Every June, Pride calls on us to honor the hard and glorious struggle of LGBTQ+ history — from the Stonewall uprising and AIDS activism, to the bars and drag stages where queer people refused erasure — and to celebrate and protect who and where we are. This year, that means celebrating the courage of our LGBTQ+ siblings, especially the way trans and nonbinary people are navigating this brutal political moment in a way that is nothing short of heroic.
Death, Rebirth, and the Liberation of My Soul
Understanding gender diversity in this cultural moment is crucial, and I want to share from my own life experience to help cut through the noise, build empathy, and ground things upfront here. In the winter of 1995, a few months out of college and at a crisis point in my relationship with my then-girlfriend, under the influence of LSD and MDMA, I experienced ego death and was embraced into the amazing grace, love, and light at the heart of our existence — on the dance floor of Mazzo, a gay trance club in Amsterdam.
In that medicine space, I came face-to-face with the false internalized constructs around gender, sexuality, and shame our culture warps us with — how boys and men are socialized early and often against anything “gay or girlie,” and learn to police and scorn expression and energies that don’t conform, in ourselves and others. That night I clearly saw in vision how my insecure, aggressive masculine energy had been suppressing my girlfriend’s light and eros, but more fundamentally suppressing and damaging my own feminine soul and eros as well. When I finally surrendered and sacrificed that aggression and false self, the Goddess appeared and embraced me into infinite love and forgiveness. I died and was reborn — kundalini surged, my heart chakra blew open, angels sang. Asking but how does this infinite Love coexist with so much suffering and violence happening real time in the world, Jesus appeared with calm compassion and grace, showing we are here to serve, take care of, protect and liberate each other.
Then Helena swirled into my sphere in real life on the dance floor — who was also Henry, a gay man I’d met earlier that week, now beautifully cross-dressed, dancing in joy and love. My first instinct was to pull back; I’d just been through a whole lot and really didn’t want to engage. Wrong answer! and I was back in the existential spiritual penalty box — I asked myself: why wouldn’t I open my heart to anyone coming toward me with love? Light and love exploded again. Helena, I’ve come to understand, like my girlfriend earlier in the vision sequence, was carrying my Anima: my own most liberated, fabulous, gender-expansive soul self, showing up to be embraced and integrated. I discuss this further in my earlier blog post, Dawn of a New Rising Son.
That experience took years to fully integrate — and I’m still integrating it. But it launched a lifelong journey of owning my queerness and gender and sexual fluidity. In 2022, I shared my pronouns as he/they, identifying as “about 25% girl.” In 2017, we (as foamy homies not Dr. Bronner’s) dedicated our Burning Man camp to psychedelic gender liberation and trans solidarity, which we called Transfoamation. This past year in the context of all the sad cultural backsliding under Trump, we revisited the theme with our camp Transfoam Now! We posted a map of the world highlighting the many cultures that recognize three or more genders, and then blasted burners of every race, orientation, and gender persuasion clean with foam, experiencing together the childlike joy and innocence of Eden before shame and judgment entered the picture.
Gender Diversity is the Natural Human Condition
Here’s what I know from my own journey and from the journeys of so many beloved people in my life, including Ariel Vegosen founder of Gender Illumination: being LGBTQ+, and in particular nonbinary or trans in our gender expression, is not a phase, a confusion, or a pathology. It’s truth breaking through.
The idea that there are only two genders corresponding to biological sex isn’t ancient wisdom or scientific fact: it’s a relatively recent and false patriarchal Western construct. The rise of trans and nonbinary identities in the West, far from being some kind of deviance, is a return to the natural state of universal cross-cultural human reality. This false construct damages straight hetero men as much as anyone else, repressing the essential feminine energies that flow in each of our glorious selves. Many of us intuitively understand that each person carries a unique mixture of “masculine” and “feminine” energies regardless of the sex they were born with; but we are socialized in a 1984-doublethink way to deny this and collapse that dynamic spectrum into the straitjacket of just one of two binaries, or else.
