This article is an abridged version of the talk that Taylor Bolinger gave at the Queering Psychedelics II conference in San Francisco in April 2023.
In 1656, Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from his Sephardic congregation in Amsterdam for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” (Nadler, 2022). They reaffirmed this ban as recently as December 2021, which “remains in force for all time and cannot be rescinded” (Aderet & Hanau, 2021). Scholars assume that this decision referred to his denial of the immortal soul, rejection of a transcendent God, and his claims that the Torah was neither divine nor binding on Jews (Nadler, 2022).
In his exile, I find Spinoza a potent allegory for the transgender experience; abandoned by his family and the community of his birth, he was forced to create a community of his own that would accept him.
Spinoza’s philosophy was radical partly for its focus on bodies and their affects. One of his most famous quotes is, “We talk so much about the Mind and God, but we don’t even know what the body can do” (Nadler, 2022).
Spinoza believed that the Cartesian dualism of mind and body represented two attributes of a larger whole. He referred to this as “Substance,” or “Deus Sive Natura,” which translates to God or Nature.
Scholars have compared his philosophy to the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta (Nadler, 2022). In this article, I want to weave together two threads: Spinozan naturalism and my experience as a social worker and psychedelic organizer.
On Spinozan Naturalism
The comparison between Spinoza and psychedelics may seem odd because he was a philosophical naturalist, but not in a reductive way. He describes a pantheistic naturalism, where minds and bodies are the attributes perceptible to human consciousness of an eternal, infinite, impersonal divinity indistinguishable from the laws of nature.
Human cognition and emotion are thus parts of nature, though we may not understand them subjectively. There are certain moments when we can perceive an intuition, which allows us to see a flash of things in this context of timeless, unitive “Substance,” and therefore understand the necessity of all things, including our own lives. He calls this form of awareness the intellectual love of god or “Blessedness.” In a recent publication, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes compared this state of mind to the experience of 5-MEO-DMT (2023).
However, we usually have only a “relative, partial and subjective picture of how things presently seem” (Nadler, 2022). Thus, we must undertake the considerable work of reason to understand the nexuses of causation and the webs of relationships which show us the how and why of things, so that we can begin to approach that sense of intuitive necessity in our daily lives.
It follows that because we are typically unable to take the god’s eye view and understand the flow of nature’s processes, we are affected by objects and others in the world. This provokes a corresponding change in our mental and physical capacities, which Spinoza calls “an increase or decrease in our power of acting” (LeBuffe, 2022).
Joy, for Spinoza, is the movement or passage to a greater capacity for action. Sadness is the passage to a lesser capacity. Love is joy accompanied by an awareness of the external cause. We love that object that benefits us and causes us joy. Hate is the same, “sadness with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (LeBuffe, 2022).
Hope is “joy from a future or past thing whose outcome we doubt” (LeBuffe, 2022). Fear is an uncertain thing whose presence will bring sadness. Because we cannot always see things from the eternal perspective, we “pray, worship, make offerings, sacrifice and engage in all the various rituals of popular religion” to bring ourselves back to a degree of that state (LeBuffe, 2022).
As we increase our knowledge, our minds may act without being acted upon to the same extent. We can cease being controlled by our passions, running to or from things beyond our control. For Spinoza, this is freedom. Our actions will necessarily flow from the attributes of the divine nature of which our minds and bodies are modes, and we will be liberated from the emotional ups and downs of this life. You can see, perhaps, the similarity to Vedanta, which also seeks knowledge of divinity for purposes gaining control of our emotions so that we may achieve enlightenment.
New scientific results also harmonize with and substantiate Spinoza’s ideas. In recent years, studies have begun to show the effect that psychedelics have on the body, such as “modulatory effects on immune responses by altering signaling pathways involved in inflammation, cellular proliferation, and cell survival,” which promises “treatment modalities in […] autoimmune and chronic inflammatory conditions, infections, and cancer” (Szabo, 2015). The body keeps the score, as they say, but perhaps it could be induced to play a new game.
There is an underlying unity in transness that we simply lack the perceptual tools to recognize and integrate.
We can see the way bodies (both collective and individual) affect one another in how conservative lawmakers are negatively affected by their perception of transgender bodies. They view them as “abominable heresies.” In response, they craft legislation that affects them negatively in turn. And despite the dualistic way our culture looks at the transgender experience as being “born in the wrong body,” I want to suggest that there is an underlying unity in transness that we simply lack the perceptual tools to recognize and integrate.
