THE GENDER-BENDING ALIVENESS OF SUCCEDENT AND CADENT HOUSES

OPA Magazine publication June 2025, by Blair Bogin

Some astrological houses are considered less important than others - places for stirring oatmeal or sitting in traffic. Astrologers direct enthusiasm toward privileged chart areas, which serve as primary doorways into active life events:the Ascendant (1st House of Self ), the Midheaven (10th House of Career), the Descendant (7th House of Relationships), and the Nadir (4th House of Home). In the circus of life, people cling to angular house stability for chart orientation, preferring the straight-forward trapeze act to an amorphous tumble.

Two factors make some houses less powerful than others:

1) Access to the rising sign by traditional aspect

2) Climbing or falling away from an angular house, succedent or cadent

If the eye of the rising sign can only see traditional aspects (conjunction, sextile, square, trine, and opposition), then the 2nd, 6th, 8th, and 12th Houses remain invisible. These shadowy places are unable to tap the helm’s shoulder and suggest navigation routes. Instead, shaded houses operate in the engine room,make the food, clean the dock, nurse the sick, and keep other dominant personality parts afloat.

The 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 11th Houses catch some slack because they wink at the rising sign through trines and sextiles. Astrologers call these supportive houses, yet their efforts are still subordinate to the angular timetable, climbing towards Mount Career, Mount Home, Mount Relationship, and Mount Self. Increasing in strength, succedent houses gain strength as they increase. Cadent ones decline and prove less friendly. In either case, people tend to deem chart placements worthy relative to angular house comfort.

Swerving off Main Street

I want to deconstruct the house-system hierarchy, to walk the plank and jump into alternative possibilities where life is not reduced to these four arrival points. Similar to derivative houses, I’d like to twirl explicit associations around to redistribute power. But why? The angles are essential for timing techniques. They offer favorable placements and important podiums of personality or change. It’s where you got this job, met this person, acquired this property, or had a facelift. Yet the angular houses are most active in the business of the world and thus the most socially indoctrinated. Here, people learn to mask into cultural submission, or adapt into the right kind of commodified weird.

Angular houses are bound to cultural values; the more people use them as guardrails, the less likely they are to decondition themselves from status-quo harms. Your less dominant houses likely hold the key to your liberation. Looming off the main street lives all the new information, where all the creative energy tied up in supremacy waits to be released.

I want to explore this concept through one of the more blatantly outdated social norms: The gender binary. This serves as a touchstone for other identity choices that people constantly cope with in society. Gender is often confined to a rigid, binary framework of stability as “what is,” when in reality, the concept of gender is more multifaceted and creative.

For folks who experience gender dysphoria, it’s not a choice. You can either demolish the what-is-ness of an angular house or live an agonizing lie. Likewise, many queer people must escape the trap of angularity because the greater system holding up these main houses does not actually take care of them. The angular houses throw people off like a cultural carousel spinning too hard-those who cannot hold on get disorganized by the liminal comings and goings of succedent and cadent houses.

Yet, many communities outside the gender norm have sewn nets underneath the rig. Every succedent house supports two cadent houses (and vice versa) elementally through trine or sextile, like a lattice of interdependence for the underdogs. For instance, the succedent 2nd aids the cadent 12th and 6th.

Furthermore, when you prowl inside this underlying chart-tissue, you can push smaller bones and muscles around, helping your overall archetypal atmosphere find its true alignment. By “alignment,” I mean what fills you/your chart with glee, and what allows you to throw your best self into the world with dignity.

Succedent Houses: Climbing toward Authenticity

The succedent houses - 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 11th - are the mountain climbers of the chart. They follow the angular houses like determined hikers ascending toward the peak. As time spins forward, planets that once held center stage in the 1st House tumble backward into the shadowy 12th, while the 2nd House muscles its way up to claim the spotlight.

The 5th/11th Axis: Call Me By My Name

Genderbending means expressing yourself without restriction by socially constructed identity, sex, or gender role stereotypes and expectations. It has less to do with categories and more to do with pleasure and dignity; it shows people what clothing, hairstyles, voice, behavior, and desired attention from others feel good for the mind and body. These topics lead to the 5th House, the place of self-expression and joy.

The 5th is a succedent house moving towards the angular 4th. The succedent houses are where you develop a unique taste in things, as if on the way up the mountain, you forage for items that necessitate your appetite, collecting quality ingredients so that your favorite flavors are baked into the cake of an angular house. Gender-abolitionism encourages standing in your power here, showing people what pleases you. Yet self-determination can be tricky, as gender is also a social agreement. No matter how much 5th House sauce you serve up, the 11th House of community doesn’t always let you dish it. Astrologers call the 5th/11th Houses supportive places of good fortune and fun, but they can also make you feel the weight of being stuck with yourself or displaced from self-continuity by others. Until everyone unlearns violence, these houses can be a traumatic interface for gender. To live in this succedent arena is to be tempered like metal, where your truth gets bent and folded by other people’s perception, until your sense of self is strengthened and less likely to break.

