First of all, welcome! Since we now have quite a few podcast episodes, hopefully this will help you find your way around.

If you want to jump straight in and listen to the podcast, visit the podcast page, where you’ll find the player embedded with all the episodes, starting with the most recent one.

Alternatively, if you hover over or expand ‘PODCAST’ in the menu bar, you’ll also find:

• An episode gallery, where you can see all the amazing humans in a neat grid (each picture links to the episode page);
• A searchable episode list in table format, which is useful if you’d like to listen to episodes about a specific gender identity – or if you like tables 🙂 (each episode number and name link to the episode page);
• An episode list in blog format;
• A categories gallery, which you can search by label/subject (again, with links to the episode page)
• A page with all the transcripts in one place! (coming soon)

Categories and labels

On the podcast categories page and on each episode page, you’ll find a sidebar which contains a list of all the gender categories, and additional keywords and tags, such as:

• Sexual and other attractions: Lesbian, Bisexual, Asexual/Aromantic, Pansexual, Panromantic, Demisexual, Greysexual/Graysexual, Fraysexual
• Neurodivergence, Autistic
• Disabled
• BDSM, Kink and Fetish
• Mental health: Depression, Bipolar, Addiction, Anxiety, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
• Surgeries and medical treatments: Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS), Gender Reassignment Surgery (GRS), Top surgery, Mastectomy/Bilateral mastectomy, Bottom surgery, Peritoneal pull-through vaginoplasty, Labioplasty, Phalloplasty, Metoidioplasty, Gonadectomy surgery
• And many others, including Drag, Conversion therapy, Extreme body modification, HIV+, etc.

Finding episodes by name

As for navigating around the site, the episodes are titled by number, followed by name, and then gender identity labels. You can find most of the episode pages by adding the first name of the person behind the website url (except for a couple with duplicate first names), for example www.fiftyshadesofgender.com/kit, which will take you to the first episode.

Follow-up episodes

There are a few folks I’ve had follow-up conversations with; Kit (episode 1 and episode 12), Alys Wilfred (Fred) (episode 2 and episode 9), and Victor (episode 59 and episode 85)

Family dynamics

If you’re interested in parenting and relationship perspectives, there is a post called Is your partner, child, parent or friend transitioning, or questioning their gender? with the players embedded for each episode with parents of trans kids, teens, or adults, and we’ve also just added an episode of a partner of a transgender woman.

Resources

If you’d like to explore terminology and find out what all these labels mean, you can check out our Glossary page. It also has links to relevant episodes for each term.

We also have a Resource page, where you can learn more about the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup, and the difference between sex, gender and sexuality.

Different types of episodes

Most episodes are conversations between Esther and and another colourful human. There are also a handful of different types of conversations: Reflections (where Katy interviews Esther about her experience doing the podcast), Listener Questions, and Panel Discussions. You can find links and players for all these below.

Reflections

In these episodes, Katy interviews Esther about her experience doing this podcast. We plan to do this every 25 episodes, and so far we have three: episode 25, episode 50, and episode 75.

25. Reflections (part 1): discoveries so far

50. Reflections (part 2): discoveries so far

75. Reflections (part 3): discoveries so far

Panel discussions

In these episodes, Esther talks to people about a variety of subjects, like How to be a better gender-diverse ally and Being LGBTQIA+ in Higher Education (HE) (this one was suggested and organised by Kit, our guest on episode 1 and episode 12).

19. How to be a better gender-diverse ally

49. Being LGBTQIA+ in Higher Education (HE)

Listener questions

In these episodes, Esther answers questions from listeners. We’ve done one so far, about the terminology that is used in the episodes.

65. Listener Questions (1) – terminology explained