Luke A.B.'s Blogging

  UK’s First Trans MP: a Conundrum for the Conservative Party? Earlier this year, Jamie Wallis MP came out as transgender. Following a car crash in late November 2021, he described his reaction to the incident as being linked to his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which he developed as a result of blackmail and rape. Wallis is an MP for the Conservative Party, having unseated Labour’s 30-year hold on the Bridgend constituency. This, combined with his transness, makes for a rather unusual situation for the Conservative Party at large, having spent the last twelve years introducing policies that have had a negative impact on the transgender community in the United Kingdom.  Wallis, in an interview with Sky News said that he wishes to transition as ‘quick as possible’ but also mentions that the process will be ‘challenging and difficult’ with ‘lots of hurdles’. Additionally, he mentioned that  ‘it's not going to be done overnight, it's going to take many, many years’...

  The Welsh Church 2- Electric Boogaloo (Hunting the oldest queer terms in Welsh) (or, 453 years is too long to keep calling us this) (Consider supporting me on my ko-fi here or my etsy here if you are able)  (CW: homophobic slurs in Welsh and English)  In my last essay about the homophobia and transphobia embedded in the Welsh Church (or Church in Wales) I wrote about the homophobic lines in Leviticus 18:22 and how there has been no edition of the Welsh Bible that does not have the homophobic implications of those lines. It got me thinking, what about the other, more dubious lines in the Bible that contain homophobia or even transphobia? And did this get extended into Welsh?  I began by gathering together all of the lines in the Bible known to be homophobic or justify homophobia. They are: Leviticus (Lefiticus) 18:22, Leviticus (Lefiticus) 20:13, 1 Corinthians (Corinthiaid) 6:9-10, 1 Kings (Brenhinoedd) 14:24, 1 Kings (Brenhinoedd) 15:12. In the King James Bible (...

  Trans in Wales- introduction There's something rather odd about being trans in Wales. It's a converging of nationality (sometimes adoptive) and marginalisation. But in all my time spent living in England (18 years), I've encountered so many more institutional problems there than in Wales. Right off the bat in my gender journey navigating England's finest trans-unfriendly healthcare networks, I experienced institutional transphobia. My first referral to a GIC in Manchester fell through after my attempt to seek mental health support for reasons unrelated to my transness were revealed to the professionals I had encountered. I never got that referral. That was back when I was in college, in England. Having gone through the mentally stressful ordeal of disguising my lateness returning to where my parents lived as studying late and the bus arriving  later than usual, I struck out alone to a busy hospital, where I'd carefully organised my appointment with a medical profe...