4 Entry Points to get Started with the Gender Wheel Approach
Doorways to a new world...
Having an initial entry point helps you focus on what’s meaningful and supportive to you first.
Over time, all of the materials will come together because they are interconnected.
Click on an entry point to jump to that particular section.
Know Your Nature
Harness Nature's Diversity to Transform Political Conversations
- Change the dynamic.
- The civil rights of Queer, Trans, Intersex people*used here as nature-based umbrella terms for the LGBTQIA+ community. Join our Learning Center to learn more about how this fits into our holistic approach.* continue to be challenged and debated.
- We are legally defending our right to exist within a system defined by gender oppression. This forces us to make sense of ourselves from a position of oppression.
- To come into true equity not just for QTI people, but for everybody, we must fundamentally change this dynamic.
The dynamic shifts when we reposition ourselves with what is really happening in Nature, specifically when it comes to body, gender, and relationship (BGR) diversity. That means stepping away from rigid man-made roles, definitions and assignments and instead validating ourselves within the reality of Nature’s vast diversity.
Many of us have seen posts, articles, even the occasional documentary about Nature’s wild diversity. But what does that mean for us as people and how can we put that to practical use?
The Gender Wheel Approach and educational tool puts the pieces together by looking at the world through circular continuums similar to Nature. This allows the universal patterns of BGR diversity to shine through. From this perspective, everybody can see the value and necessity of body, gender, and relationship diversity across all life and the political debates transform.
Having a practical tool that conveys the reality and necessity of Nature’s patterns of diversity empowers people to shift away from rigid, human-imposed binary roles and assignments.
By engaging the Gender Wheel Approach, and opening up to the reflection of all of Nature, we have the unshakeable confidence to flip the script and reframe pushback so that we center the necessity and value of queer, trans, intersex people.
Teach the Truth
Foster Holistic Learning to See Diversity Everywhere
- See the BIG picture.
- It’s difficult to make sense of the world if information about it is being suppressed, modified or controlled in any way. But that’s the position we’ve been put in.
- The current culture provides a highly distorted story of the world based on the binary when there’s so much more out there!
Over 500 fish that change sex, over 1500 animals that engage in same-sex behavior, all female lizard species, gynandromorph butterflies, trees that transition…there’s no end to the diversity waiting for us in plants and birds and bugs and whales and humans.
Learning all about a species without exclusion changes how we see that species. It also changes how we see other species. The universal patterns become obvious. This is key to a shift in mindset.
But as important as it is to learn all the facts and details, we also have to learn WHY we haven’t been taught about the body, gender, and relationship diversity of Nature. Why do we have to dig for it? Understanding why information has been kept away from us gives greater meaning to why we’re reclaiming it and what’s really at stake.
This means not just looking at Nature from an all-inclusive perspective, we also need to look at history and dig for the stories underneath the dominant culture’s version. Through the Gender Wheel Approach we look at history and the political shifts we are still contending with while exploring more about the diversity everywhere around us.
Implementing the Gender Wheel Approach lets us view the world through Nature's lens, revealing patterns and connections in body, gender, and relationship diversity while unearthing why these truths have been hidden.
Own Your Value and Necessity
Rediscover Your Inherent Worth in the Natural Order
- Heal the Impact of Oppression.
- What happens when you’re lied to? What happens when you try to make sense of yourself and your world when you're constantly excluded or invisible?
- We know lies perpetuate trauma and truth heals it. Being able to hold a consistent, comprehensive, truthful narrative of body, gender, and relationship diversity changes our heart, mind, and spirit, even our body. It instigates deep healing.
A truthful narrative about Nature’s body, gender, and relationship (BGR) diversity and how that has been aggressively suppressed helps us shift our attention inward and trust who we are on the inside. It helps us develop a strong sense of self, a feeling of belonging to the world around us and a knowing that our life has value.
These deeper lessons are hallmarks of the Gender Wheel Approach. By reorienting ourselves to Nature’s perspective we free aspects of ourselves that were locked away by the culture’s rigid binary roles and assignments.
Embodiment of our whole selves allows each individual to fulfill their purpose in community through being themselves. Nature shows us that not only is there nothing wrong with gender expansive people, people in same-sex relationships or body diversity, but that BGR diversity in nature is necessary and valuable.
Nature evolves, maintains balance and resilience through the expression of all possibilities of BGR diversity. The more we understand this, the more we shift our mindset, the more we embody the truth of who we are as a part of the natural world. This connection comforts and attends to the part of us that has had to modify ourselves in big and small ways to survive the binary, gender oppressive culture.
It’s time to change all that.
The Gender Wheel Approach empowers everyone to reconnect with their full selves and relax down into a deep sense of belonging.
Embrace Divine Diversity
Find Sacred Unity in Nature’s Boundless Beauty
- Come home to humanity.
- "It's against my religion" is a common trope used to shutdown conversations about body, gender, and relationship diversity.
- Centuries of false overlays onto creation, including ourselves can make it seem like BGR diversity is at odds with religion. When that's simply not true.
- We have been denied our humanity and a deep sense of interconnection as well as inner agency.
In the center of the Gender Wheel educational tool is a star. It represents the time before we were born and the time after we pass on. It shows the original oneness that we all come from and to which we all return.
We acknowledge this unknown aspect as an integral part of the Gender Wheel because it is this unknown, or spirit that animates the body. Without spirit the body fails to exist. And it is in this animating spirit that each of us has something that is wholly original and uniquely our own. It includes our inner sense of self and our unique individual essence. This includes what we call gender. Gender is spirit.
Our ancient ancestors across the globe made room for this aspect of Nature’s infinite diversity through specific deities, roles, words, symbols, concepts, rituals and more. Our ancestors knew that something enormous and enduring was at the core of the Natural world’s diversity and they were an inherent part of it all.
Reconnecting with Nature and acknowledging the reality of spirit as inclusive brings us full circle with our ancient ancestors.
In fact, all the 5 major religions have neutral if not positive stories about Queer, Trans, Intersex people*used here as nature-based umbrella terms for the LGBTQIA+ community. Join our Learning Center to learn more about how this fits into our holistic approach.* in their ancient past. It wasn’t because they were especially inclusive. It was simply because they understood the reality of Nature at that time.
Spirit must be free to be. It’s time to come full circle.