On the Gendered Body and Psychedelics
The body is a relatively neglected element of psychedelic thought. I argue that the histories of affective relations we carry in our bodies motivate much of our psychedelic experience.
The most thorough treatment of the body in psychedelic thought is found in yoga theory. But yogic practice was designed to prepare the body for meditation. So, I want to pause in the moments before yoga begins, in the aches and pains of yesterday and last night, to think about how our queer, transgender, and gender diverse bodies live in the world.
This focus on bodies can perhaps feel dehumanizing. I am more than my body, we protest. My body hurts, aches, it hungers, it drags me down. And it’s true. We are more than our bodies. We are each entire worlds unto ourselves. But the body is also the site of intimacy, pleasure, and camaraderie. And it is the surface through which we experience each other.
I chose to frame this article in terms of bodies because we live in a period in which the rising forces of global fascism seek to eliminate my transgender body and the bodies of everyone like me. The body is, after all, the surface along which gender transition plays out.
In psychedelic culture, we spend much of our time focusing on what Spinoza referred to as the “sad passions” (LeBuffe, 2022). I especially want to elaborate on a few of the “sad passions” or kinds of trauma that LGBTQ people carry with them. Specifically: pain, hate, disgust, and shame. It is important to note that all of the work on sad passions is also undergirded by the affect of joy, the ecstatic moment of psychedelic breakthrough that carries us upward, its power infusing our own.
Our feelings begin as sensations, are recognized as emotions, judged based on personal and social histories. Following the work of feminist Sarah Ahmed, it becomes a question of how bodies turn towards or away from one another, how surfaces are drawn between bodies, and how bodies align with different social collectivities.
The sensation of these collisions forms our sense of the surfaces of our bodies as apart from others. We tend to forget about the edges of our bodies until something impacts us to remind us (Ahmed, 2014). This sense of boundarylessness is also one of the essential elements of the psychedelic experience.
The sensation of these collisions forms our sense of the surfaces of our bodies as apart from others. We tend to forget about the edges of our bodies until something impacts us to remind us. This sense of boundarylessness is also one of the essential elements of the psychedelic experience.
If pain draws a boundary around our body, hate pulls us away from some bodies and towards others. Hate is against something or someone, but it works by aligning them with a group. As social beings, we cannot turn away from one group without turning toward another (Ahmed, 2014). But the individual is also produced through alignment with collectives.
Without transgression a border would not be required. The border as an object evokes disgust, and disgust evokes the border as a distinct object. To be “disgusted is to be affected by what one has rejected” (Ahmed, 2014). In disgust, the body recoils. The movement towards and then out, marking the violation of a border, is what sickens us, and causes us to expel the boy that has violated the border (Ahmed, 2014).
Ahmed describes disgust as closely related to the process of social abjection. Thus, disgust at our vulnerability to what is below us maintains the power of what is above, as it assigns these attributes to specific bodies, objects, and spaces (Ahmed, 2014).
Shame propels us to hide from the gaze of another, as we have been seen by others as failing to uphold some social norm. It is a painful curling inward on the self, away from others (Ahmed, 2014). But this pain cannot be attributed to an object, unlike other forms of pain. So, the feeling of shame domesticates us and prevents us from moving away from established norms, often enforced by the love of one’s family and the withdrawal of that love (Ahmed, 2014).
Shame propels us to hide from the gaze of another, as we have been seen by others as failing to uphold some social norm. It is a painful curling inward on the self, away from others (Ahmed, 2014). But this pain cannot be attributed to an object, unlike other forms of pain. So, the feeling of shame domesticates us and prevents us from moving away from established norms, often enforced by the love of one’s family and the withdrawal of that love (Ahmed, 2014).
Indeed, most of us queers are intimately familiar with all these feelings. That discomfort is an artifact of bodily interaction in one’s environment. Queer bodies cannot be at ease in a cisnormative environment (Ahmed, 2014). They cannot sink into spaces and lose track of surfaces. Queer desires become an injury to the family and social norms, something to be concealed from the view of others, the labor of concealment eventually appearing as something natural (Ahmed, 2014).
