Spring 2018 Solidarity Fund is now OPEN

We’re please to announce the Spring 2018 Action for Trans Health solidarity fund, which is open to applications from all trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender non-conforming people living in the UK. Part of this funding round will be ring-fenced for trans people of colour (i.e. from African, Caribbean, Asian, Arab, and Indigenous descent, including people of mixed race backgrounds and other racialised people).

Throughout the year, Action for Trans Health raises money to help trans people who cannot access healthcare through the NHS in a reasonable amount of time. We know that the trans healthcare system is pretty broken, and that the people who need support will usually outweigh our grassroots organisation’s ability to fundraise. Because of this, we use this application form to work out who faces the most barriers to getting healthcare through the usual routes.

Action for Trans Health takes a broad view of health. We know there are a wide number of things that can affect trans people’s mental and physical healthcare, so we don’t have any rules about what the money can be used for. We do ask that if the money is being used to access medication which will be needed long-term, that the applicant has thought about how to secure the long-term supply after the grant money has been spent.

Please note that we tend to give out small grants. The average grant is typically between £200 and £400. The largest grant we have given away has been £1500.

Once completed forms have been sent to us, a member of Action for Trans Health’s staff will anonymise the form by removing any information that could be identifying. Then this will be passed onto our funding panel, who will decide where the funds go. We will contact you to let you know whether you have been given any money within two weeks of the funding panel meeting.

The deadline for this funding round is 15 March 2018. Please fill in this form to apply

In support of the Women’s Strike, 8th March

Action for Trans Health supports the Women’s Strike on the 8th March, coinciding with International Women’s Day. #WomenStrike2018

 

There is no debate about the fact that trans women are women and as women we face numerous, unique obstacles in this patriarchal, cisnormative society in order to survive. As a group campaigning for democratic trans health care, our own work has showcased the ways in which trans women and trans feminine people are dehumanised and humiliated in all forms of healthcare in the NHS and private healthcare. From transmisogynist GPs and nurses, to relying on outdated, undemocratic forms of healthcare in the forms of gender identity clinics (GICs) which have a history of medical gatekeeping and enforcing misogynist ideals on us in order for us to gain what is essential and life-saving medicines and surgeries. Trans women also face disproportionately higher levels of domestic violence, unemployment and homelessness which is only added by the pathologising constraints put on us as women by transmisogynist doctors and psychiatrists to ‘prove’ ourselves.

Action for Trans Health is aware of the misogynist histories in medicine and psychiatry and shows solidarity to all women fighting for their own rights of bodily autonomy within a patriarchal healthcare system. As trans women and trans feminine people, our value and expertise in helping improve trans healthcare is not commonly compensated for by the NHS or other forms of healthcare services. We are women who are still relied upon despite all of the work we do as carers and workers engaging in unpaid, unrecognised and uncompensated forms of socially reproductive labour and as women we will also be on strike on the 8th March.

#WeStrike