What's new, changed or happened

As new episodes are only published every three weeks, I thought I would start this diary, and add an entry if there are any updates on previous episodes, or maybe news in the wider world that is impactful on the trans, nonbinary or intersex communities, or wider LGBTQIA+ community.

25 May 2026

On Tuesday I created an Instagram account for the podcast, it is "transwisetransstrong", and I plan to record short videos for each episode, that hopefully will increase the listenership of the podcast, which as of yesterday is heard in 69 countries, with the Christmas quiz episode, TrAnZgender Identity - An A to Z, leading the way, with a mean average of 3 downloads per day for this month.

16 May 2026

Just published at 2:00pm the latest episode, Portrait of...Caroline Cossey, which you may have noticed was sans photo, as although I contacted her representatives, Nemesis Global Media twice, requesting a photo I could use, both emails were ignored, which compares with the response I had when I emailed Radio 5 Live's Tony Livesey, with a suggestion for his Tuesday night "Midnight Musicology" segment with Professor Joe Bennett. The email was sent at 13:10 and read at 13:24, and my suggestion was for a look at gender diversity in song, which I examined in; The Kinks' Celebrate Gender Diversity and Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Parts One & Two.

14 May 2026

When I corrected the two word order error in Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Part Two, the quite correct explicit warning for the episode due to one of the songs dropping the F-bomb twice, prompted me to consider the explicit warming, for its medical description, I gave the third part of my autobiographical trilogy, A Journey of Transition: Carolyne's Story - Part Three. As this is the least listened part of the trilogy, and I wondered if the explicit warming had deterred listeners, therefore after some consideration I decided to remove it and changed the warning to advice, and stated that the information herein contended in it, should not be considered medical advice.

Also, sometimes there is an issue with the layout of pages on this website when they are updated, and so as to checked that the built in audio player was still matched to the correct episode, I listened to the beginning of each and found that four episodes had a 2 or 3 second silence before I began to speak, which I had not noticed when I reviewed the episode prior to publishing, as then I was just focusing on what I had said matched the scripted for the episode.

The episodes effected where; Take Pride in Your Flag - Revised, Trans Lives Matter, There's a Woman on the Stage and The Kings and Queens of Drag, and being somewhat pedantic, I have removed the silence from the front of these episodes, and for Take Pride in Your Flag - Revised, I also removed 3 pauses that felt a little bit too long as well, and republished, and apologies for notifications of episodes you may already have listened to. However I did not change the episodes on the YouTube channel as this would have reset the views for all four episodes views to zero, for the reason given on 12th May entry.

12 May 2026

I have just republished the Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Part One episode, as last night I was watching on Disney+ a documentary, "Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World", and I realised I had made a silly mistake and mispronounced his surname, so I rerecorded the 4 short sections where I mentioned his name, unfortunately the only way to change the audio on the YouTube channel is to delete the video and uploaded the corrected version, which unfortunately means you reset the view count to zero.

10 May 2026

So on the 26 April I said I had re-recorded a section of Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Part Two, as when I was talking about "Annabel" by Goldfrapp, I found I had transposed the order of two words, "be" and "both", and I did indeed re-record it, but whilst I uploaded the corrected audio onto my YouTube channel, I some how forgot to update the audio of the podcast version. I only found out today as I was looking at the length and word count of the last three episodes, so as to determine an episode's mean average word count per minute, and noticed that episode twenty's length was 31 minutes and 32 second when it should have been two seconds longer. I do wonder how my brain works, that I could remember the exact length of an episode, but forgot to update the audio. Well this has been corrected as of 14:32 today, as has the 4 instances of the episode's audio on this website.

5 May 2026

It was whilst editing the script for the Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Part Two episode, that I watched the Official Music Video of The Tyranny of Either/Or by Evan Greer, which mentioned the "Stonewall Uprising", and after thinking about it for a little while, I decided that I needed to revise the section about the "Stonewall Uprising" in the second episode, Take Pride in Your Flag. Reading through what I had written in the script, I realised that what I had original said was not as fully reflective of the vital contribution of lesbian, trans women and women of colour to this momentous event. I updated the episode of the podcast, however on the YouTube channel, I kept the original and added the revised version, and on this website you can still find the original via the the updated version's transcript page.

