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Transitioning with Sugar

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar: Ms Sugar Swan asks what the LGBTQIA community means to her

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar: Ms Sugar Swan asks what the LGBTQIA community means to her

This month’s Gscene theme is community and having lived, worked and volunteered within the local queer community for the last 17 years I have very mixed feelings about the community and what it means to me.

FEATURE: Transitioning with Sugar – A year in her life

FEATURE: Transitioning with Sugar – A year in her life

This year has been one of the toughest of my life, and I’m no stranger to tough years. December marks the first year of being without the best and most consistent person I’ve been lucky enough to have had in my life, having lost them after 17 years together. Next month also marks the 20th anniversar

FEATURE: Transitioning with Sugar – HIV & Me

FEATURE: Transitioning with Sugar – HIV & Me

I’ve been HIV+ for the majority of my adult life. I was diagnosed in my early 20s shortly after the death of my mother. I didn’t take her death very well and ran away to Europe for three months where I undertook some risky sexual practice as I was in a dark depression. Most traumatically I was gang

FEATURE: Transitioning with Sugar – I love men, what can I do? asks Sugar Swan

FEATURE: Transitioning with Sugar – I love men, what can I do? asks Sugar Swan

As Eartha Kitt sang during the disco revival of her career in the 1984 title track, ‘I love men, what can I do? I love men, they’re no good for you’. Never have song lyrics felt more relatable right now. Pre-transition I was never the ‘gay man’ that I was often perceived as and regular readers of th

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar – My Pride experience

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar – My Pride experience

Last month I wrote about my Pride experiences over the last 20 years and how I never quite felt like I fitted in. I was always troubled with poor trans representation. I surmised by hoping that trans folk, and the less represented minorities of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, would be better respected and re

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar – my memories of past Prides

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar – my memories of past Prides

My first experience of a Pride event was back in 1997, some 20 years ago. A fresh-faced 16-year-old kid, who knew she was trans but only in her wildest dreams did she think she could transition, made her way to Clapham Common for Pride London. I was absolutely terrified as I made my way there with m

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar – ‘You need to be more ladylike’

OPINION: Transitioning with Sugar – ‘You need to be more ladylike’

Those 6 words. Those 6 words that I have heard over and over again in many different guises since I began transition feed into a cis narrative in which I neither belong, nor wish to. The OED defines ‘lady’ as ‘a polite or formal way of referring to a woman’. Well, I am a woman, so therefore, I am a

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