What is Featured Voices?

GQ.me is a platform of resources and personal stories for & by the transgender community.
Featured Voices is a series that highlights the diversity of nonbinary lived experiences.


This experiment called Featured Voices launched in January 2016. The idea was simple: I’d set a monthly “theme” and invite others to write guest posts for that month. I wanted a chance to highlight the diverse stories of nonbinary people through my tiny platform. I think every person has a unique attribute to add to the mix, but often this attribute gets lost in the shuffle of the collective narrative.

Since then, over 50 posts from guest authors have been published! From long-time bloggers to first-time writers, deeply personal or broader social critiques, the submissions have spanned a swath of themes, ages, countries, genders, relationships, content, style, and experiences. One of our posts was even chosen as an Editor’s Pick on WordPress!

Anybody is welcome to submit a post.

You can browse the Featured Voices category to see all posts. If you like what you read, support this work through a  small monthly donation.

Featured Themes

Top Surgery

Top surgery is what got me into this whole mess – blogging, transgender advocacy, writing, connecting, and… well, you know the rest. These posts touch on several topics surrounding top surgery, including chest binding, body image, not getting surgery, different identities, round-about journeys, privilege, and my own reflections.

AMAB Nonbinary Experiences

This theme centers the experiences of an often overlooked group of people in the nonbinary spectrum.  All these stories of honesty, authenticity, questions, inner challenges, outer struggles, conundrums, or empowerment, were personal and poignant.

SOFFAs (Significant Others & Allies)

Featured among the voices were superstar partners supporting their loved one through surgery or illness, two loving mothers trying to make sense of their teenagers coming out as agender, and one seasoned mom looking back on her kid’s burgeoning genderqueerness. We also wrote about ourselves: understanding the questions our family and friends have during our transition, questioning what it means to be a good partner vs a bad partner, questioning our own self-worth in the eyes of a lover, and questioning what it means to love us.

Out at Work or School

This theme follows the coming out of professional non-binary people. They are experts at being themselves, though for many it has taken years, sometimes decades, to finally build up the courage to be candid with their colleagues, supervisors, peers, or teachers. Still others have felt empowered by the choice to not tell anyone about their future (or their history) with a different gender.

 Inspiration

The nonbinary community lacks notable role models; instead, people craft their own vision of gender. In this series, authors tell us about that special person, event, support group, moment, or community that inspired them.

Hormones

Medical transition seems to be an especially thorny issue for nonbinary identities. From navigating healthcare providers, myths and misconceptions, to simply the limits of medical science, it almost always involves compromise.

Patients & Providers

This spinoff series is co-curated by transgender health educator, patient advocate, and adorable pup lover Charlie Blotner.

Transgender Health Patients & Providers

It features an assortment of medical providers from psychology, pediatrics, emergency medicine, social work, nursing, endocrinology, and research, whose varying expertise and perspectives push us to consider legislature and standards of care around the world.

Read all Patients & Providers articles