A new study and years of research into the effects of psychedelic drugs on users are revealing their power to open doors to gender and sexual awakening.

Researchers say drugs like psilocybin, MDMA, and ketamine are assisting personal explorations into both.

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A study published in March 2025 asked 581 participants who had used psychedelics about how the drugs shaped their sexuality, gender, and relationships, without mentioning those topics in the recruitment.

About a quarter of women, an eighth of men, and one-third of people with other gender identities said psychedelics had heightened their attraction to a gender they weren’t primarily drawn to.

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“That’s not everyone, but it’s still a large number,” lead author Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, New York, told the BBC.

“Part of the beauty of psychedelics is that they loosen our fixed notions of ourselves in the world,” said Jae Sevelius, a licensed clinical psychologist and behavioral health researcher at Columbia University.

His research on psychedelics with sexual and gender minority communities showed the drugs “can create space for new ways for people to think about themselves – including their gender or their sexuality.”

“For some people, this is only something they’ve ever asked themselves internally, and never spoken out loud,” said Baya Voce, a couples counselor and MDMA-assisted couples therapy researcher in Austin.

Under the influence of a drug like ecstasy, however, notions of gender and sexuality loosen into “an open inquiry and an exploration.”

The effects aren’t always immediate.

In 2016, Hunt Priest, a straight senior clergyman at an Episcopal Church in the Seattle area, enrolled in a psychedelic drug trial at Johns Hopkins University to examine the effects of psilocybin on the religious and spiritual attitudes of clergy.

Hunt says he experienced the Holy Spirit “in a very dramatic and embodied way” that was new to him. While it wasn’t sexual, “there was a sense of eros and sexual energy.”

That sparked questions about his own sexuality that lingered. Hunt noticed a “subtle shift” in how he related to the world.

“I was more open,” he said.

Years later, he was having coffee with a male friend-of-a-friend and “there was something there,” he said. The couple is still together.

Psychedelics can pull a curtain back on gender-related questions, as well, said Chandra Khalifian, a therapist in Del Mar, California, who uses psychedelics in her couples practice.

“It’s less that psychedelics directly cause changes in gender perception, and more that they create space to explore feelings and thoughts that were already present but perhaps not previously acknowledged.”

For Shaina Brassard, that meant losing any thought about her biological sex or social gender. The 39-year-old from Albany, New York, had a ketamine-assisted therapy session in 2022, and while coming down from the high, she became aware of her hand holding her breast.

“I was like, ‘Whose breast is this?'” she recalled thinking. “I had experienced the trip as this blissful break from the weight of being a woman in the world.”

While she left still identifying as a woman, she felt less attachment to her gender and more compassion for others, from nonbinary people to men.

“It has always been obvious to me that gender is a social construct, but this gave me a felt certainty that our bodies are containers for our souls,” she said. 

Rob, who used only his first name to protect his privacy, took on the role of therapist himself when he used MDMA and mushrooms to explore lingering issues of fear and shame over his attraction to men. While he’d known since his teenage years that he was gay, he suppressed those feelings.

Growing up during the AIDS crisis, “I remember being pretty sure that I was going to die in this terrible, mortifying, painful, and socially unacceptable way because of who I was and what I did,” he said. “Fear and shame got right in there – right between my sexual desire and identity, and my courage to express them.” 

On one trip, he realized that shame had caused him to reflexively present “as straight or dominant.” Another trip on ayahuasca in Costa Rica revealed “all the times in my life when I was younger that I had missed an opportunity to have sex.”

The experiences allowed him to look back on his younger self with compassion, love, and even humor, he said, without judgment.

“The essential question all people ask is, ‘Who am I?'” Psychedelics, Rob said, helped him find out.

“Ultimately, psychedelics don’t change who we are,” Columbia psychologist Sevelius said. They do, however, “help us remember or discover who we’ve always been underneath the social programming.”

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