An interview with The Gender Doula, Eli Lawliet

I'm excited to begin this series of interviews with individuals who resonate with the communities I work with in my private practice.

Today, I'm thrilled to spotlight someone I'm eager to introduce: Eli Lawliet, PhD, also known as The Gender Doula, who supports people exploring their gender.

Bio:

Eli, the Gender Doula, is a dedicated guide for individuals navigating their gender journeys. Holding a PhD in Gender Studies from Berkeley, Eli has a rich academic background, having conducted original research and taught classes on trans medical history.

Their work as a gender doula is informed by their personal experiences of gender exploration and transition, as well as a deeply rooted spiritual practice centered around transness. Eli offers one-on-one support, workshops, and classes that incorporate a blend of somatic and spiritual practices, such as tarot and breathwork, to help clients connect with their true selves and navigate their journeys with resilience and care.

Hi Eli! For those who may not yet be familiar with your work, how would you describe your many-faceted role as a gender doula and the various ways you support the trans community?

Hello hello! So I'm quite fond of saying "gender doulas are for everyone." This is because, even though I primarily support trans and non-binary folks, I also support folks who are exploring their gender, the family members and loved ones of trans folks, and folks who just want to understand gender and its place in their lives a little better. I think that every single person benefits from exploring their gender, and I am happy to support that process in any way I can.

Generally speaking, the support I offer is tailored to the needs of the person who I am supporting. For some folks, my support consists of conversations every week or every other week that involve talking through almost any topic you can thing of. Some of those topics are expressly about gender, while others are more tangential (like career, relationships, body image, etc.). For other folks, my support may look far more specific—like helping them source gender affirming clothing, find a doctor or surgeon, or change their name and gender legally. Spiritual work has been a bigger and bigger part of what I do over the last year, and I have been facilitating more ritual and providing spiritual support for many folks.

I also support the trans community through my classes, workshops, and breathwork circles. One-on-one support isn't accessible to everyone, and it isn't always how people desire to receive their support. Offering workshops and classes allows me to teach (which I love so much!!) about topics I am deeply intimate with, and it also creates more financial accessibility for folks. I am also working on a book!

How has your personal gender journey influenced your practice as a gender doula, and what unique perspectives do you bring to your clients?

For me, gender exploration was a really horrible and fraught experience in many ways. I was raised in a conservative evangelical family in Southwest Missouri, and born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Of course there were queer and trans folks around (as there always are in small towns!), but I wasn't allowed to know them. Transness was utterly off my radar, and queerness was something I only began to learn about in my teens. When I realized that transness (and gender expansiveness) existed (thanks to a gender theory book I found in the public library), I was totally fascinated…but it took the better part of my 20's to realize that I was trans, and that I wanted to change my body.

So I really wish that I would have had more and better support. My primary gender transition support was my partner at the time, who was also incredibly abusive. As that relationship has gone further into the rearview mirror, I've had to reckon with what it means to discover your gender in the context of coercion and control. I am not grateful for the pain and trauma of it, but I am grateful for the depth of my perspective, which comes in part from the immense roadblocks and challenges that marked my gender exploration and early transition.

Another aspect of my journey was my work within academia. When I went back to school in my late 20's, I was already fully obsessed with gender and started to study it from an academic perspective. This led to a B.A. in Gender Studies from UCLA with a minor in LGBTQ Studies. While I was at UCLA, I was conducting original research and even taught a trans medical history class. All of this led to my PhD at Berkeley, where I studied trans history, medicine, and policy. I was 3 years into my PhD when I started seeing gender doula clients.

Finally, there's the spirituality of it all. As I mentioned, I was raised conservative Christian, but that never really made sense to me. I went hard the other direction and spent many years as an atheist, but when I started grad school, I also entered a severe health crisis. I needed some spiritual support, but I knew organized religion wouldn't serve me and I also wasn't willing to go all in on the white American new age style spirituality due to the culture appropriation and white supremacy rampant in those spaces. I thought, "What can I build a foundation on?" and the only answer was transness. So I've been developing an animistic spirituality ever since that finds its roots in transness.

In your work, you often blend different modalities such as breathwork and tarot readings. Can you share how these practices enhance the support you provide and the benefits they offer to your clients?

