CB: Right. 

MJM: — that their trans identity tells us nothing about their sexual orientation. 

CB: Right. 

MJM: It doesn’t tell us anything about who they desire or who they want to be sexually intimate or erotically entangled with. Yeah, exactly. 

CB: Got it. Okay, good. I just thought it would good to decouple those things since there might be an automatic like, assumption, but those assumptions are not always correct. 

I don’t know if these other three are relevant or if you wanna go into them. Do you see the ones I’m highlighting? 

MJM: Oh yeah, sure. One of the questions that Brynn Tannehill asks is, “Are transgender people pretending to be someone they’re not?” The answer’s no. Transgender people are being who they are, and most often we are projecting someone else onto them. So this comes up a lot in terms of disclosure. Like, when should or when do trans people have to tell other people that they’re trans? And the answer is like, never. You never owe someone that disclosure. That in fact the onus or the responsibility is on society to stop making all these assumptions about people. So no, trans people are not pretending to be someone they’re not. 

CB: Well, and actually – and that was what was interesting is part of their answer was, and your answer is that it’s actually quite – it’s literally the opposite. 

MJM: It’s literally — 

CB: That they’re actually — 

MJM: — the opposite. 

CB: — attempting to be more genuinely themself than they would be otherwise. 

MJM: Precisely. 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: Yeah, I can hit those other two really fast if they feel — 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: — important. 

CB: Sure. 

MJM: “What is gender dysphoria?” Gender dysphoria is a clinical designation describing people’s experience of distress inside of or in relation to their gender. And so it’s a way of naming or attending to the fact that experiences within gender, especially if they’re inconsistent with one’s sense of self, that that friction that we were talking about earlier, that gender dysphoria is a clinical name given to understanding or naming or articulating that sense of distress that I am not okay or I am not well in this constellation of the different parts of my gender. 

CB: And for some people, that’s gonna be a more intense feeling of distress than for others? 

MJM: Yeah, exactly. It could be things like looking in the mirror and seeing a body that does not look like a body that you want to be, or that you feel – or seeing a body that is so strongly coded as another gender that it feels out of alignment with the gender that you experience yourself to be. It can also be in social interactions as well; it’s not only about the body. But it’s about that experience of distress within these different gender phenomena. 

CB: Okay. And then finally you already kind of answered this with the cultural point, but one of the questions is are transgender people a new phenomenon? Because to the extent that over ther past 10 or 20 years, society has been rapidly catching up and trying to become more accepting and more open to at first something simple, like earlier in the decade it was same-sex marriage being legalized by the Supreme Court. But over the past 10 years especially, more of a push socially to normalize and not stigmatize transgender people, some people think that this is just a new phenomenon that came out nowhere that’s being pushed. But part of the point about talking about other cultures and like, the long history is that this is actually something that’s been around for a very long time, and it’s not necessarily something that’s new or coming out of nowhere. 

MJM: Correct, yeah. That there have always been gender variant people. There have always been people who experience and live gender in ways beyond the binary. What is potentially new is the language. The specific word transgender is a relatively new phenomenon for naming or understanding these more expansive experiences or presentations or the ways that we live gender. So that term is new, or new-ish; I mean, it’s not new. But I guess in the grand sweep of the history of the species, it’s a relatively new term. But there’s always been gender variance. And in fact, like, a whole ‘nother conversation could be the ways in which gender variance beyond the binary occurs all throughout the more than human world as well. That there’s really exciting and important work being done in biology and ecology looking at the ways that we impose this idea of gender as a binary. Or in biology and ecology, it’s often in terms of sex. That we go in looking for a binary, and we find it because we’re looking for it. But if we weren’t looking for that binary, and in fact there’s way much more diversity in terms of how different organisms develop or relate to that. So there is the cultural piece in terms of Indigenous cultures or just other cultures beyond the white settler western imperial colonization culture that we’re currently still living within, and then also the ways in which like, just more of the world functions beyond this binary than we usually talk about. 

CB: Right. 

MJM: Does it feel like I adequately addressed that? 

CB: Yeah, definitely. I mean, even in the occult traditions, like as we’ve already talked about, like Mercury and its transgressing gender assignments in astrology and either being able to go one way or another, or being even a neutral figure sometimes in astrology is itself kind of interesting, especially how that’s sometimes mentioned in some of the ancient texts in terms of that when talking about things like gender. 

MJM: Indeed. 

CB: All right. So I think at this point, we’re gonna transition into talking about some of the astrology. And we’ve already started to talk about some of this. Like natal placements and talking about the natal chart. Where should we – because I keep coming back to like, the first house as the sense of self and the ruler of the Ascendant and some of the things that I would look for if I was looking for things that would describe that in terms of natal placements. But where are you at at this point in terms of talking about the astrology? 

MJM: Yeah, I think that there’s – this is something that still needs a lot more research. But my instinct is that in the same way that when you look at a chart, you can’t know if someone is a woman or a man or an event or something else just by looking at the chart outside of any sort of context. In that same way, I don’t know if there’s gonna be signatures for trans people – rather that there might be a lot of different ways that we can see trans experiences described or articulated in a chart, whether it’s natally or by through some sort of timing technique. And the way that I guess I’m thinking about that and part of the question that we posed to some folks on Twitter was just as each person’s chart is different and specific and unique and nuanced, that I think that trans experiences are the same. There is no uniform trans experience. So then each person’s experience of what it feels like or what it has meant materially – externally – for them to be trans might be described differently in someone’s chart. 

Some of the things that I’ve seen in practice in clients that I’ve worked with are – and specifically the ways that as I talked through people’s charts, that these were the parts that they as the native resonated with or identified with that for them, this spoke to their trans experience were things like Uranus aspects, breaking with established traditions that Uranus seems to play an interesting role in a lot of the trans folks I’ve seen in terms of both their natal chart, their sense of self, but also in terms of how their life unfolds. Transits from Uranus specifically. 

CB: And that’s an interesting one, because that came up – I remember discussing that with Chrisopher Renstrom in an episode I did a long time ago on sexual orientation in astrology and how a lot of the astrology textbooks from the ‘70s and ‘80s would talk about Uranus being relevant for people that had same-sex relationships and Uranus being connected to the 7th house or Venus or something like that. And we wondered to what extent that that was true societally at this point in time, because it was an act of something that made you unique or stand out or almost rebellion or rejection to some extent of some social norms. But as things become more normalized, like for example with the legalization of same-sex marriage – if Uranus signatures continue to be a prominent thing, or if that’s almost like specific to our time and culture at this point. Do you know what I mean? 

MJM: Totally. I remember that episode. And I think I remember – my memory of it is that Christopher was a little reluctant to kind of answer that – he never quite pinned it down. And I think that my response to that in terms of whether we’re talking about queer experiences or transgender experiences, to the extent that it is still an act of rebellion or transgression or revolution or some sort of radical rejection of an existing norm or social convention, then I think Uranus will continue to describe those things. And if we reach a point, which at least in terms of trans experiences, when we look at the intense violence that trans people are facing right now, I don’t think we’re anywhere near that kind of normalization. But if we reach a point where being trans is no longer, doesn’t require crossing any of these socially imposed boundaries, then perhaps Uranus will not describe those things anymore. And that’s an interesting thing to think about trans historically or transculturally is how might – and this is something that I’ve heard you say before – like, within the cultural context that the chart is operating within, how do we understand it? And that Uranus might indeed at a different period in history, Uranus may not describe trans experiences in the same way that I’ve seen it described thus far, or at least that clients that I’ve worked with have identified with the words that I’m using to describe Uranus in relation to their own experiences.

CB: Right. Okay. 

MJM: Some – oh yeah. Some of the other placements that I have seen significant – some people have identified strongly with some of the language around either antithesis or detriment or being in fall or exile particular planets, depending on what they rule – whether it’s the planet ruling the Ascendant or ruling the MC or some other significant placement. That when planets are in that alienated place or that displaced context or situation far from or outside of their places of domicile or exaltation that some trans people that I’ve worked with have identified with that language, that feeling alienated, that feeling exiled in some way. And so those placements spoke to or described or articulated their experiences. Sometimes it’s – oh, go ahead. 

CB: That makes sense in terms of an episode I did on detriment with Benjamin Dykes a few months ago and our discussion about the origins of that term and how it was linked to in the late Hellenistic and early medieval tradition with these themes of otherness and outsider status. That makes a lot of sense just symbolically. 

MJM: Totally. I mean, exaltation – some of the keywords that come to mind for exaltation is like, being raised up and elevated and being made more visible. And so then being in fall or exile? No. Depression! Being in fall — 

CB: Detriment, yeah. 

MJM: — or depression would be – oh yeah, you were talking about detriment — 

CB: No, no, you’re — 

MJM: — in contrast to — 

CB: Go on with your – I misspoke; you were right. It was depression, and fall is the opposite of exaltation. 

MJM: Yeah. And so like, in that place, if we think of exaltation as being raised up and made more visible, then being in fall or depression would be less visible, less recognized, less understood in that way. Or even we might say like, oppressed or repressed in some way. The —

CB: Or — 

MJM: — opposite of being elevated. The being pushed down. 

CB: And marginalized. That’s another —

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: — term that comes to mind thinking about the opposite of exalted. And then, of course, the other contrast is like, domicile being at home and being in your element and being comfortable in your element versus detriment or antithesis being the opposite of that and being outside of your element or being othered in some way. 

MJM: Precisely. Yeah. And that’s the language that people I’ve worked with have resonated with. They’re like, yeah, that’s describing not just something about my life, but something that’s for them specific to their experiences being trans. For other people, it’s been a strong emphasis either on the first house or the ruler of the first house, the ways in which there’s an important process of self-actualization that I associate with the first house of the place of the self. And so when there’s some sort of strong emphasis, which can be challenging or affirming in different ways, but there is some importance to their process or their journey of becoming themselves in some way. But that’s language that’s resonated for people before. 

I had one client who had a particular resonance with – had a really strong conjunction I think it was the asteroid Pallas was conjunct the ruler of the Ascendant, and really identified with some of the language that Demetra George uses to describe Pallas as potentially indicating some androgynous qualities. That we look at the myth of Pallas Athena being born as a female goddess but occupying many of the roles in terms of leadership, in terms of being a strategist in war scenarios and dealing with conflict and navigating back towards resolution or peace, that these roles can sometimes describe someone who is occupying multiple social expectations of gender. And at least one client had a strong resonance with that mythology around the asteroid Pallas. 

Yeah, and then there’s ways we could think about that showing up in really all the houses. So do you wanna shift into maybe thinking through some of the ways that different parts of trans experiences might show up relevant to houses or the rulers of houses? 

CB: Sure. Yeah, let’s do that, because that was something you really liked about the episode I did with Diana where we went through the 12 houses, and we were talking about – the word is escaping me… 

MJM: Privilege! 

CB: Privilege. Privilege and its opposite — 

MJM: Marginalization. 

CB: — and how that might be experienced in different ways depending on, you know, fortunate or unfortunate placements in certain houses. And that might be relevant here in order to give people some ideas about how to approach charts when you’re trying to delineate and understand. Because one of the challenging things is knowing what to look for and what you might expect. And sometimes when you have some pointers on that, it can give you a lot to go off of in terms of them starting to do those investigations to understand how to approach things better as an astrologer. 

MJM: Indeed. 

CB: All right, so let’s start with the first start. We’ve already talked about this, but it’s so important both because the first house is the sense of self and your mind and your spirit traditionally but also the place of your body, your physical wellbeing, things like your appearance and other stuff like that. One example I had of somebody once was somebody that had Sagittarius rising, and they had Saturn in the first house in a night chart. And when they had their Saturn return when Saturn went through Sagittarius, they began the process of transitioning. So for them, it was very much tied into – it wasn’t the only thing it was tied into, but it was very much tied into to some extent the uncomfortableness of that Saturn placement natally as being something they sort of lived with in terms of feeling out of alignment with the gender they were assigned at birth. And then eventually once they hit their Saturn return beginning the long and somewhat difficult process of moving away from that. 

