dorianrose.com

‘Free University’ is the idea & practice of making education accessible. Especially on topics that would otherwise be attainable only through academia.

The ‘Free Knowledge Society for Trans Liberation’ (FRKNSTN Liberation) project is an attempt to bring otherwise inaccessible education on complex & lesser known gender topics to the general public. These workshops are mostly online, so as to reach as many people as we can who may not otherwise be able to attend. You can find out more about FRKNSTN by clicking here.

Since 2018 I’ve had the privilege of organising, hosting, and speaking at a plethora of ‘free university’ events on a variety of topics, such as:

• Transgender History 2025, Transmuted, March 2025.
• Transgender Film, Transmuted, February 2025.
• What is This ‘Identity’ Thing Anyway?, National Trans Conference, Leeds, 16th March 2023
• Transgender History, Transmuted, 22nd October 2023
• Trans-naturalities & Trans-humanities, Transmuted, 20th May 2023
• Transgender Activism, Transmuted, 3th March 2023
• Gender & Politics, Non-Binary Leeds, March 2022
• Incels and New Wave Misogyny, 2020
• What is the Contemporary Left?, 2020
• Feminism on Campus, UoR, 2019
• Turkey and Rojava, 2019
• No Future: Punk, Politics, and British Youth Culture, 2019
• What is Gender?, 2019
• A Talk on Palestine and Israel, 2018
• Brain Consumers and the Consumerist Brain (About Zombies, Film, and Capitalism), 2018

I will be continuing to fight for the accessibility of knowledge for the foreseeable future by organising with Transmuted and FRKNSTN and anyone interested in doing workshops with us!

If you would like to help fund these workshops, please consider donating to Transmuted (the current ‘parent-ship’ of FRKNSTN) or subscribing to our Patreon.

I founded www.transmuted.co.uk in January 2022 as an online, open-source space to share articles & creative work, and decided to try releasing the collection of work as a small zine in August of the same year.

I hosted a little release party at Wharf Chambers, Leeds – since then, the project has grown immensely. Transmuted became an international community, building confidence and creative solidarity in the face of transphobia. Since, hundreds have attended Transmuted’s celebratory events, raising hundreds of pounds for local charities and the project itself.

The project is now host to a lot of different mini-projects: ‘free university’ style workshops, performance events, fundraisers, a quarterly journal, and trying to make publishing your work as accessible as possible. Though none of those are technically ‘mini’ (they are, in fact, quite large).

Transmuted sells over 100 copies with each quarterly release, in several different countries and continents across the globe.

Transmuted became a community interest company (CIC) registered England and Wales (Company No. 15435240) in January 2024.

Transmuted has released 11 issues as of June 2025, and is working on two more publications this year!

Issues reached 100 pages as Issue 10 came out, and have reached shelves from Glasgow to the USA.

Each issue features dozens of amazing trans creatives and academics, who contribute work such as music sheets, scripts, short stories, poems, comics, zines, and essays on trans studies!

You can find out more about Transmuted’s journals here: www.transmuted.co.uk/shop

The TRANS Notebook (for lack of a better name) is a 24 page philosophically creative (or creatively philosophical) notebook for trans and questioning people to enjoy together! 

Featuring topics such as trans history, ‘what gender means’, how we relate to the world, and more… The notebook is designed to be fully customisable, and some guidance on materials is included with some space to test and create art alongside thoughts and reflections on the topics presented.

I originally had plans to make this into a larger workbook but unfortunately these were cut short due to a lack of funding – but depending on the future, I’d love to come up with bigger and better versions…

(24 pages printed on 150 gsm uncoated paper)

During the lockdowns, I decided to have a go at animating and creating a short game – which I decided to call ‘Box’, because the main character is a cat whose parents love boxes. I’ll pretend that makes sense.

In this very short game, you had just moved to a new town: going for your first shop at the local supermarket. You went to buy some peas for the birds (as one does), your character looking to make their first friends among the wildlife. As you bought your tweet treats, you saw a person dressed in pyjamas (‘Dug’) steal a mouldy loaf of bread, making a swift exit from the back of the shop. You decide to quickly purchase an in-date loaf, and follow them out the back of the shop. There are some jokes here and there, lots of attention added to the background for your perusal. You made your first friend with Dug and the pigeons, culminating in a rhythm game at the end where you throw peas to feed dancing pigeons!

I taught myself how to animate using Blender, and how to make the game in Unity. It took a good 3 months to build from start to finish, before life carried on – and I will always be incredibly grateful to my friends who accompanied me on this journey in such a difficult time of my life!

I’ll always be sad that I never figured out how to export it properly, but very glad that we all got to play it and experience the world of Box and Dug.

Unfortunately this meant that the game was never properly exported for everyone to enjoy.

But as it was a passion project, I was super happy with all the work I’d put in – and especially everything I’d learned in making it!

I did upload some videos to my old YouTube channel, which make for some really fun memories.