A few weeks ago, on 18th June 2010, a brand new radio station took to the air.
Gaydio, based in Manchester, is an FM station aimed at and run by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans People.
It's not the world's first such station. There are established FM stations in Australia and Toronto, for instance plus a host of internet stations
Unlike many, Gaydio is not simply a music station though; it's aimed at a wider than usual audience, and has a community development dimension too.
To find out more I spoke to one of the founding directors, Toby Whitehouse, at the studios in central Manchester.
You can listen to the station online at http://www.gaydio.co.uk
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Part Two of this personal narration of an account written in 1995, about coming out as a campaigner to organise 'fringe' meetings at the Labour and Conservative party conferences.
For more details and background please see part one.
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It was in December 1997 that the story originally known as "the John / Joan case" first came to world wide attention through a feature in Rolling Stone magazine. (The text of that feature is reproduced here)
The story was significant at that time for transsexual people, as it dealt a heavy blow to the dominant medical narrative that gender identity was malleable and a product of nurture rather than nature. For people seeking recognition that gender change was not a 'choice' but a necessity, this was more than an academic question.
Post-mortem brain research in the Netherlands that same year had suggested a biological connection for gender identity; however the story of how an accidentally castrated baby boy had been successfully reared as a girl appeared compelling because it had always been presented as an unqualified success.
The story of the child (real name David Reimer) had been part of the medical literature for a quarter of a century, and many people had an investment in the case, both as a model for treatment of physically intersex babies and to underpin sociological theories dating from the same period.
I well remember the morning when the link to the Rolling Stone story arrived in an email from an American contemporary and the haste with which we put it online for our own readers. The importance of promulgating the facts was immediately obvious.
The feature article by journalist John Colapinto blew the lid off previous accounts of what happened. It was apparent that the outcome was very different from what everyone believed.
The BBC Radio Four series 'Case Study' revisited the story this week and tells the story in hindsight through interviews and audio clips which include the account of David Reimer's mother, when she was told of the hospital accident involving one of her two sons.
You can hear presenter Claudia Hammond's programme here on the BBC iPlayer and the background on the programme is available on the Case study web page here.
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It’s nearly Party Conference season again. And it’s the first time with Conservatives in Government since the mid 1990's.
It may surprise some listeners to know that back in those days I was a Conservative Party activist. I was the secretary of an active branch of the party in Cheshire. And a regular attendee at party conferences.
I wasn’t “out” in those days. As a transsexual woman I had completed my social “transition” between genders many years before, and had settled into a quiet and discreet life among the well-to-do women who formed the backbone of a certain class of society in one of the Tory heartlands.
I didn’t advertise my transsexual history and, if anyone harboured any suspicions, it had never ever been mentioned.
All of that was about to change though. I had been a member of the campaign organisation “Press for Change” since shortly after it was formed in 1992. And now, because the campaign required visible representatives to put themselves forward on the public stage, I had taken the difficult personal decision to “come out”.
I had volunteered to organise and speak at two key events at the Labour and Conservative conferences in the first two weeks of October 1995.
This was momentous, life-changing stuff .. at least for me .. and so I wrote about it at the time.
Fifteen years on, it’s therefore a good time to revisit those two weeks covered by The Diary of a Conference Campaigner...
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