How Do I Become a Gender Doula?
One of the most common questions that I am asked is some variation of this title, "How do I become a gender doula?"
I get asked this question with regularity, and I get why, I really do. For one thing, being a gender doula is really cool! Also though, I think that a lot of trans folks recognize how much they wish they had full-spectrum support through their transition, and think it would be very neat to offer that to others.
If you are reading this blog entry because you have this question, let me start with the following.
I will consult with you as you start your own business for my usual trans-people rate of $100/hr. If you are interested in that, shoot me an email.
If you are actively seeing clients or will be imminently (aka you are past the initial planning phases of starting a business), I can add you to my virtual gender doula community, where we cross promote one another, share resources, and ask/answer questions.
Read the point above this as, "If you are doing gender doula work, I want to know you." I do not believe in competition. We are all in this together, and the more we promote one another and work together, the better we will thrive, and the better we will serve our community. If you are doing gender doula work, PLEASE get in touch!
I will eventually offer some sort of formal mentorship, and you can always join my mailing list to be one of the first to know about this.
Please note: I am a straightforward (aka blunt) communicator. I am also deeply compassionate and see the best in people to a fault. So please understand that when you read the words below, the tone is that of compassion-through-honesty. I'm not trying to be mean or to gatekeep, but this work is deeply sacred, and it would be deeply unethical of me to treat it lightly.
Also Note: If you are excited to do this work because you think that you can make money quickly or become rich, please find something else. Also if you are not trans/non-binary/gender expansive, please do not seek to do this work. I think cis people could be amazing doulas for parents/loved ones who are struggling with a child’s/loved one’s transition, though, and would love to see that happen someday.
And finally: I want to say right up top that if you plan to do this work you absolutely must invest in and engage with your own self-education about anti-racism, anti-capitalism, community care, mutual aid, harm reduction, disability justice, and bodily autonomy in addition to all the trans topics I cover below. These are not optional. If you engage in this work, especially if you are white, able-bodied, and affluent, and you do not craft a robust foundation in these principles, then your work will be in service of oppression. Full stop.
Overview
With that said, here is my best current answer to the question, "How do I become a gender doula?”
To be clear; trans people have supported other trans people through gender exploration and transition…since always. Organizing that support under the label of “gender doula work” and making that into a profession (similar to a birth doula or a death doula), is a recent thing, and I am one of the original people who did so. I got the idea to do this work while listening to a podcast with Erica Livingston, who was talking about how there should be doulas for every threshold of life.
Thats when the idea came to me, and I dismissed it immediately. It wasn’t until I spent many months in deep questioning, exploration, and personal growth that I realized that I was being called to gender doula work. When I got this idea I googled everything I could think of, and found nothing. Shortly after I started, I found Kamryn Wolf, who had gotten the idea around the same time as me. We connected, but were both very busy and trying to make this work happen, and weren’t able to work very closely together.
Which is all to say, I have been building this profession from the ground up since early 2019. I have been seeing clients since January, 2020. There is no set path to doing this work. No class, no program, no licensing or accreditation body, no legal framework, no professional association except my little group. So when you ask me how to become a gender doula, its really hard to know where to begin.
Also, I am still building. Most people have never heard of a gender doula. Most people don’t know what it is or what we do or how to find one. I am building that awareness as I build my brand, which is part of why my brand is “The Gender Doula.” If people knew what a gender doula was I might have tried to be more poetic or metaphorical, but here we are. My goal is not to build only my business, it is to build a new model for gender care and support, to create a new profession. But I need to create my business first.
To be clear, when I’m talking about being a gender doula, I’m talking about the work I do. That is, providing full spectrum support to folks who are questioning, exploring, or transitioning their gender. I wrote about what “full-spectrum support” means in this context, and I’ve also written about gender doula work here.
In short, I can’t tell you how to become a gender doula. Not yet. So I have tried to create something of a helpful guide for how to think about this topic. I have done so by asking you, reader, several deeply considered and very pointed questions. I do not want you to tell me your answers, but I want you to know them, to sit with them, to work with them, to feel them. These are vital questions.
