UK charities offering support, advice and information for trans and non-binary people
The Beaumont Society – help and support from the trans community.
The Clare Project – Trans support and social group based in Brighton and Hove but open to anyone wishing to explore issues around gender identity.
Gendered Intelligence – Trans-led charity that aims to improve the lives of trans and non-binary people in the UK, specialises in supporting young people.
GIRES – Gender identity research & education.
LGBT Foundation – National charity based in Manchester with trans services and resources.
Mermaids – UK charity supporting trans and gender-diverse children, young people and their families.
Mindline trans + – Emotional and mental health support helpline for anyone identifying as trans, non-binary, gender variant, and their families, friends, colleagues and carers. Their phone line is open Mondays and Fridays, 8pm to midnight. Ring 0300 330 5468.
Spectra – Peer-led trans services accessible to all trans and gender-diverse people, including 1-2-1 health advocacy support, and counselling, peer mentoring, referral and signposting to relevant partners, talks and workshops and monthly online and in-person social groups.
Stonewall – UK charity campaigning for LGBT equality.
Switchboard – LGBT+ helpline.
THT Direct – our phone and email service for questions about sexual health or living with HIV.
Transbucket –Health care and surgery resource for the online trans community.
WPATH – Non-profit organisation devoted to trans health.
Support for hate crime, domestic abuse or sexual violence
GALOP – LGBT+ anti-violence charity supporting all LGBT+ people who've experienced hate crime, domestic abuse or sexual violence. Their helpline can be reached on 0800 999 5428.
Housing and support
Stonewall Housing have an online referral service. Their advice line is open from 10am to 1pm, Monday to Friday, on 020 7359 5767.
The Outside Project – LGBTQI+ community shelter and centre in London. Referrals are through Stonewall Housing. Also runs online socials and events in their virtual community space.
Albert Kennedy Trust supports LGBTQ+ young people aged 16-25 in the UK who are experiencing homelessness or living in a hostile or abusive environment.
Hi 💖 I was wondering what your binding policies are? I absolutely adored ‘Upon a Dream’ and would love to bind it! It would be non profit obviously, just a copy for me and a copy as a gift for a fellow binder. I would credit you in any Instagram posts I made of it and would not share the typeset/cover on any groups etc. Please let me know! 🥰 my insta is @book_nook_bindery x
Hi! Thank you for checking with me. Im more than happy for anyone to do a bind of any of my fics as long as it follows the usual fandom rules and etiquette:):)
The only thing I ask is you show me photos once it’s done because it makes me feel nice 😂
Glad you liked that one! They have a special place in my heart :):):)
“I don’t see the problem,” says James Potter, Lily’s PhD advisor.
James often doesn’t see the problem. Almost as often as he sees solutions. He’s young, for someone at this career stage, and Lily has had some mishaps and missteps along the way so she’s a bit older than the usual student. They’re both 35 and it took Lily a while to get used to this. Deferring to him when she’s in fact older than him by those insignificant two months.
But James is brilliant, and clever, and he doesn’t see a problem.
She jabs at the screen again. The 1% that should be a great big zero.
“Your PhD depends on this working, yes?” James asks.
Lily nods.
“And its working?”
She nods again.
James takes a long sip of his green post-run Gatorade. It’s 7:42 in the morning. He’s still wearing his neon shorts and neon shoes and indecently cut tank top that he’s sweated through.
On a normal day, James does his run, cleans up in the decontamination shower in the applied physics department and eats a disgustingly healthy breakfast. His routine is pleasantly predictable.
Today, Lily stood outside the front door waiting to drag him down to her office. He made jabs about spiders laying in wait for their victims.
“I made no changes,” Lily says. “It shouldn’t be working.”
“The computer restarted, right?” There is a cheeky little infuriating smile on the corner of James’ mouth.
“Oh, don’t give me that,” she snaps. “I restart as per the mandated updates. It never made any difference before.”
A small shrug. James drinks more Gatorade. He smells like sweat and synthetic electrolytes, and Lily doesn’t like it. It’s overwhelming in her small office.
“Don’t shrug at me,” she tells him off. She often tells him off.
“Lily, you have calculated one percent of infinity,” he says and smiles so wide it’s like she got her doctor title already. “Celebrate! This is a good thing. You know full well — and I know you don’t like it, but it’s true — that a lot of what we do is happy accidents and successful errors.”
Lily picks up a cup at random from her desk, and drinks cold leftover coffee. She tries another one, and it’s marginally warmer, so it will do.
