Category: Features

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Colonialism Features Transphobia

What is Pride?

Black Pride March
Black Pride March

I sit here with so much more knowledge about my culture and my religion. Hinduism has a wide and varied history and mythology full of queer figures. This is a religion of genderflipping deities and queer heroes. It is a religion which recognises that people aren’t always male or female; there is a ‘tritiya prakriti’, a third nature. Which then begs the question, where did all that pressure to conform to normative society come from? What caused my self-hatred and denial and hurt for all those years? Why did I have this idea that I couldn’t be Hindu and queer?

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Features Law Lived Experience Transphobia

Black Transgender Lives Matter

Black Trans Lives Matter

I don’t want to become another statistic because someone thinks that they have the right to treat me however they see fit – whether that’s because I’m transgender or because I’m a woman.

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Features Gender Recognition International

Five Years in Ireland

Irish Flag

This is a particularly important anniversary because it reveals one of the most pernicious lies about trans people, a lie spread widely by both the anti-trans hate groups as well as by the media. That lie is that cis women will be less safe in women’s spaces if trans women are allowed to use them.

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Features Lived Experience Transphobia

Inconvenient trans men

Man silhoutted on beach

They will never understand the sense of grief I have for the body I should have been born with, the childhood I should have had, the adolescence I should have had. That life in my mid-20s that I’m doing over again in my mid-30s. That first operation that I needed because my body changed in puberty in ways it shouldn’t have.

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Autism Features Lived Experience Mental health

I’d rather be this’d than missed

X on piece of paper

I’ve known some online forms to literally only give 2 options for gender. It’s paralysing. Hovering over those two alien concepts. It’s almost worse when they add a third, ‘prefer not to say’ choice. As though anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into one of the binary options should be embarrassed about it; as if it’s something we must want to hide. No, I DON’T ‘prefer not to say’; I prefer to have my enbyness recognised.

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Features Lived Experience Media Positivity

My journey into broadcast media

Transistor Radio

Local Radio broadcasting is a perfect venue to share that knowledge and experience. My programme, ‘The Rachel Oliver Show’, on Sonder Radio Manchester is firmly aimed at the transgender community and specifically with our allies and friends in mind. It’s a station essentially for the mature population of over 50s and is enjoyed by people of all ages.

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