MJM: Yeah, and how that – the Saturn return – described that specifically because of that individual’s experience of difficulty and the long, hard work of becoming, of living into a more authentic self. And so for that person, the Saturn transit through the first house was really descriptive of their experience of transitioning. For someone else having a Jupiter transit through the first house might be becoming more fully, if we think about some Jupiter words, more fully or more abundantly oneself. Growing into oneself in some new way. Or a Uranus transit through the first house of like, a shake-up or a disruption of who I have been in the past, and now the opportunity or even the demand or the impulse to break away from those not only established social conventions, but established sense of self. What if I may no longer be the self that I was? I was that person, and now I am breaking from that in some new way. 

Someone else on Twitter I think it was was describing a significant retrograde period of the ruler of the first house – a kind of reviewing of who they had been and their sense of self. And so the retrograde period of the ruler of the first indicated something about that reviewing of who they had been. And so what I’m hoping is clear is that like, the first house as you were saying is the body and the sense of self and also to some extent the meeting place of the mind and body and the experiences related to those things. And each of these different potential transits through the first or relationships to the ruler of the first describe different ways someone might experience their own journey in terms of their gender or their transition in some way. 

CB: Yeah. And that there’s many different ways that that could go in being something that you – you mentioned Jupiter and maybe a feeling of like, exuberance in a transition or in coming out or what have you versus if somebody was doing – maybe somebody with let’s say Saturn there or something was experiencing it as a much more long-term, difficult but necessary thing to do. Yeah. 

MJM: Indeed. Yeah. 

CB: Because it’s not an easy thing. I guess that’s one point we didn’t mention at all is for those – if somebody did, which not all transgender people do, decide to go through with doing – with transitioning medically, that’s actually a very long and involved and can be a very expensive process, right? 

MJM: Precisely. Yeah. And the expensive might actually bring us to the 2nd house. But yeah, I think that you’re right; we didn’t emphasize that maybe adequately, that transition – whatever form, whether it’s medical transition or social transition in terms of changing your name, changing your appearance, coming back to work the next day or the next week looking different – there’s nothing easy about this. That there are, even when there is that experience of elation or exuberance that becomes possible when you start living in a way that is more in alignment with your sense of self, there is probably gonna be some indication of these challenges or difficulties not because of the person themselves but because the chart doesn’t only describe you. The chart describes your life as it interfaces with all of these other parts of the world. Other people in your life as well. And so these descriptions of difficulty could show up in any number of places. 

And as you said, expensive! Trans healthcare can be quite expensive for a lot of people. So if we think about the second house and what financial resources are available to people, in terms of their income or their livelihood or just the resources they have available in order to support the life that they are living or becoming – and I’m thinking there a little bit about kind of visually of the relationship of the 2nd to the first creating a kind of foundation that supports the first house – what are the resources available to support your journey of self-actualization? And I think like — 

CB: Yeah — 

MJM: — oh go ahead. 

CB: Oh go ahead. Go ahead with that thought. Or continue with that. 

MJM: I was just gonna say that in terms of thinking about financial resources available to trans people, that transgender people – I think this was a study from 2013 that was reported by the National Center for Transgender Equality – that trans workers reported unemployment twice the rate of the general population. That more than four in 10 trans people are currently unemployed. That trans workers are nearly four times more likely than the general population to have a household income of under 10,000 dollars a year. And so if we think about the financial resources that are made unavailable to trans people for all kinds of reasons, especially because of either denying employment or terminating employment, that there could be challenges in the 2nd house that are directly related to trans experiences. And then also that that’s not all trans people’s experiences. We can think of like, a very public figure like Caitlyn Jenner, who has immense access to wealth and white privilege and professional success. So challenges in the 2nd house may not be indicative of all trans experiences, but there might be challenges in the 2nd house or challenges to the 2nd house that could relate to someone’s experience or process of transitioning, especially if those resources are not available to them in some way because they are trans. 

CB: Yeah, sometimes – like when the ruler of the Ascendant is in the 2nd house or the other houses, you can see the actualization of the self or matters pertaining to the spirit or the body of the native being developed or being merged with or coming to fruition within the context of the house that the ruler is in. So if you had like, the ruler of the first in the 2nd and then let’s say there’s some challenging things going on there in that house, then maybe getting fired from your job because or losing a source of income because of transitioning or coming out as trans or just being identified as trans – like, for example, in the military where in the US military I think the Trump administration passed a thing basically saying that people cannot be openly trans in the military, otherwise they get kicked out basically, right? 

MJM: Correct. Yeah. That was a directive that the Obama administration had put in place to protect trans service members, and yes, the Trump administration repealed that. And whatever we think about the military industrial complex, that on some very basic level people are being denied access to resources because they are trans – federal resources – that other people have access to. And so that being an example of a way in which employment and financial resources could be made unavailable to someone because of the cultural systems or the social climate that we’re living in.

CB: Sure. But I like that you also mention the flipside of that, which is that if there are some positive placements there, let’s say fortunate placements with benefics like Venus or Jupiter, and there’s dignity and sect is going along with it and all the things that we think about in traditional or Hellenistic astrology that indicate more fortunate placements, then perhaps it’s something where after coming out as trans or somehow through the process of self-actualization, that becomes a source of income for you. Like, you know, you mentioned Caitlyn Jenner, and there’s other – who was already very rich prior to that, but let’s just say some other famous not just trans activists, but people that are trans and became known for it, and then maybe became wealthy as a result of their work doing that or becoming a public figure or what have you. 

MJM: Yeah, I don’t know if I know any trans people who’ve become wealthy for being trans, but definitely for having access to more resources. So people like Kate Bornstein who has written multiple books specifically about – in terms of gender theory, but also memoir – her own experience of being trans. And so then that becomes a resource; that becomes an avenue of generating resources is not because she is trans, but because she is trans, she is then able to write these books and perform these stage works. And there was a film made about her life. And so we can see the ways in which her gender, her experience of being trans, opened up some avenues or possibilities in terms of accessing resources. Or someone like Janet Mock who wrote a book called Redefining Realness and similarly that we see – again, I don’t think Janet Mock is wealthy, but I think she has been able to access resources partly because that book became a bestseller. And so that’s a great way of thinking about the ways that trans experiences could open up avenues of potential or possibility in terms of income or livelihood or supporting oneself. 

CB: Yeah. And that’s all – I guess I always just try to think of what are the different scenarios with every placement and what would we expect to see astrologically if this went one way versus the other. And you know, we know the extreme bad scenarios of somebody that suffers financial destitution or setbacks as a result of being identified as trans versus what the opposite scenario might be. 

MJM: Exactly. 

CB: And to back up to the first house really quickly, you mentioned in passing but we didn’t linger on it, but changing your name. And we did have a couple of people I think that talked about changing their name or using their new name when they were having major transits. I think West Arteray was one of the people who mentioned the South Node transiting over their Ascendant degree when they first announced their new name. Was that correct? Am I — 

MJM: Yeah, I think that’s true. Yeah. I don’t have Twitter open in front of me, but I can if I need to. 

CB: No, no, that’s okay. And then I believe somebody else mentioned eclipses in their first house. That may have been Sylvie. Maybe I shouldn’t be like, trying to remember names offhand because we didn’t write it down in the notes! So I’m just gonna say that there were some people mentioning that because that’s also an important thing, and I don’t know if we touched on that, but using or announcing your preferred name. 

MJM: Yeah, and I think that someone else mentioned some 10th house transits related to that as well of like, something becoming more – specifically around a name change or a name announcement and the 10th house being a like, coming into this highest place in one’s life, which we’ll get to I guess. But yeah, so these very prominent placements in relation to the native – the first and the 10th – perhaps being places where we might expect some of those big changes to happen. And in fact, speaking of Kate Bornstein, that’s a significant part of her transition happened during a Uranus transit that was – her natal Uranus is in the 4th house, and so she was going through her Uranus opposition through the 10th house. And not only was that period when she transitioned, but that’s also when she started producing public material in terms of plays and books and writing about her trans experience as well. And so we can see the way the 10th house brings some of that visibility in as well. 

CB: Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so first house transits, eclipses, nodes, paying attention to the ruler of the first as sometimes connected with the first and the actualization of the significations of the first. And then also I wanted to mention really quickly the ruler of the first sometimes being under the beams can sometimes – that traditionally there’s indicators in a chart for things which are hidden or things that are not seen or secret or kept behind the scenes. And one of those is when a planet is under the beams within 15 degrees of the Sun; you can’t see it because the Sun’s light basically blocks out the light of the planet. And so sometimes just generally when the ruler of the Ascendant is under the beams of the Sun, that can indicate that there’s something hidden or secretive about the native’s sense of self perhaps in different ways, but that could be relevant here. As well as traditionally the 4th house was associated with things that are hidden because it’s the bottom of the chart and it’s the most hidden or invisible part of the chart, so it can also be connected with those things. And I was wondering if that could also be relevant in some instances where people, due to circumstances, aren’t able to come out in some way. 

MJM: Definitely. And I would add to that list of things of hidden places or things that aren’t seen that I’ve had multiple clients and friends whose charts I’ve read who had the ruler of the first in the 12th. And the 12th also taking on some qualities of both – again, I’m getting ahead of us! 

CB: That’s fine. 

MJM: But the 12th taking on qualities of both exile and displacement, but also things that are hidden. Things that can’t be seen in some way. And some period of their life being experienced in relation to parts of themselves – the ruler of their Ascendant – not being visible, either to themselves or to other people, because of the ways that it was hidden or in aversion in the 12th house. So not the same as the 4th house or being under the beams, but a similar kind of quality of something being concealed or out of view in some way. 

CB: Yeah, I like that, and that’s important. And one of the things – again – that people might not think about if they’re paying attention to this, but ways in which concealment is sometimes necessary or integral to people’s lives and functioning and like, survival sometimes that you don’t always think of readily when you’re wondering in astrology why having indications for things being hidden is even necessary at all. 

MJM: Yeah, I love that you said that. That’s brilliant. Thinking about – actually, you just kind of opened up my thinking around something new of thinking about in what ways is the ruler of the Ascendant related to survival that we might look at that – I mean, we use words like vitality and life force and the health of the native, but in what ways might the ruler of the Ascendant be a description – and its placement – be a description of the way in which this person survives? Sometimes through being hidden because that’s the only choice, or wherever else it might be that maybe someone survives because of where we see the ruler of the Ascendant in the chart. 

CB: Right. Definitely. 

MJM: That’s so fascinating. 

CB: All right. So we talked about the first house; we talked about the 2nd house. How about the 3rd house? 

MJM: Yeah, so I mean, like, keywords that I bring to the 3rd house are things like siblings, but also the extended family in different ways – kind of like, extended kinship networks, but also local community. The neighborhood where you’re living, the people who are around you in a kind of constant way. Other things that maybe, I don’t know, could be relevant. Like, short-distance travel or in some traditions, some branches of the tradition, communication, things like messages, things like that. And two things come to mind in that – or three things maybe – and I’m thinking about in terms of like, local communities that positive or supportive placements in relation to the 3rd house, either the benefics in the 3rd house or ruling the 3rd house or aspecting the ruler of the 3rd house, could describe a supportive local community or supportive kin network, whether that’s your family of origin, the family that you were born into, or the kinds of queer family-making or chosen family that has long been a part of queer and trans community claiming one another as kin, as families, as a form of support system or care network. And actually, one of the things that I thought of that’s super interesting to me is that Sylvia Rivera, who was one of the real trans pioneers in the US trans liberation movement in the 1960s and ‘70s and then kind of disappeared from public visibility for a while and emerged later in her life – she has all these 3rd house placements, including her Sun but also I think her Moon is there – no, her Moon is in the 2nd house. She has all these 3rd house placements, and one of the ways that she talked about trans people – this was before the term “transgender” came into – oh, there’s her chart! 

CB: Yeah, there we go. For those watching the video version, here’s the chart. It has Taurus rising, and the Sun conjunct Uranus in the 3rd whole sign house at nine Cancer, and Mercury at 17 Cancer also in the 3rd house. 

MJM: Yeah, and she also has Vesta conjunct the Sun within one degree, so that’s one of the other things that I’m thinking about in terms of her 3rd house. But what I was thinking about in this moment in terms of siblings – and this is before the term “transgender” came into widespread usage – she would refer to trans folks as the “half-sisters and half-brothers” of the lesbian and gay community. Like, that’s — 

CB: Nice. 

