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This morning my underwear drawer gave me a small buzz. Same as it always does since I made the decision to transition.

Each morning my underwear drawer gives me a small buzz.

Flip-side: Montenegro — 2 lads next to a motorbike- reminded me exactly what some people see when they look at me. That’s the ride.

“Why’s it such a big deal?” you might ask.

Yeah, good question, and the answer is simple. It’s because I’ve now got a drawer full of knickers instead of a secret stash.

I used to dream of being able to wear women’s underwear, as a woman. To feel feminine. And they help me to feel just that. In fact — I adore my knicker drawer!

Maybe it’s just me, perhaps I’m weird. But I’d imagine trans guys get this too. Each morning reaching for boxers rather than the delicate undies I get excited about.

Small things you see. For a trans person who dreamt about them for years, they become big things. You’ll get what I mean if you’re trans.

#lgbtq #transgender #gender stuff #gender dysphoria #gender euphoria

Reflections on an unexpected transphobic outburst from a former friend

“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” (Brian A. Chalker)

This is a quote I heard many years ago, and life keeps handing me frequent reminders of its profound truth. After a friendship imploded quite spectacularly a few weeks ago, I once again recalled these words.

The friendship in question was already on the rocks; our association had been strained for months, and fractures were beginning to show due to constant underlying tension. I procrastinated the inevitable confrontation because I hate conflict; I was already dealing with a very stressful situation and an uncertain future. Anxiety was a constant companion, each day a renewed struggle to make it through.

Unfortunately, the blow-up arrived in the form of a one-sided phone call, a vicious verbal assault where I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, so while they offloaded their frustrations, I was left without an outlet for mine. But what was most disturbing was the unexpected transphobia which targeted my deepest insecurities like poison darts launched with deadly accuracy.

My former friend is part of the LGBT+ community and a self-proclaimed trans ally, so I didn’t see that angle of attack coming. Two phrases in particular were so out of character and went against everything I thought I knew about this person that, at first, I thought I must have misheard.

#lgbtq #transgender #queer #allyship #friends

Love, loss, and the invisible forces that keep us from flying apart

My partner of 18 years, Chris, died, and now I am at his funeral. Once it is over I wander through the cemetery, lost, looking for proof that he had been real. I wake with a jolt and he is beside me. I tell him about the dream, and he consoles me.

“It was just a dream,” he says. “Don’t be silly. I’m right here.”

As he finishes speaking, I wake up again. This is another dream. I wake to the glaringly empty space beside me, and the reality he was (is) dead.

Grief is a form of madness.

#lgbtq #grief #love and loss #death #queer

Behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia: Story in Photo Verse

Standing in view of Prague Castle I saw a man with a camera like mine Taking photos Towards the end of a warm grey day.

Our eyes locked: I spoke chancing it in Russian He answered in English We walked not quite together Down toward the river Vltava: Flowing dark...

#lgbtq #poetry #queer poetry #gay travel #prague

James Finn asked us to roar for Pride. This is mine, from South Dakota

Brian Mack changed his birth certificate to match the man he was. He started hormones, grew the beard he loved, fixed his documents, and when he died, his obituaries called him Brian. I never met him. I know his name from

James Finn, head editor of Prism & Pen, who put it at the center of a Pride essay this May and asked the rest of us to write our own.

Finn’s piece came with a frame I can’t put down. He wrote that the world seems to teeter on a cusp this year, ready to tip into deeper persecution or back toward justice, and he asked queer writers to lean on it with everything we have. He called the sound we should make a loving roar. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and I want to tell you what the cusp looks like from here. The view from a red state is not the view from a coast.

I have known what I was since before I had a word for it.

The word arrived on a television in a farmhouse den. I was ten when Renée Richards answered a CBS interviewer’s questions about her transition in 1976, and my father laughed, and my brothers laughed, and I said nothing and understood, in that silence, that what she was, I was. I was fifteen when Caroline “Tula” Cossey turned up on a late-night show in 1981, and I told myself the same thing again, quietly, to no one in the house. I had no Brian Mack. I had two women on a screen, far away, being laughed at in my own living room. It took me until fifty-three to say out loud what I had known at seven without the words, and at ten with a derogatory, hateful word, that I was transgender.