Often, people only discover the communities they truly belong to by standing in their authenticity. The 5th/11th Houses send queerness through hell to find its chosen family, releasing the chart from any estranged 4th house programming. Sylvia Rivera exemplifies someone who jumped off the 4th House ramp. She was born on July 2, 1951, at 2:30 am in the Bronx, New York, U.S. After being orphaned by a suicidal mother, Sylvia lived with her disapproving grandmother, who shamed her effeminate behavior. Rivera left home at ten years old to live on New York’s streets, where a tight-knit community of local drag queens took her in and protected her. Fulfilling the coziness of her 3rd House Cancer stellium, and the North Node in the 11th, often succedent and cadent houses compensate for where an angular house could not contain someone. Rivera’s Venus in Leo in the 4th House of home and family found full expression elsewhere.

The 2nd/8th Axis: Beg, Borrow, Steal

The 2nd House holds money and possessions. Astrologers call it the Gate of Hades, where the Sun rises from under the horizon into the 1st House, like gemstones emerging from the underworld. The 2nd House clings to the physical world to meet basic material needs. The gender binary copes with this by doubling down on security, making sure the precious metals that undulate in the 2nd are sturdy within a familiar paradigm. This often means commodifying identity, pulling our 2nd House choices up into intelligible, compact representations of male and female in the 1st House. This narrows the 2nd house pathway for many queer bodies, who often face discrimination, unemployment and financial instability. LGBTQ must traverse to the opposite 8th House to bricolage survival tactics, including mutual aid, whether that’s crowdfunding for medical procedures or finding a couch to sleep on. Gender fluidity doesn’t shut down some aspect of their soul because of material limits.

The 8th House earned the title, The Idle Place, where the Sun begins its descent into the underworld before it disappears into the sunset. This house rules death, and where people get mixed up in other people’s resources. Queer folks feel comfortable in the 8th House for two reasons. 1) They know what it means to let false versions of themselves die.2) They know that sex, gender, identity, and gender expression can all be uncoupled, re-blended, and rearranged in multidimensional ways.

The 8th House complexities free the 7th House from its limited concept of unity, where things don’t have to be one of two things, like polarized genders. Succedent houses climb towards angular peaks, filled with anticipation and heavy breathing. So, the 2nd/8th Houses are not as “idle” as often described, especially when capitalism is a principal social structure. Queers often perform unseen labor in the 2nd house to figure out their physical experience, frequently needing to rely on less conventional ways to pay rent. In the shadows, queer communities have built alternative counterpowers around money, testing out desires, pleasures and preferences with others beyond the purview of institutional and structural visibility.

RuPaul provides an interesting example for these 2nd/8th dynamics, born on November 17, 1960, at 6:52 pm in San Diego, CA. Bringing drag to the mainstream ain’t easy. It took RuPaul a lot of nonstop trial and error off the grid, doing punk and drag shows in Atlanta’s underground movie and nightclub circuit. He used his 8th House Venus to “blend elements of various female icons like Diana Ross, Cher, and Dolly Parton with a...twist” to hone his style. RuPaul played with drag as a rebellion against the status quo for many years before moving full throttle into angular stability. Succedent houses have a special kind of authenticity and mobility outside the angularity’s hustle and bustle because their energy increases, approaching the peak, and without the pressure of central importance. RuPaul initially found freedom tinkering in these shadows — their memoir is called The House of Hidden Meanings, after all. When asked what transitioned them from the punk rock version of drag to his more established glam, he replied through his Mars in Cancer in the 2nd: “Well, rent had to be paid.” Perhaps there is no way to achieve ultimate detached innocence, as if finding a way out of your culture also becomes a trap. Creatively responding to capitalism is often where genderqueer communities make ninja moves, figuring out how to avoid complicity with what’s systematically broken, while also staying fed.

Perhaps true genderbending means embracing the coexistence of this drama, where imbalances do not negate gender-queerness, but are an important aspect of its evolution. The 2nd House is often strangled by the 1st House’s energy vortex of putting yourself “out there” and “making moves.” To de-angle (detangle?) also means letting yourself waste time, wander, fail, let go, not initiate, and choose to sit, reflect, and process your experiences.

Cadent Houses: Falling into Personal Truth

Houses 3, 6, 9, and 12 are cadent, falling away from the chart angles. Climbing down a mountain feels more out of control. You have to pull back your energy, let gravity do the work, yet slow down enough not to let it overcome you. You need to let go without letting go. The cadent houses require more complex tactics because the footholds here are formed from symbols and synchronicities. Astrologers call these the weakest houses, yet I think that’s because the invisible realm intimidates. I love the cadent houses because they could easily be seen as a waste of time, places that won’t take you anywhere in mainstream society, focused on non-material concerns. Planets in cadent houses are more interested in cultivating inner riches through ideas, adventure, and spiritual efforts than in achieving tangible results. I think of the cadent houses as a lint trap for any self-betrayal happening on the material plane. If you’re going downhill, it also means the trek is coming to an end. It’s the precious feeling of going back home. The cadent houses are where we return to ourselves, as one would to the womb, a god, or a hot bath at the end of the day.