26 April 2026

When I reviewed the Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Part Two episode before I published it, I found a very slight error when discussing Annabel by Goldfrapp, but as I wanted to publish the episode at exactly 14:00 yesterday I decided I would correct the error and republish today, what I had done was switched the order of "...be both...", in the line , Why they could have let you be both, Annabel.

5 April 2026

I decided to make a few amendments the the Celebrating Gender Diversity in Song - Part One episode, by adding a another thought to the discussion of Queen Bitch and to the end, which was fortunate as I discovered that during the editing of the episode there was a 30 second silent gap, oops.

31 March 2026

Today, the 31st of March is International Transgender Day of Visibility, which was founded by Rachel Crandall Crocker in 2009, as the yang, sunny, compliment to the yin, shady, of the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

21 March 2026

I have finally added the transcript of the interview with Kestral Gaian, and the reason for the delay was, unlike my usual episodes, where I have a script that I have written, to proofread against the recording, as the episode was an interview, I had to rely on the audio software I use to record my podcasts to generate from the audio file of the interview a transcript, and although very good it is not perfect, plus it tended towards making very short sentences.

20 March 2026

With the last three episodes, I did not upload them to my YouTube channel, because after an initial flurry the number of views had dropped to a trickle, however when I discussed this with my therapist Dr Demsky, he said that I should upload them, given the potential global audience, and also they suggested revising the description of the Trans Wise Trans Strong. So for the last four days I have been revising the YouTube channel's look and description, and I used the same description for the podcast, and I also made several revisions to The Kinks episode.

The transcript of The Kinks episode, has the song titles as hyperlinks, to Spotify and for one song YouTube, and to open in a new tab I created an image of the song title, but I could not align them accurately within the text, so I reverted to just having the song title text as a hyperlink, but clicking on it does open a new tab, anoyingly.

24 December 2025

Before I uploaded the TrAnZgender Identities: An A to Z, to the YouTube channel I thought I would double check, just in case of any errors, as if you find a mistake after uploading an episode unlike a podcast you can not update, you have delete and then re-upload, which means any views the episode may have gained will be lost. Well, there was a few I had somehow missed, and after correcting them, I updated the audio on the podcast, and then after creating an mp4 file of the episode, uploaded onto the Trans Wise Trans Strong YouTube channel.

22 December 2025

So I thought for the Christmas episode, TrAnZgender Identities: An A to Z, I would script one based around a glossary I had already created, "Gender Identities and Sexual Orientations", and cut and paste from it the Gender Identities, and expand these entries with who, if known, coined the term, and again if known, when. Well it took longer than I thought it would and didn't finish the script until around 12:30 am on Saturday, and although I usually record the episode on Friday evening, when it is quite, well half midnight was rather late so I would record it on Saturday. I record episodes in small sections, so if I make a mistake, I can just rerecord a small section, however after recording three-quarters, I worried that my pronunciation of some cultural terms was not correct, and so after finding the correct pronunciation, I rerecorded a number of the terms, and then I thought saying, "registered male or female at birth" was not strictly accurate, so changed each instance to, "assigned at birth", given the cliché phrase, "you have a beautiful baby girl or boy", is in an sense a form of assignment. Net result was, that it was 02:01 am on Sunday when I was finally able to publish, so left updating this website until later on Sunday. When I add a new transcript page, I just make a copy of the previous one and then update, but checking today found that I had not updated the audio file, whoops, all correct now, I hope!

14 December 2025

When I uploaded the Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two episode onto YouTube as an Ad for the podcast, I left comments enabled but set the moderation to strict, as I wanted too avoid nasty comments, and then when I decided to upload the rest of the episodes, I again left comments enabled with strict moderation.

Although this probably prevented the most vile comments, it did not prevent one transphobic comment and another with how I described sex assignment, therefore I decided to disable comments.