#lgbtq #transgender #queer #memoir #growing up

Time does strange things to us old men, but family gives us lifetimes of love

In the 1950s when I was a child, I never wanted to miss an episode of The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, where “a boy and his dog help establish law and order at Fort Apache.” In those days, stories of the conquest of the American west rarely focused on the hardships of a provoked and tragically dispossessed Indigenous population. Here, the heroic boy and his dog were orphaned by an Indian attack and taken in by the soldiers at the fort.

As a child who was gay in waiting, I was less interested in the story’s war making than the attractive sandy haired boy and the powerful rugged men who looked after him. The faithful ingenuity and loyalty of the German shepherd were meant to be heartwarming, and succeeded completely with me.

As much as I liked Lassie, another television series of the day, I preferred Rin Tin Tin with his fearsome noble head staring protectively into the distance.

Decades later, in 2014, my son Kevin, then a young man living on his own, showed up one day with a rescued German shepherd. I was taken back to my childhood and Rin Tin Tin immediately, almost as if I had eaten a Proustian madeleine, but one perhaps shaped like a dog instead of a seashell.

#lgbtq #gay #memoir #rin tin tin #dogs

While telling trans people to “sigh and put up with” the people actively removing our rights

Reading Tucker Lieberman’s on-point story about Russell T Davies’ mini series Tip Toe yesterday, I started to feel a definite sense of unease, the kind I’ve come to expect when the British media makes any comment on trans people.

It hasn’t gotten any better after reading Davies’ pre-broadcast interview in The Guardian or the reviews coming in after the first two episodes aired last night.

Tip-toeing around the dread

Tip Toe centres around a gay man, Leo (Allan Cummings), and his not-gay neighbour Clive (David Morrissey), their escalating feud, and the final dramatic event as it all comes to a head – revealed in the first scene as Leo’s apparent murder. Who has killed Leo is, of course, left for us to discover in the yet-to-be-aired final episodes.

In Tip Toe, Davies attempts to address the growing tide of anti-queer sentiment against the backdrop of the UK’s creeping fascism. This topic is par for the course for Davies, himself a gay man who is most well known for highly acclaimed series such as Queer as Folk and It’s a Sin.

The show is broadcast by Channel 4, who a couple of years ago put out the transphobic hatchet job, Gender Wars, a documentary which essentially served as a vehicle for anti-trans activist Kathleen Stock to push the narrative that trans people are a danger to cis women.

The rest of the plot of Tip Toe is where the dread really starts to set in for me.

#lgbtq #transgender #queer #tip toe #russell t davies

And the allies who tried to burn it

n 1986, a seventy-four-year-old Black man stood before the New York State Legislature to testify on behalf of a gay rights bill.

He had spent half a century in the trenches of the civil rights movement. He had been jailed, beaten, put on a chain gang, surveilled by the FBI, denounced on the floor of the United States Senate, blackmailed by a fellow Black congressman, and forced to resign from the organization he helped create, all because he was gay.

He had organized the largest nonviolent demonstration in American history. He had taught Martin Luther King Jr. everything King knew about Gandhi.

And most Americans had never heard his name.

His testimony that day included a passage that would become one of the most quoted statements in LGBTQ advocacy history. As Out Magazine documented, Rustin declared:

“Today, Blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new ‘n — — rs’ are gays. It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.”

The man who said those words was Bayard Rustin. And the reason he was the only person in America with the moral authority to say them is one of the ugliest untold stories in the history of the civil rights movement.

#lgbtq #queer history #civil rights #bayard rustin #martin luther king jr

A curious tale of the gods and holding the fermata

A fermata is a small dot placed above or below a note on written music. It indicates a note or rest should be held. But the exact length of the hold is left to the discretion of the conductor.

There is a symphony playing, the sound of the earth turning and the heavens shifting in time. It’s a mixture of music and sound, the melody is ambient, ethereal and somehow familiar, as our planet tracks its tidy path through the cosmos.

‘Fermata,’ whispers a deep celestial voice. Instantly, the world pauses.