I want to frame the “reemergence” of transgender identities as one form within a more extensive gender diversity. Gender diversity includes “people who have culturally and language-specific experiences, identities or expressions, which may or may not be based on or encompassed by Western conceptualizations of gender or the language used to describe it” (WPATH, 2022).
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On Ritual, Gender, and Psychedelics
Throughout history, gender diverse people have held places of ritual significance in their cultures, particularly in cultures that utilize entheogenic plants. From the Aztec xōchihuah, Navajo nadleehi, Lakota winkte, Andean quariwarmi, Fang a bele nnem e bango, and Indian hijra, to the Scythian anarya, Scandinavian seithr, and English bǣddel; gender diverse people have occupied sacred places both exalted and the dejected. Both exaltation and dejection are bound by ritual and incommensurate with the operation of day-to-day life, suggesting an underlying sacred unity regardless of the social position of gender diverse people in any particular society (Bataille, 1979).
If we then extend our lens to look at contemporary Western gender transition in terms of ritual as well, we see an abjected state in which “power is handed over to family members, friends, communities, and legal institutions to decide if and when to reincorporate the individual under a new gender identity” (Schindler 2015). This reincorporation often never takes place.
As a result, gender diverse people have built their own rituals. Stylized ball culture and its attendant houses, crossdresser conventions, Pride marches, extended families of fictive kin, and Days of Visibility and Remembrance all serve to recreate the social support withdrawn by their birth kin (Muraco 2006). Even prosaic rites of passage in transgender life, like doctor visits, gender marker changes and surgeries, are rituals of this sort. I also know of two transgender women working on projects to create safe spaces within ayahuasca culture for gender diverse people.
Being gender diverse in psychedelic ceremonies requires seeing ritual in a less romantic way. Despite resistance to dominant norms, psychedelic settings are often uncomfortable for gender diverse people. We must think in concrete terms about other participants and their behaviors. There is a felt tension between one’s queer body and cissexist social norms, and that is a cause for wariness.
Ritual is marked as relatively more prestigious in relation to social power than other activities, as it uses a series of strategic and contextual settings to set itself apart from ordinary life. It creates restricted access to a container space in which interactions occur in a structured way (Bell, 1992).
Ritual is also conditioned by a “heighten[ed] formality of movement and speech,” the involvement of a specialist, a routine schedule of occurrence, “special objects, texts, and dress.” It also relies on “verbal and gestural combinations that evoke or purport to be the ways things have always been done; preparations that demand particular physical or mental states; [and] a particular constituency not assembled for any other activities” (Bell 1992).
There are many forms of this ritual practice in psychedelic life. From the informality of the so-called recreational trip to a burn or rave, to the explicit rituality of ayahuasca. The whole variety depends upon a temporal and spatial container and a range of prescribed practices to ensure a successful experience.
The consent or resistance to dominant forms of power in ritual operate ineffably at the body level as comfort or discomfort.
The consent or resistance to dominant forms of power in ritual operate ineffably at the body level as comfort or discomfort. This resistance is felt to be a pivotal element in psychedelic culture. But some forms of consent still implicit in its worldview often pass unnoticed.
The ritual environment and the participants’ bodies within it work to construct “a circular process that tends to be misrecognized, if it is perceived at all, as values and experiences impressed upon the person and community from sources of power and order beyond it” (Bell 1992).
This sociocosmic process is fundamental to participants’ sense that the ritual has been successful, and they have been redeemed within the order of things. A sense authorized by whatever spirit one believes in. This is also an increase in their power to act that is mediated through various cognitive, emotional, and practical schemes that participants internalize during the ritual (Bell, 1992).
Another reason I adhere to Spinozan naturalism here is because the most “metaphysical” forms of psychedelic thought are often the most strongly gendered. Even medicalized therapy procedure is drawn from a secularized model of psychedelic ritual. So, it still maintains some pre-existing ideological biases, like the gendered therapeutic dyad.1
On Psychedelic Spaces in Texas
My psychedelic ritual home is Myschievia, a regional burn in North Texas. It’s a small event compared to Burning Man, with less than a thousand people, founded by a group of troubled young Gen-Xers from Denton, Texas. The cooler older cousins I always needed growing up. Myschievia used to be a notoriously intense and chaotic event. People from other burns avoided it. But as we have grown up and become ourselves together, it has mellowed considerably.
