Luke A.B.'s Blogging

An update to the Transmasculine Suicide Remembrance blog-  Data Reality of the community in 2022 (content warning: discussion of suicide, transphobia) Almost a year ago, I published the first edition of my blog in remembrance of the transmasculine people that we have unfortunately lost to suicide . It's a vigil that I keep now by updating the blog with the names of people who have passed since I last updated it- though it is a strange thing to do, it's something very close to my heart as a trans man who has survived suicidality myself.  The transmasculine community is comprised of trans men and nonbinary people who self-define their genders (and transitions if applicable) as masculine. This blog focuses on them as neither group really enjoys much visibility in society. As such, our deaths (and especially our suicides) are very important to be aware of so that we can help to prevent more of them from happening in the community.  As a result of trawling the records of ...

  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’...

Queer Vexillology- Flags I have created over the years (and across the internet): A collection In the years since I realised I was queer (2014) and since I was born (2000) the LGBTQ+ community has seen many new pride flags come into being with the express purpose of helping a community feel seen and represented symbolically. Since 2014, the various queer flags, the aromantic flag and the new 5-stripe lesbian flag have all come into being. The LGBTQ+ community has a penchant for making flags as a go-to symbol for any new gender, sexuality or relationship style term.  Personally, most of the flags I’ve ever created are variations of existing flags, but I have made quite a few in my time which people in my communities use.  But crucially, last year saw the use of one of my flags in a political sense. I haven’t yet publicly come forward about this, but a few days before the BBC Lily cade article fiasco happened, I was approached online by a BBC reporter whose office is less than t...

  Friends in Unlikely Places: A history of Trans Allyship: (Trans Men Edition) It is an unfortunate assumption that throughout most of trans history, that trans people have been utterly alone in the universe, save for the lucky few who were able to find other trans people at the time they were alive. But it’s completely false that absolutely no cis people were supportive towards historical trans people in their time. Historical trans people and their cis contemporaries are a lot more interconnected than is currently thought and the under-discussed aspects of trans allyship are absolutely present in the records that we have.  The focus here will be on trans people who intended to go stealth, but had one or two people who were aware of their trans status and were supportive of their transness. Other focuses will be on historical trans figures who drew support while people knew of their status. As many names of these allies will be mentioned as possible, though it is not possible...

  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 (...

  Dictionaries in Welsh and English: Discrepancy of common Gender and Sexuality terms? Data volunteered by other Welsh speakers who own bilingual English-Welsh Dictionaries Current data up until the 11th of October 2021  (w)= Welsh Side of the Dictionary (e)= English Side of the Dictionary [if these are known] The Hippocrene Dictionary (1993) has anrhywiol for asexual Geiriadur Newydd notes these terms are unacceptable

  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...

The Welsh Church (Church in Wales) is still homophobic and transphobic: An Essay (Consider supporting me on my ko-fi here or my etsy here if you are able)  The Welsh church has a long history of homophobia and transphobia that is often overlooked when critically examining its power and status in Wales. If we are going to build a fair and free Wales for all, we need to be addressing the latent homophobia and transphobia within what would otherwise be, a fairly decent institution of Welsh culture.  Homophobia and transphobia has permeated much of society ever since strict ecclesiastical gender norms and gender roles came in and were enforced by the populace against anyone who appeared outside of these norms- either by way of their love of the same gender, or by their transgressing of the lines of gender itself and identifying with a gender that they were not assigned at birth.  Famously, the Bible is cited to justify church-based homophobia in Leviticus 18:22, which reads...

Bǣddel Bygones: An article on origins, usage and proper contextual analysis of the term Many people, by now, have written on bǣddel as a slur and have gone over how it may relate to trans women and various reclamation groups that arose in the late twenty-teens. But nobody, so far, seems to have given any credence at all for the context of its use or its origin and continued usage in British English today. Aside from apparently being the root of the word bad, it is a pejorative in Old English for gender nonconforming or effeminate cis men, intersex people and people who we would now refer to as trans women.  But this is where many non-linguists go off the rails. Old English is super old. Like, older than the Middle Ages (where people spoke Middle English). Old English is largely incomprehensible to modern English speakers and I’m willing to bet that most people involved in bǣddel debates are not able to read Old English. There’s also the issue of etymology, since again, most people ...

  Essay on TERFism: The Forgotten (almost) Terrorism  (Consider supporting me on my ko-fi here or my etsy here ) Cw: Nazis, Fascism, TERFS, Rape, Forced Pregnancy TERFS (or trans exclusionary radical feminists) are terrorist-like. They are, however, state sanctioned, which is a big problem for those of us who are trans and living in countries which promote TERFism as a convenient way to ‘support the feminists’ while beating down trans people.   How are these TERFS terrorist-like? The answer to that question lies in what terrorism is and how right-wing white terrorism in particular is overlooked.  Terrorism, broadly speaking, is any act, movement or ideology that seeks to achieve its goals through the use of violence and fear. But the narrow definition is increasingly hard to pin down. In Root Causes of Terrorism (2004) terrorism is defined as “a set of methods or strategies of combat rather than an identifiable ideology or movement, and that terrorism involves ...