This resource is for LGBTQ+ people with cancer and supporters. 

Everyone’s treatment has different impacts. While we can’t tell you exactly what will happen, we can share a range of experiences and resources that might help.

• You might find this resource useful if you work with LGBTQ+ people with cancer.

• This resource may be less useful to people with advanced cancer. See: palliative care support

this resource includes: 

• practical tips based on community knowledge

• information for diagnosis, treatment and after hospital treatment 

• information on intimacy, sex and body changes

• information for friends, carers and supporters 

• information for trans and gender diverse people 

throughout we share cancer experiences from our communities

We can’t include everything. 

We know there are people within our communities with specific access challenges, cultural needs and many ways of understanding, talking about and dealing with sickness. 

• We don’t give culturally specific information (see: our mob and cancer). 

• We don’t go into detail about specific tumour types (see: EviQ).

• We don’t include prevention or screening information (find that here) 

• We don’t include information on end-of-life or palliative care (you can find that here) 

• We don’t speak to the experiences of people with innate variations of sex characteristics. 

• We don’t provide detailed information on neurodivergence and cancer. 

• We don’t provide information for people under 18 (see: Canteen).

We try to provide links to resources for specific experiences and invite you to get in touch [LINK] if there are additional resources we should include.

Through our co-design and consultation process people with lived experience reviewed existing cancer resources, reflected on their experiences and identified the need for a new resource to: 

• Use warm, informal, strengths-based and accessible community language (we, us, ours). Co-designers told us that compassionate language is an antidote to cold research and othering language.

• Help our communities ask about and understand the long-term impacts of cancer treatment. Many people talked about not having understood the long-term impacts of the ‘poison cure.’

• Include ways to help folks re-find themselves and others after cancer.

• Make information accessible through audio. We heard it’s hard to read when you’re in cancer treatment. So, we provide audio options.

• Include practical and concrete supports, for example, links to support groups, templates (a care calendar, for example).

• Remind folks what makes our communities great, for example, mutual aid, creativity, doing family differently, nonconformity. Bring those qualities to the advice in this resource.

• Avoid generic platitudes, patronising tones and toxic positivity (for example, battling, inspiring).

The resource was created on Gadigal Country by LGBTQ+ people with different kinds of cancer, carers, friends and creative provocateurs [1]. The process was led by Shan Watson from the TGD Cancer Support Network and co-design facilitator and writer, KA McKercher from Beyond Sticky Notes. Read more about the process. 

We thank the following people for their help: 

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[1] McKercher, KA (2020) Beyond Sticky Notes: Doing co-design for real.

We use a range of terms in this resource that are specific to our communities as well as some medical terms. We’ve intentionally included words and phrases that aren’t commonly found in other cancer resources. See glossary.

There is already a range of resources available for LGBTQ+ with cancer and research on LGBTQ+ with cancer. We built on: 

The Cancer Council’s LGBTQI+ People and Cancer