Gender in astrology is a convoluted subject.

There’s the whole new agey movement in the 1960s and 1970s west where gender identities within spirituality were assigned in extremely essentialized and binary ways, where “outside” knowledge sources were heavily orientalized and used to redeem and reinforce Western colonial gender systems. Then you have Hellenistic gender systems without the context they were formed in in which planets are able to occupy several positions in a binary gender system, due to being in feminine or masculine positions, signs, or aspects. Since the conjunction was seen as a sexual way, you could have a feminine planet “penetrate” a masculine one by applying an aspect to it and shit like that. Gender in Hellenistic astrology isn’t the colonial system that we’re used to but it’s also not the queer system that we’re used to.

Something to keep in mind when evaluating gender in astrology is that gender is primarily a cultural thing. Gender norms and the ways that people identify with gender will change when there are cultural changes. That means that, if you are an immigrant, that you are trans-gender because you are trans-national. If you’ve ever americanized your name, you’ve also changed your gender. This is because the gender associations of your original name are not the same as the gender associations of your american name. There is a trans-lation process involved here.

And that’s the issue with what happened with New Age astrology. The movement was mainly white and bourgeois so they took all these gender ideals from buddhism, from daoism, from indigenous american culture, from islands, from Africa but they didn’t know how to translate. They never had to. They didn’t know how to engage in trans-ness and, so, they essentialized and colonized.

This is also how modern astrologers (and by modern, I mean modern astrologer like Alan Leo or Dane Rudhyar and not contemporary astrologers) dealt with western astrology. If we’re defining the astrology that is popular today as western, then it only has as short of a history as the West. The West is mainly a modern invention. Anything that comes before colonialism cannot be considered western astrology.

Modern astrologers were the ones responsible for creating the essentialized gender system that we associate with the type of astrology that tells us that there are “male and female energies” inside of everyone, that “female energy” is passive or receptive, and that “male energy” is active or initiating. It’s like, really? What kind of male and female are you talking about? Since they quote the yin/yang so much in this type of rhetoric, are they talking about a Chinese gender system? Because I’ll have you know that Chinese gender has changed a lot throughout its long history, that masculinity in China is very unlike masculinity in the West, that the very concept of China itself is a cultural hybrid between New Communist China and historical China, and that femininity in these two Chinas exist in almost oppositional spaces.

If we’re going to talk about queerness and gender and astrology, then we’re going to have a conversation about whether queerness is a western invention. Because the idea that western astrology is suddenly allowed to exist as this very queer thing while we still talk shit about how gender is essentialized in Chinese or Vedic astrology as the binarism of gender assignment in Asia wasn’t the impact of Western colonialism doesn’t sit well with me. It’s like white people are always allowed to progress away from their own acts of oppressing others while those who are impacted by their actions must always sit there and become what is considered backwards and in need of being saved.

So, what’s so “queer” about Western astrology? I’ll tell you: it’s because queerness is something that tries to deal directly with heteronormativity and heteronormativity has, historically, been a part of white culture. Thus, western astrology must be queer because it has to deal directly with colonial gender and heteronormativity. That’s the historical burden of western astrology. When we talk about Saturn, let’s talk about daddies. Let’s talk about white daddies and white mommies who want to aggressively save us from our own cultures. When we talk about Venus and the whore archetype, let’s talk about how white people consumed people of color as whores consistently and up to this very day. When we talk about Mars and enemies, let’s talk about white terror around so called extremists and fundamentalists who are always racialized. When we talk about Jupiter, let’s talk about how progressivism often exists as a virtue by those “educated” white liberals as to not allow others to define our own timelines. When we talk about Mercury and androgyny, let’s have a conversation how the supposed neutrality of whiteness overlaps with the supposed neutrality of androgyny and how people of color are never allowed to be sexually neutral.

Let’s not bring in more gender fluid jargon or concepts from Chinese, Vedic, island, and other fucking colonized astrologies into western astrology to save it, as if the only survival available for these cultural frameworks is to become some kind of anthropological banquet where bits and pieces are pulled into western astrology and reinterpreted by those of us living in the West. The point of having things survive and thrive outside of the West is not to save the West from itself. There are gendered ways of existing in the world that white people will never understand and there is little need to translate these concepts so that they are available to them to put on and wear like a costume.

And things are not so black and white. We don’t actually live in a world split starkly in half between the colonial world and the colonized world. We live in a world full of transgressive and secretive anti-colonial strategies, of deft invisibility, of genders that cannot be named and will never be named, of metaphorical genders and literal genders, of pseudonyms and psychosexuality. We don’t live in a cultural world split between the West and the rest. We live in a subcultural world and subculture is adaptive.

Unless you’re white, stop thinking of your grandmother as heteronormal. She isn’t/wasn’t. Stop treating western astrology as progressive and start understanding that its queerness is precisely because it struggles against itself. Start understanding that your body, as an ethinic, sexualized, and consumed being, is already inherently meaningful within the framework of a western astrology that stylizes itself as classical but relies on encounters with colonial others to position itself and start taking some control over just how you seek self understanding through the possibilities that gender, trans-ness, subculture, and metaphor you can create.