Dawn of a New Rising Son

The Rise of the Feminine and Trans Solidarity in the Time of Patriarchal Empire

Back in 2016, after my nonbinary 19-year-old old kid at the time had recently come out to me, I joked with them about fusing “son” and “daughter” into “Don” or “Saughter,” and then it hit me: “Dawn of a New Rising Son.” A Hendrix-inspired riff and celebration of the liberated, gender-expansive future rising through today’s youth.

According to recent Gallup data, over 20% of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ+. That’s not an easy path in a culture still heavy with shame and stigma—so this trend isn’t some passing phase. It’s truth breaking through. A new dawn, despite the backlash.

My own initiation into this deeper understanding of gender and spirit began in 1995, at a gay trance club in Amsterdam. I had taken psychedelic medicine, and what followed was one of the most profound spiritual initiations of my life.

At the time, I was at a crisis point in my relationship with my then girlfriend—who would later become my wife and the mother of Maya. She’d spent nine months traveling through Asia shortly after we met, and in medicine vision, I clearly saw how much I was struggling with jealousy and control issues when she returned. I saw the radiant beauty and light of her Eros and Compassion as she moved through the world, comforting lost souls. And I also saw how I was blocking that light—cutting her down with a thousand small slights and insecure jabs, fueled by my insecure patriarchal ego.

I watched my jealous aggressive masculine energy attacking her light, and realized: better that I die than continue to block and harm her. As I surrendered, I glimpsed an infinite horde of demonic beings assaulting her light—I’d been one of them. But then, the face of the Goddess appeared, and I was embraced into infinite Love, Light, and forgiveness.

In that moment, I understood: she carried my Anima, my own feminine soul, in the Jungian sense. The same energies in me attacking her, were assaulting my own soul. The Light surged through me—heart chakra bursting open, energy rising to my third eye. Angels sang. I finally understood what my grandfather Dr. Bronner meant when he said that all faith traditions, when not twisted into idols or dogmas, point to the same transcendent Source.

In coming down from that Light, I asked: God, now that I know your real, how does this infinite Love coexist with all the suffering in the world—rape, murder, genocide? The answer came: we are not separate. We are infinitesimal expressions of the divine GodSelf, playing out this cosmic dance of suffering, death, and resurrection. There is no “God over there.” It’s all GodSelf. “I Am That I Am.”

Then I saw Jesus, stepping into the heart of the maelstrom—not to explain or justify suffering, but to help us bear it with compassion and grace. That’s it, I realized. We are the part of the divine Self that can engage and alleviate the suffering of the world.

“To live, you must die.”
“As you do to the least of these, so you do unto me.”
Foamy Homies remind us: “We’re cells in the body of Jah.”
Richard Rohr writes: creation / reality itself is the Christ Body of God.

Joseph Campbell’s work taught me to read religious stories not as literal history, but as maps of the soul. Whether we believe or not the Passion of Christ happened in the material sense, or the sacrifice of the Blue Deer in Wixarica culture (see my companion blog on indigenous wisdom and regenerative agriculture), they represent universal archetypes—of death, rebirth, transcendence, and most of all, self-sacrificing love that regenerates the world. That’s the heart of the Mystery.

Right after that death-rebirth experience—the surrender of my petty insecure masculine ego and marriage with my feminine soul—Helena appeared.

Helena was also Henry, a gay man I’d met earlier that week, now beautifully cross-dressed, swirling up to dance with me in the club. We had shared a joint days earlier in a cannabis café, where he told me about being trafficked as a child and now working as a prostitute. The energy was sweet and open.

And yet… I resisted. After all I had just gone through, I didn’t want to engage. I spiraled back into the abyss.

But then I saw the truth. I asked myself: why wouldn’t I open my heart to Helena—or to anyone coming toward me in joy and love? My heart exploded open again, and I was back in the Light.

