Category Archives: Uncategorized

There has been a great deal of comment in the press about government proposals in England for self-declaration of gender by transgender people. Something that strikes me in all of this discussion is how little the people expressing hostile views know about the whole business of identity and what these suggestions are all about. CurrentlyContinue reading “Declaring Identity”

This afternoon I went along for my breast screening appointment. It was in a mobile unit parked behind my GP surgery and luckily there were plenty of parking spaces left still. I was a bit nervous, not about the risks of breast cancer or of the reports of false positive results, but more about actuallyContinue reading “Breast Screening”

How making the change to living in a new gender role can be difficult.

One of the things that most transgender people will worry about is the question of whether they “pass”. It is an issue that can prevent them from coming out in the first place as they fear being seen as a freak or oddity by others. But this whole concept of passing can mean different thingsContinue reading “The passing problem”

What happens when you receive a job application from someone who is transgender? Like other trans women I notice that I have a much lower success rate, in terms of progress to interview, than I did with the same skills and experience as a man. This is not unusual for those people in society whoContinue reading “Job applicants, unconscious bias and fear”

We like to think that the people we work with, those we have recruited and trained, will treat customers and business contacts appropriately. For the most part that is true and the more training they have had the better they will be. But sometimes they will react differently when something surprises them, something new orContinue reading “How do your staff react?”

Sitting in a pub with friends recently the conversation turned to the situation with a club we know of. It seems that a transgender man has joined it and that this has caused them problems. The conversation illustrated some popularly held views of what transgender is about and who qualifies.Now I know all the peopleContinue reading “Appearance is everything?”

I started to write this as I was angry, and that is never a good reason to write anything. Yesterday was a very mixed day but it left me feeling that people can be both good and bad at times. But as I thought more about the strange mixture of experiences that had come myContinue reading “Exclusion from not being born the right way”