If you are in the research and/or planning phase and are interested in pivoting your work to being a gender doula, I invite you to sit deeply with the following questions.
Why do I want to do this work?
What qualifies me to do this work?
What skills do I need to learn to be able to do this work?
What knowledge do I need to cultivate to be able to help clients through transition?
How do I want to support clients?
When you've answered these questions, I want you to go back and sit with them again. I'm going to write about each question, starting with:
Why do I want to do this work?
Many of us who are attracted to healing professions are attracted to them because we have been harmed. For some, this can mean that we are seeking to heal ourselves through healing others. For others, this can mean that we are seeking love, attention, approval, etc. through a profession. I have seen how badly this can go with therapists, doctors, nurses, and even community members who elevate themselves to a place of authority or to the label of "healer."
Be deeply honest and deeply compassionate with yourself. Are you drawn to this work out of a desire to heal yourself? And if not, then what work have you done to heal? What work do you continue to do? How do you practice accountability in your healing work? How do you hold the pain, trauma, grief, and healing of others?
Please understand: if you do this work, you will cause harm. This is not avoidable and it is a function of being human and working with other humans. You are accountable for doing everything in your power to minimize that harm. You are also responsible for creating your own structures of accountability more broadly. I recommend reading up on accountability, healing, transformative justice, harm reduction, etc. I also recommend finding mentors who can hold you in honesty and grace through these moments.
To be clear, I am not saying "You must be perfect and healed to do this work," because that would be impossible and also hypocritical. I am neither of those things. But I would say that you need to be well on your healing journey to do this work. If you are in the middle of crisis, or if you have not worked with others toward healing, if you have not developed robust self reflection tools, tools for regulating your nervous system, spiritual and energetic support tools, and if you don't have professionals to hold you through crisis or challenge, then those are vital to get in place before you start seeing clients.
Asking yourself why you want to do this work can also help you figure out if this is actually the work you want to do. I got to my own "why" through realizing that I wanted to make the world a better place for trans people. I realized this, examined my personal strengths and weaknesses, and decided to pursue academia/research. It wasn't until I was well on that path that I realized that there was another way I could make the world a better place for trans people, and that I was being called to something else.
But frankly, there are many ways that one can make the world a better place for trans people! That dream could have lead me so many different directions! Finding this one took time, effort, spiritual practice, conversations, contemplation, and much more. Consider the why, consider your self, consider the parts of you that you are ashamed of, that you struggle with, and that frighten you. You will need to learn to make these parts into deeply held friends to do this work. You will need to know how to walk through the underworld.
What qualifies me to do this work?
A point of clarity - I do not think that you need any advanced degree to do this work. The academy is a violent and traumatic place that has been built on the principles of racial capitalism and white supremacy. I think that there are many types of community work that happen outside of the non-profit industrial complex, outside of public health, outside of therapist school, and outside of the academy that can prepare you for this work. But if you are going to do this work, you must know what it is that prepared you and qualifies you.
For example, if your main experience with and understanding of transition comes from your own experience + social media, you are not prepared to do this work. Every transition is different. Every gender exploration journey has its own pathways and unique twists and turns. People only share a fraction of themselves publicly, if they share at all, and only in specific ways. There is no substitute for actually talking to trans people deeply, for talking to trans people who do not look like you, who do not share your identity, who do not come from your same background.
Getting the absolute broadest range of deep experience you can with different trans folks is vital to this work. Because there is a massive difference between hearing people talking about "what I wish I'd known about transition" on social media and holding someone through the complexity of their own identity and journey. There is an immense difference between reading or hearing the processed thoughts of someone who has been on a gender journey, and walking beside someone as they are on a gender journey.
What qualified me to do this work was not my PhD. And also my full, decade long research experience is an irreplaceable aspect of my preparation for gender doula work. Not only did I learn about gender and about what it was like for me - a white, masculine person - to go through gender transition. I intentionally spent time listening to people whose experiences were nothing like mine. I looked at the aggregate data, like the National Transgender Survey, but I also read and conducted interviews with all kinds of trans people, met folks all over America and the world, asked a lot of questions, took in a lot of information.
