Is it still an album if you don’t release it as a physical product?
Anyway. Here’s our most recent music collated in handy playlist form: HAVR – No-One Jumps On Rainy Days.
As I wrote on Soundcloud:
These songs were written about the big stuff: big love and heavy sadness, huge life events and little moments of joy.
It’s world mental health day today, which has the worthy goal of trying to end the stigma around mental illness. But we also need to ensure that the help people ask for is actually there – and while a lot of that is about funding, it also means education. Some of that education is needed within the health service as well as outside of it.
One of my friends recently took the big step of seeing his GP about his mental health, and was spoken to like a criminal: he was effectively told that if he thought his GP was an easy mark and that he’d walk out of there with a prescription for drugs, he had another think coming.
I’ve encountered similar cluelessness. Qualified mental health professionals have told me that the solution to my depression was to “get a wee part-time job” and  to remember that “there are brown babies in Africa that have it a lot worse than you do.”
Such people are rare, I know, but when you consider the effort it can take to stand up in the first place, and in the case of actual counselling the long waits to see anybody, it’s another obstacle that can prevent people getting the help we’re urging them to ask for.
Yes, another trans post. I’m as bored as you are, believe me. What many people call trans activism is just trans people being pissed off with constant attacks on their right to a quiet life, and with just days left in the UK government’s gender recognition consultation the attacks are getting pretty intense on social media (and the usual offenders in the mainstream too).
One of the things we keep hearing about from anti-trans groups is that we need a “debate”, a debate that they claim is being “silenced” by trans people. They’re currently lobbying MPs to demand that debate (which naturally requires a suspension of any proposed reform, and ideally a roll-back of existing equality legislation).
Christine Burns MBE knows a thing or two about trans history and legislation; she’s been involved in a lot of it. She posted this on Twitter today.
The European Court of Human Rights has debated trans rights four times: in 1987, 1990, 1997 and 2002. Their conclusions underpin the reasons why we have a Gender Recognition Act.
The European Court of Justice deliberated over the position of trans people once — in 1995/96 — that’s why Britain first legislated for trans employment rights nearly 20 years ago in 1999.
The High Court and Court of Appeal had a right old debate about trans people in 1997/8. That’s why trans people have the confirmed right to receive fair treatment from the National Health Service.
Parliament debated the rights of trans people to legal recognition in 2004, after lengthy consultations with affected bodies such as sports and insurance. That’s why the Gender Recognition Act was overwhelmingly passed in a free ‘conscience’ vote.
Countless organisations have looked at trans people and how to fairly include them in corporate and social policies in the intervening years. Trans people, who first united to provide mutual support over 50 years ago, have been debated almost constantly for generations.
Generations isn’t an understatement. Most of the current “talking points” and “legitimate concerns” have been kicking about since the early 1970s. They were debunked back then too.
Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t really about informed debate.
We’ve been debated into an exhausted mush, until the repeated calls start looking like cynical bullying rather than honest enquiry.
The UK government’s consultation on gender reform finishes in a few days time (please fill out the consultation if you already haven’t; God knows, the bigots have in their hundreds). To mark the occasion, Vice magazine has published absolutely tons of trans-related stuff. It’s a welcome alternative to the barrage of anti-trans material in the newspapers and in current affairs magazines.
Here’s a selection.
Experts debunk the myths around gender recognition reform.
Changes to the GRA are also vital for trans women in abusive relationships. As the GRA currently stands, trans people who are married before they transition must divorce or ask their partner for consent before they change their gender. This requirement puts trans people – especially trans women who are experiencing domestic abuse – at further risk of abuse and control from their partners.
Trans people who transitioned when they were young share their stories.
It is important to remember that a small number of children may be put on puberty blockers, and only after a period of assessment that identifies that the child’s wellbeing will be greatly improved by delaying puberty. For the vast majority, transitioning involves simple but life-changing social changes such as adopting a new name and changing pronouns in their day to day life.
Why I co-founded a movement for lesbians to stand with trans people.
I’ve experienced homophobia on the street when with female partners, I’ve had people tell me my sexuality isn’t valid and I’ve been fetishised by strangers and even friends. But in my local queer community, I cannot ignore the intensity of suffering experienced by my trans siblings. It doesn’t mean the prejudice I experience is unimportant; it’s about recognising the bigger picture and the fact that it’s all part of the same fight.
Shon Faye: support trans equality now.
It is no coincidence that we are currently seeing the rise of an emboldened right wing that seeks to roll back hard-won protections of the bodily autonomy of all women, all trans people and all gay people by the same stroke. That the same oppressors attack us all is no surprise. Patriarchy relies on removing agency; on compulsion and on telling women, non-binary people and queer and trans men that they do not know their own minds and cannot be trusted to pursue their own destiny.
This, on a related note, is from PinkNews:Â The next frontier of LGBT equality? Reforming the Gender Recognition Act.
Campaigning and lobbying to reform the GRA cannot solely fall on the shoulders of our trans siblings. You’ve probably seen online or in the news the hostility facing trans people at the moment. There are deeply misleading stories about young people being ‘turned trans’ and repeated arguments that being trans is a mental illness. For many cis lesbian, gay and bi people this should sound eerily familiar. It’s exactly how we were talked about in the 1980s.
Now we look back and think how absurd it was that anyone was ever allowed to claim that same-sex attraction was a mental illness or that talking about it was like ‘brainwashing’ kids into a new identity. The world didn’t end when people of the same sex could finally marry each other. It won’t end when trans people are able to be recognised for who they are.
This is the final song from the album we’ve been uploading in dribs and drabs. I still haven’t come up with a title for it, and we’re nearly done writing the next one. Oops.
New Normal is a song about heavy sadness: what if everybody feels the same and we’re too scared to say it? Musically I can hear R.E.M., Gin Blossoms (especially “Hey Jealousy”, one of my very favourite songs) and the big guitars of early Suede, and vocally I’m definitely trying and failing to be R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe.
In this modern and exciting social media age it’s very difficult to share this kind of thing: the last time I posted a link to our music on Facebook it was shown to exactly two people, because Facebook hides any content it thinks it can sell as an advert. So if you like this or any of our other songs I’d appreciate it if you could share it with others. Thanks.
As you may have noticed, the new series of Doctor Who starts tonight. I was never a Whovian – I watched it as a child and the rebooted series never appealed to me – but thanks to my daughter I’ve rediscovered it and realised what a great show it can be.
Tonight isn’t just about the return of the show, though. It’s the first time a woman, the excellent Jodie Whittaker, has played The Doctor. For my daughter, that’s incredible: someone exactly like her (smart, funny, kick-ass and female) having the lead role in her favourite show.
Some boys moaned about “a TARDIS full of bras”, of course, because having one female lead out of thirteen is political correctness gone too far. Apparently a show about a near-immortal shape-shifting time-travelling space alien is totally realistic, but having that alien assume female form is too far-fetched.
It’s their loss: as my friend Karl Hodge writes, the Doctor is a great character. Irrespective of his, her or their pronouns.
The first time I heard John Grant, I burst into tears.
People who know me won’t find that remarkable, because I burst into tears a lot. Long before I became the hormonal mess I am today, music often made me blub. But this was unusual, because it was – terrible pun alert – blub at first sight.
I was at a gig to see Elbow, and Grant was the support. I knew nothing about him, had never heard him, and he was playing this; many of the same visuals appeared on the screens above him.
I was in bits. It’s a beautiful song (and better still live), and it’s particularly powerful if you’re LGBT.
Jon Savage describes it in this wonderful profile for Esquire:
This range of sweet and sour, deep and dark emotions set against appealing melodies is what characterises Grant as a major talent. On “Glacierâ€, from Pale Green Ghosts, you can hear the emotions frozen by fear and self-hatred crack into righteous anger. Grant passes through the shock of people saying things “that sting and leave you wincing†to the refrain: “Don’t you pay them fuckers as they say no never mind/ They don’t give two shits about you/ It’s the blind leading the blind
The whole thing’s well worth reading. Glacier made me an instant fan, and I’ve since been seen blubbing away at the Edinburgh Festival gigs Savage refers to in the piece.
Grant’s a fascinating musician, both from a fan’s perspective and a musician’s perspective. While his music is becoming increasingly electronic (and oh man, you have to hear the punch of Pale Green Ghosts through a massive PA system before you die) a lot of his songs are very close to 1970s soft rock of the Elton John variety, and I mean that as a huge compliment: the melodies and arrangements are masterful. I’m currently trying to learn to play Caramel, which is one of my very favourite things in the whole universe (and I’m delighted that my long-suffering piano tutor has fallen in love with it too: as I play it badly she can go to her happy place where JG plays it properly).
Here’s a live version from the BBC.
Great, isn’t it? I love pretty much everything about this song, but in particular the chord change to A flat as he sings “he hits me with tiger eyes”. It’s a staggeringly beautiful musical moment and it has me on the brink of tears every single time. If you don’t like it we can’t be friends.
I think John Grant has a lot in common with one of my other musical loves, Mark Everett from Eels, and not just because I’m learning to play Eels’ It’s A Motherfucker too.