With that single utterance, the world is held, a note without decay. No-one moves, all living things are paused. Not frozen, simply stopped.

The Fermata. The vibrations of the single note held by a celestial conductor. It echoes through the heavens. All movement absent, the air thickens, the ability to move replaced by a single sound.

A pair of arms come down from the sky, and a divine set of hands remove the roof from a shopping mall as if it were the lid on a child’s plaything. It comes away in a single piece and is carefully placed on a nearby sports field.

Fortunately, there are no games being played, no-one is flattened, and the roof sits lightly upon the grass.

#lgbtq #transgender #queer #pause #music

A solution to letting transgender women compete…in fact all women and everybody else.

A lot has been written, said, and posted about transgender women in competitive sports. Most of it is buried in bias and ignorance.

The two major claims against trans-women participation in sports are that transgender women are biological men with the muscular and skeletal advantages of a male body, and that girls’/women’s spaces need protection from “men in drag.”

Gender is a developing concept for society. Believing that gender is purely binary is like believing that the earth is really flat — comforting, but entirely ignorant.

For brevity’s sake, sex is what is between your legs, pure biology, while gender is between your ears, a mental construct unique to human beings.

Animals are categorized biologically by their binary sex distinctions. Humans, on the other hand, can love, believe in a god, create art, and engage in continuous progress across the natural and social sciences. Humans also have the capacity to understand that gender is used to distinguish societal roles and personal identity.

They have the ability to understand that gender exists on a spectrum.

Understandably, it took time to accept the world is round; accepting the difference between biological sex and gender will also take time. The answer is to progress forward in our understanding rather than regress back to the way things were.

Sadly, change is hard to accept for many.

#lgbtq #transgender #gender stuff #sports #trans women in sports

This Pride and World Pride, I dare to dream.

On this eve before Pride Month 2026 begins, we cannot celebrate our pride, community, equality or successes, in the face of the increased oppression targeting our trans community. Yes, “Pride is a protest” is a nice aphorism that simultaneously is true and de-fangs the bite that is Pride. This Pride must be a protest — righteous, uncompromising anger. It must be resistance and civil disobedience. It must stand with trans folks and all oppressed people and declare: we are not going back. We will not be pushed into the closet or into the margins of invisibility. We will not let anyone disappear us again.

This Pride and World Pride, I dare to dream.

#lgbtq #transgender #queer #pride #lgbt rights

James Talarico should get ready to be pummeled by ads linking him to the trans community.

It was as predictable as the sun rise this morning. On May 26, White House ghoul and Trump assistant chief of staff Stephen Miller tweeted that Democrat James Talarico is America’s “first transgender Senate candidate.”

“Clearly, he’s transitioning into a woman,” Miller said of Talarico two nights later on Fox News’ Jesse Waters program.

It’s no longer enough to attempt to taint a Democratic candidate by pointing to their support for transgender rights and causes… common Republican practice in recent campaigns. Now, the Trump White House is making the bogus claim that the candidate himself is in the early stages of transition.

It’s an underhanded political tactic born not just out of bigotry and meanness, but out of desperation as well.

#lgbtq #transgender #us politics #texas #james talarico

The question that gender-critical people can never answer

As someone who is out and open about being transgender online, I come across many people who take issue with trans people. They love to remind us of our birth sex (as if we were not aware of this until they declared it), berate us for transitioning, and often implore us to find god.

When confronted with the facts of the transgender experience from trans people, these people often repeat many of the talking points being spouted by right-wing pundits like Matt Walsh or Laura Loomer. Everything from there’s only XX and XY and you can’t change your DNA to you’re just straight/gay/lesbian with extra steps. The newest one I’ve come across is trans doesn’t exist.

The Question

When I can see that a discussion with a gender-critical person isn’t going anywhere, I will pose the question.

Why does the existence of trans people bother you?

#lgbtq #transgender #gender critical #gender stuff #politics

The moment I finally understood “what was wrong with me”

It is amazing to me that after profound, powerfully egg-shattering experiences, it was another eight months (!!!!) before I realized that I am a trans woman. (Discussed in previous essays — My Trans Journey at 50 and Discovering My True Gender.)