“You need to leave the office,” James says, nose scrunched up in distaste in her direction. “Go home, take a wash, and go to sleep.”
Lily must make a face because he adds: “it’s nice outside. You look even paler than normally. Some vitamins and some sunlight will do you good.”
There is a laptop on Lily’s kitchen table that mirrors the screen of her work computer. Technically not allowed, but nobody has noticed yet. She must małe it obvious that she’s thinking about it — her face often betrays her thoughts.
“Don’t you even think of using that laptop of yours,” James says, because of course he somehow knows all about it, “or I’ll come and unplug it.”
“It has a backup generator,” Lily tells him just to come out on top, but reluctantly agrees.
***
In London, Regulus thinks he’s finally, finally, lost his mind.
YOU ARE AS SANE AS YOU WERE LAST NIGHT, OR THE NIGHT BEFORE says a Voice inside of his head. It doesn’t sound like any other voice Regulus has ever heard. It’s like… it’s not like anything. It’s incomparable. It’s a Voice that’s singular and coherent, but it’s also a hundred thousand voices merged together into a cacophony.
A choir of conflicting registers.
ALTHOUGH YOUR FAMILY’S DEFINITION OF SANE IS… DIVERGENT TO THE USUAL
“I resent that,” he answers.
NO, YOU DON’T, the Voice says, this time aloud, using Regulus’ mouth to formulate the words. I CAN READ WHAT YOU REALLY THINK, AND YOU KNOW THAT I AM RIGHT
Regulus is good at not arguing when he wants to argue. Years of practice in biting his tongue, a lesson he’s learnt in childhood that became a habit in the years since. He knows not to argue when it’s unreasonable to, when the entity he argues against is not one to be convinced otherwise — his teachers, his mother when angry, a Voice that’s more than likely a hallucination of his own brain.
YOU CAN ARGUE WITH ME the Voice says, and it sounds giddy. I LOVE TO ARGUE
Must have happened when he hit his head. The van knocked some part of his reasoning loose. Maybe some valve keeping the madness in check got damaged and it all spilled out all over his ability to keep his mind straight.
Some fears must inevitably come true, he supposes.
NOT THE VAN I’M AFRAID. MORE OF A GREAT COSMIC INCONVENIENCE, AND YOU WON THE LOTTERY. ITS TIME TO SAVE THE WORLD, REGULUS
Regulus wonders, idly, why the world needed saving.
IT’S COMING TO AN END
“The world is ending?”
MOST DEFINITELY SO. UNFORTUNATELY, YES
Regulus considers this. If the world was ending, then Voices speaking from his mouth were probably the least of his worries. This, too, could of course be a part of the madness: he always has been prone to melodramatic fits on fancy, or so at least his mother used to say.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
YES REGULUS. YOU, AND EVERYONE ELSE.
*********
so is Regulus crazy? Who is the Voice? Is James ever going to get his shower? Will I ever come up with a title?
It’s 5:24 in the morning. University of Kent, Canterbury, England.
A Monday, the fourth of May. On the desk is a cold cup of coffee, next to it a lukewarm cup of coffee, each half-drunk half-forgotten.
Lily Evans sits at the desk — sits at her desk — eyes blood-shot red with the lack of sleep. She doesn’t realise but except for the two three-minute coffee breaks, she has not stopped looking at her computer screen for fourteen hours.
It's an important distinction, that it’s her desk. That it’s her name on the door and her work on the computer, and her hard-won research grant that fuels her PhD. So sleep deprivation? It has nothing on Lily. Nothing as small as an all-nighter could get her to stop. Nothing as insignificant as—
The lights in Lily’s office flicker, once, twice, then shut off completely for exactly nine seconds.
She shrieks.
Not because of the sudden all-consuming darkness she’s been plunged into, but because of what the completeness of it means: along with the lights, the computer shuts down, too.
The screen is blank. The LEDs that shine from the inside of her custom build PC have stopped casting aurora borealis-like lights across the back wall of the office.
After the nine seconds the coffee machine on indicator comes back first, a blink of red in the vastness of nothing.
Lily turns her work computer off three times a year, for department-mandated updates. Otherwise, her semi-kind-of-not-really working function chugs away day or night, workdays, weekends, bank holidays, religious holidays, always. An unscheduled break is out of the question.
The computer turns back on — mechanic grinding whirs of the fans first, the whoosh of water in the cooling system, then the login screen.
Her hands shake as she types in the ever-so-complicated password.
