Overview

Buddhism is one of the frameworks that some detransitioners and desisters (people who stopped identifying as trans before medical transition) reach for when they try to make sense of what happened to them. Its core claims bear directly on the language of modern gender identity. It says that no fixed, essential self can be found in the body or the mind. It says that suffering comes from craving and clinging, including clinging to ideas about who we are. And it says that everything we are made of is changing all the time.

This page explains those teachings from the early texts, how traditional Buddhism treated sex, how modern teachers disagree about gender identity, how the ideas reached psychotherapy, and how detransitioners and trans Buddhists use them. Buddhism is presented here as a lens, not a recommendation. Many detransitioners find nothing useful in it, and no religious or philosophical framework is needed to accept one's body.

Core teachings

The oldest complete collection of Buddhist scripture is the Pali Canon: texts preserved in the Pali language by the Theravāda ("teaching of the elders") tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Later Mahāyāna ("great vehicle") traditions, including Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, added further scriptures and philosophy. The teachings below are shared in some form by all of them.

The five aggregates

Early Buddhism analyses a person into five aggregates (khandha, "heaps"): form (the body), feeling (the pleasant, painful or neutral tone of experience), perception (recognising and labelling), fabrications (intentions, habits and mental formations) and consciousness. The list is a checklist of everything a person might take to be "me". Once all five have been examined, nothing is left over that could be a separate, permanent owner of them.

Not-self (anattā)

Anattā (not-self) is the teaching that none of the aggregates is a self. Its classic statement is the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta ("Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic", SN 22.59), traditionally the second sermon the Buddha gave. The argument is about control:

"Form, monks, is not self. If form were the self, this form would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible (to say) with regard to form, 'Let my form be thus. Let my form not be thus.'" — (SN 22.59, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

The Buddha asks whether it is fitting to regard what is inconstant as "This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am." The listeners answer no, and the practitioner grows "disenchanted" with all five aggregates and is released.

Two features matter for gender debates. First, the body (form) is explicitly not the self. Second, neither is consciousness, perception or any inner feeling. The teaching gives no privileged status to an inner sense of who one is over the body; both are equally impermanent and equally "not mine".

Scholars and teachers disagree about how far to push this. The American Theravāda monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu argues that anattā is a strategy for letting go, not a metaphysical claim that "there is no self". He points out that in one sutta the Buddha refuses to answer, yes or no, whether a self exists (Thanissaro, The Not-Self Strategy). Others read the texts as a plain denial of a self. Either way, "not-self" as a practice of loosening identification is different from "you don't exist, so your pain doesn't matter".

Suffering, craving and clinging

The Buddha's first sermon, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11), sets out the Four Noble Truths:

1. Dukkha (suffering, stress, unsatisfactoriness) is part of life. "In brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering."
2. Its origin is taṇhā (craving, literally "thirst"): craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, and craving for extermination.
3. Suffering ceases when that craving fades and is let go.
4. The way to that cessation is the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration).

(SN 56.11, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi)

"Craving for existence" (bhava-taṇhā) is often read as craving to be something: a particular kind of person with a particular identity.

Craving hardens into upādāna (clinging or grasping). The Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta (MN 9) lists four kinds: "clinging to sensual pleasures, clinging to views, clinging to rituals and observances, and clinging to a doctrine of self" (MN 9, trans. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi). The last, clinging to a doctrine of self (attavādupādāna), is the subtlest. The Buddha claims only his teaching fully explains it (MN 11). In this framework, a strong theory about what one "really" is, held as a source of meaning and security, is itself a form of clinging.

Impermanence

Anicca (impermanence) is the claim that every conditioned thing arises, changes and passes away. It is the premise of the not-self argument. Applied to gender it is double-edged: it undermines the idea of a fixed inner gender identity waiting to be discovered, but some trans Buddhists read it as support for changing the body (see below).

The middle way

The first sermon opens by rejecting two extremes: "the pursuit of sensual happiness in sensual pleasures" and "the pursuit of self-mortification" (SN 56.11). The middle way between them is the Eightfold Path. In the traditional biography the Buddha nearly starved himself before concluding that harsh treatment of the body does not lead to awakening. Both sides of the gender debate appeal to it.

