Taking Our
Herbal T
a year long exploration
Join us for a year long herbal exploration for trans masc and nonbinary folks with endogenous estrogen dominance.
Join us in Taking Our Herbal T for a community research & collective trans embodiment project.
Together over the course of twelve months, we will work with herbs that have potential masculinizing and androgenic effects, increasing testosterone and/or androgen hormone production in our bodies.
How might working with these herbal allies shift and change our embodied experience? How might they support our internal sense of gender alignment, or external sense of gender expression?
Working with personal herbal protocols, we will collectively tend our bodies, share our experiences, and weave community. This project will culminate in a research article and a zine for our communities.
Come explore the wild amazing world of herbal support for gender embodiment with us!
Radical Community Research
There is very little documented research on working with herbs for masculinizing and androgenic effects, especially specifically for trans and nonbinary folks. We want to change that!
Taking Our Herbal T is a facilitated community research project in which we as a cohort will learn together about herbs & hormones, reflect our desired experience, and then come up with personal plans of action. We will take an herbal formula daily, document our process for an entire year, share our experiences over the months together, and then the results will be published!
This is a project by trans and nonbinary people for trans and nonbinary people. This is our contribution to exploring together, documenting research and sharing it with our communities.
Join us for a year-long exploration into trans herbalism, the awe-inspiring power of plants, and the work of community research
HOW IT WILL WORK
Monthly Surveys
the shape of the program
Core teaching on herbs & hormones
Participant guided herbal protocols
Monthly Zoom Calls
Digital Community Hub
We will meet monthly beginning December 5, 2024 on Thursdays 2-4pm ET / 3-5pm Atlantic. We will spend a year together exploring what personal herbal protocols bring about in our bodies, and share our findings with each other in community!
Our first call will be an opening call, gathering together. We will co-create our monthly survey and decide together what we want to be tracking.
Our second call will be the teaching call - a deep dive into masculinizing and androgenic herbs and hormones. This will be recorded.
After this teaching call, each participant (including the facilitators!) will be invited to come up with their own herbal formula and protocol that they will take for the year.
The remainder of our monthly calls will be sharing our experiences, what we are noticing, connecting with each other, and offering mutual support as we track the changes in our bodies.
Each month, participants will fill out brief surveys about what they’ve noticed. These surveys will be compiled, along with a pre-program survey as well as exit surveys and a 3 month follow up. All of this information will be used to create an article (and a zine!) of our community research.
Throughout our time together, we will stay connected in between calls through a digital community hub. This space will be for building community connection and resource sharing.
Who is this for?
This is for you if:
You are a herbal-minded trans masc and/or nonbinary person with endogenous estrogen dominance who menstruate/have ovaries seeking to shift their hormonal embodiment
You have some experience learning about herbalism and/or taking tinctures, so using herbal lingo, talking about the actions of plants or making your own blend would not be bewildering
You are excited to engage in personal exploration on the impacts of masculinizing and androgenizing herbs on your body
You can commit to taking your herbs multiple times a day
You can commit to noticing your embodied experience and filling out monthly surveys
You are willing for your experiences to be shared (anonymously) in the resulting research paper
You are excited by horizontal learning environments, ready to share with your peers and learn from them in return!
Who is this not for?
This is NOT for you if:
You are not a trans masc and/or nonbinary person with endogenous estrogen dominance and ovaries
If you are currently taking testosterone or plan to take it in the next year
You would not be able to follow through on submitting monthly surveys
You will not be able to follow through on on taking your herbs multiple times daily, and tracking your experience throughout the month. No shame, but for the purposes of this research project, we need folks who will take their herbs regularly! We will share the compiled research with community at the end, so you will get all the goodies then even if you don’t participate.
You are entirely new to herbalism. Again, no shame - but we will be talking through some more complicated topics and if you are completely new to herbalism, the learning curve will be too steep for us to be having the conversations we need to be having. It will fly over your head and be potentially overwhelming. We will be inviting participants to formulate their own herbal protocols, and this would be a stretch for someone new to herbalism. Again, the results from this project will be shared after we are done, so you can dive in then!
When / Where / How
We will meet monthly over ZOOM from December 2024 - November 2025.
We will meet one Thursday per month from 2-4pm ET / 3-5pm Atlantic.
Live closed captions will be available. You are welcome to come as you care to our calls, and invited to tend your body as you need to throughout.
Meeting Dates: December 5, 2024 (opening call), January 9, 2025 (teaching call, recorded), February 6, 2025, March 6, 2025, April 10, 2025, May 15, 2025, June 12, 2025, July 17, 2025, August 14, 2025, September 18, 2025, October 16, 2025 and November 13, 2025 (closing call).
Our first two calls will be recorded. The rest will be summarized and posted in the discord.
Monthly surveys will be submitted electronically, emailed to your inbox.
We will share a discord community hub throughout the year for deepening in connection, sharing our experiences, and passing along resources!
For this program, you need access to wifi, an email address & a Zoom account, a way of tracking your experiences over the 11 months, and a network of support at home.
