Trans Writes Logo: Happy 1 year of Trans Writes! sponsored aritcles

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.

So a year ago I was moaning on Twitter about how trans people are shut out of the media and its hard to make a living talking about trans issues unless you’re a transphobic cis person. Lee offered to help me out and somewhere in our discussions we came up with this amazing idea; pay trans people to write about whatever they want!

Across 1 year of Trans Writes we have taken work from 28 different writers and one graphic designer too. A few of those writers have double (and in one case triple) dipped, putting our total of works contributed to the Trans Writes project so far at 34 written works plus our cute ass logo too.

All in all that means we’ve helped put almost £4,000 into the hands of trans people – or the causes they care about – to speak about things they care about. Whether that be philosophy on the nature of ‘dysphoria’, reviews of trans media by the people closest to those stories, or even just information about trans issues the media refuses to include.

We’ve taken works from a wide-range of communities. Our first contributor piece was a piece covering the first pro LGBT protest in Nigeria, written by one of the organisers. We’ve taken works from trans people in Hungary, Finland and the US too – alongside pieces from Scottish, English and Welsh writers. (Lee has Northern Ireland covered! I didn’t forget you!)

And we’re not stopping there either. We are currently working on getting more fantastic writing from transgender and other gender diverse people too. We have pieces in the works from Australia, New Zealand and even one about culturally specific gender identities which we’re super excited to bring you. Our aim was always to elevate the voices of transgender people and we’re doing our best to make sure noone gets left behind, or forgotten.

None of this would be possible without you. You believed in what we wanted to achieve, you came and you supported it hard! I get up every morning excited to find new pieces to bring to you and new trans people to give money to, it is simply the coolest job ever even if it doesn’t pay particularly well or really at all. (Lee and I said we would pay ourselves from ad revenue, which has totalled about £300 so far! haha)

Oh, and I figure now is probably a good time to give a few site news updates! I’m going to go over the site design almost entirely to fix some errors that have cropped up and make it just a bit more easy to navigate. One of the errors is that an image I uploaded as an article header sometimes appears as a background on articles it was never assigned to. No idea why! We’re also going to be changing the way we accept pitches, requiring an email instead of use of the form. We liked the form but it became bot central very quickly, alongside people reporting errors with it too.

I also haven’t given up on running a Trans Writes Game Night either – with Terraria still being the chosen pick! I just really need to find the time for it all and have a lot of personal life stuff going on at the moment. If you follow my Twitter you probably already know, and thank you for you support there!

We’re also considering launching social media accounts for Facebook and Mastodon. It’s become increasingly clear that Twitter is not going to be a particularly supportive space of small businesses like ours, so naturally other avenues are being explored. We will of course drop an announcement here when those accounts go up so you don’t miss it!

Oh and bank account! We may finally have an actual official business bank account set up very soon. All steps have been completed and we are, I think, just waiting on a few bankers to tick some boxes and activate the account for us. That means we will finally have our grant funding released to us meaning we can massively step up our out put. We told the funders we wanted to hit 1 piece a week for a year and we’ve fallen behind on that a little so we’re going to have to go real fast!

If you want to help support our work you can check out our donate page, sign up to our Patreon or follow us on any of our social media platforms (currently only Twitter) and share our work with people you know. It all helps!

Thank you so much for your support and thank you to LGBT+ Consortium and your LGBT Futures Equity Fund (more on that here). 1 year of Trans Writes couldn’t have happened without all of you. Here’s to another year of bringing you bad ass trans-led content from all around the world.