We were lucky to catch up with Eli Lawliet recently and have shared our conversation below.

Eli, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?

My business, The Gender Doula, is both a business and a calling. I received the idea from the business in 2018, while I was in my second year of my Ph.D. at Berkeley. At the time, I was applying to law school. My plan was to get a JD/Ph.D. and work in the academic realm. So imagine my surprise when the idea of being a gender doula came to me! While I waited for my acceptance letter from law school, I spent a lot of time connecting with my body and deepening my spiritual practice. It was a profoundly uncomfortable time. I couldn’t imagine changing the track I had been on for years! I had worked so hard to get where I was. And also, I could feel that something needed to shift and that I needed to learn how to be open to it.

After months of this discomfort and struggle, suddenly it all came together. I had a plan to finish my Ph.D. and start my business simultaneously. Law school was sacrificed, and right as I decided not to go, my acceptance letter came. I’ve never regretted saying “no” to a JD.

In a perfect world, I would have loved getting to commit all of my time and energy to each of this projects, instead of working on both simultaneously. It was incredibly challenging and there were many times when I wanted to leave my Ph.D. and focus only on my business. But I come from a working class background and I have been low income my entire adult life. There were no rich uncles to front me cash while I got my business off the ground, so for the first 2.5 years of my business, I wrote a dissertation and taught classes while also taking clients, making workshops, and marketing my business. Like having 2 full time jobs and a part time job simultaneously, all of which required a tremendous amount of energy.

I think my timing was as good as it could have been, given my constraints. But I’m also real with myself – things would have been much easier for me if I had access to money.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a gender doula. Most folks haven’t heard of a gender doula, and that makes sense! When I started doing this work, I’d never heard of one either. But I heard a full-spectrum birth doula, Erica Livingston, talking on a podcast. She said that “We need a doula for every threshold of life” and it hit me like a bolt of lightning – we need a doula for gender exploration and transition. I googled around but I didn’t find anyone doing that work. I figured that someone else should do it, but the more I tried to ignore it, the more I felt a strong pull toward being a gender doula.

My background is widely varied. I held a lot of jobs in my teens and twenties that were customer-facing, including customer service, retail, and management positions. In my mid-twenties, I moved to Los Angeles and worked as a live-in cook for a family. I went back to school after I started to deeply explore my gender, and I naturally gravitated to research about trans people and gender more broadly. I ended up getting a degree from UCLA in Gender Studies with a minor in LGBTQ Studies. After that, I went to Berkeley for their Jurisprudence and Social Policy Ph.D., where I studied law and sociology. I wrote my dissertation on a topic that wove through trans history, mainly in the medical and legal areas.

So my academic experiences gave me a very deep understanding of transgender history, trans medicine, and the trans legal/policy arena. When I decided to be a gender doula, I contacted Erica Livingston and Laura Interlandi of Birdsong, and they graciously invited me into their full-spectrum doula training. By the time I finished that first training, I was seeing clients. I did another training with them the following year.

I’ve never stopped doing trainings and reading books. For example, I noticed that many of the folks that I worked with carried a lot of trauma in their bodies. So lately I’ve been focusing on learning more somatic modalities. I am currently in a training with Chauna Bryant of Breath Liberation Society so I can learn to facilitate breathwork for individuals and groups. I will be offering breathwork to clients and groups beginning this fall.

I describe my work as offering full spectrum support to folks who are questioning, exploring, or transitioning their gender, as well as to loved ones. I also offer classes and workshops that relate to gender, spirituality, the intersection of those topics, and more. I’ve recently begun offering trainings for professionals who provide services to trans people.

As for what is involved in full spectrum gender support…well, its hard to pin down! Essentially if folks need support related to gender, I will provide it or do my best to find someone who can. Due to my unique academic background, I know a lot about the finer points of transgender medicine and can help folks feel confident navigating conversations with medical providers around hormone therapy and surgery. But I have also helped folks craft a new wardrobe, disclose (or choose not to disclose) their identity in personal and professional situations, process grief around their gender, navigate shifting relationships, and so much more. I also help folks create and hold rituals for gender related moments, such as name changes, pronoun shifts, surgery, and hormones. I help folks prepare for the changes that hormones and surgery will have on their bodies, and fill out their paperwork for legal name and gender changes. I think a lot of what I do, also, is let folks know that however they do their gender, its ok. That their path is ok.

Right now, it’s very hard to be a trans person or anything who identifies as queer or LGBTIA+. There’s a lot of vitriol around the country, and while we are fortunate to have a lot of beautiful spaces here in Los Angeles, the hate has been a lot to bear. Holding that sorrow and grief with folks is a profound honor, and anything that I can do to make things even a little bit easier and more supported, I will do.

Even though I couldn’t find any other gender doulas when I first started out, there are a few more now! I am always trying to find other gender doulas so that we can connect and support one another. So if you’re out there reading this and doing gender doula work, then please get in touch!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think I’ve had to unlearn so many lessons, especially in the business realm. The world of business is very much based in capitalist ideas of constant grinding, constant growing, and never achieving enough. I have known that those are not my values for a long time, but actually unlearning those values and choosing to move through the world differently is another thing altogether.

Being an anti-capitalist business owner is complicated and means that you have to think very hard about many aspects of how you function in the business realm. Whether that means refusing to use scarcity tactics in your marketing or making sure that you’re not taking advantage of anyone’s labor, it requires a lot of intentional care and thought.

But it also means that I must personally practice what I preach, and that means taking time off, resting, and being kind to my own nervous system. I can’t advise my clients on how to care for themselves if I am constantly pushing myself to the brink. Of course, since this is a one-man show, that also means that I have to make enough money to support myself while working at a level and pace that my chronically ill body can sustain.

So this is something that I spend a lot of time considering, and that I am constantly learning and relearning.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The books that have impacted me most as a person and as a business owner are Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown and Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. Both of these books are absolutely required reading in my world.

Emergent Strategy, which I read for the first time when it came out in 2015, has many lessons. One of those lessons is to create on a small scale what you wish to see on the larger scale. This is why I am always working to create a business that is aligned with my values, including anti-capitalism and subverting white supremacy in any way I know how. And also, this is why I am always trying to create a business that is sustainable for me. I do not want to be booked and busy, I want to be abundantly resourced and serving my purpose on this earth, which is to make the world a better place for trans people.

Rest is Resistance was a life changing book for me as well. I discovered Tricia Hersey’s work when I was struggling with untreated sleep apnea. Getting diagnosed and then getting treatment was a multi-month process. In grappling with sleep and what it meant to me (and what it was doing to my body to not get it), I was used to thinking, “I have to nap so that I can keep working.” Tricia Hersey came across my socials one day saying, “We do not nap to keep working. We nap because we are divine beings who are worthy of rest.” And my mind was fully blown. When Rest is Resistance came out, I read it right away and it was just as life changing as I imagined it would be.

Putting these two books together seems obvious to me. Both hold potent wisdom and magic. They do not follow the mold of what I assume anyone would think of as business advice. But I’m not interested in replicating the world we live in. I dream of much more, and I want to spend time focusing on the advice of folks who do the same.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thegenderdoula.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegenderdoula/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheGenderDoula/

Image Credits
Headshot by Abby Mahler https://www.instagram.com/abbymahlerphoto/