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In a previous article, I wrote about budget-friendly tips for those who are starting their social transition. They require minimal time and financial expenses and are recommended for beginners.

You may also consider them if you’re not sure about your decision and still have doubts. But if the decision is made, you want to achieve better and more dramatic results, and you’re ready to invest extra money in these steps, you may consider undergoing cosmetic procedures.

Today, we’ll talk about permanent or semi-permanent hair removal you can do in a salon with the help of a technician.

We already spoke about shaving and depilating, but we skipped two main procedures that will significantly help you — electrolysis and laser hair removal. Also, we’ll briefly touch on the topic of IPL devices.

For background, hair is formed in follicles that lie in the dermis (the middle skin layer) under the epidermis (the outer skin layer). They are present everywhere on our skin except for the lips, palms, and soles.

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No industry or type of organization is free from sexual predators. Hear a spokesperson claim that their corporation, their church, their college campus, their school district is squeaky clean in that regard, it’s a good bet they’re either turning a blind eye or sweeping dirt under the rug.

I’ve loved Sarah Silverman for three decades, since her brief turn as Wendy Traston on The Larry Sanders Show. For the last several years, she’s opened her eponymously titled podcast with, “Hi, this is your friend, Sarah.”

I’ve almost felt like she was a friend, a trusted friend.

That is, until she broke my heart with one single, tasteless, totally inexplicable joke. Now, my trust has been shattered.

In her latest comedy special Postmortem, Sarah talks about losing her beloved father and stepmother in quick succession.

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With her heart thumping vigorously like a stallion, Meredith cradled her knees to catch her breath. Ezerix stilled, silently waiting for her to make her move. When she felt her strength returning to her, and her erratic breathing had calmed considerably, Meredith lunged at Ezerix with a swiftness she didn’t even know was possible to her only a few months ago. They exchanged blow after blow, Ezerix blocking every single hit Meredith sent at him. For the umpteenth time that evening, another smack to Meredith’s face sent her tumbling to the ground.

“Fuck.” She spat blood. Her cheek stung with pain. When Nyx had said Ezerix wouldn’t take it easy on Meredith if they trained, she didn’t expect things to get this violent.

The first day they began their combat training three months ago, Ezerix so utterly overpowered Meredith that even Nyx stepped in. But Meredith insisted that she needed the training. She’d vowed to get stronger to be worthy of her title as the grand elder of her coven. There was no way she would quit just because the training was harder than she’d expected. She was the one who asked for this in the first place. She might as well endure it.

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I liked director Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy (2024). It starts as a romantic comedy about a socially reserved doctor named Naveen (Karan Soni), falling for a manic pixie dream hunk, Jay (Jonathan Groff), but it quickly evolves into a deconstruction of the institution of marriage — depicted in the attempt to win over Naveen’s socially conservative family so they can have a traditional Indian wedding.

The film had a lot of great one-liners, and I found myself swooning over Naveen and Jay’s budding relationship, one that felt very real (a rarity in traditional romantic comedies). I also felt that they handled the more racially-charged elements of this film (i.e., Jay’s intense interest in Indian culture) surprisingly well. If you haven’t had a chance to see this film, this is your cue to pause this article and watch it. I’ll be here when you get back.

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Disclaimer: This is NOT your typical article!

What follows is a memoir chronicling my lifelong journey of flunking as a socially acceptable human!

Not in the Job Description is a creative nonfiction hermit crab essay (a style which allows story to be told through narrative techniques while adhering to an unrelated structure). The story is delivered through a series of emails to the ‘HR of Society’ over a 30+ year timeframe and HR’s (un)helpful replies and performance reviews because this is how I’ve experienced gender (and life in general): full of expectations, performance reviews, and invisible KPIs.

Note: Not in the Job Description was submitted in part towards the award of Master of Creative Writing (Macquarie University), 2025.

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The best part of Pride started in the dead of winter, when I was sitting in a tiny black box theater in the back of an art gallery, bundled in my pea coat and scarf, drinking cups of white wine with an 80-year-old German lady.

My new friend Josh had just returned from the Edinburgh Festival with a play he always wanted to stage in an art gallery. Gerta was friends with an actress I worked with Off-Broadway and kept encouraging me to visit her gallery in Brooklyn, so I decided to go down there and bring Josh along.

