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    Testosterone for women ‘a life-changer’ James Beal - Social Affairs Editor Researchers are developing the world’s first testosterone patch for women with menopausal symptoms, and the UK could be the first country to test it. Medherant, a company founded by David Haddleton, a professor of chemistry at the University of Warwick, aims to start clinical trials this autumn. If these go well, Haddleton said the potential to improve women’s lives was huge, including helping them with their sex drive — as they cannot be prescribed testosterone for this on the NHS at present. Some instead turn to irregular doses of a gel that is approved only for use onmen, experts say. Testosterone is an essential hormone for women and its production drops heavily after the menopause. Oestrogen and progesterone hormone replacement therapy (HRT) patches — which stick to the skin to deliver medications — are available. However, there is no testosterone patch for women suffering with adverse symptoms from the menopause. Professor Haddleton said: “The work we’re doing at Medherant and at Warwick isn’t just theoretical, but instead aimed at a problem women are facing which can drastically affect their everyday lives and jobs. “This could deliver a product that is much needed and is just not available. With the technology already proven to work we can use our new patch to remove needless misery from women’s daily lives. We hope this will transform life for women suffering from postmenopause issues nationally and indeed globally.” Guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in 2015 recommended testosterone supplementation be considered for menopausal women with low sexual desire if HRT alone was not effective. The new patch is intended to address this gap in menopause products and provide treatment for women that can be made widely available.

    The Times’ hypocrisy: Testosterone for cis women a “Life-Changer” but poison for trans people?

    Lee Hurley -
    Times' hypocrisy: praises testosterone patch for menopausal women, yet demonises its use for trans people. Question media's double standards.
    A photo of Arthur Webber, captain of the first all trans masc football team in Europe with the ball. Photo by Lucy Copsey (@lucycopsey_98 on Twitter)

    All trans masc football team; “we made history here”

    Arthur Webber -
    "As I led the first ever all trans masc football team in Europe onto that pitch to thunderous applause, all my worries melted away. It didn’t matter what the score was; it didn’t matter if I left the field covered in mud and smelling like the Year 9 boys PE changing room. We made history here."
    A Bissu from the Bugis people of South Sulawesi performing a wedding ritual; an example of a culture specific identity

    On visibility; culture specific identities

    Michael van Zeijl -
    On #TransDayOfVisibility we wanted to do our extra best to give the spotlight to the least visible members of the transgender and gender diverse communities around the world. Thank you to Michael for reaching out and writing this piece on culture specific identities they titled "What an Indigenous person would like the queer community to know":
    Trans Writes Logo: Happy 1 year of Trans Writes!

    Happy 1 year of Trans Writes! #TransDayofVisibility

    Gemma Stone -
    We soft-launched Trans Writes on #TransDayofVisibility in 2022 to an honestly incredible and overwhelming reception. Today we say Happy 1 year of Trans Writes and have a quick look at the work we've achieved.
    Did JK Rowling agree with Nazis? JK Rowling smiling at the crowd during her book reading at the white house in 2010.

    Inside JK Rowling’s latest transphobic argument; trans sex offenders

    Gemma Stone -
    As I touched on in the article marking JK Rowling's wacky weekend, the author has once again leaned into using crime related statistics to support her bigoted nonsense. But does it? Lets take a look inside JK Rowling's latest transphobic argument;
    It’s easy to roll our eyes at trans issues. But what if we’re wrong? Jeremy Clarkson Jeremy Clarkson Next image › As we all know, JK Rowling recently expressed an opinion on the transgender debate, and she wasn’t just cancelled, she was erased. They put her in the delete bin, and then afterwards, all her former fans, and even the actors and actresses she’d made famous, emptied the bin into a landfill site so seagulls could feast on her eyes. Mercifully, I’ve always known I would not suffer a similar fate, because I’ve always had exactly the same views on transgenderism as I do on Victorian literature or trees. It’s not something that’s ever interested me, so why should I bother forming an opinion on it? If I want to get fed to the seagulls, I could think of a million other ways of going about it, all of which would be far more satisfying than calling Eddie Izzard a man or laughing at Sam Smith’s insistence that an interest in angling makes you a “fisherthem”. The fact is that I don’t know any transgender people. I once saw a very tall lady in Selfridges who had an Adam’s apple and hairy hands, but that’s it. That’s my only actual real-world experience of the issue and it left me completely underwhelmed. However, in recent times, the transgender issue has come to dominate the news so completely that I’ve been forced to pay a bit more attention. We are being asked whether schoolchildren should be allowed to change gender and whether a man can go to a women’s prison. This is big stuff, when you think about it. And there’s more. In the past week alone, there’s been a row about the new gender-neutral lavatories at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and we learnt that officers in the Metropolitan Police are to be stopped from investigating crime so they can spend more time learning about “faer” and the hundred or so different pronoun options that are available to modern-day youth. And then there was Baroness Fox, who was uninvited to speak on the cancel culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, because she’d retweeted a Ricky Gervais joke about transgender people. Meanwhile, we have Piers Morgan, who’s making a good living from the debate, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, whose charity will now be supporting the Global Boyhood Initiative, which challenges traditional gender roles. Oh, and on Thursday, World Athletics, the governing body for those who like to run around and jump over things, announced that anyone who went through male puberty may not take part in female events unless they are — deep breath — DSD (differences of sex development) intersex people whose testosterone levels have been below 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a period of at least two years. It would be easy at this point to roll your eyes and think the world’s gone mad. But hang on a minute. Because what if you’re wrong? When I was at school in the Seventies, we were aware that the homosexual act was kind of technically possible, but the notion that anyone would do such a thing was of course laughable. And then a few years after Rock Hudson died of Aids, Freddie Mercury got it and died too. We were in shock. You mean he . . . you know? And then Elton John announced he had a predilection for members of the same genital grouping. And suddenly the floodgates opened. In school we’d always joked that one of the teachers was gay, then it turned out he was. And so was one of our friends. And now, just 40 years on, I feel weird for never having tried it. I went to a gay wedding last year and in January I spent a happy week cruising (on a boat) round the Caribbean with a gay couple. And it’s not a recent thing, either. It wasn’t invented by Alan Turing. Leonardo da Vinci was gay. So, probably, was Richard I, and James VI, and Florence Nightingale. Sir Ian McKellen reckons even Shakespeare swung both ways. Gayness, then, has been around since the very beginning. Well, not the very beginning obviously — we wouldn’t have got far if Eve had been a lesbian — but close to the beginning. So, what if it’s the same deal with transgenderism? Has that also been going on for years? Will we discover in the coming decades that half those brave Tommies in the First World War trenches were secretly hoping to have their old chaps shot off so they could go home and put on a frock? Think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body We know that in the early 20th century, a boy in California decided he was a girl. She called herself Lucy, married a man and, when that failed, opened a brothel. Where, during a routine venereal disease check, it was discovered that she had a penis. So, off she went to prison. And that, to me, has some troubling Turing overtones. I realise, of course, that the whole trans debate has been hijacked by lunatics who glue themselves to stuff and claim to be from a gender that doesn’t even exist, and I know too that there is some kind of civil war going on between fiercely women women and women who just say they’re women. This creates a noise that’s annoying to most of us, but think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body. I believe that this is possible and I accept that it creates several problems for society, and not just in the lavatory or in a prison or in the school high-jump competition. But how can we address these issues when every teenage halfwit is muddying the waters by claiming to identify as a bat and inventing a pronoun that wouldn’t even be allowed in a game of Scrabble? “Faer”, my arse.

    Jeremy Clarkson asks ‘What if you’re wrong about trans people?’

    Lee Hurley -
    In a recent Sunday Times column, Jeremy Clarkson discussed the prevalence of transgender issues in the news and, although he makes jokes and uses problematic language throughout the piece, he posed an important question: "What if you're wrong?"
    JK Rowling's wacky weekend; an image of JK Rowling reading her book to children at the White House in 2010

    JK Rowling’s wacky weekend of transphobic crap

    Gemma Stone -
    This week has been quite the week for anti-trans activism as Posie Parker visited Australia and New Zealand on her #LetWomenSpeak tour. Culminating in 'sieg heil' Nazis, a tomato sauce incident and JK Rowling's wacky weekend of transphobic lies!
    A picture of Ana Kasparian speaking at an event and gesturing with her hands

    Ana Kasparian; person who menstruates of the year award!

    Gemma Stone -
    There are some fierce contenders in this year's round-up of people who menstruate being absolutely completely and utterly normal about that fact. Today we honour Ana Kasparian who launched her bid to win the award via Twitter last night.
    Promotional image for Again Again. The image shows a hand held up against the sun, written in the palm is the number "2863" - which represents the number of days Agatha has been stuck in the time loop.

    ‘Again Again’; a queer sci-fi film from Mia Moore & Alexa Feeney

    Gemma Stone -
    Again Again is currently running a campaign to crowdfund for its production. It is written and directed by Mia Moore & Alexa Feeney, who I spoke to about the queer sci-fi film hopefully coming to screens soon!
    What is a vigil? An image taken from a vigil in Bristol to mark the death of Brianna Ghey. It shows a tree with a ribbon for every victim of anti-trans hate crime. Representing Brianna is a sparkly pink ribbon. Around the base of the tree are lit candles and messages of love and support.

    What is a vigil? A letter from Trans Safety Network

    Trans Safety Network -
    Like many trans people recently, researchers at Trans Safety Network have joined with our communities to attend, speak at, and help organise vigils so that we can mark the death of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old trans girl from Warrington. The question we hope to answer in this letter is a difficult one - what is a vigil?
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