Let me tenderly start off by clarifying that I fucking adore Gena Marvin! And one thing is the core of my intense love for her, something that runs so thinly in society at large but oozes out of her as easily as she breathes, and that precious soul element is: courage. Gena has heaps of this rare substance called bravery, despite the fact that she appears as a soft contrarian, a vulnerable artist, someone who seems more of a passive masochist than a tough fighter. The martyr quality that emerges from her character is given by the fact that Gena was born a Sun in Pisces. By her birth name Gennadiy Chebotarev, a Russian artist born in one of the most unwelcoming places on Earth, Magadan, a remote city in Siberian Russia, known for its harsh winters, famous prison and strong gender normative culture, Gena is currently living in exile in Paris, France, after a lifetime of quiet resistance.

The other element of my intense love for her is that she is so creative. Creativity and courage when functioning optimally inside an individual result in the most irresistible charisma. This is the magical stuff of an individual who had to work at it, and unfortunately this work came about through withstanding intense violence and hatred related to her sense of self. Gena was born with a very interesting conjunction in her chart: a trifecta which involves a Saturn in Aries at a later degree conjunct a Jupiter in Aries at an early degree and in the heart of these powerful outer-planets, lies a Moon in Aries, a fire lighting the dark.

I have started this website writing about the painful karma of being born with a Moon conjunct Saturn so I won’t insist on the subtleties of this placement in this article, (it’s just important to know that Gena carries within a deep maternal wound), but I do want to focus on the loose conjunction between her Saturn and her Jupiter in Aries. This is an astrological aspect which usually denotes a lifetime of having the harshest tests related to one’s identity and then these are shortly followed by the biggest blessings. This punishment and blessing cycle brought on by Saturn and Jupiter, touches her emotionally in a very profound way (because of the presence of the her Moon sandwiched between these significant outer planets).

Alternatively, you could also see the Saturn-Jupiter astrological aspect as a lifetime of taking on tests and limiting situations in a willing way, and feeling the fear and doing it anyway. The pressure which Saturn stirs in the mix eventually eases into the most surprising growth and self-confidence, courtesy of Jupiter. And with the Moon in Aries left to do the emotional work, self-belief is the resurrection card. Through hardship, a link to the Divine within gets activated, much like in the martyr effect, or the idea that the more persecuted that you are the more your belief in the Divine is strengthened. Such beliefs fit with someone’s astrological energy when they have an abundance of planets and points in Pisces and Aries.

Here is how Sue Tompkins describes the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction: “Saturn will tend to define, restrict, restrain and add an element of fear to all those things we associate with Jupiter: namely faith, meaning, joy and enthusiasm. Jupiter expands, enlarges and increases the Saturnian principles of order, responsibility, discipline and caution. Jupiter and Saturn together usually yields great persistence, patience and perseverance. Nevertheless, this is perhaps the combination associated with solid material success, and the easy aspects especially seem buffeted in this area of their lives (…) The Jupiter-Saturn individual often craves, and frequently reaches, an influential and executive position in the world.” _{(Aspects in Astrology, p.227-229)}

To be fair, the whole collective has been soaked in these astral influences because since 2022, the transiting outer planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune together with the North Node and South Node axis have been touching upon the Alpha (Aries) and Omega (Pisces) of the zodiac, the first sign and the last sign of our equatorial constellations. We are all on some level having to let go of a part of our lives we grew attached to, in favour or staring anew and rebuilding everything with courage. Gena knows this process intimately, as her chart portrays such ending and beginning energies which she carries within and from which great creative ideas and potential spark out of. What I love about her is just how determined she is to keep pushing preconceived gender norms and to risk her physical safety as she does so. She inspires me to be less afraid to pursue my own self-expression, during a period in which most of our role-models and heroes are either strangely silent or dead.

I will admit that writing this article proved challenging. Especially because I can’t help gendering her, even when the whole purpose of her art and self-expression is to go beyond gender. Gena is trying to help us understand how to live outside of gender, in a very physical and practical way. The sumptuously filmed documentary about her life, her art and her resistance (and which inspired me to write this article), a film called Queendom, details the lived aspects of crafting an existence outside of gender and how painful, frightening and exhilarating the whole process is. I highly recommend watching it and if you do, please let me know if you manage to get Sevdaliza’s song ‘Human’ out of your mind. It still haunts me to this day, it’s so powerful.

I ultimately decided to include the ‘she/her’ pronouns since it appeared to me that in her artistic journey Gena moved from the masculine principle (within which she was born) into the feminine one, but without making her body’s transformation the core aspect of her journey. I see her message as being broader, and while deeply embodied and political, her story transcends the usual narrative of “the person who shifts genders and is oppressed by traditional gender norms in society”. Gena uses her body as a tool to subvert authoritarian politics in society. She advocates for courage and freedom, especially the freedom to dress as you please and to express who you are without fear of violence or being excluded from the benefits that other gender-confirming people enjoy in society. Her protest is not just queer and concerning identity but it is also political, as Gena is actively and dangerously resisting being part of the populist collective that advocates for war and the domination of other countries, much like we are seeing in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.

Simply existing in the world, especially as a woman and then as an artist, as a creative force is seen as threatening at the moment in time, as something that needs to be controlled or treated with corrective violence. And this medieval mindset has long expired and has to change. The hopeful silver-lining comes from the strangest of places: the symbolic rumbles and metaphorical earthquakes brough about by Pluto’s transit through Aquarius, which has already begun to create social chaos in order to consistently normalize what has been seen as ‘weird’ or ‘outcast’. Give it a couple of years (and the trine between Uranus in Gemini and Pluto) for the ‘weird’ to find out just how much they belong.

With universal love,

Lexi