MJM: — in her speeches she talked about trans folks as half-brothers, half-sisters. And so I love all these placements in the 3rd house and thinking about the ways in which trans people claim kinship with one another because of trans identity. 

And then there’s also a way – and this might spill over a little bit into the 4th house – of just in the idea of chosen family. Who do we choose to be our family? Sometimes in terms of the 4th house describing the parents, and so who are the people we choose as parental figures? But also maybe just more broadly the people we live with and in the home. Do you have other thoughts on the 3rd house? 

CB: Yeah. I mean, the 3rd I primarily think of siblings and communication. I mean, you mentioned other relatives, and I was thinking in a positive placements, you might have – like, let’s say you’re having problems with, you have difficult 4th house placements and your family’s not very supportive or you don’t come from a supportive family, but if you have positive placements in the 3rd house, you might have a sibling who is very supportive or somehow pivotal in shaping you and your role and your sense of selfhood, or maybe you have an aunt or an uncle who has gone through a similar thing that you have some sort of connection with in that way. It’s one of the things that I thought about as scenarios that would be straightforward there. Another one was just communication and if communication sometimes when there’s difficult placements in the 3rd house where communication can be a source of difficulty or obstacles or something that the person is working on throughout the course of their life, versus if there are other placements there it can be something that comes with greater ease or maybe you have greater adaptability in terms of adopting different communication styles and how that could be either advantageous or disadvantageous. 

MJM: Yeah, totally. And another chart reference that came to mind is Kate Bornstein who I was talking about earlier has two dignified planets in the 3rd house – Venus in Taurus and the Moon in Taurus. And this is just kind of quirky, but it’s interesting to think about that Bornstein has been really active on Twitter for many years. And actually as she went through several health crises with cancer that she even talked about really openly about her Twitter community; she calls them her “twibe” – the Twitter tribe, twibe – and talked about how life-sustaining those connections have been for her. So we think about that as like, both community – like, a localized community in that Twitter is something you engage with on a kind of daily basis, but then also the communication aspect of that as well. And like, maybe social media is in the 3rd house; we don’t know for sure, but like, that’s one of the places that I sometimes see it showing up. If there’s strong – especially in her chart, like, really supportive placements in the 3rd house, then we could see how something like Twitter could be a source of real support and life affirmation, especially during difficult times. 

CB: Yeah. And definitely especially writers and people that end up making a life of let’s say being able to communicate effectively about their life and being able to build a following or something surrounding that or having a natural gift for communicating. You do see that come up with 3rd house placements that are fortunate. And this is a pretty good example of that in some ways. So this chart, for those just listening to the audio version, you sent me the data ahead of time for Kate Bornstein, and it has Pisces rising. It’s a day chart with the Sun just barely above the Ascendant. And the 3rd whole sign house is Taurus with Venus and the Moon and the North Node and the Lot of Fortune in Taurus in the 3rd whole sign house. 

MJM: Yeah. Exactly. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s a good one. Okay. And so let’s see. So moving — 

MJM: Oh, can I say one more thing about – or couple more things about – her chart since you had it up? Sorry. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. 

MJM: Because this relates to the 3rd house, and it’s interesting that you were relating this the 3rd house and communication and the writing books, that of course her Moon in the 3rd house rules the 5th house of creative expression among other things. And so she’s had two of her books, Gender Outlaw in 1994 and then her memoir A Queer and Pleasant Danger, where released when the Moon was activated by profection in different ways. In 1994, she was in an 11th house profection year, and the 5th house was handing over to its ruler in the 3rd. And the Moon is so highly dignified, so she was – so we see the 5th house benefiting from the ways in which it’s giving some of the responsibility or authority not only to its ruler, but to this really dignified ruler in the 3rd house. And so there’s maybe this confluence of the 5th house creative expression, but also the 3rd house communication and the ways in which maybe that contributes to some of the writing that she’s doing. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. 

MJM: And in 2012, she was in a 5th house profection year when A Queer and Pleasant Danger came out, so that also was activating the Moon as the ruler of the year, and so just seeing that really beautiful 3rd house getting activated specifically around – in different ways – around these publication dates that were both of these books are about her own experiences and expressing those in some way.

CB: Okay. That’s great. And even the Mercury placement’s kind of nice in this chart, because even though it’s in the 12th house hidden away a little bit, it’s applying to and has that nice sextile with Jupiter up in the 10th, and a sextile also with the degree of the Midheaven. So it’s like, a mitigated 12th house placement. 

MJM: Yeah, and I was looking at that and thinking about like, writing about the things that were hidden, and then the aspects to Jupiter and the Midheaven and the 10th house being bringing the things that are hidden into public view kind of by way of that aspect, applying to those sextiles with Jupiter and the Midheaven and Mercury being the “what are you writing about? I’m writing about the things that have been hidden” and some things that are challenging. She actually wrote a whole book on suicide and the ways in which suicide is so pervasive in queer and trans youth, and her own experiences of suicidal ideation. So part of what we might see of the Mercury in the 12th house is the writing about and bringing into public visibility by way of those sextiles to the 10th house some of the things that are not only hidden, but also saturated with anguish or despair or suicidal ideation maybe.

CB: Yeah. That ‘s a great example. And that’s often how I see it work out when you have a placement that’s in a difficult house like the 12th or the 6th or the 8th, but then it’s configured to a planet that’s in an angular house or configured to an angle that they’re able to do something constructive with what would otherwise be challenging circumstances or difficult subject matter or topics. 

MJM: Yeah, exactly. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s good. So moving onto the 4th house, and that’s like your parents and your family and your living situation primarily traditionally. 

MJM: Yeah. And so maybe positive placements there could indicate a really supportive family. And of course negative or challenging placements, whether that’s Mars or Saturn or sometimes I see – and not everyone’s gonna interpret it this way, just to acknowledge that! Sometimes I see Pluto strongly signifying misuses and abuses of power. And so in terms of a youth or a child’s relationship to parents, especially if they are not affirming, that Pluto could describe some of those challenges with the authority of the parents and the ways in which that may not be affirming. And when I think about home, the home or the living situation or just housing in relation to trans experiences, this is more data from the National Center for Transgender Equality, one in five transgender people have experienced homelessness at some point in their life. One in five! And so like, which doesn’t mean that all trans people are going to have challenging placements in the 4th house, but for one in five trans people, homelessness has been part of their lived experience. And so we might see challenges in the 4th house directly related to family rejection, discrimination, violence in the home, and sometimes being thrown out of the home. Sometimes being denied housing that – I mean, I live in Ohio. And as of now, you can still refuse to rent to someone based on sexuality and gender identity, and that’s actually the case in a lot of states. There is no federal mandate for making housing available to people, which means people can be discriminated for housing. 

CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s pretty straightforward. I mean, the last thing we already mentioned there was just that which is hidden or secrets can sometimes be relevant in terms of the 4th house. And if maybe the ruler of the Ascendant was there, that maybe something about the sense of self having a greater need to hide certain things or what have you. 

MJM: Yeah. I agree with that. And an example of the ruler of the Ascendant in the 4th house is Sylvia Rivera’s chart if we wanna flip back to that. And one of the ways that I was looking at that or interpreting that is one of the things that Sylvia Rivera did that was maybe some of the most important work of her life – so she has Taurus rising and Venus in Leo in the 4th whole sign house. And one of the things that she did that was maybe some of her most important work was establishing an organization called STAR – the, I think I have written down here – the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And the primary work of STAR was to provide housing and support to homeless LGBT youth and sex workers in lower Manhattan. And so we can see how — 

CB: Wow.

MJM: — the – yeah, right? That like — 

CB: Yeah, that’s really good. 

MJM: — big part of her life was providing housing for other people, and the benefic of sect is ruling the Ascendant in the 4th whole sign house. And it’s in not a tight conjunction with Pluto, but we can see the ways in which that providing housing – we could read that as in resistance to or pushing back against the authority that we might read in terms of abuses of power. Like denying people housing or the kinds of homelessness people experience. I mean, Sylvia Rivera also had like, a really traumatic childhood in terms of her father abandoning her when she was born, her mother committed suicide early in life, and then she was living with her grandmother and was kicked out when she was 11. So that’s some of the other ways in which I’m reading Pluto functioning there is that there’s not really a lot of other harm to the ruler of the 4th. The Sun is in Cancer in the 3rd house. It’s conjunct Uranus, and Uranus might describe an instability in the home life, and definitely she experienced instability in terms of housing her whole life. And part of what we might see the ruler of the Ascendant, Venus, in the 4th doing is responding to that instability or that kind of social systemic harm around being denied housing and responding to that in cofounding an organization with Marsha P. Johnson to provide housing for queer and trans folks. 

CB: Yeah. I love that, because it’s a good example of how sometimes the placement of the ruler of the Ascendant and the house that it’s placed in can sometimes come to represent something that’s almost like a signature of the native’s life as a whole. Because it sometimes ends up being about what they direct themselves to or what they focus their attention towards in some major way at some point in their life. And it’s interesting, as you said, that being the most positive planet in this person’s chart, because they have a night chart, so Venus is the most positive planet. And sometimes when the most positive planet is the ruler of the Ascendant, the ruler of the Ascendant sort of takes on the agency – or the person takes on the agency – of the benefic, which in this case was helping other people with their home and their living situation. 

MJM: Precisely. 

CB: Yeah. Good example. 

MJM: Thanks. 

CB: Okay. So that’s really good. What was I gonna say? Oh yeah, but also sometimes – that’s also tricky though – it brings up another interpretive principle that’s tricky where sometimes when it’s the ruler of the Ascendant, the person themself can do good things in that area, but that doesn’t necessarily always explain fully the circumstances of whether they’re the recipient of good things in those areas, as you were talking about how their early family and home life was very difficult. 

MJM: Yeah. And I didn’t throw every technique at this chart, but I did look at a lot of different ways, and the only thing that I see to account for those difficulties is the Pluto and Uranus placement. The Sun is in pretty good condition. It’s not in like, it’s not dignified in any particular way, but it doesn’t – it’s not being maltreated. It’s not ruled by a malefic or anything like that, so – and it’s actually in aversion to Mars and sextile Saturn, so yeah. In terms of explaining how did this – where do we see in the chart this person who had a really traumatic home life growing up, especially in youth, but also her whole life she struggled with housing. Where do we see that described in the chart? And Pluto and Uranus are the only two places where I land in terms of that. 

CB: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that Pluto conjunction with Venus is super important there in the 4th house, and especially as the ruler of the Ascendant and the Sun conjoining Uranus. There’s some other stuff going on here, like the Sun even though it’s kind of wide is squaring Neptune and some sense of a lack of clarity in terms of one’s parents potentially and nebulousness surrounding that relationship I could see being relevant even though that’s like, a seven-degree orb. It might be relevant there in terms of part of a greater sort of T-square that’s going on. 

MJM: Can I say one more thing about that Uranus conjunction with the Sun, just because — 

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: — we’re talking about it? So like, one of my keywords for Uranus is revolutionary, radical change in some way. And not only was the organization that Sylvia Rivera cofounded with Marsha P. Johnson called the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionary — 

CB: Revolutionary. 

MJM: She strongly identified with that term. And this is a quote from an interview that she gave with Leslie Feinberg, and she said, “I met Huey Newton,” who was a Black Panther Party leader, “at the People’s Revolutionary Convention in Philadelphia in 1971. Huey decided we were part of the revolution. That we were revolutionary people.” And she stressed, “I was a radical. I was a revolutionist. I am still a revolutionist. I am glad that I was at the Stonewall riot. I remember when someone threw that Molotov cocktail, and I thought, ‘My god, the revolution is here! The revolution is finally here!’” I hope you’re hearing how many times — 

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: — she says this word! 

CB: I love that those — 

MJM: And she says, “I always believed that we would have a fight back. I just knew that we would fight back. I just didn’t know it would be that night. And I am proud of myself for being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kind of hurt, because that’s when we saw the world changing for me and my people.” And if that is not the Sun conjunct Uranus speaking — 

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: Yeah.

CB: Definitely. And it’s such a close conjunction. So the Sun is at nine 34 Cancer, and Uranus is at nine 40, so they’re within – they’re applying within six minutes of arc, so it’s like a cazimi Sun-Uranus conjunction, and that’s very, very descriptive. 