I learned how to recognize my own biases and over time, how to shift them. I learned how to see where the community had gotten things wrong, and how those things had been corrected or not corrected over time. I talked to people who worked with trans people, studied the systems, saw how fucked up they are. I learned about trans history, read the words of trans people from decades ago, learned about various controversies and arguments.
I will never know what it feels like to struggle with the intersections of racism and transphobia and the way those with more melanin or other racialized features are treated in gendered spaces. I am not the ideal gender doula to hold these experiences or these folks, and no amount of research or book learning or community building or conversation will ever change that.
But it would be completely unethical to take that and use it as an excuse not to learn, to grow, to do everything in my power to create less harm. And that holds true across every iteration of this work.
Other qualifications include my doula trainings, my own spiritual journey, my personal experiences, my years as a service worker, a retail worker, a manager, a personal cook, a tutor and teacher. My experience being a little witchy kid in a conservative christian home. My path away from that religion, all the way to hard atheism and back to my earthy folk magic practice. My gender studies background and all of the incredible teachers I had along the way. The classes I have taken and keep taking outside the academy. My daily energy work practices. My trauma history and the work I've done to heal.
These are some of my qualifications. There are more. Yours may be completely different. What are they?
What skills do I need to learn to be able to do this work?
When I was first called to this work, I realized that while I had a lot of knowledge, there were gaps in my skills. I knew how to hold people - I've been doing that forever. I knew how to teach and how to listen, how to give advice, how to meet people where they were at, how to research, how to troubleshoot and problem solve.
I had no idea at all how to run a business, how to pay sole proprietor taxes, how to set up a scheduling system or write a contract or onboard clients, how to manage the accounting for a small business, how to protect my own energy when holding deep space for others. I had a lot of the raw skills for this work, but there was a sharp imbalance between my raw skills for gender doula work (which were quite robust!) and my raw skills for almost any other facet of owning a business.
I did a ton of research, I talked to people, I read books, I took classes, I went to two doula mentorship trainings, I connected with people in my community and in my area. Since starting my business, I have also received free legal and accounting help from Start Small Think Big, who saved my life by getting me set up with an incredible accountant, setting me up with lawyers who wrote important things that I didn't understand (like the terms and conditions of my website) and got my name, The Gender Doula, trademarked.
Please take note: I am not rich or even middle class and my family has no money. I live in one of the most expensive cities in America and I have never made it out of the "low income" category. In fact, looking at the income guidelines, I've never even broken the "Very Low Income" cap during a single tax year of my adult life. I did trades - my website design was done on trade, my logo was created on trade (and done by my sibling, who is an artist), and even the resources list on my website was done on trade. I also received scholarships and other support. And I leveraged my academic funding to support me when my business could not…which means, of course, that I had to start my business while also actively writing my dissertation (while also dealing with chronic illness, some of which was untreated and undiagnosed for the first 1.5 years I was doing this work.)
I have also continued to invest in business classes, marketing classes, trainings about taxes, and in addition to that, classes about somatics, breathwork, other modalities, and forms of self care. This has meant sacrificing in many other areas, working out payment plans, partial scholarships, trades, etc. I have joined professional spaces that have felt supportive and have done my best to consistently learn and grow in these areas. And that's not including the things I just taught myself - like how to use TikTok, how to use Instagram, and how to set up MailChimp, etc.
I started with some incredible skills, but I needed a LOT more to get where I am today. So what skills do you need? How can you learn them? What would it take for you to create a business? And crucially: who can help you?
What knowledge do I need to cultivate to be able to help clients through gender exploration and transition?
This is similar to the above points, but different enough to have its own category. I'll give an example.
Even with the qualifications I described above and the skills, There was knowledge that I needed to cultivate. For example, the wide and wonderful world of estradiol, progesterone, anti-androgens, SERMs, and other medical steps that folks take to hormonally modify a body that produces its own testosterone. Being a trans man, the process of hormonal transition is comparatively uncomplicated. It's testosterone…more, or less. Recently some anti-androgens have joined this simple drug, to various effect, but it is dead simple compared to what my transfeminine clients deal with.