The 6th/12th Axis - The Elbow of God

The 12th House is where you hover with hunches and spiritual reflexes. It’s a place for confusion, misfortune, isolation, and suffering as much as it is for healing. Astrologers call it the house of self-undoing because it leaves your ego behind for metaphysical terrain. Thus, it is the location for melting away the gender binary. Modern society uses this house to dissociate from its bodily experience, a privilege that gender non-conforming folks don’t always have, and so here the raw material of transformation, deep self-reflection, and wisdom churn. As Irtiqa Nabi says, “The sea speaks honestly to those willing to drown.”

The 12th encourages processing the secret sorrows that visible houses would rather avoid, deepening the archetypal dimensions around gender identity. In many non-Western traditional communities, genderbending reflects the kind of spiritual discernment and awakening necessary to navigate this mystic realm. The 12th is the incomprehensible and boundless, where gender goes to transcend itself.

In contrast, the 6th House plucks you out from the soup of oneness to integrate the self into the slow march of daily rituals. It is the house of health, work, and routines - where the 12th tries to funnel its swirling holy void into your hands and make dreams incarnate. Thus, the 6th House is burdened with the most difficult task: maintaining a body.

If having a body isn’t hard enough, the gender binary swoops in to add laborious extremes. Going to the gym or waxing an underarm creates no issue if being conventionally strong and hairless brings joy, yet remember these are hidden houses where the dust of unconscious content can collect around the binary-gender spell. Falling away from the 1st and 7th, you can find yourself wading through the loose trash of maintaining a false appearance. The risk here is psychic claustrophobia that forces you into awkward physical routines to appease 1st and 7th house outcomes. The 6th House is a place of service, so it’s tempting to take on a limited male or female role to feel valuable and serviceable. For instance, rolling up your sleeves when you wish it were a dress, to be helpful in a “rugged masculine” way. Or, if you were socialized as a woman, it may manifest as worrying about standing up for yourself (1st) because assertiveness is culturally interpreted as bossy, which isn’t structurally generous to the 7th of relationships!

Anxious symptoms or illness may ensue when your truth gets stifled. The 6th House acts as an elbow or hinge, taking the brunt for the rest of the chart, often subjugated by physical circumstances. Born February 18, 1934, at 9:00 pm in New York City, NY, Audre Lorde queered the 6th and 12th Houses, helping a generation recognize the importance of finding authentic, self-preserving habits. With her soulful Mars and Mercury in Pisces combined with freedom-seeking Uranus in the 7th, much of her poetry recognizes that unconditional love does not mean driving someone to the airport when you don’t want to. The 6th is a place to heal any incongruencies between what you want to do for others and what you have the capacity to actually do. The 6th/12th Houses close the gap between higher and lower self, where you get to explore deeper realms of our sacred work, and realize what your true devotions are, outside of gendered expectations.

The 3rd/9th Axis - Rewriting the Story

The 3rd and 9th Houses hold mental activity and perspective-making faculties. They are liminal realms unsuitable for profitable dealings because the mind is some non-space where scholars reside in abstract puffs of speculation and conceptual patterning. For these houses, materialism and the five senses that experience the physical world are terrible devices for measuring reality. And yet, when someone feels more masculine within their abstract mind, despite having the gonads culturally defined as female, materialists begin to ask for “the corpse of god.” In other words, people seek scientific proof for something that spans higher realms of consciousness.

Neurologist Robert Sapolsky says, “If you got to choose between what chromosome you have in your liver, and what your brain thinks about what it is, I’d vote for the brain every time.” Here, you must believe people when they tell you who they are, and let their search be wild, free, and full of transition in the same way the Moon’s swift motion rejoices in the 3rd House. Costa Rican-born Mexican singer Chavela Vargas is an example of gender bending the 3rd and 9th Houses. Throughout her music career, she cross-dressed and exclusively swooned over women in her song lyrics. With Uranus in the 3rd, accurately representing her queer world while surrounded by machismo attitudes, her work was a revolutionary stand against heteronormativity.

When the 4th or 10th Houses stop making sense, you go to the 3rd/9th to make life feel “understandable”. The 3rd/9th is also where you grapple with mental health and the ways social conditioning imposes a single description of reality onto people. It’s easy to take whatever “meaning” automatically blips into the mind from social media, school, family, and run with that. The default settings of the 4th and 10th Houses can seep into the head and confuse people with the message that they need to be translatable to their family or neurotypical enough for professional opportunities. Genderbending doesn’t survive this strategy for long and is devoted to unlearning it. Genderbending shows that it’s way more advantageous to tolerate the shared awkwardness of finding a new language together, of patiently re-representing reality into more dynamic stories.

In Conclusion:

It’s tempting to prioritize and favor the powerful angular houses because the top of a mountain is exhilarating and makes life feel like it’s going somewhere. The invitation is not to dismiss the cosmic portals of the four directions but to occasionally experiment with inverting their influence, so that inner authority and self-approval become the sustaining structure. In a world choked up by materialism, violence, and discrimination, genderbending is one of many experiences that allow people to drift away from traditional checkpoints and still feel held by chosen families, shared resources, self-care routines, unique pleasures, and new descriptions.