Transgender Children are Paving the way forward: we will miss it until we don’t.
2018, the year I turned 40, was a doozy.
Looking to the skies, the slower moving outer planets, Saturn was in Capricorn, Pluto remained positioned in Capricorn, and Neptune stayed in Pisces the whole year. Uranus did a little dance in Aries, pushed a two step into Taurus for about 6 months and slide back into Aries. Jupiter spent most of the year vacationing in Scorpio then crossed the border into Sagittarius by the end of the year. 2018 was an invitation to the party of change and transformation.
The Universe doesn’t “understand” time. With that said, though, I believe we are here to build the extraordinary as our presence is a force field during a time of necessary restructuring of what is unstable and unsustainable. The primary driver of this heavy, exhausting energy was Saturn moving into its home sign of Capricorn in late December 2017. Because Saturn rules discipline, karma, and restriction, its presence in Capricorn demanded absolute accountability and forcing us to face cold realities of choices we’d made. Adding to this structural strain, the summer of 2018 brought an unusually high number of simultaneous planetary retrogrades that ground forward momentum to a painful halt. Most notably, Mars—the planet of energy, drive, and action—went retrograde alongside Mercury, the planet of communication. This specific alignment turned daily interactions into a minefield of misunderstandings and drained everyone's physical vitality. Concurrently, a new series of intense eclipses began along the Cancer-Capricorn axis, directly targeting the tension between home life and professional ambition. These cosmic events forced sudden endings and uncomfortable emotional reorganizations, making 2018 a grueling period of forced growth, heavy responsibilities, and systemic and oppressive upheaval.
Still skeptical about the validity of astrology? Totally cool so I encourage you…start by Googling out how the Moon affects our oceans.
Though everything in the Universe is not fixed, I have found it is easier to imagine the 12 Zodiac signs as a map with the Planets and the Sun vehicles driving through the terrain.
2018 was a year of moving mountains and exercising atrophied muscles and bones we’d buried deep beneath our surfaces. The Universe is never out for revenge; it moves with compassion and love for balance, harmony and unity. At any given point, it sends a continuous frequency in the form of some open-ended questions to consider:
What are your truths?
How do your truths affect you and others?
What are your realities?
How are your realities affect you and others?
How do you hold yourself?
Where do you make space for yourself and others?
I trust Astrology because it is a language, not a religion. Energy doesn’t lie and truths have legs. Authenticity is the water pump on the river deeper into our alignment. Laws are decided by the Universe without our permission and defy rules we create out of our own pain, projections, ways we live contained (literally in a meat suit) and to keep our brains busy to continually justify the harm we cause our ourselves and others.
Astrology is simple, not easy; and it’s not supposed to be. It’s an ongoing conversation in every direction between Earth under gravity and that which flies through what we call infinity. We will never move at the same speed and that is, I believe, a part of accepting our existences as humans. Our design does not include moving at the same speed as the Universe because that would mean we’ve figured it all out.
It’s downright laughably dangerous to continue to believe our existence is binary, this or that, one or two, black or white. We can prove it’s very not binary, regardless of your gender expression and presentation.
Enter more astrology:
In 2018, the Sun of course still shone and moved through all 12 of the signs in the calendar year yet, it hit the astronomical constellation of Ophiuchus, an unofficial 13th Zodiac sign, the mythical serpent-bearer. Excluded for neatness from Western astrology to make the 12 months match with the 12 signs. Go figure. Ophiuchus represents the Greek mythological figure Asclepius, the legendary healer and son of Apollo who became so skilled he could bring the dead back to life.
What more did 2018 bring?
A glimpse of avenues for deeper connections, a chisel to excavate what we buried out of necessity, a sliver of light we were holding onto out of self-preservation, and another door out of fear leading us to experience what loving ourselves and each other feels like…that is, if we choose it.
The more inner faster moving planets including Mars traveled across multiple signs, starting in Scorpio, moving into Sagittarius, then Capricorn, and Aquarius, before turning retrograde and dipping back into Capricorn during the summer, then returning to Aquarius and finishing the year in Pisces. Venus & Mercury cycled rapidly through the zodiac signs on their normal short-term schedules, with Mercury experiencing retrogrades exclusively in fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) and Venus retrograding between Scorpio and Libra.
While I wasn’t paying as much attention to astrology back then as much as I do now, astrologically speaking, 2018 felt uniquely difficult and undeniably joyous because a series of intense planetary shifts forced a harsh collective and systemic reckoning. The heart wants what it wants and it is absolutely no surprise (now) that it was the year Brene Brown wrote her famous blog, The Midlife Unraveling. This blog had me snot-bubbling over my salad at the kitchen table, the heat melting me into a puddle recognizing something about my life did not feel like mine. There was nothing I wanted more that year than to unravel and complete fall into pieces. Exposing myself, however, included a strategy which meant redefining boundaries, taking responsibility for my chosen and given identities, and assigning order to the chaos. The person people thought they knew, including me, was cracking open and coming out.
After shoving them back underwater one too many times, they’d had enough. The person I had previously believed I should hide was not scary nor broken nor a burden. 2018 was a year of surrender and being The Fool. One of the bigger obstacles was slowing my absorption of unhealed energy—and feeling into my rawness. It was something for me to understand why I believed I was supposed hold what was not mine. Feeling so much all the time had somehow caused me to go numb. People had a lot to say what they “thought” of my transition but was my life, not theirs. While announcing my name and pronouns, I remained committed to the shifts from every beautiful glimmer.
There was a time when America believed it could threaten the transgender out of people. Some people and places still conform and obey to that code. The threats work…for a while. America got me to believe it knew me better than I knew myself. It restricts bathroom rules and creates policies rooted from racism meanwhile it runs on empty, stealing human autonomy. This is where energy and astrology can fill in gaps and tell us a a more compassionate story. 2018 was not the beginning of me re-writing my story; I just began to remember how to tell my truth. I stood face to face with what had been there the entire time, holding my grief of ‘how long’, wading through the layers no one else believed. America was built on wanting people to ignore our in-betweens but nuance keeps us all breathing and thriving.
A gender transition is often be told and perceived through the lens of who is watching; which is why I write about mine. Cisgender doctors helping transgender kids. Cisgender parents supporting transgender children. Cisgender adults who peaked in high school running to the court houses whining that a transgender child’s life is ruining theirs. As I write this in 2026, more than half of the country, 27 states have bills banning care for the gender diverse population. These states dig in their heels, pulling as hard as they can on the reigns of life shoved into their hands after generations of trauma and abuse otherwise known as colonization. States treat each and every one of their citizens like race horses to run in only one dicated direction.
2018, the ghost of our Christmas past, came and went like a bad dream before the Groundhog Days of 2020. If we thought we were losing control before, 2018 held up a mirror saying, “LOOK. YOU NEED TO SEE THIS…” The structural pressure intensified in May 2018 when Uranus, the planet of sudden disruption and rebellion, entered Taurus. Taurus desperately craves stability, safety, and comfort, so Uranus moving into this sign triggered volatile shocks to financial systems, personal values, and feelings of basic security.
What was happening for you in 2018?