MJM: Yeah. All right, should we shift to the 5th house? 

CB: Yeah. Okay, so 5th house traditionally can be things like, well, go ahead. I’ll let you take it. 

MJM: Oh! I mean, most of my traditional training came from you, Chris, but I will – say, like, what I tend to use in the 5th house is I emphasize pleasure and erotic connection and creative expression. For many people – or for some people, it’s also descriptive of children, but I don’t emphasize children to start off with; I start with pleasure and eroticism and creative expression. And I think that, because we were talking about earlier what’s the difference between sexuality or sexual orientation and gender, because gender norms can rely so heavily on heterosexist ideas or even compulsory heterosexuality approaches to sex and pleasure, an experience that a lot of trans people describe is feeling alienated from sexual pleasure. And so a question that we might think about in relation to the 5th house is how can we make pleasure more available to more people, especially those who are most marginalized? And that idea – like, it’s not a direct quote, but that idea is sort of referencing the work of Adrienne Maree Brown who wrote an incredible book called Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, which I kind of – not in every session, but in many if people have like, big 5th house profections years or transits going on, that’s kind of like, my “Here’s your moving through the 5th house manual. Go read this book! It’s gonna help you.” And so, again, if we think about the challenging and supportive aspects, that supportive aspects to the 5th house or supportive placements in relation to the 5th house, whether that’s benefics in the 5th house, ruling the 5th house, or aspecting the ruler of the 5th could describe people who do have support and access and being made available to their own pleasure and their own bodies and erotic connections with other people. In other people’s charts, especially if we see challenging placements, there could be indications of that unavailability. Feeling dissociated from pleasure, feeling alienated from one’s physical experiences. So like, if we think of Venus rejoicing in the 5th and the ways in which – and in the nocturnal hemisphere of the chart – the ways in which the pleasures of the body are in the 5th house, that positive or challenging placements in relation to it could describe someone’s access to that. And then I also think that – this is not gonna be true of all trans people’s experiences, but a lot of trans people, including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson who I was referencing earlier, are sex workers or have been sex workers, specifically because of the ways that other access to economic means are made unavailable. And so we might think of what role does sex play in someone’s life, not in adition to their own access to pleasure but like, for example, if we see connections between the 5th and 2nd or the 5th and the 10th, then to hold the possibility that maybe there is something about sexual economies or sex work being described in someone’s chart. Like, not ruling that out as a possibility when we see those connections, knowing that survival sex work is something that a lot of trans people have engaged with just in order to survive. 

CB: Right. I remember reading about that. I think it was in like, Janet Mock’s — 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: — biography, talking about doing sex work in order to fund their transition, and that being a really part of her biography. 

MJM: Yeah. Her book, Redefining Realness, that was where she described that. And a lot of folks – like, there’s a beautiful documentary about Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who was another trans pioneer and was also at Stonewall at the Stonewall riots. I don’t think – Stonewall riots were, I was about to say, do people know what that is? Chris, do you know what the Stonewall riots are? 

CB: I mean, I do, but I don’t think most people know. It’s not quite reached the level of like, the 4th of July or like, I’m trying to think of another national holiday at this point. 

MJM: Well, like, it’s commemorated by Pride, and most people know what Pride is. They just don’t know where it came from. So Stonewall was one of a series of riots of LGBT people fighting back against police brutality and police oppression. There was one in San Francisco in 1966 at Compton’s Cafeteria, and that was actually the first time that trans folks fought back against the police specifically being assaulted and raided by the police. And then at Stonewall, it was a bar in New York in 1969, was another moment where trans and queer folks fought back, because bar raids – police raids of the bar – because it was illegal to be queer. And it was actually illegal to wear the clothes other than the clothes that were designed or attributed to your gender. You could be arrested for wearing the wrong clothes. And by the police accounts, many trans people were wearing “the wrong clothes.” So Stonewall was a moment of riot, of fighting back against the police, that really… What’s that word? When you throw a match on fuel – ignited? Yeah, ignited. 

CB: Ignited. Yeah. 

MJM: Yeah, ignited the momentum of the LGBT movement. And yeah, so Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was another trans pioneer who was at the Stonewall riots, and she also describes the years of sex work in her life, specifically because she had been denied employment in so many other ways. She’d been kicked out of multiple colleges simply for being trans, or as she said she was kicked out of college for wearing dresses. 

And so when other forms of material support are made unavailable to you – so thinking about some of the things we were talking about in relation to the 2nd house – the 5th house might be a place where we see people doing some sort of sexual labor in order to survive or support themselves.

CB: Yeah. And only because – you had linked to a YouTube video where Chani had recently delineated Janet Mock’s chart. 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: So we have the chart. I think it was a result of that, or maybe the data was in her biography, but she does have the ruler of the 5th in the 2nd, or Mercury, so it’s the same planet, so there’s a connection between those two houses. 

MJM: I did not realize that; I had not looked at her chart in quite some time! 

CB: Okay. Yeah, so I just wanted to mention that in passing since you mentioned that as a hypothetical delineation. But then — 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: — there’s like an example right there. So that’s one thing. Another thing I was thinking about was somebody recently was telling me – talking about after the recent Supreme Court appointment, somebody I know who is trans who had been raising a child with their partner, they had a child, they’re moving to do a full adoption because they’re nervous about some of the laws changing and whether that could cause problems for them raising their child with their partner, even though they’ve been with them since birth, and some issues. If there were problematic placements in the 5th house potentially issues surrounding children or something like that coming up potentially. 

MJM: Totally. Yeah, that makes total sense. And challenges to parenting or having access to one’s children, or custody being a question that a lot of trans people might face. 

Something else just like, in passing – just because I’m still thinking about Kate Bornstein’s exalted Moon ruling the 5th – is just thinking about so many amazing trans artists and creatives, and looking for positive or supportive placements in the 5th describing performers and writers and musicians and dancers and visual artists and filmmakers, and that being a possibility that we might see of what do we create and put out into the world in the 5th house, and just so many amazing trans creatives, partly because, I don’t know. I think maybe as trans people, we get to – or we’ve had to – get to create or recreate ourselves. We’ve had to make our own way. We’ve had to make it up. Make up our genders, make up our identities. And so I’m not saying that that makes us automatically more creative or more artistic, but there could be a sympathy there in terms of an openness of one’s imagination to create what was not there before, if that makes sense. 

CB: Totally. And that makes me think of a piece of birth data that I just discovered yesterday when I was preparing for this episode, which is that it turned out that on AstroDatabank, there was birth data for Natalie Wynn who runs a popular YouTube channel called Contrapoints. And you’re a big fan? 

MJM: I am a big fan! In fact, I actually – I think it was last week or the week before that you retweeted something that Natalie Wynn had posted, and I went down like, a four-hour spiral of rewatching a lot of her videos. She’s just scathingly intelligent. I mean, she calls herself an ex-philosopher; she was a philosopher who then just like, abandoned the academy. But part of what that means is that she’s bringing like, an immense amount of critical thinking resources to her work, and then makes these extremely aesthetically driven and thoughtfully, critically thinking analyses of cultural phenomenon – things like masculinity or cancel culture or one that I watched the other night was on cringe. Like, what is this rising idea of like, Google searches around the word – like, “oh, that’s so cringe!” And like, what do we actually mean by cringe? And she spent like, almost two hours talking about what we mean by cringe and analyzing it from a sociological and psychological perspective. Yeah, just brilliant and creative trans media maker. 

CB: Yeah. So like, really deep, philosophical discussions and insights, but also putting them sort of in the context of like, almost performance pieces at the same time. And so — 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: — you’re gonna love this, looking at the chart. So the thing I’m correlating with that is she has Scorpio rising, and she has Cancer ruling the 9th house of education and philosophy, and the Moon is placed in the 5th house of performance and creativity. How do you like that? 

MJM: I love that! Oh my gosh, that’s brilliant. And —

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: — this is another 12th house Mercury! Fascinating! 

CB: Sextile the Midheaven. 

MJM: Yes! 

CB: So — 

MJM: Very similar relationship to Kate Bornstein’s Mercury in the 12th house, sextile the Midheaven. Fascinating. 

CB: Yeah. So it’s a mitigated 12th house placement, so it’s like, there’s the hiddenness or sometimes some of the issues that you run into in the 12th house can also indicate like, struggles. But with the mitigation, sometimes there’s more ready expression of it in a constructive or positive fashion in the person’s life oftentimes. 

MJM: Amazing. Thanks for bringing that chart in.

CB: Yeah. And I read the last thing is just on – at least, I don’t know the exact chronology and I haven’t done a full work out, so I shouldn’t state this too strongly, but at least on AstroDatabank, it had a data entry point of saying that Natalie started transitioning in 2017. And if that’s true, that would have been the very tail end of Saturn in Sagittarius, so that would have been the very tail end of her Saturn return with Saturn at 28 Sagittarius conjunct Uranus at 27 Sagittarius. 

MJM: Yeah. And so not only the tail end, if that’s accurate, not only the tail end of her Saturn return but potentially the most intense part of her Saturn return over those three years, kind of building up to this moment. And her – at least the way she talks about her transition was like, because she already had a YouTube channel before she transitioned, and so her transition was very public. But also going through stages of denial of – and so if we think about Saturn and some of Saturn’s significations of refusal and saying “no” and denying, that this kind of building up to a point of breaking past some sort of denial and moving through, for her, stages of identity before finally coming to the point of acceptance or realization that in fact I’m a trans woman, and that these other ways in which I’ve described myself or identified were ways of me avoiding this truth about myself and the ways in which, yeah, that could relate to some of those Saturn placements. And also Saturn is conjunct Uranus within one degree, so there’s another point for Uranus in this conversation. 

CB: Well, and also – it’s easy to overlook, but look at how closely the Saturn-Uranus conjunction is squaring Mars. Because if you move – not just move —

MJM: Oh, across signs. 

CB: Yeah, cross – so it’s cross-sign, but still within three degrees. So even in a Hellenistic context, Saturn and Uranus natally are squaring by degree Mars, which is the ruler of the Ascendant, which is in Aries at zero degrees of Aries retrograde. So that means during the exact Saturn return, it wasn’t just Saturn returning to its natal placement and hitting the Saturn-Uranus conjunction, but also squaring and causing some tension there with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 6th as well. 

MJM: Well, and this is anecdotal – I don’t have the exact dates on this, but – that means that Saturn has been moving through her 3rd house, and in late 2019, she experienced a major Twitter cancellation. Like, cancel culture. Like, Natalie Wynn is canceled because she said things that people didn’t like. And it’s interesting that Saturn is the malefic contrary to sect and was moving through her 3rd house, which we’ve already associated with communication and potentially social media and Twitter and things like that. And so this very challenging planet moving through her 3rd house, and that coinciding – because Saturn is still in Capricorn – that coinciding with this major moment of cultural cancellation and people saying, “Don’t pay attention to Natalie Wynn anymore,” that she’s wrong for these reasons that I’m not gonna get into. For the record, I agree with Natalie Wynn; I don’t agree with her detractors on this point. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So just the expression of Saturn transiting through the 3rd and how you express your message, and sometimes getting pushback or setbacks in the context of that and learning and moving forward and so on and so forth. Luckily, that transit is almost over, so Saturn will be out of the 3rd house for her in the next – by the end of December. 

MJM: December 17th, I think, is the ingress. 

CB: Okay. So yeah, so that’s a good —

MJM: This is so fun, Chris! I’m so glad we’re doing this! 

CB: Yeah, we didn’t get as many charts together, and originally – we should mention that this is – we might as well, we were gonna save it for the end of the show, but I wanted to give a shout out to Irina Tudor who we were originally talking about doing this episode with because I wanted to have a strong chart component. And Irina has been collecting birth data from queer folks to have a sort of research project. But we wanted to do this episode first as initial starting point, and then I’m gonna do a followup at some point with Irina because they’re doing very important work gathering much more data than either you or I have and doing really interesting things with it. So I wanted to give a shout out to Irina and sort of earmark that for a future discussion. And we should probably mention the URL or the Twitter – do you remember the Twitter handle? 

MJM: No, but I think it’s in the Google Doc. Let me scroll — 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: — down. 

