“Tender” is a column about all of the beautiful, delicious, and liberating ways that LGBTQ+ people work with food. From production to preparation, local farms to reimaginings of the restaurant, our community is at the forefront of what it means to nourish and be nourished today. Read more from the series here.
On a quiet street in Philadelphia on Lenapehoking land, Yaya Vallis glides around their sun-drenched kitchen, passing a collection of heavy glass jars. Each one bears a handwritten label: motherwort, ginger and clove, lemon balm, mullein leaves, skullcap, and chamomile cordial. Today, Vallis is preparing a lilac honey infusion. It’s spring and the sweet lavender-hued flowers are in bloom. A few weeks from now, their floral aroma will fade and the grape-like clusters will slump to the ground. Vallis wastes no time emptying a jar of petals into a pan of warming honey. Scruffy chin stubble peeks out below their widening mouth as they take a first whiff of the heady fragrance.
For the 28-year-old self-described dreamy faeboi, plants are spiritual guides and gender allies. “Herbs are so affirming. They show up like, ‘How can I support you?’” Vallis tells me. “Asking for the support of different herbs has made me feel comfortable in myself and knowing it’s okay to ask for help.”
Herbalism makes room for empathetic relationships between people and plants. It can alter how someone relates to the literal dirt beneath them (get eye-level with a plant and your perspective will quickly change). And as care work, it invites collaboration with plants as autonomous beings with the power to transform the material nature of our bodies. In their practice, Vallis strives to harness the power of this ancient method to address the needs of their QTPOC community members — themself included — today.
A fifth generation Black herbalist, Vallis’ lineage stretches from the wetlands of Mississippi to the hills of Kentucky to the Bermuda islands, all the way back to a babbling creek on Piscataway lands in Washington D.C. where they were raised. Theirs is a history steeped in wildflower teas, root tinctures and milky oatmeal baths — medicinal recipes passed down from their great-great grandmother, Minerva Jewell Adams, who brought herbalism with her from Mississippi to Chicago in the early 1900s. For decades, Adams bottled tinctures, fed folks from her kitchen table, and offered her skills freely or for trade at church gatherings and community meals. “Herbalism in the South is autonomy,” Vallis explains, maintaining that the legacy they inherited ought to be a gift for all, not a commodity to profit from.
Before moving to Philadelphia, Vallis worked closely with local community-based herbalists such as D.C. Mutual Aid Apothecary, a volunteer-run clinic affiliated with Herbalists Without Borders, that makes herbalism accessible through free plant giveaways, medicine-making classes, and farm workshops. These days, Vallis works as an educator at Philly Herb Hub, a community apothecary that provides free herbs and workshops for Black folks in Philadelphia.
In 2021, Vallis received a grant from trans podcast Gender Reveal that jumpstarted their project to distribute mutual aid herbal kits for the queer community. Ingredients like sustainable honey, locally grown mushrooms, salts, and oils can be cost-prohibitive, so the funding helped pay for honey from Honey Haus, a community of queer backyard beekeepers in Southeast Texas. The kits include seasonal tinctures like nettles (ideal for allergy season), bath soaks, and a zine filled with artwork by Vallis illustrating the local biodiversity of Pennsylvania flora. By giving away their creations at little to no charge, the herbalist strives to follow in traditions of pre-capitalist societies, where people could freely forage and grow food on communal land that, because it belonged to no one, belonged to everyone.
“I can see a plant, understand its history and [potential use as] medicine, and then I’m that much more tied into the landscape. I feel supported as I walk around my neighborhood and I can see all of my comrades, everyone just growing and thriving,” says Vallis. “In that sense, herbalism is anti-colonial medicine. It strengthens the bodily autonomy of the individual, which is key for resistance, giving people the skills to heal themselves as much as possible. It’s definitely connected to how my ancestors were healing.”
Working to pass on the knowledge of wild plants is a skill set that has often carried revolutionary potential because these practices threaten state control over people’s labor, movement, and gender expression. For centuries, feudal rulers and colonizers singled out and antagonized peasants and Indigenous people for their gender nonconformity, nature-based spirituality, and their use of herbal methods of birth control and abortion. In a cruel, though unsurprising twist, colonial forces have since appropriated plant medicine and reoriented herbal knowledge to fit capitalism’s tendency “towards productivity, and quick fixes,” remarks Vallis, a process that erases the historic plant geography of one’s bioregion. “By separating and destroying keepers of this knowledge, it is unable to be passed on. I cannot even begin to imagine what has been lost.”
