I’m delighted to tell you that the wonderful people at Cipher Press have taken on my book, Carrie Kills A Man, after 404 Ink’s triumphant farewell. I believe it’ll be getting a new ISBN number but it’s otherwise identical to 404’s version, including that brilliant cover by Cipher’s creative director, Wolf.
If you’re not already aware of Cipher, their catalogue is absolutely packed with brilliant books. I’m over the moon to be in such great company.
A typically astute piece by Dr Ruth Pearce on trans lives and trans visibility in the past and present.
For decades, the trans liberation movement has fought to change the world. We found new ways of being, and created language, art, and culture to name and explore these possibilities. We won new civil rights. We achieved incremental improvements in the provision of healthcare and education. We have made it a fair bit easier for many people to exist in the workplace, and to survive on benefits. We have built community: feeding each other, housing each other, and providing advocacy for each other, and partying together.
As the UK enters a new era of state-mandated segregation, I find myself asking: was it all worth it?
These are dark times for trans people; yesterday the government implemented the inconsistent and unlawful EHRC code of practice, a code so incoherent that the EHRC’s own head – appointed against the recommendations of multiple MPs, who judged her as utterly unsuitable for the role – couldn’t give any coherent advice to service providers when asked simple questions by Parliament’s equality committee recently and by Channel 4 News last night. Like all current anti-trans activism the code is based on the bigoted belief that there’s no such thing as a trans person, and that it’s therefore necessary to make trans people’s lives so difficult that we either detransition or kill ourselves.
Dr Pearce:
Today, the trans liberation movement faces off against vicious foes and their allies in the Labour government, who would see us eliminated altogether. Trans people of all ages and backgrounds are forced to navigate laws and policies designed to make our lives more difficult and more dangerous.
It is all too easy to think that the trans activism of the past has failed, that every gain has been reversed in an orgy of hate and bigotry. Yet this is simply not true.
As I wrote in Carrie Kills A Man:
Trans and non-binary people are not a fad or a phase, a lobby or an ideology, a cult or a conspiracy. We’re your sons and your daughters, your sisters and your brothers, your friends and your colleagues.
The genital-obsessed weirdos are correct about one thing: there really are people being infected by a social contagion that’s harming women and children. But it’s not us; it’s them.
I’ve spent a few frustrating weeks trying to distribute the new Unquiet Mind album to streaming services, and I’ve had to pull one of the tracks from the release (except on Bandcamp). The song, Unquiet Mind, has been falsely flagged by an AI as using uncleared samples. It doesn’t, because I don’t use uncleared samples or steal other people’s work.
It’s all the more ironic because my own work has been stolen – by AI. Books I’ve written are in the stolen datasets of the big AI players.
As things stand now, an AI on an unspecified streamer or download store somewhere in the world has decided that I’ve nicked something from a Middle Eastern band even more obscure than mine, a band whose track is geoblocked so it can’t be played in the UK. The decision is final, there’s no-one to appeal to and that one store’s mistake means I can’t submit the song to any streamers at all.
Don’t you just love AI?
It’s not the end of the world because there’s no money involved: my streaming numbers are insignificant. But it’s still annoying. If I were good at marketing I’d be plugging the song on social media as THE SONG THEY TRIED TO BAN, but I’m not so I’m not (other than in the headline, because I think it’s funny). If you’re interested, the song is available on our bandcamp.
The reaction in some (primarily media and political) circles to the death of professional arsehole Rod Liddle has been to invoke the old saw, don’t speak ill of the dead. But there’s a difference between keeping your mouth shut so a distant cousin doesn’t punch you at your gran’s funeral and reminding people of the many sins someone horrendous has committed.
Rod Liddle was a mediocre writer, horrifically racist, bigoted against pretty much any marginalised group you can imagine and a woman-beater, cautioned by police for punching his 20-weeks-pregnant girlfriend in the stomach. He was a defender of child sexual abuse material, mused that he couldn’t be a teacher because he’d want to fuck the children, used his platform to demonise some of the world’s most vulnerable people, and the world is a better place without him.
The Times, well aware of all the above but happy to employ him for many years, today called him a “playful genius”. And some of the UK’s highest-profile anti-trans “defenders of women and girls”, including Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and Rosie Duffield, have heaped praise on the paedophile-defending, woman-beating misogynist because of course, he was a transphobe too.
Media critic Mic Wright pulls no punches:
Subject yourself to Liddle’s body of work and you’ll find someone who never let go of the childish inclination to insult and degrade. He is so beloved of people on this side because he said all the unpleasant things they are too cowardly to say in public. He may have been delightful to his friends but he should be judged on what he put out into the world and that was bile by the bucketload.
…He maintained columns in The Sun, The Spectator, and The Sunday Times precisely because he was a voice for the party line — the party of Murdoch that never needs to seek re-election. The tributes to Liddle illustrate just how much of their audience most of the British media hold in total contempt.
The undermining of the rights of LGBTI people serves as the tip of the spear in a broader backlash against human rights protection overall.