Emptiness and the two truths

Mahāyāna philosophy extends not-self into emptiness (śūnyatā): nothing at all, not just persons, has a fixed, independent essence. It also distinguishes two truths: conventional (or relative) truth, the everyday world of names, bodies and roles, and ultimate truth, in which those categories are empty. The best-known gender passage in Mahāyāna scripture is in chapter 7 of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. The monk Śāriputra asks a goddess why she does not transform herself out of her "female state". She replies that she has looked for her female state for twelve years and not found it. She then uses magic to swap bodies with Śāriputra, leaving him in a woman's form, to show that "all things do not really exist" in the way he assumed (Vimalakīrti Sūtra, ch. 7, trans. Thurman). The story challenges the belief that women were spiritually inferior. Today it is quoted both by those who say gender should be held lightly and by trans Buddhists who say it shows sex can change.

Sex and gender in traditional Buddhism

Four sex categories and the paṇḍaka

Early Buddhist texts recognise more than two categories of person. Alongside men and women, the monastic code (Vinaya) names the ubhatobyañjanaka (a person with the characteristics of both sexes, roughly intersex) and the paṇḍaka. Paṇḍaka originally meant something like "impotent man". In the texts it covers several kinds of male who are sexually or physically "deficient" by the standards of the time, including eunuchs, some men who were the receptive partner in sex with men, and those born without normal male function (Gyatso 2003; Cabezón 2017). These were social and legal classifications of people who did not fit the expected sexual role, not evidence that sex is a spectrum (see intersex and DSDs). Paṇḍaka is not an ancient equivalent of "trans woman", and translating it that way is much disputed.

The Vinaya bars paṇḍakas from ordination, and expels them if they are ordained by mistake. Harvard Buddhologist Janet Gyatso argues that the Vinaya's long list of exclusions was driven partly by worries about sexual misconduct and about how the community looked to lay supporters (Gyatso 2003).

In Thailand the Pali paṇḍaka is commonly rendered as kathoey (feminine males), and being born kathoey is often explained as karma from sexual misconduct in a past life. That history, and its "tolerant but unaccepting" social result, is covered on the Thailand page.

Sex change in the Vinaya

The Pali Vinaya also contains two short cases in which a monk wakes up with the characteristics of a woman, and a nun with those of a man. The Buddha rules that the former monk should join the nuns' community, keeping her original ordination and seniority, and the reverse for the former nun (Thanissaro, Buddhist Monastic Code, Pārājika 1). The commentary adds that if the sex changes back, so does the community.

Trans-inclusive Buddhists cite these cases as evidence that the Buddha accepted sex change. Others reply that they describe spontaneous bodily transformation, not a choice to change the body to match an inner identity. A 2021 article in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics argues for trans ordination in Theravāda but notes that "sex-change" in the texts differs from modern transgender identity because of its spontaneity and reversibility (Artinger 2021). Notably, in both cases the person is placed according to their body, not according to how they felt.

Monastic ordination today

Because monastic life is organised into a monks' community and a nuns' community, ordination is still structured by sex. Some kathoey have been ordained as monks in their male sex, and in 2009 the Thai Sangha Council tried to ban the practice (The Conversation, 2022). Even the Plum Village community founded by the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, which explicitly welcomes LGBTQ lay practitioners, says that people with "transgender experiences" cannot currently ordain, because the order is still divided into monks and nuns (Plum Village, Expanding the Spectrum of Love).

Modern teachers on gender identity

There is no single Buddhist position on gender identity. Below are representative public statements from Buddhist teachers and writers, grouped by direction.

Trans-affirming views

In a 2017 Lion's Roar column, a reader born male asked whether seeking surgery conflicted with the teaching on no-self. All three teachers who answered were supportive. Zen teacher Sallie Jiko Tisdale wrote that the Buddha's own story teaches that "extremes are not conducive to real understanding", and that "for a certain number of people, it will require gender-reassignment surgery." Insight teacher Narayan Helen Liebenson wrote that "the teaching of anatta does not say there is no self; it states that nothing conditional can be pointed to as being who or what you are." Andrew Holecek, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, said both relative and absolute truth must be honoured: "We find our way to the absolute through the relative, not by dismissing it" (Lion's Roar 2017).