According to Gallup, more than one in five Gen Z Americans now identifies as LGBTQ+. That’s not a trend manufactured by culture: this is what happens when shame and repression lift enough for people to live their truth. My own adult kid, along with so many other incredible LGBTQ+ family and friends, has shown me what courage looks like when you refuse to let the world’s smallness define you.
This truth shows up across cultures and throughout history. In early September of last year, right after wrapping up at Transfoam Now!, my wife Mia (who coordinates and leads our burning man camps) and I went to Samoa for the first time, where we source coconut oil for our soaps from a sister company we helped set up eight years ago. Turns out Samoa is one of the many cultures around the world that recognizes and affirms more than two genders. 98% of the population is devout Christian via colonization, yet the culture continues to celebrate and affirm Fa’afafine and Fa’afatama: gender-diverse people with honored roles in family and community, for generations. Even though born and initially assigned male or female at birth, these individuals proudly and publicly, in their professional as well as personal lives, wear, adorn, and express the gender usually associated with the “other” sex, and their families and communities celebrate and accept them. I discuss this in more depth in my previous blog post, From Burning Man to Samoa: Thoughts on Belonging, Healing & Change.
The Arc of History Bends Toward Justice
Right now, the political moment is grim. The Trump administration and other conservative figures and politicians are dismantling or weakening hard-won protections, anti-discrimination policies and cultural acceptance and respect for trans and nonbinary people. They are seeding widespread paranoia and weaponizing manageable concerns around fairness in sports and youth healthcare into a moral panic and blunt instrument of dehumanization. A moral panic is an exaggerated public fear that a scapegoated group or behavior threatens society’s core values or safety. It is often fueled by sensationalized media coverage and wielded by politicians to justify social control and policy changes. What we are witnessing is a classic example.
On the topic of sports, some have proposed approaches aimed at balancing inclusion and fairness without a blanket ban on transwomen, such as the California Interscholastic Federation’s policy of sharing medal podiums—though there remains disagreement about whether these policies are the right solution. Regarding the topic of healthcare, there are false reports circulating in media and public discourse that minors are allowed to access hormone treatment and gender-affirming care without parental consent, which are used as reasons to ban this type of care. These decisions should be left to parents and doctors navigating difficult situations for their kids’ welfare, without the state inserting itself and interfering. I wrote about this previously in my Open Letter to the Incoming Administration last year.
Many have been emboldened in their bigotry not only by Trump’s executive actions and incendiary words but also by the silence and failure of politicians who have previously touted themselves as LGBTQ+ defenders to fight them. We’ve unfortunately seen this before. George Wallace used hateful rhetoric and policies to deny Black Americans their civil rights in the 1960s, declaring “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And across generations, demagogues have targeted LGBTQ+ people for political gain. Black and LGBTQ+ histories related to oppression are not the same, but are connected by fierce struggles facing a familiar strategy: demagogues stoking paranoia and fear of a vulnerable minority to gain and preserve power. From Black civil rights to marriage equality, from interracial love to gender liberation, progress has never arrived on its own. It has come because people organized, risked, marched, resisted, loved, and refused to disappear — and because they kept bending the arc towards justice. Even George Wallace repented later in life.
Our Pride Soap Label and Support for the ACLU Foundation
Our Pride Soap label and campaign are a direct response to Trump’s hateful policies and rhetoric that seek to deny and erase the right to exist of our trans and nonbinary siblings. Too many corporations that were fair-weather friends to LGBTQ+ communities have now withdrawn their financial and organizational support for Pride and LGBTQ+ organizations. This is an important moment for companies like ours to step forward precisely because so many are stepping back. We have leveraged our label to send love and appreciation to our LGBTQ+ siblings and explain why we have committed $100,000 a year for three years to the ACLU Foundation.
The ACLU is a leading organization in the fight to protect LGBTQ+ rights and civil rights broadly, both in the courts and in the culture, and they need our support now more than ever. Both the ACLU and Dr. Bronner’s have been longstanding advocates for people’s right to love who they love, to be welcomed in all aspects of social life, and to express their gender identity freely and openly. The ACLU has been fighting for LGBTQ+ rights for one hundred years, and they know that when the government targets one minority, it is part of a broader agenda to limit bodily autonomy, freedom of expression, and ultimately the freedom to be ourselves. Learn more on the ACLU’s webpage about our campaign in support of them here.
