Privacy Policy

Few subjects are as personal as the one this site is about. Your gender identity and any information about your health or surgery are, under data-protection law, special-category data that deserves the highest level of care. We have built Coming Into Self (“we”, “us”) to need as little of your data as possible, and this policy explains, as a set of plain questions and answers, exactly how we treat what little there is.

Why is this policy stricter than most?

Because the data this subject can involve, your gender identity, your health, and details of surgery, is the most sensitive category the law recognises. We have designed the site so that we never need that information from you in order to be useful. The safest data is the data we never hold, so our first principle is simply not to collect it.

What do you collect when I just read the site?

Very little. To serve pages securely, our hosting and content delivery network process routine technical details such as your IP address and browser type. Where we measure traffic at all, we use a privacy-conscious analytics provider configured to minimise what it sees, with IP anonymisation and no cross-site tracking. We do not build a profile of you, and we do not follow you around the web. You can clear or block cookies through your browser at any time.

What if I email you?

If you use our Contact page, we receive your message and whatever you choose to put in it, such as a name or email address. We hold that correspondence only for as long as it takes to deal with your enquiry, then remove it.

Please do not send us sensitive details about yourself

We ask this plainly: do not email us your gender identity, your transition, your medical history, your weight or measurements, your surgery plans or dates, or any photographs of yourself. Email is not a secure or confidential channel, we cannot give individual medical advice, and we do not want to hold special-category data about you. If you write to us, please keep it general. For anything personal about your care, your clinical team is the right and safe place.

Do you ever sell or share my information?

No. We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising profiling. The only parties that handle any data on our behalf are the infrastructure providers that make the site work, namely a content delivery network and a privacy-conscious analytics provider. We would share personal information beyond this only where the law strictly requires it.

What rights do I have?

Depending on where you live, you may be entitled to access, correct, delete, or restrict any information we hold about you, or to object to certain uses of it. Because we hold so little, there is usually very little to act on, but to exercise any of these rights, write to us through the Contact page and we will respond as the law requires.

How long do you keep things?

Correspondence is kept only as long as needed to handle your enquiry and any sensible follow-up, then deleted. Aggregated, anonymised analytics are retained no longer than we need to read general trends.

Is this site meant for children?

No. This is a resource for a general adult audience and is not aimed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under the age at which they can consent to such processing where they live.

How is the little you hold protected?

We apply reasonable technical and organisational measures to safeguard the limited data we hold. No transmission over the internet is ever completely secure, which is exactly why we ask you not to send sensitive details by email in the first place.

Will this policy change?

We may revise it as the site develops. The “Last updated” date above shows the current version, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised policy. If anything here is unclear, please reach us through the Contact page.