Reminder that I am playing Wharf Chambers in Leeds as part of wormboys on Wednesday. We have written a lot of new material recently, and are excited to share it with a live audience. We’ll be supported by Tiger Island and Etheriel, with live visuals from Kit Watson, so it’s going to be a great night.
More information plus a ticket link can be found here.
Last year I joined the Glasgow Transfem Electrolysis Project, a super cool initiative which is raising money to train and equip two community members as electrolysists. Building on the example of Electrolysis by Siobhan, who opened her service off the back of a similar project in Manchester, the project’s aim is to ensure affordable and safe hair removal for trans women and non-binary people.
In an era of continued NHS failings and civil rights rollbacks, it’s important to be reminded of the power that lies in coming together as a community and working towards a common goal in our collective interest. Hateful policymakers and journalists can never take that away from us.
You can donate to the fundraiser here. We are also running LOVE ELECTRIC, a gig at Mono in Glasgow on Thursday 13th February, with pop, folk, punk, and drag artists. If you’re local, please come by to learn more about the project, and see some incredible live performers! I’m really excited for what’s going to be an amazing night.
Gig tickets are available here.
New year, new gigs! We have two headline shows coming up for wormboys. Come and see us if you can!
Thursday 23rd January
The Cavendish Arms, London
With the legendary Schande, plus exciting new supergroup Tomboy Grandpa.
£9 advance.
Tickets available here!
~
Wednesday 2nd April
Wharf Chambers, Leeds
With Tiger Island and Etheriel, plus live projections from Kit Watson.
£6 advance, £8 on the door, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Tickets available here!
Application deadline: Friday 17 January 2025, 24.00 UTC/GMT
We are currently recruiting to the editorial board of the Community Development Journal (CDJ), for which I’m currently one of the co-editors. This is a normal enough practice for many publications, but a bit of a historic moment for CDJ, which has historically relied on recommendations from an existing board member over the past 59 years(!) of the journal’s existence.
The current CDJ editorial board takes a very constructive and democratic approach to decision-making, so I’m really excited for the potential to reach beyond our existing networks to expand our diversity of knowledge and skills. Moreover, as Kirsty Lohman and I note in our editorial for issue 60.1, this will be (as far as we are aware) the first time we have ever recruited beyond the UK and Ireland – something that I feel is long overdue.
The full call can be found below, cross-posted from the CDJ Plus website. If you are at all interested, please do apply! Importantly, we are seeking to recruit practitioners as well as researchers, so you do not need to hold any kind of academic post in order to apply.
The Community Development Journal is seeking to appoint up to five new Editorial
Board members to join us from March 2025. We welcome applications from
academics and practitioners globally, particularly encouraging those from under-
represented groups.
About the Community Development Journal (CDJ)
Established in 1966, the CDJ is the leading international journal in its field, covering
a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for
cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of
community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the
life of communities. We particularly seek to publish critically-focused articles that
challenge received wisdom, report and discuss innovative practices, and relate
issues of community development to questions of social justice, diversity and
ecological sustainability.
The journal is published in partnership with Oxford University Press on a profit-share
basis. The income received from the journal is managed by a charitable trust linked
to the journal, of which editorial board members are also trustees. The trust can fund
initiatives such as conferences, seminars and other activities that support its mission.
The strategic objectives of CDJ are currently:
With several long-standing board members retiring, we are looking to refresh the
membership with active and engaged people committed to promoting community
development scholarship.
About the role
Board member responsibilities include:
We ask that Editorial Board members commit to minimum of three years.
Who are we looking for?
The Community Development Journal is committed to equality, diversity, and
inclusion. We actively seek to create an Editorial Board that reflects the diversity of
the communities we serve and study.
Skills and experiences we would particularly welcome include some of the following:
In early September I recieved an email from the Department for Health and Social Care, inviting me to participate in a closed consultation on the Labour government’s proposed extension of the Tory ban on puberty blockers. The deadline was 1st October 2024.
September was already extremely busy. I started the month at the International Trans Studies Conference in Chicago, and ended it at the WPATH Symposium in Lisbon. In the meantime I was faced with various writing deadlines, administrative tasks, and the start of a new teaching semester. The small number of other academic experts and voluntary organisations who were also invited to respond no doubt faced very similar challenges with the short notice and unforgiving deadline.
Nevertheless, I scrambled to respond. Like Cal Horton, I regard government consultations on trans healthcare to be inherently abusive at this stage; as I wrote to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2018, “we respond not with hope or optimism, but in fear. This is the power you wield over us”. Given the turgid vibes found in recent political discourse, I also held little hope of a long-term ban being prevented. However, it seemed worth using what little prestige I have as an academic to at least try to encourage the government to listen to actual evidence.
Trans Writes are now reporting that an extension of the ban until 2027 is on the cards for Britain, following a unanimous vote on the same by the Northern Ireland Assembly. With this in mind, I am now publicly sharing the evidence I provided in the closed consultation, plus slides from an oral presentation to the Commission on Human Medicines, who advised the Government.
I don’t think for a moment that sharing these materials will change anything in the short term. However, I feel it is important to put them in the public realm now for the sake of transparency.
Going forward, I hope the work that many of us have done in building and sharing an ethical base for the ethical provision of trans healthcare will make a difference. In the meantime, there is an important lesson here about relying on existing, unequal systems of power and control. As Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift argue in their new book Trans Femme Futures, making demands of institutions leaves the power in their hands. It is more important than ever for trans people to build power and knowledge within our own communities, in collaboration with others.
We have survived worse in the past by sharing information, ideas, and life-changing medication between us, and we will do so again.
On Thursday 12 December I will be speaking at the University of Stirling for the Punk Scholars Network UK annual conference!
In-person bookings appear to be closed, but you can still register for free to attend online.
In my talk, I am planning to draw on the history of trans movements, trans studies, and trans punk to argue that we can and should be using creative DIY skills to change the world. Trans experiences show the power of genre-crossing, which can be applied to knowledge exchange within and beyond both universities and punk scenes. From gigs to zines to academic talks and self-archiving, trans punk pedagogy can help us work through our complicity, and build solidarity across difference.
I’ve co-authored a short chapter for a new book that’s due out in February. The book, titled A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States: From Margins to Mainstream, traces the development of trans medicine across three centuries, with writing from more than 40 contributors.
The book is currently on offer from the publisher, SUNY Press. If you order by 6th December you can buy the book for 50% off with the code HOLIDAY24. That means the paperback edition will come to $22.47 for those in the USA, or £24.12 with postage for buyers in the UK.
I should clarify also that, as usual with academic books, I won’t personally be seeing a penny from its sale. So if you’d like to read this publication, please do get it at a bargain price if you can!
Our chapter is titled “By Us and For Us: Bringing Ethics into Transgender Health Research“, and I wrote it collaboratively with Noah Adams, Jaimie Veale, Asa Radix, Amrita Sarkar, and Danielle Castro.
In this chapter we explore the context and subsequent impact of an earlier work, our co-authored journal article (with additional author Kai Cheng Thom) Guidance and Ethical Considerations for Undertaking Transgender Health Research and Institutional Review Boards Adjudicating this Research. That article is now one of the most highly-cited works I’ve contributed to. Since its publication in 2017, it’s been used to inform the design and implementation of hundreds of studies, becoming more influential than I ever could have imagined.
I’m really grateful especially to Noah Adams for leading on the process of both our 2017 article and new book chapter. I first met Noah, along with Jaimie and Asa , at the 2016 WPATH Symposium in Amsterdam, which saw the presentation of numerous extremely unethical studies on trans and intersex people. I learned a great deal very fast at that symposium, and through the subsequent writing process with Amrita, Danielle, and Kai.
Most importantly, I learned that it is possible to change research and practice for the better through interventions that centre community perspectives, mutual learning, and our collective responsibilities to one another. This is an important thing to bear in mind in our current age of disinformation and the abuse of scientific discourse: while abusive practices have a long history in trans medicine and medical research, another world is possible.