CB: So it’s Irina Tudor — 

MJM: Queer Astro Data – at QueerAstroData on Twitter, and then the project is the Queer Astrology Data Research Project. And I think at this point, they have a Patreon to support the work. So as we said earlier, there’s so much work to be done in the area of developing more research in terms of learning from trans experiences, trans lives, studying trans people’s charts, talking to trans people, and Irina is doing so much of that work. So if that is work that is interesting or exciting or relevant to you, please do check Irina out on social media. Find the Patreon; become a subscriber. 

CB: Yeah. And Irina is also doing important work in terms of broadening the scope of what you’re looking at and also trying to be inclusive and looking at intersex people as well and making room for that in a way that maybe some of the other astrology databanks haven’t yet. 

MJM: Correct. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s see – 4th house, 5th house, 6th house. 

MJM: 6th house? 

CB: So 6th house traditionally is the place of health, illness, and work as sort of primary significations of the 6th house. 

MJM: Yeah, and I agree with all of those, and the one that I work with the most is actually that it’s the place of subordinated people and population. Because of course, historically, the 6th house was the place of slaves and slavery. And I’ve seen – I mean, I’ve been consulting with people for almost two years now, and I’ve seen so many indications of 6th house placements being relevant for people who are working with or belong to marginalized populations within social hierarchies, including trans community. We could also look at the 6th house as relevant to some of the employment issues that we were talking about earlier, either in terms of opportunities or challenges, which are a significant part of a lot of trans people’s experiences. And then also because it is the place of health and illness, to the extent that someone’s trans experience involves seeking medical care that that could show relevantly in the 6th house as well, either opportunities and benefits or challenges and hardships. 

CB: Definitely. That makes a lot of sense. Do you have any – I’m trying to think of any examples offhand. Do you know of any, or we don’t have to. 

MJM: Not immediately. 

CB: That’s pretty concise; we can keep going. 

MJM: I mean, Natalie Wynn’s – ruler of Natalie Wynn’s Ascendant is in Aries in the 6th house. And so like, we could say something about the ways – I mean, it’s dignified in its domicile. It’s the malefic contrary to sect and it’s retrograde. So I’m not quite sure; I would have to spend some time thinking about how I would delineate that and maybe – I mean, I would love to talk to Natalie Wynn and hear about what that experience has been like. But I would wonder if employment has been challenging and then eventually, because of the retrograde, like, maybe there was difficulty around employment and then eventually finding – and I would look at this probably by progression and see when did Mars station direct by secondary progression, and see if that coincides at all with her moving into self-employment and the ways that Aries often carries some connotation of individual momentum or self-sufficiency or striking out and doing something on your own in some way. And so Mars taking on some of those action-oriented qualities and doing something bold and dare I say courageous in terms of a YouTube channel on which she openly discusses a lot of her own life in relation to complex social ideas, that maybe there’s something about that there. But I would have to spend more time thinking about it and maybe talking to her in terms of what has the relationship to employment and then self-employment been. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. And I also, you know, again to whatever extent that timeline was create – if 2017 was actually the point of starting to do any sort of medical transitioning, the 6th house I sometimes associate with just the body and medical procedures related to the body since it’s below the horizon and the possibility, especially with the ruler of the Ascendant there, of just medical procedures involving redefining a sense of self and whether 6th house things would be relevant to that sometimes if or when a person might decide to opt for doing any sort of like, medical transitioning. 

All right, so that’s the 6th house. 

7th house is traditionally the place of relationships, other people in your life, partnership, and other people in general. 

MJM: Yep. Those are my significations for the 7th! I tend to say significant relationships and committed partnerships, and all that’s held up in everything that you just said. And I guess what comes to mind is we’re living in a cultural moment, I think, in which trans people are often fetishized. And we can see that in things like the kinds of porn that people are consuming, or the kinds of search engine terms that people are using. And so clearly there is desire for trans people, and yet there’s so much stigma and shame associated with loving or committing to a trans people that a lot – not all, but a lot – of trans people describe struggling to find love, to find partnership, not only because of their own process but because of the processes of their partner. People who are not actually have not made peace with their desires, have not yet come to the place where they are proud and affirming to say, “Yes, I love this trans person; I am committing to them; I am in a relationship with them.” And so one of the ways I’m thinking about the 7th house is there’s actually a lot of work for cisgender people to do in this area in terms of dismantling their own shame around desiring and loving trans people. And then we might see some of that reflected in the sense the 7th house is not the self, but the other, that we might see some of the partner’s difficulties or challenges or shame or stigma around being in relationships with trans people – we might see some of that reflected. We might also see trans people who have really affirming and really supportive partners. People who have stayed with them throughout a journey – maybe after they transitioned, maybe throughout their transition. Like, I’m thinking about Jennifer Finney Boylan who’s a trans memoirist and writer; she writes for The New York Times a lot these days. And she’s a professor at I think Barnard in New York. And she was married to her wife for a number of years before she transitioned, and now they’ve gotten to the point where they’ve been married as wife and wife longer than they were husband and wife. And I can’t remember the exact date, but so we might see something like that in the 7th house where the enduring or the stability of partnership that continues across whatever transition journey someone’s moving through, that positive or supportive placements in relation to the 7th house could be describing something like that where a partner is continuing to remain committed and supportive throughout someone’s transition journey. 

CB: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense and would be really important and really crucial. And that was something I liked in Tannehill’s book is just talking about, you know, that it was already – that cis people – there’s some people that are, you know, fortunate in relationships, and there’s some people that are unfortunate in relationships, let’s just say astrologically. And even cis people dating – there’s already so many different filters through which people and boxes that you have to check when people are dating in terms of when people are compatible or not compatible, and it’s even harder for a trans person dating because it just adds another potentially filtering thing in terms of what people you can even have relationships with, and then even if you could have a relationship with somebody, running into an issue of if they’re fetishizing you or if it’s a genuine relationship or compatibility or what have you. So just being open to and realizing the types of things that trans people have to deal with in terms of relationships would be important for an astrologer counseling a trans person when it comes to the 7th house. 

MJM: Indeed. Yeah. And I don’t have any like, super pithy chart examples for this. Just one observation in Kate Bornstein’s chart is that she has Virgo on the 7th; she doesn’t have any planets there. But Virgo is a mutable sign, and one of the things that we inherit from the tradition – I don’t remember who wrote this, but you probably would – that sometimes mutable signs on the 7th indicate multiple marriages or multiple partnerships. And Bornstein was married multiple times and is now in a long-term partnership with Barbara Carrellas. So just noticing that of like, oh, there’s a mutable sign on the 7th, and indeed that person has had multiple marriages and long-term partnerships. 

CB: Okay. Nice. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and a lot of those delineation principles would still be just pretty straightforward in terms of relationships and describing things in that way. 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: All right. So let’s move onto the 8th house. 8th house is like, traditionally mortality but also other people’s money and the role that other people’s money plays in your life in general, or sometimes specifically the resources of your partner. 

MJM: Yeah. Exactly. And I guess I feel a little tender about thinking about this one, just in terms of thinking about death and mortality as significations of the 8th in relation to trans communities, and this being a week that we are memorializing a lot of people who’ve died – a lot of trans people who’ve not only died but been killed. And then I’m also reflecting on suicide rates in terms of trans communities that – I think this is from a 2018 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics, specifically surveying trans youth. That more than half of trans male teens had reported attempting suicide. More than half. 

CB: Wow. Yeah. 

MJM: And I don’t know what the rates are for cisgender teen men, but I don’t think it’s more than half have attempted suicide. 

CB: Right. 

MJM: And it was almost – it was 29.9 percent of trans female teens, and then 41.8 percent of nonbinary trans teens. And so when we’re thinking about how might death and mortality show up in a trans person’s chart, recognizing that the data, the rates of trans people contemplating or attempting suicide because of the immense amount of social pressure, all the forms of discrimination that trans people experience, is off the charts. And in fact, one of the largest sources of – actually, I need to breathe a second. 

CB: Yeah, that’s fine. I can take a moment. 

MJM: I mean, you can leave this in, too; I don’t mind. But I just realized that I was getting ungrounded. 

CB: That’s okay. Yeah, I’m glad that you shared some of those numbers and some of those statistics, because until you see it, it’s really staggering. It’s something – it’s one thing for people to repeat that like, sometimes for example, I saw after June when I did some of the episodes on intersectionality that sometimes some types of people get triggered by the term “intersectionality” or they think that it’s something else, like a social ranking – that people that are marginalized are trying to flip the table on people that previously were not marginalized, and that somehow it’s about ranking the people that are the most marginalized are now the people that should be in charge of everything, but that’s not actually what it is. It’s identifying people that are actually at the greatest risk in society and people that statistically – like, if you look at the numbers – just are being sometimes killed at much higher rates than other people that aren’t in those marginalized groups. And that’s really important. 

MJM: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and I am so glad that you brought intersectionality into it, and no, it’s not about making oppressed people like, inverting the hierarchy. Intersectionality was a term introduced by a Black feminist legal scholar named Kimberle Crenshaw who was specifically trying to bring attention – introduce a framework for recognizing that people who live at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression experience forms of oppression or marginalization or discrimination at that intersection that is not only additive. That there are things that happen at that intersection that only happen at that intersection. And so in the article that she introduced the term intersectionality, she was specifically looking at cases of Black women who were being discriminated against in terms of employment, and the legal system, the court, was not able to recognize these cases of discrimination. Threw them out! And the response from the judges was like, well, there are Black people working at these businesses, and there are women working at these businesses so you can’t make a claim for racism or sexism. But what was the case is that only Black men were being hired, and only white women were being hired. And so the experience of Black women who experience both racism and sexism were not being recognized by the law, by the legal system! 

So that’s where intersectionality comes from. It’s a framework for recognizing the ways in which multiple axes of oppression and also privilege intersect in specific people’s lives. And in terms of the kind of like, oppression olympics of like, who’s more oppressed than someone else, I guess I just try to get us back to we all hold multiple possibilities of privilege and oppression. They don’t cancel each other out. So you might experience someone – not you specifically – someone might experience privilege for being white, and also might experience oppression or marginalization because they are poor. And that those two things don’t cancel each other out. That in different contexts, those do different things. And that part of intersectionality is being able – like astrology – is learning to be able to account in the complexity for these things, rather than “it’s either this or that.” Which hopefully part of what this episode is doing in relation to intersectionality and the discussions that you had with Bear and Diana is recognizing that the more we can get out of this like, “it’s either this or that,” this binary thinking, the more equipped we’re gonna be to actually handle the complexities of people’s real lives. And actually, I think it was bell hooks, who was another Black feminist scholar, who said – this is paraphrasing, but said something like – critical thinking starts when we get above either/or. That we can’t be in critical thinking if we’re still “and it’s either this or that” – that that’s reductionist thinking, and that the more complexity we can handle, the more we’re actually dealing with the world as it is and people’s real, lived experiences. And so —

CB: Right. 

MJM: — yeah, in terms of the 8th house, looking at the ways in which suicide rates driven by an immense amount of social discrimination and harassment and bullying are so high in trans youth, but also trans adults. In 2015, this is actually the largest source of survey data on trans people ever aggregated, there was a survey called the 2015 US Transgender Survey found that – this is gonna be a hard number – 97.7 percent of trans people who had experienced four discriminatory experiences in the past year, things like being fired or being forced to resign or eviction or experiencing homelessness or physical or verbal assault – that 97.7 percent of people who had experienced four incidents had attempted suicide. And that’s in the adult population, so. Yeah. That’s one of the ways that I think about the 8th house. And so where might that be shown? How might that be shown? It could be something like the luminary of sect in the 8th house in aversion to the Ascendant, or it could be the ruler of the Ascendant in the 8th house, which can sometimes indicate a risk of the person’s vitality or their health and wellbeing specifically in relation to mortality, sometimes in the form of something like suicide, sometimes in the form of something like violent assault. Things like that. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. And I don’t wanna go too much into specifics about some of those placements, just because there’s a lot of complicated things that go with that. But that’s really important, just understanding some of those numbers, because it’s really staggering and it really orients and like you tried to say at the beginning of this episode, just in terms of this being not just a matter of preference but a matter of life and death for many trans people. You know, that the stakes are much higher than it is for people that don’t experience things like that. 