The anthology Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices (North Atlantic Books, 2019), edited by Kevin Manders and Elizabeth Marston, collects over thirty trans, genderqueer and nonbinary practitioners from both Mahāyāna and Theravāda traditions (North Atlantic Books listing). In a 2023 Lion's Roar essay, René Rivera, a trans man who transitioned at 48 after fifteen years of Insight practice, describes transition itself as a direct lesson in not-self: the experience of a gendered identity changing showed him that no fixed self could be found (Rivera 2023).

Writer Ray Buckner argues that cisgender teachers misuse the two truths against trans students:

"When transgender Buddhists describe their relative truth, Buddhist teachers too commonly pressure them to focus instead on the ultimate truth, thereby ignoring the realities of their bodily experiences." — (Buckner 2022, The Revealer)

The strongest form of this view is that discouraging transition on "not-self" grounds asks trans people alone to practise detachment from their bodies, while everyone else keeps their haircuts, braces and preferences.

Other views

The Zen teacher and author Brad Warner argues the opposite. Buddhism, he writes, rejects any immaterial mind or soul separate from the body, and treats body and mind as one. On that view the "wrong body" idea requires a mind–body split that Buddhism does not accept:

"According to Buddhist philosophy, it is utterly impossible for someone to be born in the wrong body." — (Warner 2023, Hardcore Zen)

He concludes that hormones and surgery may relieve "superficial aspects" of suffering but cannot reach its root. The same argument appears on mind–body dualism and born in the wrong body.

The feminist scholar and Buddhist teacher Rita Gross (1943–2015) took a more complex position in her posthumous book Buddhism beyond Gender (Shambhala 2018). Her target was what she called "the prison of gender roles". She argued that replacing old roles with a "new and improved" set "would simply be clinging to a different set of conventions", and concluded:

"Being gendered does not subvert enlightenment, but clinging to gender identity does." — (Gross 2018, excerpt in Quest)

Gross was not writing against trans people. In the same passage she says a society free of gender roles would let people use their bodies however they ethically choose, "whether or not those bodies were born with their current sexual equipment". Her argument is that identity built around gender, of any kind, is a form of clinging. Gender-critical and trans-affirming readers both quote her.

From the meditation hall to the therapy room

Many detransitioners meet Buddhist ideas through therapy rather than temples. Several "third-wave" behavioural therapies borrowed Buddhist practices, minus the religion.

Mindfulness translates sati, which in the Pali texts means remembering or keeping something in mind, as well as present-moment awareness. The modern clinical meaning, "paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally", is a 20th-century reinterpretation (Gethin 2011).

MBSR and MBCT

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts for chronic pain patients in the late 1970s (Kabat-Zinn 1982). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) combined it with cognitive therapy to prevent relapse in recurrent depression. It teaches people to see thoughts as passing events, not facts. An individual-patient meta-analysis of 1,258 patients from nine trials found MBCT reduced the risk of depressive relapse over 60 weeks compared with no MBCT (hazard ratio 0.69) and compared with active treatments including antidepressants (hazard ratio 0.79) (Kuyken et al. 2016).

ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), founded by psychologist Steven Hayes, aims to change a person's relationship to painful thoughts rather than their content. Its core processes include defusion (seeing a thought as a thought, not a command), acceptance of unwanted feelings, and self-as-context: an observing self that is distinct from any story about oneself. Hayes himself wrote about the parallels with Buddhist teaching on suffering, attachment and the self (Hayes 2002). A later review describes ACT as, in part, a Western adoption of Buddhist tenets, while noting that ACT reached them through behavioural science (Fung 2015). In ACT terms, "I am a man trapped in a woman's body" would be treated as a self-story to be held loosely, whatever its content.

DBT and radical acceptance

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), developed by Marsha Linehan for chronically suicidal patients with borderline personality disorder, balances change with acceptance (Linehan 1993). Linehan drew on her own Zen training for its mindfulness and acceptance skills (Psychwire, Zen and DBT). Its best-known skill, radical acceptance, means fully acknowledging a reality that cannot be changed, without approving of it and without fighting it. The idea, close to the Second Noble Truth, is that pain becomes suffering through refusal to accept it.