HOW MUCH?
There are two costs associated with this offering: the cost of the program & the herbs
PROGRAM COST
This year long program (12 monthly meetings, teaching on herbs & hormones, resources for further learning, an online community hub and more) is offered on a wide sliding scale. We invite you to participate at the level consistent with your honest access to resources, wealth, capacity to work and make money, family support, whiteness, and privilege.
The sliding scale is: $1000 USD ($1350 CAD)/ $750 USD ($1000 CAD) / $500 USD ($675 CAD)
ECONOMIC ACCESS: Recognizing that trans folks are often economically marginalized as well as socially marginalized, we have two solidarity pricing options. Please reserve these limited spaces for those who truly need them to be able to participate.
Solidarity options: $250 USD ($335 CAD) / $100 USD ($135 CAD)
New to sliding scales? Here are some guidelines to help!
You should pay full price if:
You are financially secure (spend little time worried about accessing basic necessities)
You own property or have some personal savings
You have some disposable income
You have access to family financial support
You should request a 25% or 50% discount if:
You do not find your financial situation reflected in either descriptions for the highest cost or the lowest
You are struggling to pay off debt or build savings and move away from paycheck to paycheck living
You have a steady income
You are able to cover basic needs such as food, shelter, childcare, etc without overwhelming stress or strain
You should request the solidarity options (75-90% discount) if:
You are fixed income/low income
You do not have access to savings or family/friend financial support
Folks who pay on the higher end support the participation of folks on the lower end, and help compensate your facilitators for their labor throughout this program, including publishing our collective research.
Payment plans are also an available option at checkout if that supports your participation.
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Thank you for participating in the sliding scale process thoughtfully
and contributing to a wider ecosystem of access!
2. COST OF HERBS
In addition to the program itself, participants can expect to spend $50-100 per month on herbs.
We will help folks source the herbs they need, but participants will be responsible for ordering them and refilling them as needed over the year.
Please factor this into the total price, so you can plan accordingly! You can expect anywhere from $25 - $100 per month for herbs, which would be $250 - 1000 total for ten months.
If you are an herbalist yourself, or live among herbalist community, you may have cheaper ways of sourcing herbs, and we encourage you to use those networks where supportive!
Who are your facilitators?
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Ember Peters (they/them) is a clinical herbalist, educator, gardener, and non-binary queer anarchist of Ashkenazi Jewish and Greek ancestry living on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley in so-called Nova Scotia, the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Mi'kmaq people.
Ember has over 3500 hours of clinical experience focusing on accessible trans inclusive care and supporting people with complex chronic illness. Their practice integrates scientific knowledge with energetic systems, the latest scientific research, phytochemistry, physiology, flower essences and holistic nutrition.
Ember is a Registered Herbal Practitioner with the Herbalist Association of Nova Scotia (HANS) and a founder of the Maritime School of Holistic Herbalism. They have taught widely about herbalism at conferences and schools across Turtle Island, and their work has been published twice in the Journal of the American Herbalists Guild.
Dismantling white supremacy & transphobia are cornerstones of Ember’s practice, a part of their life-long commitment to fighting for liberation for all peoples. They recognize community based holistic health as a tangible step towards collective and individual liberation and resilience.
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rowan walker (they/them) is an herbalist, writer, facilitator and bodyworker committed to nourishing queer aliveness as we build the world to come.
they are a trans agender person of Irish, Lithuanian, Scottish and Sicilian heritage living on unceded Abenaki land (so called vermont). rowan is chronically ill and lives with long c. they love to swim in cold waters, sing to plants and read old books.
Through their practice, of hawthorn and yew, rowan teaches, writes, and supports queer community through group work and 1:1 care. They are a community herbalist with clinical training and has been working in this field for a decade.
with a virgo stellium, rowan loves to research and nerd out about plants, queer health, and embodying our radical values even under pressure. they are an anarchist, working to support settlers in diaspora reckon with the violence in their lineages, and they believe deeply in the project of total liberation.
may Taking Our Herbal T be a contribution to deepening our collective herbal knowledge and support for our trans & nonbinary community
Registration
Registration opens Oct 6, 2024 and will remain open until Oct 30 or until the cohort is full.
Space is limited to 30 participants.
HOW IT WILL WORK
Folks interested in participating will be asked to fill out an application form. Use the link below to access it!
After that, we will schedule pre-program Zoom interviews. If everyone is on board and it feels like a good fit, then we will invite you to participate and send along the formal registration.
Special note: if you wish to participate but the time of the calls doesn’t work for your schedule, and you’d be interested in another weekday or evening cohort, email rowan (ofhawthornandyew@protonmail.com) to be placed on a waitlist.
Questions?
Email rowan with any questions at: ofhawthornandyew@protonmail.com
Interested in checking out rowan's work? head to their website: https://ofhawthornandyew.com or sign up for their newsletter below!
Interested in checking out Ember's work? head to their website: https://www.wildcurrentherbalism.com/ or sign up for their newsletter below!
