Eli Mann is a Poughkeepsie-based story-teller, educator, writer, and coach passionate about supporting others in self-exploration and self-expansion.
Eli’s lived experience transitioning within gender, spirituality, sexuality, and relationship structure has created a lens for seeing the ways in which we’re each always in transition in our lives. Our lives are full of changes, challenges, and fresh starts, and we deserve to be seen for our courage and to receive support as we redefine ourselves.
Eli feels passionate about building a world where we can all come together with all of our identities, stories and experiences validated, heard, and represented. Eli believes that healing comes from feeling heard, seen and held, and from living with the ordinary, everyday courage that comes along with putting yourself out there and sticking around for whatever happens next.
After over a decade of writing and speaking publicly about the lessons learned through their life experiences (and a lifetime of devouring every possible nugget of information from as many of life’s teachers as possible), Eli launched a coaching practice to become available to others looking for a comrade and guide as they navigate life transitions.
Eli’s passions are conversational intimacy, shared storytelling, progressive spiritualties, and movement, often in the form of partnered dance and tai chi.
The world Eli wants to live in embraces the full range of human emotions and human bodies with intentionality and care. Eli is committed to asking difficult questions that get us thinking about togetherness, connection, and shared values. Their love for others, knowledge, expression and diversity has brought them them to the place where they value transition and creation in all forms.
Eli believes that each individual should feel free to redefine themselves as many times as necessary, and urges people to consider that maybe the identity they jive with most hasn’t been invented yet.
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*The pronouns “he” and “they”, used interchangeably, are intended to more accurately reflect Eli’s nonbinary yet masc-presenting gender. Eli has identified as nonbinary (including genderqueer, bigender, agender, androgynous, and more) on-and-off for 15+ years and does not hold any particular gender identity closely. Eli honors the fact that for the first 21 years of life, that life experience was shaped by being a female-perceived person, and for the last 14+ years, the perception as some type of man has shaped every encounter outside the boundary of their skin.
A little more on Eli’s educational, work, & volunteer background:
Eli graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2012 having majored in psychology and sociology, and has worked since 2013 as a legal assistant and office manager. The scope of his paid desk work has included assisting various attorneys who practice in the areas of divorce, separation, custody, child support, orders of protection, name changes, wills & estates, real estate, criminal defense, and employment discrimination. Eli has also enjoyed many years of seasonal data entry work for accountants, and to this day gets hot for spreadsheets.
Before entering into full-time employment, Eli spoke in colleges, high schools, middle schools and trade schools, educating folks about gender and sexual orientation. Eli has also participated in a wealth of community organizing concerned with fighting jail expansion, protecting tenants from rising rents, critiquing cancel culture, and ensuring dignity for all.
From 2013-2014, Eli served as a moderator for a small TNG [kink] chapter with their partner at the time and other friends. (If you don’t know what TNG is, we can get into that in another setting.) The group still runs today, though it is many iterations of leadership removed from the leadership at its inception.
From 2014-2017, Eli served as a deacon in a small church within the United Church of Christ (UCC). In 2018, Eli & two friends founded a church service, SEEDS, to try to bridge the gap that exists within queerness and Christianity. The service dissolved due to scheduling and other material incompatibilities and not due to any kind of change of heart among the leadership. That said, Eli now feels mostly Jewish, so it was probably for the best.
In 2017, Eli’s community shifted again when a friend of one of his closest friends found herself in a kill-or-be-killed situation within a wider domestic violence context, resulting in the death of her abuser. Eli immediately launched into supporting the community of “purple people” that grew around this woman and her family until her early (yet still untimely) release from prison in January 2024. The impact of those seven years, and everything witnessed and experienced as a part of being a part of that web of support, is still being tended, sorted, and understood within Eli’s body and wider life.
Eli has lost friends to addiction, overdose, suicide, cross-country moves, court involvement, isolating partnerships, cancer, and even that small voice inside that signals you’ve grown apart from someone. Honoring the palpability of grief is a big part of Eli’s practice.
Eli has a strong network of close friends, teachers, instructors (including dance, tai chi, qi gong, acupuncture, and massage), counselors (including somatic & family-dynamics trained therapists), parents, and lovers. They teach, guide, listen, love, enrich, enliven, and infuse ordinary days with joy.
In his spare time, Eli reads about communication, boundary-setting, conflict resolution, restorative justice, recovering from trauma & abuse, and loving people even when they’re hard to love and even when that means walking away.
Eli lived the first 20 years of their life as a girl and woman, spent a few years in a stage of double-take androgyny where most folks couldn’t quite tell what their gender was, and is now perceived as a man by most people through the help of testosterone, which they started injecting in 2011. Eli took a hormone sabbatical from 2018-2021 and is happy to speak to that experience (and also happy to be back on testosterone). The twenty-some-odd years Eli lived perceived as a girl and woman shaped their life profoundly, creating a strong affinity with those who experience gender-based discrimination and live with CPTSD from gender-based violence. At the time of this writing, Eli has a strong preference to be seen as a trans person and not as a guy, though they understand the reality of their embodiment and are not particularly upset to be seen as a man by strangers.
Eli runs a blog over at WovenTogether, though notes there is no “recent” writing. That said, there is a bunch of work in progress (just like Eli)!
Things Eli spends time thinking about:
Boundaries ‣ Authenticity ‣ Intimacy in friendship ‣ Getting out in nature ‣ Grief ‣ Spirituality ‣ Human need ‣ Corporate greed ‣ Having love-filled connections with friends old and new ‣ How to sit with discomfort better ‣ Body work ‣ Tai chi & qi gong ‣ Liberation theology ‣ Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ‣ Intersectional Feminism ‣ Healing from trauma ‣ Being weird ‣ Communicating more intentionally every day ‣ How to organize around economic, race, and gender inequality ‣ Relationships (within oneself, between the self and others, between the self and the divine) ‣ Gender ‣ Sexuality ‣ Prison Abolition ‣ Empowerment ‣ Vulnerability ‣ Discipline ‣ Interdependence ‣ Power relations and what they’ve learned about them through kink/BDSM ‣ Plants ‣ Food ‣ Letting children be teachers & guides when it comes to freedom, creativity, and expression ‣ Remembering we’re all works in progress ‣ Music ‣ Artistic expression
everyone transitions 