What the evidence does and does not show

These therapies have good evidence for depression, anxiety and emotional dysregulation, but we found no controlled trials of them as a treatment for gender dysphoria. What exists are clinical observations and first-person accounts. Gender dysphoria often occurs alongside depression, anxiety, trauma and obsessive thinking (see mental health), so it is plausible that tools which help those conditions also ease some people's distress. That is a hypothesis, not a demonstrated effect.

How detransitioners use these ideas

On /r/detrans, Buddhism and meditation come up repeatedly as one strand among many: therapy, exercise, time in nature, psychedelics, gender-critical reading and simply getting older. The accounts below come from a small, self-selected set of comments and cannot show how common these experiences are.

Seeing the self as constructed

The most frequent theme is that practice made the constructed nature of the self visible from the inside, not just as an idea.

I think the biggest thing for me was becoming aware of the contrived nature of my own ego. It's all well and good to conceptualize this, but mindfulness practice helped me to see it first hand. … It helped reduce and eventually heal the divide between the body I have and the person I wished I could be, recognizing that these are not really different in any substantial way. —cranberry_snacks, desisted

This maps closely onto the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta: the "person I wished I could be" is a perception and a fabrication, no more "me" than the body. For some, that insight dissolved gender identity as a category:

Mainly meditation showed me that gender identities are bs, just passing thoughts you attach yourself to. We are women just because we are in female bodies. These bodies are temporary vehicles, thats it, i play a woman in this life, and so are you. —Elaranu, detrans female

A detransitioned man who practises Zen put the contrast in terms of attention:

Zen is applicable to the trans experience, because it asks us to focus on the opposite of what gender makes us focus on.

Gender focuses us on the body, the mind, and how we are perceived by others. Zen reminds us that those things are not who we are*, in the truest sense.* —sentientmassofenergy, detrans male

Elsewhere he turned the not-self argument against the "wrong body" model directly: "Who is the "I" who is in the wrong body??" (sentientmassofenergy, detrans male).

Attachment to a self-image

A second theme is that suffering came less from the body than from clinging to an image of who one should be. This echoes the Buddhist category of "clinging to a doctrine of self".

I also believe it is suffering to develop so much attachment to identity, but I lean more stoic/buddhist with regard to human experience so that's my attempt at nirvana talking. —Eyes-9, desisted male

Others draw on rebirth rather than not-self. One desisted woman asked why, if she might have been "a man, but also a cat, and a bug, and a fish" in past lives, it should matter so much what this particular body looks like (New-Yoghurt-1179, desisted female).

"Ego death"

Some describe the collapse of a trans identity as an ego death: a term borrowed from psychedelic and meditative traditions for the temporary dissolution of one's sense of self. It is not a Pali term, but it is often linked to anattā.

I had what I call an “ego death”. My identity of a man in a woman’s body was all I’d ever really known. It was something said to me from a young age and something I considered fact. —Luck_Unlucky2, desisted female

She then rebuilt herself from small things, such as whether blue was really her favourite colour, close to what existentialist writers call self-making.

Accepting the body

The third theme is practical: mindfulness and DBT skills as ways of living with dysphoria without acting on it. A commenter flaired as a verified mental health professional described the DBT approach:

So when you have a thought that you should be a woman, you can accept that thought and know that you don’t have to act on that thought. When you feel distress over your masculinity, you can accept the distress and know that it will pass and it can only cause you as much harm as you let it. —Froidinslip, verified professional

I’d recommend you look into DBT coping mechanisms, particularly radical acceptance and mindfulness. Figure out some grounding techniques and reconnect with your body for what it is—not for what you wish it could be. —detransdyke, detransitioner

Some commenters frame this as a middle way between rumination and repression:

That's not to say that the answer is to ignore and repress either. Repression is at least as bad as rumination. I feel like this is where mindfulness and therapy can really help. Learn detached self-observation, and learn how to pay careful attention without pouring mental fuel on the fire. —cranberry_snacks, desisted

For many, acceptance is also needed after medical transition, to live with changes that cannot be reversed. The healing and recovery page covers this, including body neutrality and grief.