MJM: Exactly. 

CB: Yeah. So that – any other things? I mean, inheritance is an 8th house thing, and also just sometimes I’ve noticed people with just in general with positive 8th house placements having a knack for or ability or sometimes just a luck receiving benefits, especially financial benefits and gifts from other people, and somehow that becoming relevant somehow in terms of their overall life story. And I could see different ways where that could be relevant, yeah, to a trans person for different reasons. 

MJM: Sure. I mean, and maybe this will be a transition point into the 9th house – I’m not gonna talk about my chart very much at all – but Jupiter rules my 8th house, and Jupiter is in the 9th house. And I went through all of my levels of education, undergrad and grad school all the way through my PhD, almost fully supported by fellowships and scholarships and grants and things like that. 

CB: Nice. 

MJM: And so like, part of the way that showed up for me is that the benefic of sect was ruling the 8th house in the 9th house, and so I received a lot of institutional support for my education, for example. 

CB: Nice. I like that. Yeah, that’s a great example of that and how that can sometimes work out. All right, so that’s a good transition into the 9th house, which is traditionally the place of like, education, religion, and one’s personal philosophy. I’m realizing over the past year more and more it can also be the place of politics and where the role or the ways in which politics and one’s sense of morals or morality can overlap and be intertwined with one’s politics. It’s also traditionally the place of travel and foreigners and foreign countries, and just exposure to that which is foreign in general as a sort of broad archetypal meaning. 

MJM: Yeah. All of those things. I mean, the ones that I’m most personal with, I have several significant planets in the 9th house, is higher education and academia specifically. And so I guess I think it’s like a callback moment to transgender studies and the ways in which we’ve seen the emergence of a field in the last 30 years of trans people writing scholarship from and about trans experiences – people like Sandy Stone, people like Susan Stryker and a lot of other folks. But also just more broadly, a larger field of gender studies that might be indicated. And so like, I actually wanna pull this up while I’m talking; I’ll just say that my memory is that Judith Butler, who is one of the most critical thinkers of gender who has shaped my reality – oh yeah, the ruler of her Ascendant is in the 9th house. And so and we have one of the most influential gender theorists in my lifetime having that placement. And so not only trans people writing their experiences – do you have Judith Butler’s chart in your files? Amazing! 

CB: Yeah, I’m on the ball with some — 

MJM: You are! 

CB: — of these charts, you know. Yeah. 

MJM: I’m so impressed. Yeah, so — 

CB: I mean, most of them — 

MJM: — Aries Ascendant. 

CB: Most of them you gave, to be fair, you gave to me like, before yesterday. But this one I had. Actually, this might be one Leisa gave to me, so shout out to Leisa Schaim for that one. 

MJM: Shout out to Leisa Schaim! Yeah. Aries Ascendant, Mars in Sagittarius in the 9th house. And so like, not only in the 9th house significations of – I’m gonna finish this thought and then say something about Judith Butler – not only the 9th house significations of higher education and academia and the ways in which Judith Butler is a really prominent theorist and professor of gender theory, but also maybe something about the Sagittarius qualities showing up there as well. Sagittarius I often associate with going out beyond one’s own borders, extending out beyond the horizon of the familiar and opening up the kind of expanse of what is possible, and that Judith Butler’s work around gender specifically, although not exclusively about gender because she’s also done some really important work around international war and conflict and the conflicts in Israel and Palestine, so there’s also that international component there that’s interesting. But just moving out beyond borders being something that I associate with Sagittarius, both ideologically in terms of gender, but also potentially in terms of international conflict being signified there as well. 

I will say Judith Butler is not trans, but she has said in multiple interviews – and I mean, again, this is coming from a gender theorist who has spent quite a lot of time thinking about and talking about and writing about gender – that if she had come of age in a different period of time in a different cultural moment, she may have been trans. But given her age and when she came up, she was instead a butch lesbian. And I don’t wanna make any sort of easy correlations between these identities, but I think it’s an interesting – going back to what we said earlier, that identity is not fixed, it’s not static, that it can evolve over time – to have this very prominent gender theorist acknowledge that, given a different cultural context, she may have been trans. She’s not, and as far as I know, she has not claimed a trans identity, but that there’s something about thinking about her and her work in relation to trans experiences, whether or not she herself identifies as trans. 

CB: Right. Definitely. Or being able to contribute important work in that area. 

MJM: Indeed. 

CB: Or work that would affect that area. 

MJM: Yeah. And then in terms of religion, I don’t even know where to start with that, so I think I’m not gonna touch it! 

CB: Sure. Yeah, okay. One of the things it brought up, though, just the chart exchange we just had is how, you know, I had gotten that chart from Leisa, because Leisa was very interested in Judith Butler. And you had been interested in Natalie and exclaimed when I shared a post from Natalie Wynn last week, and that’s one of the things in addition to watching one of her videos yesterday when I was preparing for this that led me then to search out the chart. But also having the experience – well, the general point I wanted to make is just that our interests and our backgrounds as astrologers and our unique experiences in life that give us a specific focus and specific interests, that’s part of what dictates the birth charts and like, the celebrity charts or sometimes even just client charts that we look for and that we find and that sometimes come to us. And that’s actually one of the important things about the greater inclusiveness and the increasing and the diversity of the astrological community is that like, different people that have different focuses and interests are gonna search out and find different examples that are unique to them and that speak to them for some reason, whether it’s because that person is a celebrity they follow or they like the books that they’ve written or, you know, in Natalie Wynn’s case, both of us following her YouTube channel or what have you. But that’s a really important thing that’s happening right now with the greater – the way that the astrological community is expanding. And you can also see this, if you look on AstroDatabank, it’s like, there’s a lot more birth data from a few decades ago, but the types of birth charts that tend to be collected tend to be – there’s like, an emphasis towards them based on who was collecting them and where were the astrologers coming from at that time. 

So that’s something I actually noted earlier this year when there was this really amazing birth chart that Deon Mitchell used in a lecture for the Queer Astrology Conference. And I thought that that was such a brilliant example to use, but it was one that I hadn’t seen anybody use before, and it was just a really cool instance of that principle or that concept that different people are searching out different charts based on their interest and bringing that into the community and sharing that with other astrologers that has some sort of cumulative affect that builds up over time. 

MJM: Yeah, exactly. That makes me think of something that Kelly Surtees said in her NORWAC keynote in 2019 about cross-pollination – the idea of being involved in things other than astrology, that our astrology gets richer specifically in the ways that you’re talking about. Like, because of your interests, you might look up those people’s charts, and then your astrology gets enriched through that experience of making these connections between your astrological interests and your other interests. So like, I hear Austin Coppock reference wrestlers and fighters a lot in the forecast episodes and things —

CB: Right. MMA fighters. 

MJM: Kelly references tennis – yeah, exactly. And Kelly references tennis players and the royal family. And my files are full of feminists and choreographers and dancers, because that’s the people I’ve spent my life with! So yeah, I agree entirely in that we’re in a moment where we get to do the exciting work of not only expanding our interests in terms of whose charts we’re interested in astrology, but also expanding our interests in the world. Who are we giving our attention to in terms of how people are living, what they’re contributing to the world, what they’re writing, what they’re presenting, and how might that loop back into the astrology that we’re doing? 

CB: Definitely. Yeah. And that then again becomes an echo again and a reflection then about how astrology and what astrologers do is a reflection of culture and is a reflection of what’s important to them in their time. And people showing up and showing the things that are important to them in their time and sharing that with each other then becomes, you know, at some point, sort of like a snapshot of our culture and what the world is actually like in our world as astrologers at this point in the early 21st century. You know, if somebody was to look back here five centuries from now on how things have changed and relative to how they are then compared to how they are right now. 

MJM: Exactly. 

CB: All right. So 9th house. Did we – like, the 9th house is usually a very broad house, so there’s a ton of other things there. I guess maybe we don’t need to dwell on it. It can also be a place of like, astrology, divination, and the way that that can play a role in your life. You know, one of the – this is like, less relevant, but I remember one of the biographies that I was reading yesterday was about that it was a while ago that the person transitioned, but that they had to go to Thailand in order to do that back in the 1990s or early 2000s or something. 

MJM: Yeah, Janet Mock. 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: And that was actually an experience of a lot of people was that – I mean, trans healthcare in the United States is so inaccessible in terms of a lot of insurance companies not covering it, so then having to find other ways to access healthcare. I hear that other places that have general healthcare for all, that it’s more accessible. But then in terms of if you are paying out of pocket, sometimes going overseas is a way to access healthcare. So I love that as a 9th house signification in terms of thinking about what might bring you overseas in terms of your own, yeah, the needs associated with your transition or your transition journey. 

CB: Right. Or even the opposite. Like, if you’re traveling, let’s say, in different countries where maybe if you could run into an issue or something being a trans person in a foreign culture that, let’s say, is not as accepting, and if that could be a potential issue, let’s just say, as a transit or something like that. 

MJM: Yeah. Other cultures that are not as accepting, with the emphasis that like, the US culture is not accepting! We need to — 

CB: Right. 

MJM: If we need to review the statistics at any point, like, the US is not an ideal model to be holding up at the moment, but indeed — 

CB: Sure. 

MJM: — there are places where it’s even harder to be trans. And then there’s places where it’s – overseas – that it’s easier to be trans for a whole variety of reasons. 

I guess the only other thing that comes up in the 9th – and this isn’t a fully developed thought, but – something about around the religion and spiritual tradition is that there might be specifically I guess that word “tradition.” There might be traditions that we inherit that hold space for gender complexity in a way that we have something to learn from. I wouldn’t – yeah, I don’t have much more to develop that, but just to say like, that there are different traditions, religious and spiritual traditions, that might hold gender differently. 

CB: Right. That makes sense. All right, so that’s good for the 9th house I think. So moving into the 10th house, which is traditionally like, your career, your reputation, your public sort of appearance or social standing, and your overall sort of direction in life to some extent. 

MJM: Yeah. I agree with those, and I would say like, career, public roles. Also things like achievements and accomplishments. What are the notable things that you accomplish in your life? And by “notable,” I mean like you said – like, visible. The things that other people recognize the most. And so in terms of that, we might think about actually some of the people that we’ve already named. Some people like Janet Mock or Laverne Cox who was the first trans person to be on Time magazine’s cover several years ago in the like, kind of iconic cover of “The Transgender Tipping Point” – whatever that means! But still, like, the first time a trans person who had been on the cover of Time magazine. Or people like Kate Bornstein or Chaz Bono or Caitlyn Jenner who’ve been really famous because of their transition, or people like Justin Vivian Bond or Natalie Wynn, who we were talking about, or Juliana Huxtable or other trans people being cast in films and television at a higher rate than ever before right now, for better and for worse. And then also like, trans people writing bestselling books – books on The New York Times bestselling list. So I guess I’m riffing on the idea of like, accomplishments and achievement, and just naming some of the people that come to mind that we could call like, celebrities or just like, public figures who have become really prominent. Yeah – beautiful cover. Aww! 

CB: Yeah. So here’s the — 

MJM: Some memories associated with that. 

CB: For those listening to the audio version, just the Time magazine cover with Laverne Cox on it from it’s dated June 9th, 2014. And Laverne became big because of their role in Orange is the New Black, right? 

MJM: Correct, yeah. Laverne Cox — 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: Yeah. And then went on to be director and producer in other projects, and yeah, was the producer of an amazing documentary that came out this – a hard documentary, but an amazing documentary – that came out this summer called Disclosure on Netflix. And in terms of like, recommended resources for people, I guess I think of the Disclosure documentary – it’s specifically about representations of trans people in film and television. I think it should be recommended viewing for all cisgender people. That I think that sometimes cis people don’t recognize the ways that trans people have been shown images of ourselves for decades in film and television, most often as things like a joke. Like, the punchline to a joke is like, “Ah, they’re trans!” Or “They’re wearing the wrong clothes!” Or just the immense number of roles for trans people in film and television that are dead prostitutes. Like, to the point where it almost becomes a sick comedy at a certain point. Like, how many more dead trans prostitutes can there be in film and television? And then a trope of just like, utter revulsion around trans people that we see in films like The Crying Game and other things like that where people are physically ill because of a trans person. 

