You don’t get many men turning up at the Women’s Equality Party conference, but Jon Skeet is one who was there. What’s more he was very supportive of the LGBT group and our advocacy for trans people. That’s how I met him. We’ve chatted a bit on social media since. We are, after all, both coding geeks, so we have something in common there too.

Yesterday Jon mentioned that he was thinking of doing a Christmas fundraiser and he asked if there were any trans groups with a specific link to IT. I mentioned that Trans*Code could always do with a few quid to put on hack days. I didn’t think any more of it until this afternoon when Jon got in touch to say that the appeal was online, and he was hoping to raise £1000.

For context, that’s more than my entire budget for LGBT History Month in Bristol, and I don’t crowdfund that because I don’t think I could raise that much money.

We are now 6 hours in on Jon’s campaign and the total raised stands at £1820.

So it looks like one of the things I have to do next year is run a Trans*Code hack day in Bristol. Any young trans folks who are interested in programming, do get in touch. And if anyone knows of a company that would donate some office space on a Saturday, I’d be very grateful.

Details will be sorted out in due course. In the meantime, if people could share the campaign on social media that would be great. I’m sure we can find things to do with additional money.