Although I had attained the unassailable realization of “repressed femininity arising in me,” I didn’t know what to DO with that. I tried telling one person I trusted. It went… poorly. So my realizations kind of dried up, I slipped back into depression, and [insert half a year of being dysfunctional here.]

Then it was early winter, and I was doing what I typically am doing: reading, writing, researching things.

The title of an online article caught my eye — “Gender Dysphoria Is Not What You Think.” It was written by Cassie LaBelle, whose profile pic was this charming cartoon-character who seemed smart and quirky, the kind of person who would be fascinatingly fun to have lunch with.

If there is a multiverse, then there are probably realities in which I never read this article. I feel sorry for those alternate-mes; I hope they’re ok.

But in THIS reality, I did read this article. (Yay!) And that was The Key.

#lgbtq #transgender #gender stuff #identity #coming out

Jim Crow is back, baby! A modest extension of the South Carolina Student Physical Privacy Act.

Building on the historic passage of House Bill 4756, which on May 15, 2026, established the outdoor portable toilet as a constitutionally sufficient sanitary accommodation for transgender students in South Carolina’s public schools and colleges, the SC General Assembly is reportedly weighing a broad expansion of the law to cover the remaining shared facilities of student life.

A draft companion bill, tentatively titled the Student Physical Privacy Act (Comprehensive Facilities Modernization), would extend the porta-potty framework to drinking fountains, classroom doorways, library seating, the cafeteria food line, hallway lockers, the school bus, the gymnasium bleachers, the auditorium, the parking lot, the marching band, and any patch of grass on which two or more students might conceivably stand within four feet of one another.

A source close to the drafting committee, speaking on condition of anonymity because the source is a composite of every press release issued by the bill’s sponsors over the past eighteen months, explained the underlying principle.

“We are protecting the privacy of our daughters,” the source said. “If a transgender student can be safely accommodated by a single-user portable restroom located on the lawn outside the science wing, it follows logically that she can also be safely accommodated by a single-user portable drinking fountain located on the lawn outside the science wing. Frankly, we should have thought of this in January.”

#lgbtq #transgender #us politics #gender stuff #satire

A transgender counsellor explains low-dose HRT, gradual feminisation, non-binary transition, dysphoria relief, and slower transition.

One of the biggest concerns about hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that some trans women and non-binary people have is related to body changes. It might sound controversial because many trans people take HRT specifically for anticipated breast development, skin softening, fat redistribution, reduced body hair growth, etc.

But what if you are not ready for fast changes? Or you need extra time to prepare for transition? Or your age and health don't allow you to go all-in? Or your transition should be kept away from the eyes of others? Or you are simply not sure if HRT is something that will work for you?

Hi, I'm Kira, a transgender woman and counsellor specialising in transgender care. In my work, I mostly focus on the psychological and social aspects of transitioning, but the topic of medical transition almost always emerges. It's something that many trans people are interested in but naturally have concerns about.

It's natural to have anxiety about the effects of HRT, fear of other people noticing body changes before coming out to them, or uncertainty about whether it's the right path. There are multiple other concerns, which we'll talk about later in the article, but my answer in some of these cases is the same: "Have you considered taking low-dose HRT?"

#lgbtq #transgender #hrt #hormones #gender stuff

We usually set our udders free when we’re at home…

I hate wearing a bra. Ask any woman, especially those over fifty, and the consensus is the same. Bras are a drag.

I remember when I first started wearing one. I think I was about thirteen, and those two Hershey’s Kisses were beginning to bloom. I made the mistake of walking downstairs bra-less.

My older brother and his flock of card-playing friends turned to stare at me.

“Where’s your training bra?”

My brother pointed and laughed as he said this in front of nine of his buddies. I was mortified. From that point on, it became necessary to conceal them.

I tried to keep them high and perky even though I was a tomboy, and bras didn’t interest me. But the magazines told me to wear one, and so I did.

In college, wearing a bra was passé. Women’s lib was all the rage, and I gladly complied by going au natural. Of course, it was a little hard to jog with those dangling participles, but feeling the nipples against my T-shirt was a cheap thrill.

#lgbtq #queer #lesbian #feminism #bras

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