So it’s a hard film to watch, because these are not positive representations of trans people. There are some eventually. But the history is not a great one. But that’s a documentary that Laverne Cox produced and is now having huge visibility, because it’s on a platform like Netflix. 

And then also Janet Mock – I can’t remember the year; I think it was either last year or the year before – signed a contract with Netflix as their first trans – can’t remember the terms of the contract, but it was like, major development work in terms of Netflix, in terms of creating new films and new televisions using that platform. So yeah. So those are some things that I would associate with 10th house stuff. 

CB: And it looks like, just so people can find it, if you just search “Disclosure documentary” or “Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen 2020” it’s the full name of the film, and then it will come up in Google.

MJM: And it’s – yeah, it’s a really necessary film produced by Laverne Cox, directed by Sam Feder. Sam Feder also actually made the film, the biopic documentary – like, it’s a documentary about Kate Bornstein. So that’s another. And Sam is a trans filmmaker. 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: And that documentary is called Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, which is a riff on the title of her memoir. And it’s not as easy to find as Disclosure, but it’s one of the best documentaries; I really love it. 

CB: Okay. All right. Other 10th house stuff. And we also have, because Chani did the delineation – also there’s a YouTube video with it – for Laverne Cox, there is a birth chart out there. So it’s like, should I – is it okay to share some of those charts? Like, what do you think? 

MJM: I think it’s fine. I think like, I mean, I wanna honor the fact that Chani delineated them really publicly for Netflix — 

CB: Right. 

MJM: — on YouTube over the summer, and like, go watch those films. But I think the chart is already out in the world, so if we wanna take a look at it, why not? And also like, kudos to Chani to doing like, big public visible astrology with really important trans people. 

CB: Right. Definitely. And doing just amazing work and having her book out there just affecting so many people. It’s actually gonna be really interesting, because just the sheer number of people that it’s touched and influenced in different ways has been interesting to see, and I don’t think we’re gonna even know the full impact on that until in retrospect like, years later. 

MJM: Yeah. I mean, it has become my go-to recommendation, You Were Born This Way by Chani Nicholas has become my go-to recommendation in terms of like, zero information beginners. It is such a generous and compassionate guide into your first exploration of your own chart. In a lot of ways, structurally it’s very similar to Demetra George’s Astrology and the Authentic Self, but whereas that book is targeted primarily towards intermediate, advanced practitioners blending traditional and modern astrology, You Were Born This Way by Chani Nicholas is really for people who are coming into it for the first time and moving through the places of life – the Ascendant, the ruler of the Ascendant, and the luminaries. And I would say that I also recommend it for advanced practitioners, because Chani’s prose, how she writes about astrology, I think we have so much to learn in terms of the language that she puts to significations. So not to get too far off on Chani Nicholas, but really excellent book in terms of thinking about a really inclusive and welcoming approach to astrology. She doesn’t address trans issues specifically, but it is a book that is written with a, I don’t know, all of her work has been trans inclusive. Like, I actually think the first time I saw Sylvia Rivera’s chart was in one of her classes, in one of her workshops, and it blew my mind that, oh, wait, we could actually study trans people’s charts! And that was the first time I realized that I had never seen another trans person’s chart, so. 

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: Yeah, that book! 

CB: And also, Chani – because it’s accessible, but it also goes into things like the ruler of the Ascendant in addition to as part of the “big three” as well, like the Sun, Moon, rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant. So it’s bringing in more advanced forms of astrology and making them accessible to people, while also being inclusive and then also then getting into some of the things that we’re talking about here where we were similarly focusing on the ruler of the Ascendant and the houses that it’s placed in and such. 

MJM: Yeah. You Were Born For This. I can’t remember – maybe I said “You Were Born This Way,” which is a Lady Gaga song, I think, so! 

CB: Right! 

MJM: So apologies, Chani! I meant You Were Born For This. 

CB: Yeah, You Were Born For This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance. And that’s actually another great keyword that obviously was included very deliberately there, but the notion of self-acceptance or radical self-acceptance as being one of the other important things that maybe astrology can offer and that’s maybe also within the context of our discussion uniquely important for trans people in connecting it also with that idea of like, using astrology to seek out and to help to establish the authentic self. 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: All right. 

MJM: One more 10th house thing that I have is a timing thing related to Sylvia Rivera’s chart. So in 1973, she was in a 10th house profection year, and during the fourth annual Christopher Street liberation rally in Washington Square Park, she gave what became one of her most influential and cited or referenced, remembered, speeches she ever gave that’s come to be called “Y’all Better Quiet Down Now,” where she struggled to get onstage because, frankly, lesbian and gay men – primarily gay men – were trying to keep her from speaking. And so this was a moment where we could see within the LGBT community trans people being excluded. And she took the microphone and insisted on speaking. And she said some things like – not like, but these are some of the things she said. She said, “You all tell me go and hide my tail between my legs. I will no longer put up with this shit! I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment. All for gay liberation. And you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that!” 

And not only was she quite literally taking to the stage during a 10th house profection year, in addition to her work with STAR in terms of providing housing for people, this moment of speaking up for trans people within the larger LGBT liberation movement when trans people were being excluded – this became something that she was the most well-known for. And so that just correlating a little bit with 10th house visibility, but also accomplishments and reputation.

CB: Brilliant. I love that. And having that stand out or be accentuated in a 10th house profection year. 

MJM: Exactly. 

CB: Got it. Okay. Any other 10th house stuff? I did – actually, let me put, since we mentioned Laverne Cox I’m just gonna put the chart up really quickly. So the chart has Leo rising and the Sun up in the 11th whole sign house conjunct Mercury and Saturn. But we were talking about having a Taurus 10th house, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, which is at four degrees of Cancer in the 12th and is applying to this kind of nice opposition, actually, or somewhat helpful opposition with Jupiter in a day chart in the 6th house. 

MJM: Yeah, and Jupiter’s fallen, but that’s gonna be supportive for both of them to be applying into that kind of, I don’t know if this is a term, but like, mutual bonification in some way. 

CB: Right. 

MJM: Like, they are in a sense bonifying one another — 

CB: Sure. 

MJM: — and that’s helpful. 

CB: Definitely. All right. So let’s move on from the 10th house to the 11th house, which actually is relevant for the chart we just looked at, but the place of friends, groups, and alliances. 

MJM: Yeah. And I think of the 11th house also in terms of larger community. So if I think of the 3rd house in terms of local community, that the 11th house is community that’s more like, networks or social movements. The 11th house is where we connect with folks who share our vision of the world. So sometimes I think about that in terms of the angular triad around the 10th, but the 9th house is where we are composing or working out our worldview through things like education and travel and religion. We’re figuring out what do we believe to be most true, and in the 10th house we enter the public stage. We start making our moves and making our mark on the world. And the 11th house is where we connect with other people who share that vision of the world that we’re trying to make. And then we get busy making that world a reality. And so in terms of how might the 11th house show up in trans experiences, I mean, the first thing I think about is in terms of social movement is the trans liberation movement spanning the 20th and 21st century with things like that we’ve already talked about, like the Compton’s Cafeteria riot and the Stonewall riots and the Christopher Street liberation rally, and the ways in which we’re continuing to build this momentum of creating a different kind of world together for trans people. And then more recently, just in my own lived experiences of – this feels particularly relevant the week of Trans Day of Remembrance – of gathering with community to memorialize and to remember trans people who have been killed. Like the countless vigils that I’ve been to at this point. But then also the marches. The marching in the streets, protesting and demanding that trans lives matter. That Black trans lives matter. And so these kinds of activisms, specifically in terms of social movement, those are some things that I would look at in the 11th house. 

So if it played a particularly prominent role, so if something like the ruler of the Ascendant or the luminary of sect was in the 11th house, I might consider the possibilities of is this person taking on some sort of leadership role, or facilitation role, in regards to community and social movement? And if those are placements that someone sees in their own chart, are those things you’ve considered? Are those things you see happening in your life, or are those perhaps opportunity that maybe you might actualize or ask the question – “In what ways do I wanna be involved in community? In what social movements do I feel drawn?” Specifically I’m thinking about trans people, but really, I guess that delineation would work for anyone. But trans folks seeing what is my role in a larger community context? What is my role to contribute to social movement? 

CB: Yeah. And both sometimes the advantages of having friends and allies and being a part of social movements in order to attempt to enact change, or in other instances sometimes experiencing tension within even social movements like the example you just used a little bit ago of having to get up and grab the microphone and literally, you know, assert oneself in terms of what role you have played if it’s being diminished in some way or if you’re receiving opposition or challenges within the context of your allies or your friend group or what have you. 

MJM: Yeah, exactly. And I think that we would expect to see that more with challenging placements like the malefics like Saturn and Mars, or potentially some of those Pluto or Uranus significations in the 11th house maybe bringing up some of that struggle with power in terms of Pluto or the instability or unreliability that Uranus can sometimes bring to a placement like that. Or something like if the 11th house was ruled by a planet in either antithesis or fall, the ways in which that might reflect on someone’s experience of community. And contrary to that, if the ruler of the 11th house was dignified by exaltation or domicile, the ways in which that might describe some particular promise or potential for someone’s experience of friends and community and involvement in social movement. 

CB: Yeah. Or sometimes it’s just like, having good friends in your life, or having bad friends in your life, depending on the placements. And like, let’s say you’ve got difficult placements in the 4th house, and your parents are not supportive, but you’ve got positive placements – supportive placements – in the 11th house, and you luckily have a supportive friend group or you have like, that one friend who’s always been there for you or helps you during part of your process or part of your journey. Or conversely let’s say you do start going through some sort of process and journey and find yourself ostracized from your friend group in, let’s say, like the worst case 11th house scenario, depending on the placements and the different manifestations. 

MJM: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. All right. And okay, so let’s move on to the 12th house finally. What are some of your significations for the 12th house? 

MJM: The 12th house I think about things like isolation and solitude and retreat, but also exile, being displaced or removed from the familiar surroundings. That could correlate or describe people’s experiences of otherness or being alienated or exiled from society in some kind of figurative way but also literal ways, in terms of things like psychiatric hospitalization or things like imprisonment. So I think about incarceration and the prison industrial complex as something that’s deeply related to 12th house significations – being removed and being confined and constrained because Saturn has its joy in the 12th, and that kind of feeling of limitation. But I think like, prisons – that’s not a stretch. I think prisons have been historically associated with the 12th house, as have hospitals. 

And then how does that relate to —

CB: Hold on a sec. That’s actually a really funny – that’s a funny manifestation maybe of Laverne Cox’s chart where we’re looking at the ruler of the 10th in the 12th, and she became famous for in a television program that was about being in jail. So I don’t know if that’s like — 

MJM: Yeah, not lost on me!

CB: That was – you already got that. That was just hitting me for a second, so that’s kind of funny. 

MJM: It’s brilliant. It’s like, sometimes the astrology’s just literal! 

CB: Yeah. Which is like, sometimes I think somebody in isolation, you might see an example like that as an observer and think that that’s a stretch, but honestly, like, the astrology often is surprisingly literal like that and you see things like that over and over again.

MJM: Yeah! And I mean, and part of the reason that I think Laverne Cox, that role was written in the first place was because of the ways in which trans people are policed and incarcerated higher than any other population in the United States. So according to Lambda Legal, which is an advocacy group, one in six transgender people have already been to prison, have already been incarcerated. One in six! And for Black transgender people, it’s one in two. That is half. Half — 

CB: Wow. 

MJM: — of Black trans people have already been to prison, have already been incarcerated. And to think about that within the larger context, why might someone be incarcerated? Because they are forced or compelled by a society to do things that the society deems to be illegal, to be criminal in some way, in order to survive because society has not made available the resources that someone needs in order to survive. And so we see trans populations, trans people, trans communities being incarcerated at these extreme rates – one in six, one in two; one in six for the general population, one in two for Black trans people – specifically because of the ways in which trans folks have to survive outside of what has been prescribed as a legal economy. And so then trans people face heightened forms of criminalization. 

