25 October 2022 – Jenny-Anne Bishop

Transgender and gender-diverse people

What you need to know

Jenny-Anne describes her talk as, “All you need to know about Transgender and Gender Diverse people. Plus your chance to ask all those questions you don't know who to ask or felt were to invasive or inappropriate.”

Jenny-Anne Bishop OBE

I'm Jenny-AnneBishop, an older (76) married Trans woman, living with my partner Elen in Rhyl, North Wales. A graduate in Industrial Chemistry and an Analytical Chemist, I retired from being a sales and marketing manager in scientific instruments in 2008. This gave me more time to be able to engage in voluntary work for the Gender Diverse and LGBTIQ+ communities.


My voluntary work includes:

  • lay pastoral leader (Elder)of the Manchester Metropolitan URC LGBTIQ+ congregation
  • member of the Westminster Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity
  • member of the Welsh Government Equality Plan Board

I also advise many public service providers in England & Wales on Trans inclusion and equality and I am also a trustee for several LGBT+ organisations.

I help manage Unique, the largest Transgender social and mutual support group in Wales. I help coordinate TransForum Manchester, a large Trans Support and Activist group in Manchester, which gives me daily contact with the Trans community. For over ten years I was part of the Sparkle Manchester organising team, and a Sparkle Trustee. I work on several Equality and Charter mark steering groups including the Trans Advisory Board for Prison and Probation and the HMPPS Equality & Human Rights Scrutiny and Inclusion board.

My core interests are:

  • the inclusion and recognition of full rights for all gender-variant and gender-diverse people
  • the reporting, prosecution, management and reduction of Transphobic and Homophobic Hate Crime
  • improving the NHS health care pathway for Transgender people, particularly in Wales
  • fair and equitable health and care provision for Older LGBT people in social care & care homes
  • inclusion of Christian Transgender people in the life of UK Churches

I particularly enjoy providing Trans Awareness and Equality training(so far almost 800 courses to over 150 organisations), supporting parents and children of Transpeople, and the use of performance art in education and awareness training. I played a key part in projects to detail and record LGBT history in Wales (Welsh Pride),the April Ashley Trans History Project in Liverpool and the “Gender Fluidity” project in Wales, which produced information leaflets for all Trans people and their supporters, and the ongoing designing and setting-up of the Welsh Gender Service.

My partner Elen and I also run a community house for Trans people. We have appeared many times on various radio stations, and on over 20 national and regional television programmes, and in many magazine and newspaper articles. We do much work with the media to raise awareness and to work for fair media treatment and the accurate representation of all gender diverse people.

In 2016 I was awarded an OBE for Services to the Trans Community.

My hobbies include a lifelong interest in railways and travelling the world in search of operating steam locomotives, listening to a diverse range of music, collecting local postcards as a social history, walking in our local area, and visiting Snowdonia.

Talk notes

Jenny-Anne has kindly provided the following notes relating to her talk: