Queer, trans, and intersex Buddhism: implications for culturally relevant social work practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of queer, trans, and intersex people in Buddhism can be confusing for clients and needs clarification. There is precedent for queer inclusion throughout Buddhist traditions, time periods, and cultures, though there has been a great deal of discrimination against gender and sexually diverse communities. There is room for spirituality and social work to expand its understanding of Buddhism beyond mindfulness practices and literature on queer spirituality in social work is often limited to religions that dominate Europe and North America. This article examines histories of queer, trans, and intersex people in a variety of Buddhist traditions. Using a queer Buddhist hermeneutics the article discusses stories of queer and trans bodhisattvas in Buddhist scriptures. The article also discusses tonglen (compassion meditation) and its relationship with queerness, trauma, and HIV/AIDS. The article then explores deity yoga practices for non-binary and gender fluid Buddhist beings and meditations that can be affirming to queer communities. The article ends by discussing how multi-level social work praxis can support the development of a queer-engaged Buddhism steeped in what Dean Spade (2015) calls a trickle-up social justice praxis that embodies the brahma viharas (Divine Abodes).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".