It also used to be a much straighter burn. When Myschievia started in 2005, it was much harder to convince minorities to camp in the woods in the middle of rural east Texas. But things have changed in that regard as well. The Millennial cohort was always polyamorous and bisexual, and today Myschievia is not just queer, but transgender as well. Honestly, it was the sense of safety this community provided me that allowed me to feel comfortable enough to transition at all.
But I began to take psychedelic healing truly seriously after my partner overdosed on heroin in 2014. They survived, fortunately. This began a healing process where, using the work of Stanislav Grof on psychedelic therapy, we took turns holding space for one another while we dealt with our core developmental traumas. For them, the violence of their childhood, and for me, my repressed transgender identity.
After years on the Myschievia planning committee, I decided it was time for something different and left to help start Decriminalize Nature Dallas. I was introduced to the organization at the first Queering Psychedelics conference. We experienced moderate success as an organization, but due to the state of Texas politics, I’ve been asked not to talk about it publicly.
However, I also experienced a considerable amount of transphobia and queerphobia in that position. Especially in my role as moderator of the Facebook page. Whenever I posted about LGBTQ psychedelic topics, so-called libertarians would come out of the woodwork to trash the idea that unnatural LGBTQ people belonged in the psychedelic community.
In Texas, libertarians are one of the major subgroups of psychedelic users. Their cultural values range from open-minded to conservative. Fortunately, at Myschievia, we kept them contained by community advocacy in favor of minority inclusion. But in the larger psychedelic community, there is no such barrier. One of the board members of Decriminalize Nature Dallas was a libertarian who would go on to become radicalized by QAnon after the organization ceased operations during the Coronavirus pandemic.
I’ve often been asked why I didn’t leave Texas and move to the West Coast. The truth is twofold. Firstly, I did try to move to Europe and had to come home after a year because I was homesick. Secondly, I’m a fighter, and I value the bonds of loyalty I’ve forged in the adversity of an unforgiving environment. I did my undergraduate at the most conservative public university in the US, Texas A&M, and not all my friends survived that experience. My psychedelic naturalism was forged in the fire of religious fundamentalism, which is why I still hesitate at narratives that place the spirit before the world.
I was asked to participate in the Queering Psychedelics book and then this conference after I met Bia at a MAPS Conference in Austin where I spoke about Decriminalize Nature Dallas. I reminded the audience that places like Texas are the front lines of medicine work, and that so much work remains to be done.
I have two adopted nieces who are trans teens who live down the street from me, and there’s another trans boy in our neighborhood. Fortunately, their parents are affirming. But LGBTQ kids are four hundred percent overrepresented among unaccompanied minors. They are exclusively homeless because of family rejection. Many of my trans friends experienced this when they were young. In my social work internship, I worked at a Transitional Living Program for homeless teenagers. I had the opportunity to be the first trans adult several trans teenagers had ever met. I was the first person ever to affirm them and show them that they could have a life and succeed.
I may have to leave Texas, but it won’t be until I’m forced out. As a social worker and advocate, my beliefs compel me to fight for as long as possible. I owe it to those kids. I will not run. I will smuggle them out if I must. But I will not leave them.
On Gender Gender Diversity Transforming the Psychedelic Space
I have to admit something. Psychedelics did not heal me; transition healed me. Facial feminization surgery spontaneously cured my nineteen-year dependence on cannabis. But, and I don’t admit this much, I realized I was trans because of psychedelics. It was a visionary flash in which a feminine being of golden light appeared before me in darkness. I realized that darkness that I’d been enveloped in for so long had been her sleeping form.
She informed my masculine persona that he was a shell she had created to protect herself from a dangerous world, but now that she was safe, she was back and would require the use of the body again. Thank you, sorry, but please get your affairs in order and say goodbye.
To many who profess a psychedelic spirituality, a fundamental unity and nonduality are revealed to them in their ritual practice. Transness may seem to them like a misapprehension of that sense of oneness. As a border object myself, I have gotten stares of derision and disgust at flow jams, integration circles, yoga classes, an eco-farm, a local psychedelic medicine conference, and a New Age event center in the Central American jungle. These microaggressions illustrate the affective complicity of even otherwise open-minded people in the dominant system of power relations.