There is no change in the code. It’s backed up (in triplicate) to various secure cloud services anyway, but despite that Lily always fears losing progress.
Not that there has been much. Despite the stipulations of her PhD funding, Lily has not made lasting changes to the program in a couple months. Sure, there has been experiments, and research, and at one point, in a fit of mad desperation, she even installed an AI agent to sort out the gaps in her code, but even that resulted in a vague unhelpful message I am not sure what you are trying to achieve.
Lily knows exactly what she’s trying to achieve. She’s had to explain it in her PhD proposal, and defence of the proposal, and multiple times to her advisor who gets it but also doesn’t.
Lily is calculating the mass and time of the universe. Or rather: Lily is calculating how much more mass and time is left for the universe.
She clicks through the files, checking that everything is where it should be, refreshing the UI just to double-triple check.
It’s a simple UI. There is only one component there, and there only ever has been. A big red number zero.
The number, now, is 1.
***
It’s 5:24 in the morning, Richmond Park, London, England.
Father Regulus Black, of New English Church of Providence and Misery, is practicing his sermon.
Be wary all you who do not see the End, for when the End comes all will be explained. Look into the eyes of that to your right, and that to your left, and see... and see...
Father Regulus Black is meticulous — in every aspect of his life. His clothes are pressed, his hair is neat, his sermons are well researched and written in such a way to always rouse emotions in his flock.
He always looks where he’s walking.
It’s a beautiful day. Father Regulus is enjoying the very early morning sunlight just waking up, and how it reflects off the dew on new leaves of a tree next to the crossing.
He doesn’t think he makes any noise when, first, the mass of a white van reverses into him, then when his body and head make dull, heavy contact with the street.
A light explodes behind his eyes, blinding the view of rough tarmac. He blinks against it — thinks he blinks against it — but it makes no difference. The light is there, eyes open or shut.
PAIN IS NOT AT ALL AS DESCRIBED, something inside of his head says.
The van driver doesn’t attempt to lift him up, and for that Regulus is grateful. The situation is already undignified enough without being manhandled off to the pavement.
“Are you alright, mate?” The driver asks, hovering awkwardly over him. “I was barely making 5 miles an hour; didn’t see you step out onto the road. Didn’t you notice the van?”
WE ARE WELL a Voice which isn’t his responds out of Regulus’ mouth as he contemplates the possible minor-ready-to-turn-major injuries. Slight damage to the spinal cord could turn deadly if he turns his head.
YOU ARE FINE, the Voice in his head says. I WOULD NOT HAVE CHOSEN A VESSEL SO FRAIL.
He sits up. Turns toward the driver. Doesn’t become instantly paralysed – a relief.
“I’m fine,” he answers, in his own voice. “Sorry about the inconvenience.”
It’s five minutes of painful social interaction while the driver tries to convince him to go to a hospital just in case while also making sure Regulus knows the fault is solely his own. They part ways awkwardly, goodbye-thens and misjudged see you laters.
WE ARE IN A HURRY, REGULUS the Voice says both inside of his head and out of his mouth once they’re alone.
The human brain is a remarkable thing. Faced with the unexplainable, the mind creates a series of coping mechanisms (largely summed up as denial). Yes — there is a Voice both in and out of Regulus’ head, coming out from his vocal cords, that isn’t his, and yes — the apparently autonomous entity has taken control of at least some of his faculties, but Regulus wasn’t about to panic about it.
IF YOUR SERMON IS ABOUT THE END OF TIMES, the Voice says, YOU SHOULD SPEAK ABOUT THE FIRES OF DAMNATION.
Regulus thinks that maybe he should have gone to the hospital after all.
***
It’s 5:24 in the morning, University of Kent, Kent, Ohio, United States.
Two men: one tall, one taller, stand in the middle of a road, a campus map open between them.
They are completely, utterly silent, but somehow they communicate. The tongue of the shorter one darts out to, maybe, wet his lip. It looks like he’s tasting the air.
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
NEXT PART
new fic! Im so excited for this one and I hope you are too
it’s an idea Ive had in my mind for years and have written about 10k of as original fic but pivoting it to this is so much more fun and so satisfying.
we have pandalily, we have wolfstar, we have jegulus.
we don’t have a title (the original title is “A Priest, a Demon, and a Physicist walk into the Apocalypse” but Thats a bit unwieldy)
As a warm-up for the Wolfstar Mind The Age Gap Week we decided to share a few of our favourite Wolfstar Age Gap fics… here’s part 1: Professor Lupin! We know you all love him too!