RuPaul, Bronski Beat, and the Power of Queer Art
Art and stories have a unique power to foster and increase empathy and understanding between people of different backgrounds, experiences, and identities. Few have made the truth of expansive gender more visible, more joyful, and more undeniable to mainstream America than RuPaul and the high art of drag. I hold RuPaul in a similar light as Martin Luther King Jr. and Harvey Milk for how they have informed and reshaped my understanding of humanity and social change. RuPaul and friends have built a media empire that has brought the transformative power of queer, gender-expansive fabulosity into living rooms across the country for over fifteen years — and in doing so, cracked open millions of hearts and minds. “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” isn’t just a catchline; it’s a liberation theology.
Another piece I revisited recently that impacted me and the larger culture deeply is the glorious and tragic song “Smalltown Boy,” laid down in the mid-’80s by the Bronski Beat, about the archetypal LGBTQ+ experience of being bullied in school and driven from home, from family, from belonging, and having to find love and acceptance elsewhere. My kid and I recently watched this video essay on “Smalltown Boy” together, which I highly recommend. Then as now, too many LGBTQ+ youth take their lives and don’t make it through, and knowing and seeing others who have likewise suffered but emerged victorious and fabulous is truly life-savingly powerful.
I’m so grateful to RuPaul, along with all the queens on Drag Race and LGBTQ+ champions everywhere, who are leveraging art and media to pierce the darkness, intolerance, and hate wherever it still permeates in this land of the supposedly free — reaching young queer kids and blessing them with love and affirmation, and a vision that no matter how much it might suck right now, it will get so much better. And hopefully with time and exposure to these queer rock stars and success stories, their current families, friends, and communities will grow to be more open, loving, and accepting too.
I’m thus so proud and thrilled to announce that Dr. Bronner’s will be featured in the current season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars! We’re excited to share a series of posts from the all-star queens as well as Bruno from the pit crew on our social media in the weeks to come, along with posts from other LGBTQ+ rock stars.
Two “Transcestor” Champions to Honor
I want to honor Ashawna Hailey, a transwoman and former board member of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) before she died, who stepped up early with $5 million when founder Rick Doblin’s dream of MDMA-assisted therapy was still a long shot. MDMA helped her heal from the trauma of shame and rejection she experienced, and through her generosity, MDMA therapy is now healing veterans, survivors of sexual assault, and so many LGBTQ+ folks carrying the wounds of a world that tells them they shouldn’t exist. Every person healed by this therapy owes her a debt.
I also want to honor a trans brother and former employee at Dr. Bronner’s, who was born intersex and assigned the wrong gender at birth, who transitioned to his true self as a proud trans man. He blazed into our lives like a shooting star, and died by suicide during the Covid years. Trans people experience mental and emotional distress at significantly higher rates than the general population due to the unique stressors and social stigma they face. Our world can be so vicious and transphobic. Trans people are much more likely to think about and attempt suicide even than lesbian, gay, or bisexual people, who themselves are at significantly greater risk than the general population. This is what isolation, hatred and erasure cost. Rest in power brother!
You Are the Dawn
To every LGBTQ+ sibling reading this: your path to owning and expressing your true self is one of the most epic, courageous, and fabulous journeys a human being can take. The world needs your light, your disruption, your Trickster-Queer divine energy shattering false constructs and cracking open hearts. Like Billy Elliot blasting free Superman-style from his doomed, homophobic (but also beautiful and awesome) coal-mining world to dance the lead swan in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake; like the trans folks at Stonewall who threw the first kicks so we could throw parades: you are the ones bringing the dawn of a liberated, empathic, fabulous, kind, and joyous world, where we are all loved, celebrated, and taken care of.
Happy Pride! We see you, we celebrate you, we fight for you. You are the dawn!
As Dr. Bronner shouts from our label: We’re All-One or None! All-One! All-One!! All-One!!!