And one of the things that comes to mind – I wish I had a birth chart for her, I mentioned her earlier, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who’s a trans pioneer and real advocate in the trans community, was the executive director and is still really involved in an organization called the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project, which is an organization based in the San Francisco Bay area that specifically advocates on behalf of and educates around incarcerated trans, gender variant, and intersex people led by formerly incarcerated trans people on behalf of incarcerated trans people. And the executive director is now Janetta Johnson. And there’s a great – I think I referenced this earlier, actually – Angela Davis’s talk on feminism and abolition where she’s specifically looking at what can we learn by making the connections between trans experiences and the prison industrial complex? So we’re living in a moment right now where there’s so much advocacy for abolish police, abolish prison, and that in fact there’s a lot to be learned about how these institutions function through getting to know and getting to understand the ways that specifically trans people have been subject to the violences of this system, of looking people up specifically for their survival because they were trying to survive in the ways that were available to them. 

CB: Right. Yeah. And I think like, some of the points that you made were definitely things that were emphasized during the different seasons of the character that Laverne Cox played on the show. Like, I think in season one, wasn’t that the premise of how she ended up in prison in the first place was like, supposed to be through stealing in order to fund her transition, I think, or something like that was the plot point if I’m remembering season one correctly? 

MJM: Yeah, that’s my memory of it as well. It was a long time ago. And then some of the other things that they depict – I mean, actually, first, already it’s a softer representation that a lot of trans people are incarcerated in facilities that don’t align with their gender. And so trans women being – so at least in Orange is the New Black, Laverne Cox’s character is incarcerated within a women’s prison. I don’t mean that that’s okay at all. Like, I think – my politics around prison abolition I think are pretty clear from my social media presence, but I guess I’m saying abolish prisons, I’ll just say that. And the violence that a lot of trans people undergo in prisons starts from being incarcerated in facilities that do not align with their gender, such that they’re then highly vulnerable within those institutions. Imagine a trans woman who’s already facing so much violence out in the world, then being put inside a male correctional institution, and all the kinds of violences that happen there, including rape, including physical harm. And then in terms of some of what gets represented in Laverne Cox’s character, Sophia’s story and Orange is the New Black, being denied access to healthcare. Not being given access to hormone replacement therapy. And that that’s a violation of not only bodily autonomy, but someone’s trans experience, someone’s gender, to say that because you are incarcerated, you can’t have access to these medications anymore. And so we can see how someone’s trans experience inside of a prison, inside of a facility, then shows us more about how that facility operates. How these social practices around punishment, how they really function not around rehabilitation, not around supporting people in living lives that are more supported and sustainable, but that these institutions are actually organized around violence, around harm to people’s bodily autonomy and ultimately their sense of self. I

In the documentary Major that I was talking about earlier, one of the things they talk about is that many trans prisoners, because they are – because it’s determined by the people who run the prison that they are in danger in the institution, they are often put into solitary confinement, which is something else that we see represented in Sophia’s storyline in Orange is the New Black, presumably for their own protection. And yet, solitary confinement in excess of I think it’s in excess of 16 days is considered a form of torture by the United Nations. And yet we regularly employ this tactic that is recognized internationally as a form of torture, and we say it is “for their own good,” or in order to protect them. And so we see the ways in which violence is coded as protection. We say to trans prisoners, “We’re trying to take care of you,” but what we’re actually doing is violating you. We’re actually harming you. We’re actually subjecting you to immense physical and psychological harm. Yeah. Those are some of my — 

CB: Yeah. 

MJM: — thoughts about the intersection of trans experience and the prison industrial complex. 

CB: No, that’s really important and a lot of those are really striking 12th house themes, especially the sort of mental torment that one can go through dealing with something like that, being in solitary confinement as an even additional form of imprisonment besides already being in physical imprisonment in terms of being in jail. 

But so then the flipside of that, though, with positive 12th house placements can sometimes become advocacy for people that are in those positions, including advocacy for transgender prisoners or people in prisons, advocacy in a health context or in terms of hospitals and receiving not just good physical care, but also mental health advocacy, which to me the 12th house sometimes dealing with mental health issues can also be an important component as well. 

MJM: Yeah. I think of those things as well, in terms of the 12th house often being a place where we address not only our own healing from the wounds that we carry and our own traumas, but then once we’ve done that work of healing, then we are in some sense equipped or capable of supporting other people through their journeys of healing, whether it’s material forms of medical care, or psychological care, or simply supporting and being with others in their journey of isolation or that sense of alienation or exile or their experiences of mental anguish. That once we’ve gone through those processes ourselves of healing some of those wounded or traumatic places, then we can support others who are moving through those kinds of experiences. 

CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few months, just the notion of sometimes suffering as a 12th house thing that sometimes comes about, but the type of empathy that a person only develops as a result of having been there themself and having suffered or experienced loss or hardship. But then being able to turn around and help people or be in a position to help people better and more effectively than you would have otherwise by truly understanding it. 

MJM: Yeah. I think that’s a very timely thing to be contemplating. 

CB: Yeah. All right, well, we made it through all 12 houses. I’m kind of surprised and impressed. So — 

MJM: I’m thrilled! I feel so good about what we just did! 

CB: Yeah, I’m glad we did that, and just to reiterate – so I found the number, since this is being patterned after episode 258 which was titled “Astrology as Radical Self Care” with Diana Rose Harper where we did a similar thing going through the 12 places or 12 houses and talking about privilege and how it could be experienced in different ways, which was somewhat similar but a lot different than what we just did here. But people can check that episode out for the sort of where we were going with that and how we started that. But I’m glad that we did that to try to place this in a much more technical context in terms of talking about some of the issues, but also talking about the way that it’s relevant directly to people’s lives within the context of their natal chart. And I’m sure there’s like, a multitude of different ways and things that we didn’t touch on, but hopefully that can at least give people a starting point for starting to orient themself towards some of these things, whether they are a transgender person themself and they’re trying to understand their birth chart or get into astrology, or whether they’re like, a cis astrologer or what have you that’s trying to understand better and become better equipped at being able to see clients and deal with transgender issues even if that’s not their own background. Hopefully that’ll be a helpful starting point. 

MJM: Yeah. That’s what it feels like we just offered, and yeah, I wanna echo what you just said that we did not account for all possible experiences that could show up in these houses, or the ways that they might describe different people’s transgender experiences. Like, we didn’t do that, but hopefully we gave some ways in to start to think about how whether it’s your own experience as a trans person might be reflected in the chart, or the ways that practitioners working with trans clients might see not only someone’s trans experience described in the chart, but specifically going back to some of the things we started with – the complexity of someone’s experience. That not only is there not one singular trans experience, that each person’s trans experience is gonna show up potentially in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different houses, such that kind of moving away from looking for “what is the thing in a chart that might show that someone is trans” and instead looking at “here are the ways that each of these places of life relate to or could relate to someone’s experience of transition,” of moving away from this unchosen starting place of the gender that we’re assigned and moving across various forms of socially imposed boundary towards some other social location, some other identity or experience of one’s gender. 

CB: Right. That’s brilliant. That’s such a good ending and conclusion that I don’t wanna say anything else, because that was perfect. So thank you. 

Let’s give a shout out to – we wanted to mention some resources. We’ve actually sort of done this at different points already throughout the episode, but just to reiterate, you know, Irina Tudor’s Queer Astrology Data Research Project is a really great resource that I think people should look into and help support and fund. And you can find more information especially on the Twitter account, which is at QueerAstroData. And I’ll put up a link to that in the description below this episode. 

There’s also the Queer Astrology Conference – I know you wanted to give a shout out to them – which is at QueerAstrology.com for providing a platform over the course of the past decade for some of these discussions where they’ve started to happen and started to percolate in different forms, right? 

MJM: Yeah, exactly. That a lot of people in that context, in the context of the Queer Astrology conferences have been thinking critically about gender, have been working to make astrology as a field, as a practice, more inclusive of more gender experiences. And the back catalog of a lot of the recordings from the Queer Astrology Conference is available on the website QueerAstrology.com. I presented at the 2020 conference, and I know that at least for that one, you can still register retroactively and have access to the recordings after the fact. And a lot of people – I’m not gonna speak for every presenter because I didn’t see every presentation, but a lot of the presentations that I attended at that conference, people were actively doing the work of making astrology more inclusive of more gender experiences. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. And I’ve got some previous episodes – I remember I interviewed Ian Waisler, who is the founder of the Queer Astrology Conference – way back in some early episodes. So you can find that in the back catalog at least of an audio version of The Astrology Podcast. 

Let’s see. We mentioned Chani Nicholas’s readings, which I’ll link to – those two on YouTube which are from the show Star Power on Netflix, right? 

MJM: Yeah, it’s Star Power for Netflix on YouTube. So it’s like, it’s not – if you go to Netflix’s website, you’re not gonna find it, but if you search “star power Netflix” on YouTube, you’ll find it. 

CB: Okay. 

MJM: So it’s like, a YouTube show created by Netflix that Chani Nicholas does readings for people. 

CB: Yeah. And that’s just brilliant. 

MJM: Including Laverne Cox and Janet Mock. 

CB: Yeah. So we definitely recommend checking out those, because that also will give you a preview into Chani’s unique and really brilliant approach to delineating charts, which is then a good sort of introduction to why we’re recommending her book as well as just being a great intro to astrology if this is an area that you’re feeling like getting more into. 

MJM: Yep. 

CB: All right. And what about yourself? What do you have coming up? What’s your astrology agenda for the future? Do you have anything you’re working on, or where can people learn more information about your work and get a hold of you?

MJM: Yeah, I do have some things I’m working on. There’s some new offerings that I’m gonna be making available in 2021 that I haven’t released yet, but and then probably gonna be doing some talks and workshops next year as well. 

My website is MichaelJMorris.co, and you can learn more about my practice there; you can read some testimonials of other people’s experiences. You can find links on my Resources page of other podcasts that I’ve been on. I’ve been so, I don’t know, I was about to say “lucky.” It’s bigger than that. I’ve just been so grateful to be able to have such rich and beautiful conversations with so many astrologers, so many practitioners over the last year that for some – somehow, I’m now someone who is on podcasts! And you can find links to a lot of those on my Resources page. 

I’m currently booked up for consults through the end of 2020, but I’m gonna start booking for 2021 sometime soon. So if you’d like to work with me, if you’d like to know more about what offerings are coming up in the new year, sign up for my mailing list on my website. I promise I am not someone who sends out a bunch of newsletters. But just as things come up, if that’s information you want, that’s the best way to get it. And then you can follow me on Instagram at CoWitchcraftOfferings, or on Twitter at MorrisMichaelJ. 

CB: Brilliant. Awesome. Well, people should reach out. I’ll put links to all of those sites that we mentioned in the description either below this video on YouTube, or on the description page for this episode on TheAstrologyPodcast.com. 

So I’m trying to think if there’s anything we missed, but I think that was pretty comprehensive. So thanks a lot for doing this with me and taking the time, and yeah, I look forward to having you on again in the future. 

MJM: Thanks, Chris. I am so full of gratitude that we had this conversation. I feel really nourished; I feel really cared for that you are using your platform to, yeah, contribute to the mattering of trans lives in not only our field but in specifically the ways we talked about astrology as a field reflecting the world and perhaps even participating in the kind of world or the culture that we create. And I’m really grateful that you’re doing that work with us. 

CB: Yeah. And the type of world that we want to create – I think that was a really good keyword that you just used. 

MJM: Thanks. 

CB: Yeah. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening or watching this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks for your support. And we’ll see you again next time! 

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Special thanks to the patrons who support The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, shout out to the patrons that are on our Producers tiers, such as Nate Craddock, Maren Altman, Thomas Miller, Bear Ryver, Catherine Conroy, Michelle Merillat, Kristi Moe, and Sumo Coppock. Find out more about how to become a patron at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.

Also, thanks to our sponsors this month, which include the Astro Gold Astrology app, available at Astrogold.io; the Portland School of Astrology at PortlandAstrology.org; the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, available at Honeycomb.co. And also the International Society for Astrological Research, which is hosting an astrology conference August 18th through the 22nd, 2021; find out more information at ISAR2020.org. As well as the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening May 27th through the 31st, 2021, and you can find out more information about that at NORWAC.net. 

Finally, the software we use here on The Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire Astrology Software, and it’s available through Alabe.com, and you can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘AP15.’