Gender Rituals: Creating a Sacred Space for Your Body, Your Gender, and Your Becoming

by Eli Lawliet PhD

Rituals and practices for reclaiming your gender journey, nurturing trans joy, and coming home to your innate, embodied sacredness

Drawing from his lived experience as a trans person, his training as a gender doula, and years of leading ritual and body-based healing work, Eli Lawliet offers tools for both personal transformation and collective survival—so you can live your gender journey wholly and unapologetically

Gender Rituals is a radically inclusive guide to honoring and navigating your gender journey—and reconnecting to your body as an ally.

Created by gender doula Eli Lawliet, PhD—the pioneer of gender doula work and a trusted guide to trans, non-binary, and gender-expansive people worldwide—this book offers gentle yet fierce practices to help you reconnect with your body, honor the milestones that matter to you, and cultivate trans joy…no matter where you are on your gender journey.

Whether you’re releasing an old name, claiming a new one, or celebrating the transformations of HRT, Lawliet shows how to imbue your gender-affirming with meaning and ritual. Lawliet also

Why this work is for you—regardless of your relationship to gender, how you identify, and whether you’re new to spiritual or ritual practice
There’s no such thing as “not trans enough”—and how to experience your gender journey as profound, affirming, and valuable, whether you have a “destination” or not
Foundational skills for ritual and energetic work, like cleansing, grounding, attuning, and shielding against transphobia and harm
How to access the wisdom of your transcestors and community
How to support identity-aligned choices

In a world that tries to define you, erase you, or make you small, Gender Rituals helps you reclaim your gender journey as sacred, powerful, and fully your own—an act of healing, resistance, and joy.

Genres: Queer

288 pages, Paperback

Expected publication August 25, 2026

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who Gets to Decide What a Transformation Means?
Eli Lawliet’s “Gender Rituals” Returns Names, Bodies, Hormones, Surgery, and Spiritual Practice to the Person Living Through Them.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 10, 2026


“Thirty Seconds” – Drawn from Eli Lawliet’s “Gender Rituals,” this saffron-lit interior reduces transformation to its quietest beginning: one body, one small movement, and enough undisturbed time for attention to arrive before anyone else decides what that attention should mean.

During one of the smallest exercises in Eli Lawliet’s “Gender Rituals: Creating a Sacred Space for Your Body, Your Gender, and Your Becoming,” the reader is asked to wiggle their toes for thirty seconds. Notice movement. Notice sensation. If toes are inaccessible, choose fingers, facial muscles, some other patch of bodily territory where contact does not immediately become conflict. It is an almost comic instruction in a book stocked with candles, altars, divination, hormone rituals, surgery blessings, and relationships with the dead. Yet those thirty seconds tell me more about Lawliet’s method than any of the grander apparatus. A person estranged from a body does not necessarily need to be ordered into loving it. First they need enough quiet to notice that it is there.

Eli Lawliet, a gender doula writing from his own trans experience and an animist spiritual practice, begins from another absence. American life has ceremonies for some thresholds and surprisingly little language for others. A first dose of hormones may arrive in a pharmacy bag. A form can record a new name; it cannot know what the old one carried. Hair falls to a salon floor. Surgery becomes an appointment, a consent form, a recovery schedule. The events happen. Their meanings are left to improvise. Lawliet wants ritual to occupy that gap, giving a change enough form that it can be noticed, witnessed, grieved, welcomed.

Much of “Gender Rituals” is devoted to supplying those forms. Its opening gathers roughly twenty people on a Pacific beach to release names, pronouns, and former understandings of themselves. Participants write in chalk on stones, remember what those identities carried them through, then return the stones to the water before calling in what comes next. Some throw them; some let the tide take them. Later, haircuts, clothing, hormones, baths, scars, names, and medications acquire their own ceremonial weight. Lawliet’s magic is often this plain: an ordinary thing, handled deliberately, is allowed to mean more than its use.


“The Stones” – Along the Pacific edge of “Gender Rituals,” chalked stones, separated bodies, and the incoming tide turn release into something less absolute than erasure – an old name or understanding can be thanked, carried to the water, and relinquished without pretending it never helped someone survive.

Early on, however, the book spends five chapters before gender becomes the pressure organizing its ritual system. Part One teaches timing, customization, cleansing, grounding, shielding, altars, intuition, sigils, divination, and record keeping. Readers already familiar with contemporary magical or wellness traditions may feel the train has checked the tickets and explained emergency procedure twice before leaving. Lawliet’s cautions about appropriation and his accommodations for disability, neurodivergence, money, space, and safety are substantive. But he has a habit of anticipating the reader’s discomfort before the reader has quite had time to feel it.

That caution shapes the prose too. Lawliet writes in a warm, conversational second person, with the cadence of a facilitator who would rather repeat an instruction than let discomfort masquerade as failure. A ritual can be shortened, skipped, repeated, or performed alone. A book about bodily autonomy has no business becoming bossy about candles, and Lawliet rarely does. Still, he often states a point, illustrates it, anticipates resistance, reassures, then circles back. The voice can resemble an excellent spotter who keeps a hand near the bar after you have shown that you can lift it.

Ritual becomes most persuasive when Lawliet lets objects do some of the thinking. Chalk loosening from stone in seawater says more about release than another declaration can. Transphobic residue imagined as grease on a stovetop gives cleansing a physical logic. A phrase practiced before surgery becomes something the mouth can still find when fear narrows language. The body becomes a teammate rather than a defective object. Lawliet is not a stylist of compression. His better gift is to turn abstraction into action: wash it, move it, thank it, cut it loose, set it on a table and come back tomorrow.

In Part Two, that gift begins repaying the long preparation. The sequence is not arbitrary: body, expression, identity, transphobic injury, hormone therapy, surgery, transcestors. Bodily attention comes first, then expression and self-naming, then the social world’s resistance. Medical transition raises the stakes; surgery tests the fantasy of certainty; ancestors widen the solitary self into lineage. By the time surgery arrives, the body has already been practiced as a source of information rather than merely a problem to solve. Lawliet tells readers they may skip around. The deeper argument benefits from not doing so.

Precisely where many self-help books reach for body love, Lawliet slows down. He does not ask a dysphoric, dissociated, traumatized, or simply wary person to leap from estrangement into adoration because an affirmation card says Tuesday is the day. The movement is connection, allyship, trust, love, pleasure. Thirty seconds of toes may lead to imagining the body as a collaborator. Later exercises ask what bodily “yes” and “no” feel like. Only after communication becomes possible does Lawliet approach love. The body is not made sacred by declaration; it becomes something with which one can negotiate.

At heart, those negotiations make the book more interesting than its spiritual furniture. Desire is not obligation. Fear is not refusal. Uncertainty is not proof that a choice is wrong. Bodily sensation is not infallible either, and Lawliet is best when he does not pretend otherwise. His account of beginning testosterone while unable to claim maleness refuses the tidy version of transition in which the self discovers a hidden answer and simply catches up. His body seemed to want something his existing story could not yet authorize. Hormones did not uncover a finished identity waiting backstage. They changed the conditions under which he could understand himself.


“First Dose” – A hand pauses beside an ordinary medication object in “First Dose,” where the smallest gap on the table becomes the threshold: medicine can alter a body, but the meaning of beginning still belongs to the person whose hand must eventually cross the space.

Pressure puts that ethic under its hardest test in the chapter on surgery and regret. Lawliet knows regret has been made politically radioactive. In hostile discourse, its existence is used to discredit gender-affirming care; in defensive affirmative discourse, admitting fear can feel like volunteering evidence for the prosecution. He declines both roles. Some people regret gender-affirming procedures, he says; he has worked with them. People also regret marriages, careers, degrees, moves, and other consequential choices without society suspending agency until prophecy becomes available. A wanted surgery may still terrify. Consent does not become purer by pretending the future can be known.

A book this affirming might easily have made brightness another obligation. Lawliet usually resists that temptation. Gender-affirming clothing can reveal one desired silhouette while making another source of dysphoria newly obvious. Hormones can produce unexpected emotional intensity or a disorienting lack of it. A transphobic encounter can linger after the offending person has vanished. A new name can require gratitude toward an old one rather than its ceremonial execution. Joy matters here, but it is not asked to clean the room before grief, boredom, fear, or ambivalence are allowed inside.


“Before Surgery” – Held inside cooler cobalt architecture and a room that seems more certain than the future, “Before Surgery” gives Lawliet’s hardest argument its visual form: fear can sit beside desire without becoming refusal, and a consequential choice need not arrive with prophecy attached.

Doubt becomes more useful than certainty until Lawliet begins explaining the metaphysics behind the practices. He is explicit about his animist spirituality. He works with astrology and divination, speaks to spirits and transcestors, and regards transness itself as a portal to sacred knowledge. He also tells readers they need not share those beliefs. The difficulty is grammatical as much as philosophical: the prose can use the same calm declarative register for spiritual experience, therapeutic metaphor, client observation, historical claim, and assertions about how unseen forces operate. “Energy” may describe a felt state on one page and an external spiritual force on another.

I do not think the answer is for Lawliet to believe less. A book this spiritually committed would be duller if he handled his cosmology like contraband. The problem is that different sentences ask for different kinds of assent, and the prose does not always mark the change. “This practice helped me hear myself” is not the same proposition as “this is what these forces are doing.” A secular reader can translate a shield into visualization, cleansing into sensory reset, an ancestor altar into historical remembrance. Translation, however, is not agreement.

Meaning is where the rituals become harder to dismiss, even for someone who leaves the metaphysics behind. A doctor can prescribe hormones but cannot decide what the first dose means. A government can recognize a name but cannot consecrate it. A surgeon can alter tissue but cannot determine what is being welcomed, mourned, feared, or released. A stranger can misgender someone without earning permanent jurisdiction over that person’s relationship to their body. Lawliet’s rituals repeatedly return that interpretive work to the person living the event. This is less glamorous than magic, and to my mind more radical.

If private ritual has a political limit, Lawliet mostly knows where it is. He wrote portions of “Gender Rituals” amid intense hostility toward trans lives, and Chapter 9 is explicit about the cumulative effects of misgendering, rhetoric, media exposure, and fear. A shower cannot repeal a law. A protection ritual cannot make a workplace safe. Energetic boundaries cannot manufacture medical access. But after a hostile encounter, a shower can mark the point at which another person’s mistake stops narrating the evening. The book occasionally approaches the self-help temptation to answer public injury with private practice; it is better when it stays at the scale of one person reclaiming an hour.

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“After the Encounter” – In the quiet bathroom of “After the Encounter,” water cannot repair the public world outside the frame, but it can mark the smaller moment when another person’s misrecognition stops being granted the right to narrate the rest of the evening.

Tolerance and recognition are not the same thing. People often demonstrate enlightened acceptance of transition by refusing to make a fuss. Sometimes a fuss, properly designed, is exactly what the moment requires. Not spectacle or interrogation, not the compulsory inspiration in which a trans person must become a symbol before dinner. Simply acknowledgment. Something happened. Someone crossed a threshold. Even wanted change can contain mourning. Even ordinary medication can carry history. Ritual, in Lawliet’s hands, gives that history a body, an object, and a little time.

Repetition is both the instrument of this method and its most persistent drag. Lawliet distrusts the idea that transformation occurs through one grand gesture, preferring tiny practices performed often enough to become relationships. The prose follows that principle too faithfully. Its central assurances – trust yourself, adjust the ritual, proceed according to capacity – recur until their force thins. One wishes the editing had trusted repetition as a ritual principle without making it so fully compositional. “Gender Rituals” could lose meaningful length without losing generosity.

Over time, though, repeated practices change jobs, and that is where the structure earns its keep. Cleansing begins as ritual hygiene and later becomes recovery after transphobic exposure. Grounding starts as spiritual technique and becomes a way to separate bodily information from panic. The body moves from estranged territory to ally, then to source of consent, participant in HRT, partner in surgical change, and finally a defense against other people’s projections. Community begins as an optional setting and becomes witness, protection, lineage, futurity. The same tools return, but the stakes around them have altered.

Put beside neighboring books, Lawliet’s combination sharpens. “A Queer Dharma” by Jacoby Ballard also asks how embodied spiritual practice can address queer and trans life without pretending oppression exists only inside the practitioner’s mind. “My New Gender Workbook” by Kate Bornstein likewise makes the reader work on their own categories rather than merely absorb theory. Lawliet is less formally mischievous than Bornstein and more self-composed in his spiritual system than Ballard. His unusual move is to make ritual answerable to gendered particulars: the first injection, the new garment, the discarded pronoun, fear before an operating room, the wish to be witnessed when “that’s fine” is supportive but still too small.

One of the strangest and most revealing developments comes late, with transcestors. Lawliet uses the term for trans and gender-expansive predecessors while acknowledging that contemporary labels cannot simply be pasted backward onto lives lived under different categories. His spirituality goes further, treating transcestors as presences to address, petition, and thank. Skeptical readers may stop at historical lineage; Lawliet keeps walking into relationship. What saves the section from becoming ancestor-themed décor is an ethical demand. Venerating Marsha P. Johnson, in his account, cannot be separated from caring about the marginalized people with whom Johnson made common cause. If the dead become companions, they may also become inconvenient company.


“The Door Left Open” – The final watercolor turns solitude into the possibility of relation – one living figure, one empty chair, one unfinished doorway, and a slightly warmer pulse of pink within the returning saffron light suggest the transcestor work of “Gender Rituals” without deciding whether the company in the room is memory, history, spirit, or all three at once.

Useful, searching, and occasionally overconfident, “Gender Rituals” lands for me at 81/100, or 4/5 stars. The ritual primer runs long; the prose often says twice what one concrete image has already made clear; the spiritual confidence occasionally outruns the distinctions a wide audience needs. But its better chapters give haircuts, names, hormones, misgendering, surgery, pleasure, and fear a shared ceremonial vocabulary without pretending they all feel the same. By the conclusion, Lawliet’s phrase “trans audacity” pushes that vocabulary outward: if the world was wrong about the limits of one’s own becoming, perhaps some of its other limits deserve suspicion too.

Lawliet’s quietest sacred act may be less mystical than the apparatus suggests. It is not necessarily the candle, altar, card, bath, stone returned to the sea, or voice addressed to a transcestor. It is the decision to give an experience enough attention that its interpretation need not be handed to whoever happens to be watching. Lawliet occasionally tells readers too confidently what the unseen world means. His best rituals do not supply answers. They arrange the conditions for listening: a little room, a body given back its time, a door left open long enough for an answer to arrive.


Compositional Thumbnail Sheet


Character Anatomical / Gesture Study


Faint Pencil Underdrawing


Pencil + First Saffron Wash


Light-and-Value Architecture Study


Proportional Color Swatch / Pigment Ledger


Watercolor Border Details Study


Cover-Color Proportional Wash Map / Translation Chart


Six-Work Series Planning Sheet


Proposed Alternative Full Dust Jacket with Flaps

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.

[Cal · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 Stars!

Thank you to NetGalley and North Atlantic Books for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Gender Rituals by Eli Lawliet was a phenomenal read. As someone who has been a part of alternative spirituality circles for many years, it’s hard to find books that really stand out to me anymore. But Lawliet does exactly that in an extremely intelligent, grounded, and compassionate approach to ritual work. This book not only fills a gap in the literature as a book primarily for a trans audience, but does such an excellent job explaining ritual itself that I think it is essential reading for anyone interested in spiritual practices related to animism, witchcraft, and paganism.

The book is broken down into four main sections: an introduction to ritual, a section on energetic hygiene, a section on gender rituals, and a section on ancestor work. The introduction to ritual itself contains a beautiful explanation as to why ritual is important and the impact of the lack of ritual in our current culture. It’s a section that does an excellent job setting the tone for the rest of the book.

The section on energetic hygiene consists of cleansing, grounding, and shielding. This is a section that could have felt very repetitive considering how foundational these practices are in the spiritual communities that intersect with this book. However, there is a care to Lawliet’s writing where he does such a good job at clearly explaining the mechanics and purpose of a practice that it manages to feel both refreshing and rewarding to read.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to gender rituals. These rituals cover a wide variety of experiences and particularly focus on common experiences in the trans and genderqueer community. There is a lot of ground covered in this section and even if a reader does not resonate with each ritual presented to them, the way that Lawliet presents information also provides the reader with tools to create their own rituals to fit their needs.

The final section of the book is dedicated to working with the ancestors, specifically the transcestors, a deeply queer understanding of ancestor work that encourages readers to connect within and beyond their blood relatives. It’s a very good introduction to ancestor work and also does a good job at providing a framework for ancestor work for people who might be coming from a background with family trauma.

All together Gender Rituals was a joy to read. I was constantly struck by the deep care the author took in creating this book. I’ve been consistently recommending it to people since I read it and look forward to putting it in the hands of readers for years to come.

[August · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and North Atlantic Books for giving me the chance to read this ARC! Gender Rituals is probably one of the most impactful non-fiction self-help/spirituality books I have had the pleasure to read. The author takes the time to thoughtfully set you up to understand the purpose, order, and resources that are provided within. I really liked the way that it goes through some of the basics of energetic hygiene and ritual before really diving into some trans-specific rituals and processes. It's rare that you find a book on the topic of ritual that isn't overly religious or cisnormative so this was a real gift.

I found myself taking notes on the chapters, expanding my definitions of gender affirmation, and being excited to work on myself and my relationships with my transness. I have never really considered mixing my queer identity with my spiritual identity but now that I have, I firmly believe there is a market and need for this kind of work. I genuinely can't wait until this book comes out so I can get my hands on a physical copy to reference and annotate.

[Anisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. This was such a lovely educational read, not just for trans people but for anyone who wants to feel closer to their gender. I loved the pacing and the introductory part of the book, where the author explains how one's gender is an inherent part of our existence and how something as simple as wearing makeup is also a gender ritual! Through the course of the book, I was able to learn a lot about the importance of any ritual and how they impact us and help us ground ourselves and make us feel one with our bodies. I absolutely agree with the author's words that 'if you found this book, it was meant for you.' Absolute 100% recommended to anyone who looking for a good educational/self help book, irrespective of how you identify!!

[Charlie Tombini · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It was so absolutely affirming. The pacing is gentle, and it assumes belonging immediately, like you found the book, and it found you because you needed it. I appreciate how neurodivergent friendly it was, and it has good examples for practical activities and basically tutorials for specific rituals, which is very informative and helpful. I particularly enjoyed the part on which is talked about cultural misappropriation on spitirual spaces, its a very important topic and not talked about nearly enough. I also appreciated the book recommendations and the beautiful book design. It was a nice read.

Thank you, Netgalley and North Atlantic Books, for the eARC. This was an unbiased and honest opinion.

[Penelope Bloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book that made me think more thoughtfully about my gender and the rituals I enact. It is a book that makes a case for thoughtfulness and intentionality. It felt very validating, in a world where ritual can sometimes feel frivolous (even though it isn’t) – a valuable book to help reclaim the importance of ritual, including ritual for cleansing after bad experiences. I think people of any gender identity would benefit from this (and certainly anyone who has felt disconnected with their body) but certainly gender nonminority individuals.
Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for this ARC!

[Mary Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really thoughtful book, helping people harness the power of rituals to bring the sacred dimension of life into our life transitions. The writing is clear and organized, which lets the ideas shine through. The author helps people think about the power of rituals in a way that makes them accessible to everyone, not just "experts."

[clarah rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 out of 5

lots of good and affirming info/practices. will definitely be picking up a physical copy once released.