Yes! So tarot has been with me since the beginning, but at first, I was somewhat shy about bringing it into the support space. Now, I regularly have clients ask me to pull a card for them, and I can also use tarot to support or lead a session by pulling cards to help guide the conversation. I also regularly use the archetypes and lessons from tarot to help clients make sense of their experiences and identities.

Breathwork is a newer addition. When I was early in my gender doula journey, I realized that I would need some sort of somatic modality to support my clients. I had worked with Amy Kuretsky, a wonderful acupuncturist and breathwork facilitator, and had seen how powerful it was. But I needed the right teacher. I found my teacher in Chauna Bryant and the Breath Liberation Society! I'm in the last part of my 400 hour facilitator training, and I've used breathwork with many clients to facilitate ritual, but also to help folks connect with their bodies, their intuitions, and to practice energetic and spiritual connection.

Both modalities are powerful in their own right, and I also blend them into classes. For example, Snake Medicine will have 4 breathwork sessions blended in, as well as tarot archetypes and spreads. Folks don't have to engage with these modalities if they don't want to, but I think for many people, they really enhance the experience!

How do you approach creating and facilitating rituals for gender transitions, and why do you believe these rituals are important for your clients?

I have a general rhythm that I follow for gender rituals, but so much of what we do in ritual is collaborative. I will start by going over various questions with my client - what they want the ritual to include, who they want to be in attendance, any elements that they feel are important, anything that they don't want to be in that space, etc.

Every ritual is different. When I do grief ritual, it's often a more in-depth version of breathwork. The point of this ritual is to move the grief, to be with the grief, to experience it, express it, become intimate with it. That type of ritual may have many words or very few words at all. However, a ritual to mark the release of, and calling in of, a name and/or pronoun, may be almost entirely words with some symbolic actions. In July this year I facilitated my first marriage ritual, which was special beyond words! A wedding is not so different from a name/pronoun releasing, but both are quite different from a pre-surgical ritual.

Ritual is vital because it is a deeply human way of marking time, of holding the sacred, of integrating important parts of our journeys. Ritual allows us to make space for our experiences and, if desired, to be witnessed and held by our communities. Ritual can facilitate deep emotional work, but it can also celebrate our becomings. In Western culture, most of our rituals have been reduced to capitalistic function, so there is something really profound in the ways our body remembers ritual when we're properly held in it.

What are some common challenges that individuals face during their gender exploration, and how do you support them in navigating these obstacles?

This is a great question with so many answers! I feel like I could write a book (or several) about this! I would say that one problem that is very common, but which few people discuss and/or realize is normal, is doubt. So many folks who come to me are worried that they aren't trans enough, that they don't know who they are, that they can't trust themself or their body. So many questions and insecurities and frustrations! And even when folks are well on their way through social and/or medical transition, doubt is still a common (and natural) part of the process.

I think that's the biggest thing, too—that doubt is totally normal. So often there can be a perception that the doubt itself is "evidence" that you're not really trans, or that you don't know what you want, etc. I wont go so far as to say that doubt makes you trans, but it is a very, very common part of the journey.

When people are experiencing doubt, there are many tools that I can bring in to support that part of the journey, depending on how the person best navigates doubt in their life. So I might start by asking questions about the doubt. When does it arise? What does it feel like in the body? What is your relationship to doubt in other areas? Just some questions to get a better sense of the doubt. Sometimes we will go into "What if" territory. For example, I might ask what if you are wrong? What are the consequences? And we can talk through what that would look like. I find that grounding fear in reality can be a very helpful way to come back into the body.

My favorite thing is to help folks resource themselves from their own experiences. For example, we might talk about previous experiences where they felt doubt, and moved forward, and things turned out well. We might talk about times when they were disappointed or wrong about something, and how they processed that experience. If folks can tap into their own magic, the ways that they have already grown and healed and processed and integrated, that is profoundly resourcing for moving through the present!

How do you ensure your practice is inclusive and supportive of clients from diverse backgrounds, particularly neurodiverse folks and people of color?

Thank you for asking this! Inclusivity is so important to me, and while I always work to build it into my work, it's one of those things that I am always iterating with. Some things are that I always have the option for folks to use captions for our meetings, and I always have the option for folks to keep their cameras off or do a phone call instead. I've done text meetings for folks when they were experiencing a non-verbal time. I offer a lot of practical support for neurodiverse clients - for example, I can take complex tasks and break them down into to-do lists and schedules, I can write scripts for doctor's office visits and scary phone calls, I can look at complex insurance paperwork and provide explanations, and I can write emails for folks as well.

