Category: Health

  • An admission

    It’s yet another week in the ongoing demonisation of trans women; former prime minister Liz Truss wants to introduce a member’s bill that would ban healthcare for trans teens and make it illegal for trans women to use women’s spaces, and a bunch of bigoted right-wing shits have made a film mocking trans women in…

  • Unethical. Unscientific. Unsafe

    The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is…

  • HRT+DNA

    Over at Stained Glass Woman, Doc Impossible has written a fun piece about HRT and what it does regarding DNA.  As ever, the “basic biology” crowd are ignorant about actual biology: the super-short version is that DNA is an instruction book but hormones decide which specific instructions your body will actually follow. Change those hormones…

  • “I no longer feel safe”

    Jane Fae writes in Metro about the UK government’s demonisation of trans women: “I no longer feel safe as a transgender woman. I no longer feel included. …Did I mention I was angry? Well, yes, that. But also scared; fearful for my future in a country that can contemplate this; and – having seen how…

  • Pain

    I really love Cat Valente’s writing, and her latest essay – Pain Is Not Penance – is a thoughtful piece about pain and our understanding of it. Some of it feels like an exorcism. Pain, Valente writes, is something many of us have learnt to believe is a punishment: For something you’ve done, something you’ve…

  • Now they’re closing clinics

    A US health clinic for trans people has closed its doors permanently after the introduction of a state-wide ban on healthcare for trans teens. As Xtra magazine reports, the ban was largely based on wild allegations by a single person, allegations that appear to be largely or completely baseless. But the national press, and the…

  • Fake science, real cash

    The Huffington Post has an interesting exposé of the people making good money from bad takes and pseudoscience: you can make tens of thousands of dollars presenting pseudoscience in the employ of anti-trans religious extremists. And while the article is mainly about the US, the UK gets a look-in too. You may recognise the names…

  • Where’s the rush?

    The London Gender Identity Clinic has just updated its waiting list information: as of July 2023 it was making first appointments for people first referred in July/August 2018, five years ago. With 324 new referrals each month and 55 first appointments offered per month, it’s clear that that five year figure is only going to…

  • Years and years

    One of the more irritating barks of the anti-trans sealions is “what rights don’t trans people have, exactly?” It’s irritating because it’s deliberately obtuse: many of the rights we have on paper are rights that are not enforced, which means they might as well not exist. And the sealions know that but pretend not to.…

  • The trick is to keep peeling

    It’s nearly six years since I started transitioning, and my relationship to my body has changed quite significantly since I began. As I wrote in my book, I never had the severe body dysphoria that many trans people experience, the discomfort, unhappiness or even horror that comes from your body and mind not matching up.…