Over the years, I came to understand Helena was also carrying my Anima, an externalized mirror of my soul. By embracing her inwardly, I was embracing my most fabulous, liberated, gender-expansive self.

Dawn of a New Rising Son is also me—reborn in spirit. And it took time. Even after all that, I still struggled. At one point, Ariel Vegosen, my friend and founder of Gender Illumination, asked me which of the 24 shades of gender I identified with. The question stuck. It pointed to a truth: gender is a spectrum. We all know people assigned male or female at birth who embody a unique mix of masculine, feminine, and perhaps other forms of expression.

Why limit ourselves to a binary? Why not have more terms and ways to describe our gender identities? The evolving pronoun lexicon (including he/him, he/they, they/them, she/they, she/her) is helping us map an infinitely diverse reality.

It’s like upgrading from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s General Relativity—moving from a flat map to multidimensional space-time.

Many cultures have long embraced more than two genders. Mainstream culture in the United States is just catching up—and though the Trump-era backlash is loud, it’s a blip in the long arc of history. I’m reminded of Governor Wallace, defiant in the face of civil rights: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Yet even he later repented.

The future is gender expansive. Like with gay marriage or interracial love, justice and widespread acceptance for trans and nonbinary people is inevitable.

Which brings me to the sad situation of Elon Musk and his trans daughter Vivian he has disowned.

Right now, it feels like we’re watching Star Wars unfold in real life: Trump as some kind of Emperor Palpatine-Jabba the Hut hybrid, with Elonakin / Darth Musk as his apprentice. I’ve been reading How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley—and have found it to be an unnervingly accurate playbook of how democracies fall to authoritarianism. They’re running it page by page.

There’s a lot of Sith energy crackling in our culture right now—energy that cuts across all hearts. There’s no final victory, but we can learn to recognize our own Darth shadow and try to not let it steer the ship. We can reach for the Jedi within.

And yet—I know my own shadow. I don’t want to judge too harshly. I just hope Elon can find healing, especially with his trans daughter. Reconciliation with her could ripple healing across our culture. I, too, am neurodivergent—almost placed in special ed as a kid. My brain needed to rewire, and thanks to therapy and loving parents, I found my path. But none of that can excuse cruelty or disowning family. It’s not okay to defund USAID’s life-saving programs, deny our or other countries shameful history, or spread baseless conspiracies. It might be funny watching William Shatner’s character act out and blame his supposed Mad Cow disease on Boston Legal —but not in real life. [i]

I also want to honor Ashawna Hailey, a trans pioneer and former board member of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), who donated $5 million to help bring MDMA through FDA approval. When founder Rick Doblin’s vision was still a long shot, Ashawna’s generosity helped make it real. MDMA helped her—and has helped countless LGBTQ+ folks—heal from the trauma of rejection and shame.

In my mind, every veteran, every survivor of sexual assault who finds healing through MDMA therapy, owes a debt to Ashawna. I’m also excited for the release of Chris Stauffer’s study on group MDMA therapy for veterans and others dealing with gender-related trauma, in time for World Pride in DC.

Our 2017 Burning Man camp, Transfoamation, celebrated gender liberation and psychedelics with signage honoring Ashawna, trans heroes of the Stonewall uprising that Pride events honor every year, and gender-diverse cultures worldwide. This year, we’re back—with Transfoam Now! —and planning an installation for the upcoming MAPS Psychedelic Science conference. I’m part of a diverse wonderful camp of folx at burning man, but Dr. Bronner’s as a brand is not present.

I pray we, as a nation, wake up to this moment and stop propping up this archetypal Orwellian Empire. Look up “doublethink,” and consider where we are: climate collapse denied, Russia glorified, whitewashing history on both sides of the Atlantic, dismantling our system of checks and balances, and suppressing institutions across society especially higher learning. We’re repeating what we refuse to learn.

But it’s always darkest before the dawn. I believe that we’re on the cusp of a collective awakening—a rising sense of shared humanity where we finally treat each other with justice, equality, and love for all.