An affordable performance space always feels like a scarce resource every theatre artist in the city has to fight for, so Josh was overjoyed when Gerta offered him and his cast the gallery to perform one weekend in early June.

And as he thanked her and they clinked their plastic cups, Gerta added —

Jamie, you’re a great actor, you should do something too! Make it a double-bill!

I thought my days of making theatre for free were long behind me. But one never wants to turn down an opportunity, and I’d been wanting to develop an original solo play for a long time. This was just the deadline I needed.

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Here in New York State, where marijuana has been legalized both recreationally and medically, I have my medical marijuana license which assists with treating my bipolar disorder, CPTSD, the depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as insomnia that makes it difficult for me to fall asleep. I am also a queer person. To me, it seems clear that not only does marijuana legalization, when done correctly, supports all people, but specifically queer people.

Let’s add some context as to how marijuana uplifts queer/LGBTQ+ lived experiences.

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It was midnight. For most people, this was a time of quiet and recovery after the hustle and bustle of the day. At the Vogelstein family estate, however, midnight was the most active time. Today was even more alive than usual as every vampire in the estate stood on high alert, watching every move of their demon visitors with extreme wariness.

Inside a massive, luxuriously furnished study, Ivan and Nyx were in a meeting with three of their visitors.

“You have what you want. Return what is ours,” said one of the three demons Qixoq had sent to present the secession contract.

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Just recently, we got an insight into how transgender Americans actually feel about themselves and their health — with the publication of a massive new survey just a few days ago. It didn’t exactly find anything unexpected given that healthcare providers, experts, and trans people themselves have long tried explaining to people that trans healthcare is a huge benefit for trans people, but I digress.

For context, more than 84,000 trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people took part in a survey organised by Advocates for Trans Equality. One of the more interesting things noted in this survey was that of the people who had detransitioned and gone back to living as the gender they were previously assigned, the number one reason respondents gave was transphobia. Of the ones who ceased in their transition, only 4% stated that it was because gender transition wasn’t right for them which is by all accounts, a very small percentage.

This isn’t that surprising. Many trans people, including those who have detransitioned for this reason, have mentioned this.

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“But I see you…”

The words trail off, or maybe they don’t. Maybe all existence did the decent thing and paused for me to crystallise this moment.

We’d just been giggling about the time we went to a country “locals” pub, and after seeing us walk in, someone put Bronski Beat — Smalltown Boy on the jukebox repeatedly. We stayed in there all night, standing our ground whilst sat at a corner table, laughing about how it was the best passive-aggressive thing ever.

After we talk about being me being visible, and Tessie says those words with a certain weight, the less pointed music of a gay bar fades to silence.

The refreshed feeling in my mouth from vodka, lime and soda dissiapates as it suddenly goes very, very dry because of a different kind of thirst.

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Donald Trump has orchestrated an act of bureaucratic ephebicide so exquisitely sadistic, so perfectly calibrated in its malevolence, that it stands as the apotheosis of his pathological cruelty masquerading as governance. This septuagenarian sociopath, whose bottomless narcissism feeds on the suffering of the vulnerable, has turned his focus on one of America’s most vulnerable populations: LGBTQ youth.

LGBTQ+ youth attempt suicide at four times the rate of their heterosexual and cisgender peers, with 39% seriously considering suicide compared to just 14% of straight youth, and transgender youth facing even more harrowing odds with 46% contemplating suicide and 80% having considered it at some point. These numbers* are not the result of some inherent vulnerability but the predictable outcome of the systematic discrimination, rejection, and minority stress that Trump’s policies have weaponized into a tool of mass destruction.

Enough of the euphemistic cant of Washington chatter and let’s call this barbarism what it is: Trump’s engineered deaths of suicidal children through the calculated withdrawal of life-preserving interventions.

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I was in the grocery store when my uncle leaned in and said, “You’re a shame to the family name.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. The whole town already knew.

A few days earlier, I’d written a letter to the local newspaper. It was honest. I was trying to say I’m here. I exist. I didn’t out anyone. Didn’t share family secrets. I just said what I felt. But in a town like mine, even that was too much.