Trans perspectives

Trans commenters also use meditation, and many report that it helps with strong emotions. But some argue that for them acceptance practice was exhausted before transition, not an alternative to it:

I was just recalling a number of stories of trans folk who say they spent years trying to meditate peace with their body only to realizing transitioning was the only solution. —Croconeer, mtf

Unironically learn to do mindfulness meditation. I’m not going to pretend that it will completely make you happy 100% of the time, but it will take the edge off of your strong emotions. —-countvideo-, mtf

Both sides describe the same practice; what differs is what they conclude about the body. Some trans-identified people meditate for years and remain content with transition; this page does not question them.

Critiques and limits

Spiritual bypassing

The psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood coined spiritual bypassing for the "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks" (Welwood, Tricycle interview). The risk applies in every direction. "There is no self" can be used to dismiss a dysphoric person's distress as illusory. It can also be used to avoid the hard work of understanding where the distress came from: trauma, internalised homophobia, internalised misogyny or autism. Many detransitioners say that exploring those roots was essential (see reframing dysphoria).

One commenter described "acceptance" being used to shut that exploration down:

Every time I brought up reasons for my dysphoria like, CSA, bullying, attraction to people who typically like the opposite gender, my local therapist kept saying to stop trying to find reasons why I am like I am and work on accepting myself. —Luck_Unlucky, desisted

Acceptance in the Buddhist and DBT sense means seeing clearly, not refusing to look.

Detachment can become self-rejection

Teaching on the dangers of sensual pleasure can be read as permission to reject the body or sexuality altogether. One questioning commenter wrote of his own renunciation, "Some people would call it reppression, I call it freedom" (Prestigious_Fly2810, questioning own transgender status). Yet the middle way rejects war against oneself, and detachment driven by disgust with one's body may be another form of the body hatred that fed dysphoria in the first place.

Meditation is not always calming

Meditation can destabilise as well as heal. Interviews with practitioners and teachers from the Theravāda, Zen and Tibetan traditions produced a list of 59 kinds of meditation-related experiences across seven areas, including the sense of self. Responses ranged from very positive to very negative, and in some cases the distress and impairment were severe and long-lasting (Lindahl et al. 2017). One detransitioner said they had "hated meditation and mindfulness because of the awareness it brought to my body" (hundlort).

Buddhism can feed gender beliefs too

Buddhist ideas did not lead everyone away from a trans identity. One desisted woman traced her belief in a male soul partly to Western Buddhism:

As a teenager I got into New Age Spirituality and Buddhism, which lead me to decide I must have been reincarnated wrong or born as the ‘worst sex’ as a punishment (karma). —deleted, desisted female

A Chinese Buddhist commenter replied that her own tradition was "very different from the New Age western Buddhists that you were probably exposed to" (Kirikizande, desisted female). Another man recalled that before he detransitioned he was "a Buddhist into psychedelics" in a very "affirming" crowd (ToastNeighborBee, desisted male). The karma explanation of the kathoey, described on the Thailand page, shows the same thing at the level of a whole culture.

Assessment

Buddhist philosophy offers detransitioners three things. It offers a diagnosis: much suffering comes from clinging to a fixed picture of oneself, and a gender identity can be such a picture. It offers a method: watching thoughts and feelings arise and pass without obeying them. And it offers a reframe of the body: neither the true self nor an enemy, but an impermanent, functioning thing that can be cared for.

It does not settle the question of transition. Not-self undercuts the idea of an inner gender essence, but it equally undercuts the idea that the body is the self. Traditional Buddhism placed people by their bodies in monastic life, but its texts also imagine bodies changing sex. Modern teachers read the same sources in opposite directions. What can be said is that the Buddhist account of craving, clinging and self-image gives a coherent explanation of why some people find that changing the body did not end their suffering, and why some found relief by changing their relationship to identity instead.

The main danger is using "non-self" as a slogan to dismiss real pain. In the early texts not-self is a practice for ending suffering, not a reason to ignore it.

Related pages

• Philosophical frameworks: the other lenses in this series
• Stoicism: a Western tradition with a similar emphasis on acceptance
• Religion and spirituality: Buddhism alongside Christianity, Islam and other faiths
• Psychedelics: ego dissolution by another route
• Healing and recovery
• Gender nonconformity without labels
• Support directory: gender-exploratory therapists and support groups

References

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