The Age of Aquarius entered our awareness with a big flower children/hippie/Woodstock bang in the late 1960s together with the invitation to make love instead of war. The New Age movement, as it was called later, was mildly derided during the 1980s, but this emerging energy is back in full force although it looks a bit different now.
Between the #metoo movement, women entering politics in unprecedent numbers, and gaining a better education in many parts of the world, female power is rising. It’s the women who are carrying the shift away from our patriarchal cultural models of the past several thousand years. However, something more is happening. Indigenous leader and elder, visionary, author, and scholar Barbara Hand Clow wrote in 2001 that “the Aquarian energy is so androgynous that it will tend to balance male and female powers.”
The LGBTQ movement is vocal and visible like never before (here a somewhat related post on changing family structures), and many are openly questioning gender as a binary choice. Some male to female, and female to male transitions are playing out in bright daylight, such as William Bruce Jenner’s transition to becoming Caitlyn Jenner. Public figures like actor Billy Porter and Jonathan Van Ness of Queer Eye’s Fab5 are questioning what it means to be male with their wardrobe choices.
In confirmation of the incoming androgynous Aquarian energy, The NYTimes Magazine’s recent article Neither/Nor presented us with people who are not transitioning from male to female, or vice versa, but instead cannot truly define their gender according to the binary model. Thus, transitioning from one to the other is not a choice and they feel caught somewhere else. They don’t feel female, nor do they feel male. Gender fluidity is not necessary something new on earth, as many other cultures have acknowledged a third gender (see a previous post on that). Whether Porter or Van Ness, or the less publicly visible people who are caught in the middle, they are on the forefront of an emergent energy that will balance the strong female/male polarity we have been taking for granted for so long in the Western world. Thank you to all those pioneers who are showing us a different way.