2024 has been a good year for the publication of articles I’ve been working on with colleagues for a long time. Hot on the heels of recent pieces on microaggressions and domestic violence comes the latest peer-reviewed work from the Trans Pregnancy Project, published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. It’s open access, which means you can read it for free or download a copy to share here:
‘Why Is the Chubby Guy Running?’: Trans Pregnancy, Fatness, and Cultural Intelligibility
by Francis Ray White, Ruth Pearce, Damien W. Riggs, Carla A. Pfeffer, Sally Hines
The article opens with the titular question, “why is the chubby guy running?” – drawn from a story shared by a research participant who ran a 5k race while thirty-nine weeks pregnant. We use this as the starting point for exploring the topic of fatness in respect to trans men and non-binary people who experience pregnancy, addressing the gendering of both pregnancy and fatness, stereotypes associated with fat men, and how certain bodies become legible or intelligible.
A lot of research participants in the project described complex relationships to fatness during their pregnancy, especially where their bump was inaccurately read as a “beer belly”. The writing of this article was led by fat studies expert Francis Ray White; I really appreciated the opportunity to work with them on making sense of these stories, and thinking through what they might mean both for trans birth parents and for our understanding of gender and pregnancy more widely.
This is likely to be one of the last published works from the Trans Pregnancy Project (although we do have at least one more article on the way!)
The project originally wrapped in 2020, but we had such an enormous amount of data that we’ve been writing it up ever since since, addressing topics including media representation, midwifery, conception, pregnancy loss, sperm donors, testosterone use and cessation, racialisation and whiteness, partner abuse, and young people’s views about possible pregnancy. I’m grateful as ever for the trust offered to us by the research participants, and hope we can continue to expand and evidence society’s understanding of their experiences.
I have a new article out in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, co-authored with colleagues at University College London. It reports on the findings of a study led by Talen Wright, looking at the mental health impacts of microaggressions on trans people.
You can download and read the full study for free here:
The association between microaggressions and mental health among UK trans people:
a cross-sectional study
by Talen Wright, Gemma Lewis, Talya Greene, Ruth Pearce, and Alexandra Pitman
What did we find out about microaggressions, mental health, and trans people?
Wright designed a survey of 787 trans adults in the UK, asking questions both about participants’ mental health and their experiences of microaggressions. When analysing the findings, we found that experiencing more microaggressions was associated with worse mental health, including increased severity of depressive and anxiety symptoms, and increased odds of lifetime self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.
We also found evidence indicating an association between specific microaggressions and specific mental health outcomes:
Why is this study important?
With apologies to my co-authors, I consider this a form of “cat detector” research. I base this term on an image shared a few years ago by the Facebook page High Impact PhD Memes, purporting to show someone successfully wielding a cat detector:
The meme is funny because, well, it’s obviously a cat. The research is stating the obvious.
And so this research might quite reasonably seem to many trans people. We know that microaggressions are harmful: that when people deny who we are, it hurts. When researchers or journalists or politicians talk about high rates of poor mental health among trans communities, we know that it is because people are harming us, that entire systems are set up in ways that harm us.
At the same time, we live in a political and policy context where trans people’s voices are rarely heard, and disinformation runs rampant. A lot of cis people are getting inaccurate information about our lives and needs, including healthcare commissioners, doctors, nurses, therapists, educators, and civil servants, as well as our families, friends, and colleagues. Trans people are often portrayed as overly sensitive to other people’s transphobic behaviour, or living in denial of reality.
Given this context, I feel it is beneficial to demonstrate empirically – with statistical analyses! – that small actions add up, and “microaggressions” cause real harm.
I hope this research will be useful for countering non-evidenced transphobic policy approaches. For example, the UK government’s current guidance on “Gender Questioning Children” in schools directly encourages educators to undertake actions that are associated with harmful outcomes in our study. As more research is conducted and published in this area, we will have more information available to clearly demonstrate the risks of transphobic policy, and empower advocates fighting for change.
I was relieved to see today that the Charity Commission’s investigation into Mermaids has finally concluded. The Commission’s published decision found that Mermaids was mismanaged in several respects, but did not find evidence of misconduct, especially in terms of safeguarding young people or providing medical advice.
This is great news in that Mermaids can now continue to operate as a charity and seek funding from relevant agencies to do so. The organisation clearly faced an enormous squeeze during this time, that significantly affected service provision.
However, I am concerned by the language used around the Cass Review in the Commission’s report and accompanying press release. I feel much of this language is deeply misleading and demonstrates considerable ignorance regarding the Review. At the same time, I feel there are some good, practical recommendations in there for charities which face potential harassment from media reporting and on social media.