My response to that comment was to trust that it was accurate, as being on the autistic spectrum I can be guilty of being too trusting.

I came across an interesting article on the "Psychology Today" website, titled Trust on the Spectrum by Louise Taylor Ph.D. The Neurodivergent Therapist, where they discussed trust issues and being on the spectrum, and mentioned the phrase, which they said they intended to live by, "Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe", and I think I might follow suit.

So back to that inaccurate comment, which was for the, What Are Words Worth episode and the poster claimed I said “…assigned a sex…” and said something like sex was based on observation and was recorded, I replied before checking the audio, that was a good point, however after checking the audio of what I actually said, it was, "..sex they are assigned at birth,...", now, where’s my paddle?

But it got me to think about that phrase from a trans perspective, as it is in common usage , as although preferred to, “ being born male” or “ being born female”, it does not convey by what basis a babies is sex assigned.

I remembered an article I had read from the, “NHS Southampton Children’s Hospital”, titled, Sex assignment in newborn babies, and I also found online another article from the “NHS Digital service manual” site, titled, Sex, gender and sexuality, where they discuss the assignment of sex, and from these two sources I formulated my own phrase.

“sex they were registered with, which would have been based on the appearance of their genitals”

I feel this conveys how sex was determined and that it is an exercise in bureaucracy.

So after overdubbing the relevant section of the What Words Are Worth episode, I reviewed the audio and found in the section were I describe the term, gay, I had said “transphobia”, when I meant, ”homophobia”.

This is all the more embarrassing as I had previously corrected a mistake I had made regarding the Liberal MP Henry Labouchère, who I had called “transphobic”, instead of, ”homophobic”.

I also decided to remove from the video version I would post on YouTube, mention of this website, so I created two versions, one for YouTube and one for the podcast and after a final check uploaded both versions.

12 December 2025

As I have created YouTube versions of all the podcast episodes, I have removed from the Episodes and Transcripts pages the YouTube version of Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two, and now at 12:45 the views of the top three episodes are:

Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two (86 views)

Trans Lives Matter (59 views)

A Journey of Transition - Carolyne's Story - Part One (5 views)

10 December 2025

After a bit of research I found that YouTube like my podcast host, will allow you to sign up to have ads added to your, in this case, videos once they had 1,000 views, so I decided to create videos, with the same technique, I used for Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two, of using the cover art as a video source, although this time they would be exact copies of the original podcast episode. I uploaded episodes 1 to 8, 10 and 11, and then found that YouTube only allows 10 videos to be uploaded per day, and therefore I uploaded episodes 12 and 13 the next days.

7 December 2025

A bit more about the WI decision, they said it was not a decision they wanted to make, but had to, following on from the Supreme Court’s ruling, I do wonder though if there might be a trans equivalent person to Rosa Parks, who refuses to give up their metaphorical seat, as what Rosa stood up for, or should that really be sat down for, was against the law where she lived, and whose act of defiance, sowed the seed for a change in the law.

Also the YouTube version of Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two currently stands at 37 views.

5 December 2025

Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two - Created a video of this episode, after first editing the end of the audio to promote the Trans Wise Trans Strong podcast, using the episode's cover art as a video source, which cross-fades into the cover art of the podcast at the end, when I promoted the podcast, fingers crossed it will bring more subscribers.

What Are Words Worth - When I clarified the origin of the word "transsexual", I did wonder if the changes to the age of consent if gay in Northern Ireland was 100% accurate, and after some further research, amended the audio to make clear that when it was lowered to 16 in England, Scotland and Wales, the reason it was only lowered to 17 in Northern Ireland was because in 1950 the age of consent if straight had been raised to 17, so lowering to only 17 was still consistent with the other three Nations in that the age of consent if gay or straight was still the same.

Wednesday 3 December 2025

Just seen on the BBC News website that the Women's Institute, the WI, will as April 2026 no longer offer membership to transgender women, as a direct result of that hateful Supreme Court ruling, which I discussed in the episode, "Trans Lives Matter", well I actually joined my local branch a few years ago, when I learnt they where trans accepting. I am to say the least feeling a bit shit at the moment, and even though the ban does not come into effect until April next year, I emailed my local branch to say as of now I will no longer be attending.