After it was published, I wondered if I’d fucked up. I mean, I did get some encouragement — a few people reached out quietly. But it was my uncle’s voice that stuck. That echoed.

That moment in the grocery store broke something open in me. Made me start asking questions I’d never thought to ask. About my family. About all the things we never talked about. About the silence that felt so heavy sometimes I could barely breathe.

That’s when I found out about “poofter bashing.”

And that’s when everything started making horrible sense.

Turns out my father and his brothers — along with a bunch of other blokes — used to go out looking for gay men to beat up. They had a word for it. Poofter bashing. Like it was cricket or footy. Just something you did.

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I started to transition at age 60.

I started late.

Baby boomers were not allowed to be transgender as children. The word “transgender” didn’t even exist back then. You were either a boy or a girl based on your sex organs, not your brain. The world had as much understanding of gender as medieval society had about the shape of the Earth.

Boys were boys, girls were girls, and the Earth was flat.

Simple.

Except it isn’t that simple. The world requires some thought.

Ignorance requires none.

We learned the world wasn’t flat, that humans evolved, and that gender and sex are not the same. Animals have sex organs, and humans have a developed brain. We can create music, art, science, and medicine. We can also believe in God, love, and the human spirit.

When I was diagnosed as transgender, I worked hard, very hard, to prove I wasn’t. The evidence was clear, but I refused to believe the facts. I hated them.

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Tolerance sounds like a nice word. A word that suggests maturity, peace, democracy. But let’s be honest: when you say you tolerate someone, you are not truly respecting them. You are just enduring their existence. As if they were noise, heat, or traffic.

You tolerate cold when you have no jacket. You tolerate a headache when there’s no medicine. You tolerate delays because the world doesn’t run on your schedule. But people? Human beings? Members of your own species? You tolerate them?

This word — tolerance — is used too often in LGBTQI+ contexts, especially by people who still want to feel like the norm. “I tolerate gay people, I tolerate trans people,” they say. As if we were a test to pass. As if they were giving us permission to exist, but only if we behave. Quietly. Politely. Gratefully.

But I am not here to be tolerated. I am not a weather condition. I am not background noise. I am a life. Complex, complete, and unwilling to shrink for anyone’s comfort.

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Every year, as Pride Month begins, a familiar voice resurfaces within our community — a voice that urges us to embrace respectability politics. It tells us to make ourselves palatable to the cis-heteronormative majority. To tone it down. To keep it “respectful.” Not to scare the cishets.

At first glance, this advice seems protective — perhaps even wise. But in truth, it often becomes an invisible, insidious trap — one that doesn’t just shape our behavior, but literally reshapes our brains to accommodate oppression.

In this essay, co-authored with psychologist Waheed Ahmed, we explore how respectability politics affect not only our communities, but our neural architecture. What begins as a survival strategy can hardwire stress, fear, and self-erasure into our brains. Understanding this process helps us begin to undo it.

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Even though I pass as a man now and since I began my transition journey a little over three years ago, I can't remember the last time I was misgendered. I still get very nervous whenever nature calls and I need to use the public toilets.

I believe this is for several reasons, the main one being the most recent UK Supreme Court ruling, that transgender women have to be referred to as their biological sex assigned at birth and not their gender identity. Which, of course, we all know is absolute madness. So this is now having a huge impact on single sex spaces, toilets being the main one.

And then we have the little orange dictator across the pond sitting in the White House, making life absolute hell for the LGBTQ+ community, which is why the UK is jumping on his bandwagon. All because some of our “leaders” want that “special bond” back with the US.

Gross.

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Before starting my transition, I remember thinking: “How do I hide a 5 o’clock shadow? How do I choose a wig? How do I find a foundation that matches my skin and doesn’t look like fake tan?” These are questions many transgender women ask themselves at the beginning of their journey.

Hi, I’m Kira. A transgender woman and counsellor specialising in transgender care. Last time we talked about the mental side of preparing to go out and presenting as a woman. If you haven’t checked it yet, follow this link.

Now you are prepared, you are confident, and you’ve made the decision to present as a woman — but where should you start? I’ll share some tips and knowledge that I learned during my social transition. I tried to make them budget-friendly and avoid permanent solutions like surgeries or cosmetic procedures.