For people of color, one thing is that I recognize that there are aspects of their experience that I wont be able to speak to. I can hold space for the fullness of their experience, including rage and grief with whiteness and white people. But there is a difference between someone who can hold space and validate your experience, and the sacred experience of knowing that someone knows, in their bones, what it means to feel the thing you're feeling. I hope that when I start training gender doulas, I will be able to provide more robust referrals for folks who would rather work with a person of color.

But in terms of what I can provide, I can offer the same level of support I would to all clients, but with extra care and consideration for the racialized elements of that person's experience. For example, finding a surgeon is a challenge, but even moreso if you have melanated skin, which may require specific types of care. So I might spend a lot more time sifting through photos for a client with melanated skin so I can find meaningful "results" photos that can guide our conversation about their preferences. In the more social realm, I will follow a client's lead in terms of social transition, disclosure to family, etc. I wont pressure a client to cut ties with their family, for example. I never would, but I will be particularly mindful for folks from different cultural backgrounds from myself, you know?

Finally, there's the community and personal work of it all, which is a continuous engagement for me. I believe that undoing white supremacy and whiteness itself is the responsibility of those who benefit from whiteness. So I try to never be satisfied with my learning or actions on this front, and continuously re-engage with my own learning and unlearning in addition to community efforts. These are just a few examples, and if a prospective client wanted to have an in-depth conversation about these topics, I would offer time for that free of charge before beginning the supportive relationship.

Any words of advice, support, or care you'd like to share with someone who is early on in their gender and/or identity journey?

yes! Its okay if it doesn't always feel good. It's okay if you're scared. It's okay if you have doubts. You're not behind, you're not "too late." Honor your timing, but don't be afraid to take a leap of faith when you're ready. There's no bad outcome of a gender exploration journey, because no matter what happens, you will learn, grow, and evolve. And if you need support, reach out!

Is there anything that you're particularly passionate about or obsessed with at this moment?

Literally so many things!!! I am one of those people who is always learning, always taking more classes, always buying more books. Right now, I'm very into deepening my relationships with the earth through the lens of transness-as-spirituality. My partner named this type of spirituality, "transimaginality," after I explained about "imaginal cells" in a caterpillar. Basically, caterpillars have these cells, called imaginal cells or imaginal disks, that carry all the DNA necessary to become a butterfly. When a caterpillar goes into their cocoon and turns into soup, the only things that remain are imaginal disks. These cells specialize into the different structures of a butterfly. But in the caterpillar, they are seen as invaders by the immune system, and attacked.

When I read about these, I said, "trans people are the imaginal cells of humanity." And thats when my partner came up with transimaginality as a descriptor for the spirituality I've been investing in for many years now. So I am continuously looking for these types of lessons and mirrors and relationships in the earth and in animals and insects. I'm obsessed with the unique portal of transness, and how that portal is reflected across all of nature.

Any particular offerings or opportunities you'd like to share with folks?

My most exciting opportunity right now is Snake Medicine!! Snake Medicine is a 12 week class, open to all folks of all identities, where we use the snake's shed cycle as a roadmap for navigating personal evolution, growth, and change. In Snake Medicine, we talk a lot about grief, rage, and threshold times, but we approach these experiences from a perspective of resourcing. I want each and every person who joins Snake Medicine to leave with a robust toolkit for navigating their own sheds, which they will hopefully continue to build on for many years to come.

The class includes live meetings on Zoom, workbooks, tarot spreads, meditations, breathwork meetings, and so much more. It's a really beautiful and robust offering that weaves together many threads of identity, experience, myth, and animism to create a web of support that is unique to each person. Folks can read more and sign up here: https://payhip.com/b/HhpUS or bit.ly/SnakeMed (case sensitive)

What is the best way for folks to learn more about your amazing work and offerings, and to stay in touch with you?

The best thing folks can do is sign up for my newsletter! Newsletter subscribers get exclusive access to my monthly "Ask The Gender Doula" advice column, as well as discounts and first chance at scholarships and offerings. That link, as well as my podcast interviews, monthly breathwork circle, and more are all on my LinkTree here: https://linktr.ee/TheGenderDoula