Rainbow Lottery – First Draw on 12 June

What is The Rainbow Lottery?

The Rainbow Lottery is a weekly online lottery, and is the UK’s first lottery dedicated to supporting LGBT+ good causes. You can support Out In The City (we get 50p from every £1 ticket) and you could win up to £25,000!

How does it work for supporters?

The draw takes place every Saturday night at 8.00pm, starting 12 June 2021.

• Each ticket costs £1 per week and consists of six numbers. The more numbers you match in a draw the bigger the prize you win.

• Players choose who their ticket purchase will support.

One ticket costs just £4.34 per month (three tickets costs £13.00 per month) and there are a range of payment options.

Players can pay:

• Monthly via Direct Debit;

• Monthly via Debit Card (VISA, Mastercard etc); or

• One off payment via Debit Card (five weeks, three months, six months or twelve months).

Players are notified by email when they win.

Pride in Ageing

Pride in Ageing was set up in response to concerns that too many lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people over the age of 50 are living in isolation and facing discrimination as a direct result of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Laws change but attitudes can be harder to shift.

Members of Pride in Ageing are featured in this video:

‘A story that hadn’t been told’: inside a groundbreaking trans surgery centre

In a moving documentary Born to Be, the work of pioneering surgeon Dr Jess Ting and the lives of his patients are brought to the screen with sensitivity.

Garnet Rubio moved to New York City from Texas at 19 with a singular mission: transitioning. While her friends attended college, Rubio worked as a model, did her research and saved money for expensive and time-consuming gender-affirming surgeries. “The two years that I’ve spent here have been completely devoted to saving money, affording to live here and then transitioning,” she says on the morning of her vaginoplasty in Born to Be, a documentary about Mount Sinai’s Centre for Transgender Medicine and Surgery (CTMS) in Manhattan, the first comprehensive healthcare centre for transgender and non-binary people in New York and one of the few specialised centres of its kind around the country.

The camera follows Rubio from her apartment to the centre, the final pre-op stages – a last consultation with her surgeon, Dr Jess Ting, on the aesthetics of the procedure, a hug from her friend, last Instagram – to the operation table, where the weight of anticipation brings her to tears.

There are several poignant, deeply emotional scenes of relief and excitement in Born to Be, which traces the centre’s groundbreaking medical practice as well as the experience of patients. Other times, it’s disarmingly, candidly clinical: how Dr Ting turns a forearm skin graft into a new phallus or the cuts required for facial feminisation.

The story of a transgender health and surgery centre is still itself relatively new; at the time the centre was founded in 2015, Ting was working as a general plastic surgeon in New York City, with little awareness of transgender healthcare or experience in gender-affirming surgical procedures. The film makers hoped Born to Be “could give information about light being at the end of the tunnel, that things were changing regarding healthcare”.

Rubio, in particular, allows the camera into some highly sensitive moments – consultation appointments, discussing desired aesthetics with Dr Ting, first post-op dilation. The decision to allow the camera into the doctors’ office “was necessary”, Rubio said.

The main barriers for his procedures are not skin grafts or medical limits, said Ting. It’s “the world – there are so many people who don’t accept what we do, who don’t accept trans people and who would just like to delegitimize the whole concept of being trans or being yourself or being able to choose for yourself your own course in life.

I wish they would see this movie,” he added, “because maybe they would change their minds a little bit, and see that trans people are just like you and I.”

Born to Be is available digitally in the US now, but a UK date is still to be announced.