Herbalism is a practice that reconnects people to the land, to their bodies, and to each other — truths that can be especially meaningful for trans people, who too often face a slate of indignities when seeking care within mainstream medicine. In the United States, roughly 25% of trans people surveyed for the 2015 U.S. Trans Survey reported being denied routine, gender-affirming care by their providers. Over half said they’d been refused coverage for confirmation surgeries. A third of respondents noted experiencing transphobia from their providers — a rate that increases for trans people of color and trans people with disabilities. In this environment, nearly one quarter of trans people steer clear of the doctor’s office to avoid potential mistreatment, and a third can’t afford to go at all. While herbalism does not replace access to emergency medical treatment, surgery, and pharmaceuticals, it offers a vital supplement to conventional healthcare for trans and queer communities. Herbal medicine helps trans people to claim agency of our own bodies and to bypass institutional gatekeeping over who has access to comprehensive healthcare. “[Herbal approaches] allow us to be the experts of our own bodies,” Vallis says. “You do not need to prove that you are in pain in order to receive support.”
These are lessons Vallis has learned from their own practice. As a neurodivergent person with high levels of anxiety, the healer employs natural solutions to ground their emotions and ease their stress. The calming quality of herbs like milky oats to relieve anxiety, mugwort to aid sleep, and maypop to connect with one's body is no small thing in a time when the state threatens the lives of trans people daily. As preventative care, Vallis observes how the benefits of herbs strengthen with prolonged use, especially chamomile, lion’s mane, and turkey tail mushrooms.
Beyond providing avenues of relief, plants can embody models of nature’s inherent fluidity. For Vallis, mushrooms have always seemed especially punk queer. Take Schizophyllum commune, a fungus with over 23,000 unique sexes. “It's just amazing to think of one species interacting with the world and propagating like that,” they tell me. “It helps me imagine different realities for myself. Western conceptions of gender really just do not work at all. They literally crumble apart.”
Mushrooms have long been part of their practice to help with exhaustion and stay alert. Recently, they started growing lion’s mane, thanks to an at-home grow kit that allows Vallis to harvest fresh mushrooms and tincture them at home, increasing the benefits (and the decreasing costs) of fast-acting adaptogens that help stabilize moods and manage their mental health. In keeping with a more expansive understanding of our relationship to plants, Vallis speaks of fungi and herbs not as things to consume but as “more-than-human kin in the medicinal community.”
Mushrooms are gaining popularity as food and medicine, but the lingering cultural squeamishness around fungi may contribute to their slow integration into herbal pantries. Distrust for edible mushrooms is not solely attributable to their deceptive, poisonous doppelgangers. Fungi are unpredictable and many species refuse to be domesticated. Not quite plants, not quite animals, their invisible anarchist networks perform ecological mutual aid underground while their flamboyant fruiting bodies appear, like a pop-up drag show, after rainstorms and natural disasters to carry out a slow-motion demolition, breaking down dead matter so new life can grow.
As part of an upcoming project, Vallis is working with the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington D.C. that lobbies policymakers to expand the legalization of psychedelics and provides funding through community grants for plant medicine researchers, educators, artists, and entrepreneurs. Vallis’ project will focus on the Indigenous use of tobacco and psilocybin. It’s their first time growing tobacco, and Vallis is hopeful that the Northeastern native plant will honor them with a harvest. They are curious about the history of tobacco in the United States, and how it has been used depending on whose hands it is in — from a revered medicinal plant, “to a cash crop that's sustaining the oppression of so many people,” as Vallis puts it. Learning these histories doesn’t happen overnight, but that’s part of the appeal. “We need time to slow down to examine how these relationships have played out over history,” they tell me. “To really think about ourselves in that context, and how we're going forward from here.”
Moments of stillness between plants and an individual can change how we interact with our surroundings. The capitalist machine demands faster speeds, greater output and higher profits, but plants orient us to the benefits of radical slowness. “Herbalism is anti-rush culture,” says Vallis. “Working with herbs gives me more compassion for myself and my gender expression because they remind me to ask, ‘What makes me feel good? What do I need to live my fullest expression of my being right now?’ I think that micro-attention has transformed all of my relationships, including the one with myself.”
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