An open letter to all organisations using LGBTQIA+
Inclusion is a wonderful thing – and we should all want a world where inclusion is valued, and everybody can be part of public life and free to live without stigma. However, inclusion should not involve erasing or misrepresenting the needs of marginalised groups of people, tokenising their existence, without trying to understand their needs…
The Invention of Intersex
The below essay is very quickly written and still very much a work in progress, but I felt it was important to share some of this information as part of Intersex Awareness Day. As someone born with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, I had until recently felt fairly neutral about the term Intersex as I could…
Two things can be true at the same time, Mr Jones!
Being caught up in the gender wars is no fun and I have become increasingly tired of people tagging me into the many ridiculous debates about whether or not sex is binary, bimodal, a spectrum or possibly doesn’t even exist at all. However, I didn’t wade into this debate to argue endlessly about the nature…
Parents are human too
I’ve written a lot about my own experiences of being born with a variation of sex development. However, it is not just my story and it has also had a huge impact on my family, especially my parents. I found it hard to write their story & separate it from my own voice and feelings,…
Tale of a good GP
I decided to apply to medical school when I was 30. This was a decision that I made overnight after reading about the new Graduate Entry course in a copy of the Evening Standard that had been left in my shared house. “I can do that”, I thought – “it will be easy, they need…
Are you there God? It’s me, Clare.
“We moved on the Tuesday before Labour Day. I knew what the weather was like the second I got up, I knew because I caught my mother sniffing under her arms. She always does that when it’s hot and humid to make sure her deodorant’s working. I don’t use deodorant yet. I don’t think people…
Girl in the snow
Whilst living with friends in London in the late 90s and thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, I listened to a lot of Belle and Sebastian. I especially loved the song Fox in the Snow and thought of myself as like the ‘Girl in the Snow’. Girl…
Pictures of you
Throughout my childhood I had regular hospital appointments. This was at our very big but local hospital and it would usually involve missing a day of school, which always seemed to result in missing some major school gossip as something exciting always seemed to happen on the day that I was away. As many things…
Caught in the middle
Although I am always meaning to write something about my experience as a woman with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, I am also a terrible procrastinator and with work and kids to juggle, a few tweets are usually the limit of my attention span. Before starting this piece, I was also worrying about the best terminology to…
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Differently Normal 