Binders
The most concerning statement can be found in the Charity Commission’s press release, concerning Mermaids’ former provision of binders to young people as a harm reduction measure:
The Commission has issued statutory advice to the charity requiring that, should it ever resume this service, its future policy and controls should reflect the recent Cass Review, or any future NHS guidelines on parental involvement.
The Cass Review does not, of course, actually make any formal recommendations for non-medical service providers – moreover, its commentary on social transition is not well-evidenced.
However, the Charity Commission decision quotes the final report of the Cass Review, which states that “parents should be actively involved in decision making unless there are strong grounds to believe that this may put the child or young person at risk“. This would appear to align with Mermaids’ actual policy, which was to work with parents, families, or carers unless a young person was not directly supported. The issue, of course, is that the Charity Commission (and, indeed, the Cass Review team) do not fully interrogate or understand the considerable risks posed to young trans people by unsupportive parents.
I am increasingly of the impression that policymakers are taking all kinds of decisions without having read the Cass Report in any detail, let alone with a critical eye. This would appear to be another example of this.
Having “regard” to the Cass Review
Similarly, in a sub-section of the decision report titled “Implementing the findings of the Cass Review”, the Charity Commission recommends that trustees working with “children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender dysphoria” need to “ensure that they have regard to the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the Cass Review and ensure that they have reviewed their charity’s literature, website and guidance in light of them“.
This statement is, I believe, being wilfully misinterpreted on social media and in media commentary. For example, the Standard’s report on the decision leads with the headline “Charities should follow Cass Review recommendations, say watchdog”. However, that is not what the decision actually says.
In the UK, “have regard” means that organisations should take account of guidance and carefully consider it. An example of this can be found in the Charity Commission’s rules for charities on public benefit:
As a charity trustee, ‘having regard’ to the commission’s public benefit guidance means being able to show that:
- you are aware of the guidance
- you have taken it into account when making a decision to which the guidance is relevant
- if you have decided to depart from the guidance, you have a good reason for doing so
In the current political climate, this strikes me as an eminently sensible approach to the Cass Review. I would expect all service providers and researchers to be aware of the Review’s final report, to take it into account, and (for the purpose of defending against bad faith actors) be able to provide good evidence for acting otherwise.
Going by a statement from Mermaids Chair Kathryn Downs for Third Sector, this appears to the charity’s planned approach to having regard:
“The Cass Review final report is the highest-profile review of youth healthcare in the world and has influenced NHS England’s policies. However, it is not legislation or guidance.“
She then goes on to emphasise that Mermaids’ advocacy and policy work will continue to be “driven by and give a platform to the voices of young trans people“.
We deserve better from the Charity Commission
Overall, I feel this is good news for Mermaids, and for trans organisations more generally. However, the language used by the Charity Commission, especially in their press release, really muddies the water by providing considerable grounds for bad faith interpretation.
It’s also deeply frustrating to see the Cass Review continually upheld as a paragon of policy advice. Trans people know that the Review was conducted by non-experts and involved individuals hugely hostile to our very existence. As a researcher, when I open the final report I see a methodological and ethical nightmare. The Cass Review is an example of runaway bad science, treated as an article of faith by mainstream decision-makers, many of whom haven’t actually read it.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that the Charity Commission’s final decision reflects the influence of transphobic actors. Two years is an extraordinarily long time for an investigation to take place, and surely does not serve the interests of the young people Mermaids work with. Earlier this year the Commission’s Twitter account “accidentally” shared a transphobic post claiming (without evidence) that the charity had caused “so much harm”, calling into question the independence of the investigation.
I’ve been critical of Mermaids myself in the past, especially given I did not feel appropriately supported by them when I came out as a teenager. I am sure I will continue to be critical in the future. However, I hope this criticism can always be both constructive and grounded in reality, recognising our shared interest and care in building a better future for young people.
I’ll end this post, then, by amplifying Mermaids’ demand for better:
…the time taken to publish this report has been frustrating, significantly affecting Mermaids’ fundraising and ability to deliver on our charitable objectives. We call on the Charity Commission to ensure that organisations serving groups facing rising hostility are supported and protected, whilst being held to account where this is necessary.