The subtle politics of glances also extends to having one’s identity invalidated during ceremony, being avoided in group settings, or not being allowed to participate due to strict gender roles, as in traditional UDV ayahuasca churches.
For example, a local festival, Medicine For the People, has strongly gendered components. Would I be included, or would I be confronted there? I feel too much shame to even try.
Of course, gender diverse people are vulnerable to sexual violence in and around a ritual setting in the same manner that cis women are. To have such potential for violence hanging over one’s head may impede the ability to engage in ceremony. The question lingers, “Is this space safe to relax my hypervigilance and be comfortable?”
Being transgender in psychedelic spaces is often accompanied by the feeling of being radically alone. Most pagans, for example, worship a system of divinities centering an explicit gender binary and have long struggled with transgender acceptance.
Normative bodies can safely believe only mind or spirit exists. But feminine, gender diverse, and racialized people must know that the body is irreducibly social.
Normative bodies can safely believe only mind or spirit exists. But feminine, gender diverse, and racialized people must know that the body is irreducibly social. It is the site through which all the affective tensions of collective life are transmitted and played out.
We would not be here today if the psychedelic movement had no trouble accepting LGBTQ people. In my recently published thesis, I found that 86% of therapists, in Texas, admittedly, are not competent to work with transgender clients (Bolinger, 2022). On the other hand, gender-affirming treatment has also been shown to be strongly correlated with improved mental health outcomes (Turban et al., 2022). One study found sixty percent lower odds of depression and seventy-three percent lower odds of suicidality in youths who received gender-affirming treatment (Turban et al., 2022). Which is, and I say this somewhat jokingly, even more effective than psychedelic therapy.
Our movement here today desires to produce difference within the psychedelic movement in the same manner as the LGBTQ and psychedelic movements seeks to produce difference within the broader context of social reproduction. So, I hope this talk can be a framework for thinking about psychedelic gender diversity and produce a difference within a difference.
Perhaps we can use the discomfort we are affected by in cisnormative psychedelic settings in a generative rather than constraining way (Ahmed, 2010). We can learn to embrace discomfort, our lack of ease with normative scripts, and face the uncertainty of where the discomfort may take us with excitement (Ahmed, 2010).
Perhaps our task might also be to remember that the past is living rather than dead; that it lives in “wounds that remain open in the present”, and to break its hold (Ahmed, 2010). Part of this will require being open to being affected by what one cannot know or feel and a sense of affectionate solidarity with other minorities, not least indigenous people.
If the psychedelic community intends to heal the deeper traumas of our society, we must transcend the colonized gender binary and cease the ongoing violence, because in truth, psychedelic conversion therapy is still going on (Wells 2019). We can start as individuals and look inside ourselves at the damage done by capitalist colonialization. How are our individual and intergenerational traumas situated within that historical violence? We can sit with the collective trauma that we, as white-coded subjects, are complicit in. And how can we repair that damage? How much of ourselves have we excised to conform to socialized gender expectations? To our race and class? What demands like this have we made of others? Why?
It is also impingent upon us to stand in material solidarity with Indigenous land rights and ways of knowing. Looking at human history and culture, it is evident that gender diverse people flourish when socially supported, even coming to play vital social roles. As a two-spirit native once said, queer and Indigenous “liberations are interlocked” (Pruden & Edomo, 2016).
But ultimately this liberation will require collective and institutional action. What would our movement look like if we centered those on the receiving end of social violence? If we created spaces for the trauma of the abject to come to the surface? This would require a sense of safety that would have to be carefully cultivated, and it would be up to us to safeguard its flowering.
Something I didn’t hear enough about at Queering Psychedelics II was psychedelic power and queer power. Psychedelics help us develop our inner power, and I want to close by arguing that queer and trans people should let that reflect into the outer world by taking direct action, building and connecting affinity groups, and seeking to take institutional power.
In doing so, we could open ourselves and our movement to the affect of trans joy, increase our capacity for genuine resistance to dominant norms, and maybe, finally, to attain true Blessedness.
Full Trans Liberation Now. Thank you.
Art by Luana Lourenço.
Notes
1 For more on ritual, gender, and psychedelics, see Bolinger’s chapter, “Gender Rituals and Gendered Ritual: Reflections of a Transgender Activist in the Psychedelic Community, in Queering Psychedelics: From Oppression to Liberation in Psychedelic Medicine.
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