And there's more. I had to cultivate a lot more knowledge on topics like autism/ADHD and trans identity, I have to consistently refresh my knowledge about various top and bottom surgical options, and I never stop learning more about state and local guidelines around legal transition as well as the labyrinthian horror of insurance navigation.
I have a background in women's fashion from a retail perspective, plus I've always loved clothes and fashion and had an estrogenic body for like 28 years, so that helps with some things. And also, my knowledge about women's fashion requires consistent updates.
I also try to keep resource lists that are curated to specific experiences (something I am always behind on, because I never organize them and rely on the notes app search function to find things) and to keep up with emerging research. I am in WPATH and USPATH and various Facebook groups. I talk to other trans people and scholars and read books constantly.
Even with all of that, there's so much I don't know, and this is where those research skills come in handy. I am a very good researcher. If nothing else, my doctoral education has given me that. I also have people I can reach out to with questions, and other people with things like institutional access who can help me with different papers. If something in in academic journals but not publicly available, I am pretty good and summarizing and translating it for clients. You do not need these same skills sets, but you will need to be in community with people who can help with these things.
Ideally, I would love if gender doulas could pool resources to send a few people to various major conferences each year, and those people could summarize the panels they attended for everyone. Someday.
So, what knowledge do you need? How robust is your understanding of medical transition? Social transition? The differences between transition in different geographic areas? How to find clothes? How to find providers? How to get help with finding answers that you can't find? Trans history in the US or elsewhere? Trans culture in the US or elsewhere? These are some of the many pools of knowledge that I dip into and out of every day.
How do I want to support clients?
Lets say you read all of the above (good job!) and you're like, "Okay, I don't want to be that kind of gender doula. I want to __________." Awesome. That's great! Because that’s what this last question is all about.
How do YOU, specifically, want to support clients? Because I know that I am not the right gender doula for everyone. I wish deeply that I had a whole huge list of folks, each with specific strengths, that could support people in all different ways. In fact, if gender doulas were more plentiful and robust, I would probably just specialize in supporting people who wanted to explore gender with tarot, astrology, ritual, animistic study, and spells!
Lets say you read the above and you recognize huge swaths of this work that I didn't even put in here. Lets say you see huge gaps in what I've written here. Well, me too…this is already so long, and its just the barest scratch on the surface of what I could say about all of this. And also - I invite you to start from that place.
Because here's the facts - you have unique magic, unique insight, and unique skills. And yes, you will need to add to those things in order to make this work as a profession. But those aspects of you are absolutely necessary, they are precious, and they are irreplaceable. If you read through all of the above and you still want to pursue this work, then I invite you to spend time really sitting with this question.
AND ALSO - maybe you read through all of the above and realized that you wanted to support trans and gender diverse folks in other ways. Maybe you
Want to become a somatics practitioner and help trans people get in touch with their bodies
Want to support trans people after surgery, in person
Want to work with trans youth to create better policy, better housing, or spaces outside the government and non-profit industrial complex for them to thrive
Want to specialize in helping neurodivergent trans people find community
Want to focus on body autonomy and health-at-every-size nutrition or activity/physical therapy for trans people
Want to make art or poetry or zines or shirts or other creative products
Want to create herbal medicine for trans people/transition
Want to become a medical researcher who creates better options for trans people
Want to write books about trans people
Etc. etc. etc..
What I am saying is, there are many roads, many avenues. So if this is the one, that's awesome. But give yourself the space to follow your experience, your dreams, your desires, your skills, your interests, and your needs. Do you want to be a gender doula? Gender doula work could include many of the options above, but again, is a focus on full-spectrum support.
If you have read this entire piece, if you have sat with each question, taken time, and sat with It again, and you have come to the conclusion that this is in fact the work you want to do…I can't wait to know you and to see what you create.
If you still want mentorship from me, I do hope to offer group mentorship within the next 3-5 years, and I am available for consulting 1:1 at my hourly rate. Again, you're welcome to sign up for my email newsletter. I would love to have you! And I hope that no matter what you choose, you take that drive to help trans folks and alchemize it into something beautiful, something that nourishes you, and something that nourishes our community.