It has been (a little over, sorry I’m late) 6 months of Trans Writes. Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve achieved and what we hope to achieve in the future.
We launched on Trans Day of Visibility to a – quite honestly overhwelmingly – positive response. The community really came forwards for our initial funding goals allowing us to find a trans graphic designer to design our super cute logo and start sourcing articles.
That we did! With 17 articles sourced directly from the transgender community, mostly on important trans issues. Including; a sobering piece on chest binding and the importance of safety information, RFU’s transgender rugby ban, life in Hungary for transgender people and a nonbinary person’s perspective of a Parliamentary debate on nonbinary legal recognition.
We’ve also been able to source articles in support of creative works featuring or even led by and for transgender people. Including a review of Elliot Page’s on-screen coming out as Viktor Hargeeves in The Umbrella Academy’s Season 3, A trans man’s take on Trans Pride London 2022, A review of Abigail Thorn’s “The Prince” and even an article from activists leading the first LGBTQ+ Pride event in Nigeria.
We couldn’t have done any of this without your extremely generous contributions to our site. We absolutely do not want to rely on community funding to keep delivering amazing content forever, but the generosity, love and support you have shown us has been immense and enabled us to put over £2,000 in the pockets of transgender people for their work. Thank you so much. You are amazing.
On the financial front; I am applying for grants and looking for bursaries to support us all the time while also trying to sort out all of our background details to make us a ‘proper org’. Thankfully there’s groups like LGBT+ Consortium who have all the know-how I very deeply lack! We’ve applied and been accepted as members, you can find our page here. They seemed really keen to help support Trans Writes too, which is awesome!
We are also looking for sponsorships and similar support where we can get it. We were even approached by Push The Button to place a nominal ad on our site as a means of supporting us, which we accepted! Thank you!
We sold some nominal ad space to @PushTheButton who clearly just wanted to support our work.
So here's an extra shout out to them, a big thank you and a heads up that we are still and always looking for cool trans people to tell some cool stories!
Get in touch!!
— Trans Writes (@Trans_Writes) October 6, 2022
In the media we have been promoting Trans Writes wherever we can, gaining coverage in Them.Us, a small shoutout in iNews, a mention in Press Gazette, a big shout out in We Are Queer AF and my site-leading feature for Huffington Post includes a mention of us in my bio!
It’s fair to say that even if we packed it in now Trans Writes has been a raucous success. We’ve shown that there is a quite sizeable audience for good trans-led media that doesn’t simply regurgitate the transphobia ever-present in mainstream media’s coverage of our issues. We’ve seen in recent polls how media coverage has affected public opinion on transgender people for the worse and we aim to be the biggest part of the solution to that problem that we can be.
We don’t have an official roadmap of any kind but at our most ambitious I envision Trans Writes becoming a not for profit media org of its own. Delivering content led by and featuring trans people on all issues and topics; not just transgender ones. I see us becoming a networking hub for transgender talent to find each other and collaborate on their own projects. I see us creating or funding documentaries on trans history and of course; promoting and supporting trans artists of all kinds.
Until our launch and the last 6 months I thought I was being too ambitious with all of that. I thought we’d do okay but you have all truly blown our socks off with support and now I think maybe I wasn’t ambitious enough!
So those are our loosely defined goals. I don’t think we will hit them over the next 6 months though that would be lovely. They are definitely a bit more long-term than that, but I am positive that we can make them happen eventually, especially with all of your support!
If you’d like to help support us you can send a one off donation via Paypal here or sign up to our Patreon. Every penny of this goes towards trans creators (I have a personal Patreon linked in my bio card too!). Lee and I have chosen to only pay ourselves from ad revenue and in the interest of full transparency we have been paid a total of £150 for our work so far. (It would be £300, but Lee didn’t take his half – I did, I have electrolysis to pay for.)
I think that’s everything! Please keep sharing our work, keep supporting trans-led media and trans voices specifically. Together we can weather the transphobic moral panic media storm and perhaps not only survive it, but thrive through it. Thank you again to everyone, you’re amazing!
