Kamryn Wolf
GENDER DOULA
& SPIRITUAL CARE PROVIDER
Hi there! I’m Kamryn, and I use they/them/theirs pronouns. As a gender doula and a spiritual care provider I offer support to people of all genders through times of transition.
History
I was my first gender doula client. It was January in 2018, and I was sitting alone in my room administering my first testosterone shot. The desire to ritually memorialize that milestone of my transition overcame me, and yet I had no idea how to begin. As the weeks and months passed, I felt ambivalent about the changes I was observing in my body and relationships. As a nonbinary trans person, I was super stoked on some of what was happening, and super fearful about other outcomes of my weekly testosterone shots. I felt so confused.
I craved someone who could affirm the complexity of my experience of gender and transition and also support me in developing spiritual practices that deepened my connection to self, community, and the sacred. But without a model for what trans spiritual care could look like, I began experimenting. Friends gathered at my apartment for a T(ea) Party, where I invited them to bless my journey with testosterone. I interviewed other trans people about their experience with transition and spirituality, and imagined rituals that could satisfy their unmet needs. Many, many, selfies were taken as I strived to understand myself in my rapidly transitioning body and social context.
The ritual practices I designed for myself worked. And the more I talked with others in my communities, the more obvious it became that I wasn’t alone in needing spiritual care through transition. In the Fall of that same year I began offering gender doula support to others, and after three years of working with clients in a part-time capacity, I am proud and delighted to have expanded to a full-time practice in September of 2021.
Bio
I am passionate about offering spiritual care services to communities who aren’t typically able to access them, including transgender youth and adults, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer youth and adults, people who have experienced religious or spiritual trauma, and people who are religiously unaffiliated and/or identify as secular, atheist, or agnostic. Raised in a secular household by a Jewish dad and a Greek Orthodox mom, I am currently religiously unaffiliated.
I earned a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary (NYC), where I studied ritual, ecological grief, performance, and spiritual care, and received the Robert E. Seaver Award for Worship and the Arts. During much of the COVID-19 pandemic I worked as a hospital chaplain at King County’s Harborview Medical Center (Seattle, WA), the only certified Level 1 adult and pediatric trauma and burn center in Washington State. My clinical assignments included the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit and the Medical and Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. I have completed three units of Clinical Pastoral Education, both at Harborview and at Albany Medical Center (Albany, NY).
I’m also trained as a facilitator of Our Whole Lives and Sexuality and Our Faith, a lifespan sexuality education program published by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, and as a community death doula by A Sacred Passing (Seattle, WA).
In a more distant past I’ve worked as Program Coordinator for teen and adult programs at the Pride Center of the Capital Region (Albany, NY), as a sex educator at Toys in Babeland (Brooklyn, NY), and as Coordinator of Client and Community Needs at Third Root Community Health Center (Brooklyn, NY). I’ve collaborated with fiddle-player Connor Armbruster on a mixed-media performance titled lowercase liberation, artist and educator Hana van der Kolk on the ritual project cocodamah (collective containers for desire and maybe also healing), and Rev. Lea Matthews on a workshop “Spiritual Care for Trans Youth and their Communities,” among others.
To learn more about the many people and organizations who have shaped me and my practice, check out my lineage page.
I appreciated your flexibility in discussion. It helped me realize that the concepts of identity and gender pervade so much of life, and so it’s okay that many different ideas come up in conversation.
—Anonymous