Please enjoy our picks and leave us more recs and suggestions in the comments/reblogs, if you have them!
the birthday boy by greenvlvetcouch (mpr3g)
the wrong foot by SayAnythingGrace (philophirosine)
What’s Older You Like? by augustbettyandivy
Wait for you by MarigoldWritesThings - @marigold-hills
Therein is Love, Therein Desire by tealeavesandtrash - @tealeavesandtrash
Remus is sensitive to changing tides, a part of the moon always with him, and Black is like the sea. He can smell it on him, the way his magic builds up and crackles about the fingertips.
A werewolf, a convict, and a riddle.
I'm excited to share my first foray into fanbinding, featuring one of my favorite wolfstar fics. Please give it a read!
I also included the original illustrations in the story from @hoje--aqui and @a-sunset-outside-my-window (used with explicit permission), and I think they look spectacular!
It's such a romantic and beautifully researched story in such a fantastic setting (Egypt, which has always been an obsession of mine) I knew I needed some way to manifest my adoration into a physical object. I think the printed format makes referencing the footnotes a lot easier too!
I knew immediately that I wanted to try binding it using the Coptic technique with a simple cover, so it would feel like an old dusty tome dug up from somewhere. The inside cover is lined with real papyrus. I loved working on the typeset, and I used an Egyptian lotus for the scene change ornaments. The stars in the sky above the dunes on the belly band are arranged into the a constellation of Altair too, and I included a couple of old lithographs that I felt captured the scenery.
I'm grateful I was allowed to bind this lovely story, it was a very fun project! I already have some ideas of the next stories I'd love to work on.
Absolutely beautiful and the fact that my copy didnt make it to me (THANKS ROYAL MAIL) is forever breaking my heart.
Thank you so much for making this and especially for putting so much thought into it. The fact that you got so many little details that aren’t even noticeable unless one knows what to look for!!!! Im endlessly impressed.
And im so pleased to be on the same paper as @hoje--aqui and @a-sunset-outside-my-window because their art is as much a part of this as Remus’ poor little broken body.
UK charities offering support, advice and information for trans and non-binary people
The Beaumont Society – help and support from the trans community.
The Clare Project – Trans support and social group based in Brighton and Hove but open to anyone wishing to explore issues around gender identity.
Gendered Intelligence – Trans-led charity that aims to improve the lives of trans and non-binary people in the UK, specialises in supporting young people.
GIRES – Gender identity research & education.
LGBT Foundation – National charity based in Manchester with trans services and resources.
Mermaids – UK charity supporting trans and gender-diverse children, young people and their families.
Mindline trans + – Emotional and mental health support helpline for anyone identifying as trans, non-binary, gender variant, and their families, friends, colleagues and carers. Their phone line is open Mondays and Fridays, 8pm to midnight. Ring 0300 330 5468.
Spectra – Peer-led trans services accessible to all trans and gender-diverse people, including 1-2-1 health advocacy support, and counselling, peer mentoring, referral and signposting to relevant partners, talks and workshops and monthly online and in-person social groups.
Stonewall – UK charity campaigning for LGBT equality.
Switchboard – LGBT+ helpline.
THT Direct – our phone and email service for questions about sexual health or living with HIV.
Transbucket –Health care and surgery resource for the online trans community.
WPATH – Non-profit organisation devoted to trans health.
Support for hate crime, domestic abuse or sexual violence
GALOP – LGBT+ anti-violence charity supporting all LGBT+ people who've experienced hate crime, domestic abuse or sexual violence. Their helpline can be reached on 0800 999 5428.
Housing and support
Stonewall Housing have an online referral service. Their advice line is open from 10am to 1pm, Monday to Friday, on 020 7359 5767.
The Outside Project – LGBTQI+ community shelter and centre in London. Referrals are through Stonewall Housing. Also runs online socials and events in their virtual community space.
Albert Kennedy Trust supports LGBTQ+ young people aged 16-25 in the UK who are experiencing homelessness or living in a hostile or abusive environment.
I'm massively in love with Dunes and Waters, it combines the two things in the world I am completely obsessed with and is so well-written! I was wondering if I could bind a personal copy of your story with full attribution? I'm a complete newbie so it'll be my first bookbinding project ever, but I could think of no other fic I wanted to see a physical copy of more than this beautiful piece.
Many many thanks!
- kumathel
Hi! Im so glad you enjoyed Dunes!
Yes of course, go ahead :) would love to see how it turns out if you’d be willing to share photos.