They are accompanied by rollbacks in women’s rights, restrictions on independent media and civic space, attacks on judicial independence and national human rights watchdogs, and hostility toward migrants and refugees.
The playbook is familiar across borders: political actors and others with influence exploit economic hardship, war, climate breakdown, and technological disruption to manufacture fear and discontent.
They scapegoat marginalised groups, present basic equality as a threat to traditional family values or children and dismiss international law as “ideology”.
When democracy comes under pressure, LGBTI people are often the first targets.
…LGBTI people are not asking for “special rights”. They demand only what international law promised every human being after the devastation of World War II: to be treated like everyone else – to have their basic human rights acknowledged, to be protected by international treaties just like everyone else, and to live with dignity as themselves, free and equal. Their rights are not an ideology, nor are they inherently in conflict with the legitimate rights and interests of others.
If you’ve been following my musical adventures you’ll know that my plans to release new songs gang aft agley: without a producer cracking a whip or a deadline to hit, Unquiet Mind records tend to take much longer than intended. But I hope they’re worth the wait, because David, Kenny and I put our hearts into everything we do – and at last, there’s some new music for you to listen to. Including the “nearly finished” song I talked about in Carrie Kills A Man back in 2022, Gallow Green.
The new record is called Don’t Know How To Human, and it was recorded and produced by me with lots of help from Luminous, who helped fix my mixes and took care of all the mastering. I’m enormously grateful for his help.
Don’t Know How to Human is a collection of 14 songs about witches, goths, non-binary people, mental health, #metoo and more. From the college rock of New Normal to the memento mori of Everything Ends it’s an album about trying to survive and even thrive in a world that feeds on outrage and anger. It’s a lot more fun than that sounds, I promise. And I think it’s more musically adventurous than our previous releases, although you’ll be glad to know that while I did try to rap on one of the songs I quickly realised what a bad idea that was.
We won’t be playing any gigs to promote this one but you may see me pop up from time to time with my guitar in hand: for example I’ll be playing one of these songs at the 404 Ink goodbye party at the Edinburgh Book Festival. That’s on the 22nd of August.
There’s a powerful essay on Assigned Media by about the death of Lindsey Graham, a terrible, hateful man, and her reaction to it.
Visaggio writes about trying to be a good person, the kind of person who doesn’t speak ill of the dead, the kind of person who tries to see the good in even the worst of us. But Visaggio is trans, the kind of person Graham and other evil people have spent years harming.
Yet here I am. Cheering and joking and mocking, fruit flying from my hand, hating this man who, unlike those I once prayed for, has never to my knowledge actually murdered anyone. He died, and all I can say is I wish it had happened sooner, and been more humiliating. I gleefully entertain fantasies my editor has asked me to cut from this text. Ten years of public scorn and mockery for trans people as a category and for myself personally showed me how. Ten years of being told we are affronts to God, a danger to children, sick, deluded rapists have been my education. I have, at last, learned how to hate.
Ten years after I transitioned, I am a better person in countless ways – but in this, the most important one, I am worse. Ten years of abuse at the hands of bigots and opportunists, ten years of eliminationism, ten years of my own father’s endorsement of these people; all of that has taught me to hate, to hate fiercely. To wish ill. To dream of the moment I can say, at last, these fuckers are dead, and it is better this way. Do you understand? They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.
I’m nine years in rather than ten, but I feel that way too. I’ve been taught to hate, and I hate it.
My publisher, 404 Ink, will be closing their online doors later today so it’s your last chance to buy one or more of their brilliant books for a bargain £5 apiece. If you haven’t already got Carrie Kills a Man and Small Town Joy today’s your lucky day. I’d recommend the entire catalogue too: one of the reasons I wanted to be published by 404 Ink was because of the quality of the books they published. Joining the family was like a musician signing to Creation Records.
Labour have published their draft bill on banning conversion therapy, and as expected it does nothing to protect trans people: there’s a huge carve-out for healthcare providers that’s so wide it means any quack can call themselves a provider and continue to torture kids. The “ban” is also worded in such a way that it could be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups, which means that it will be used to attack gender-affirming organisations such as support groups.
The fact that it’s a draft bill means that any action could still be several years away, but it’s already served its purpose: it’s generated lots of headlines saying that Labour is banning conversion therapy, even though it isn’t.
The reason it’s not a complete ban is because conversion therapy for trans people is now government policy, delivered on the NHS. It’s not the “abusive” therapy described in the draft bill, which doesn’t really exist any more: we’ve largely stopped giving trans people lobotomies, aversion therapy and electro-shock treatments. But a series of counselling sessions with a nicely spoken doctor trying to convince you that you’re not really trans is still conversion therapy.
I saw it described well on social media earlier: imagine a smacking ban that said smacking was fine if the kid deserved it.
On a hot day like today, what could be better than hiding from the sun in your local queer bookshop and picking up a copy of Queerphoria, which is out in paperback today? If you buy it online, I’d recommend Bookshop.org: it gives a cut to independent booksellers and you can nominate your preferred one.