Tuesday 2 December 2025

To the episodes transcripts where I mentioned my psychotherapist Dr Kenneth Demsky, I converted the text of their name into a hyperlink for their website, and then I also took the opportunity to add hyperlinks to relevant referenced external website sources.

Monday 1 December 2025

I Am Not A Disorder - Clarified where I used myself as an example of Dr Demsky's two additional variables of "The Klein-Demsky Matrix of Sex and Gender", in respect of how female I now considered my anatomy.

Tuesday 25 November 2025

Slight audio edits of two episodes.

In The Beginning - Re-recorded the introduction again, as the previous version was a bit confusing.

What Are Words Worth - Added that the word Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, coined which was the German word, "Transsexualismus", and clarified that although Dr David Oliver Cauldwell did indeed coin the word "Transsexual", it was based on the word, "Transsexualismus", coined by Dr Hirschfeld.

Sunday 9th November 2025

Spent the day working on the website, and now all twelve transcripts are available.

I also made a few minor changes to three episodes, which I republished today.

Trans Lives Matter - Added that the phrase "biological sex" does not appear anywhere in the Equality Act 2010, and neither did "trans woman/women" and "trans man/men" appear in the Gender Recognition Act 2004, although "transsexualism" was mentioned, just twice.

Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two - Replaced the word "agonists" with "analogue" after "Gonadotropin-releasing hormone", and reworded at the end of the episode, where I mentioned this website.

A Journey of Transition: Carolyne - Part One - I removed the word "The" from the mention of "Get In blog".

Saturday 8th November 2025

I finally managed to completed the script for the final part of my autobiography trilogy, and published today at 5:00pm

Monday 27th October 2025

I made another very slight change to the introduction of Episode 1 - "In The Beginning", and republished, must learn when to let go! Also, I republished Episode 8 - "What Are Words Worth", again after correcting a couple of errors that had crept into Friday's edit.

Friday 24th October 2025

Spent today and yesterday, creating a transcript for each episode from the working script by listening to the episode's audio and even though before publishing each episode I had listened to the audio, I found I had still missed a number of errors, some small, and from one episode a missing section, as detailed below.

In The Beginning - I removed the word revolt , from the sentence, "The addition of an extra X chromosome may revolt result in some or most of the following; ", and I found I had dropped the "s" from the "Johns Hopkins Medical Centre", renaming it the "John Hopkins Medical Centre".

Take Pride In Your Flag - In one place I had renamed the "Genderqueer Pride flag", the "Queergender Pride flag", and although I said I would discuss a flag for each letter of the initialism, LGBTQIA+, I had somehow missed discussing the "Intersex Pride flag". I also removed from the end of the episode a discussion about national flags, I had included it as an illustration of how important flags are but felt listening to it again, it was a tangent too far.

What Are Words Worth - I had describe the MP Henry Labouchère as transphobic instead of homophobic, although if being transgender had a greater awareness towards the end of the 19th century, I feel sure he would also have been transphobic, and found I had dropped the "+", from two mentions of the initialism, "LGBTQIA+".

After amending the recordings of episodes 1, 2 and 8, I republished them to day.

Friday 17th October 2025

Spent today and yesterday, emailing the US states I haven't already emailed about the Podcast, as well as the 10 Canadian provinces and New Zealand.

Monday 29th September 2025

Before beginning the writing of "A Journey of Transition- Part Two", I thought I would review part one and discovered that I had missed one or to events, therefore part two's narrative will be somewhat non-linear.

Monday 22nd September 2025

When I recorded episode 9, “Celebrating Trans Films - Part Two”, I was pitching my voice up, as I am somewhat self-conscious how my voice sounds, but listening again to the audio, it sounded a bit strained and so over the weekend I re-recorded this episode, and after reviewing it for any errors, and correcting a few I found, republished today.