Both men aren’t afraid of adult-oriented rock; both men write often hilarious lyrics; both men take often harrowing experiences and subjects and turn them into truly transcendent music.
I cry at Eels gigs too.
Keeping up with trans-related news is a pretty depressing exercise: most of it is ill-informed or malicious, often parroting the very same “talking points” set out by viciously bigoted evangelical organisations. You can usually tune out if you see the words “cultural Marxism” (an anti-semitic far-right trope), “transgender ideology” (a phrase coined by right-wing evangelists) or “transgender lobby” (the belief that trans people are secretly being funded to the tune of millions from shadowy sources, enabling us to control the media. Not only is that one laughable, but it’s usually anti-semitic too: the source of the trans lobby’s money is usually believed to be “the Jews”).
The relentless and bigoted characterisation of trans women as dangerous is particularly galling when it comes from the likes of Rod Liddle, who accepted a police caution for allegedly punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach and who tends to take the side of alleged rapists. Or from Richard Littlejohn, who wrote about the murders of five sex workers in Ipswich: “in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.” I’d link to that piece but as so often happens with such columns, the Daily Mail has removed it from its website.
This week, there’s lots of attention being given to a very flawed, politically motivated and thoroughly debunked study of a made-up condition, rapid onset gender dysphoria. Publications as diverse as Glasgow’s Herald newspaper, whose straight, white, male, conservative columnists rail against black people, feminism and LGBT people, and The Spectator, whose straight, white, male, conservative columnists rail against black people, feminism and LGBT people, have been quick to talk about it and strangely unwilling to note that the grown-ups have pointed out that it’s an enormous crock of shite.
Meanwhile back in the reality-based community US psychologist Kristina Olson has been awarded a “genius” grant for her ongoing work studying the development of transgender children. Among many other interesting things about gender and inclusion her work has found that if trans kids are supported, they don’t want to kill themselves – something that many other studies have found too. As Quartz reports, Olson’s 2016 study:
found that transgender children who have openly transitioned to the gender they identify with have similar rates of depression and anxiety as cisgender children.
Of course, there’s been a pushback from right-wing media and social media: Olson avoided media interviews for eight months after online abuse.
Meanwhile, yet another study has found genetic differences between trans women and cisgender (non-trans) women.
they found a significant over-representation of four genes that are involved in processing sex hormones. This variation suggests a potential biological reason why certain people experience gender dysphoria.
Those behind the study propose that these genetic variations can affect the male brain’s ability to process androgen, meaning that the brain develops differently in a way that is less “masculine†and more “feminine,†contributing to gender dysphoria in transgender women.
This is an emerging field of research but there are already lots of solid studies that suggest there’s at least a genetic component to being trans (the field of epigenetics in particular is fascinating). I could link to reliable studies all day long. But such studies are inconvenient for the people who argue that being trans is a choice or a fad, which is why they don’t write about it.
There’s an agenda, all right. But it’s not ours.
One of the great joys of being a parent is reading to your children (or as is happening more and more often these days, having them read to you). There are more kids’ books to choose from than ever before, and I’m often struck by the power and beauty of them.
This, from Town Is By The Sea (Joanne Schwartz; illustrated by Sydney Smith) is glorious.
It’s a deceptively simple book set in a mining community in Nova Scotia but relevant everywhere. In it, a child talks about his day and his routines while his dad mines for coal under the sea. It’s quietly heartbreaking – the book very cleverly hints at the danger and fear of the men working underground without breaking the spell of the main narrative – and very beautiful.
Another writer I’ve come to love is Oliver Jeffers, whose children’s books are just perfectly pitched: my son’s current favourites include The Great Paper Caper, in which a bear is ruining the forest because he wants to follow in his father and grandfathers’ footsteps. I don’t want to spoil the excellent twist. My son also loves How To Catch A Star, which really evokes the way kids think, and pretty much everything else Jeffers has produced. We’re big fans.
Jeffers is probably best known for Lost And Found, a tale of a boy and a penguin that was animated for TV, but I think his best work may be The Heart And The Bottle, which I can barely think about without getting all teary.
It’s about love and loss, and it will take your breath away.
Some people think UKIP is just a party of racists. Nope! It’s a party for bigots of every kind. Whether you hate the blacks, the gays, the muslims or the trans, UKIP is the party that’ll tell you the problem isn’t you, it’s them.
I’ve been reading the latest UKIP interim manifesto – yes, this is what my Saturday mornings are like; yes, I’m amazed I’m single too – and the whole thing is of course a horrific pile of shit. But there’s a new addition to it this year: the blatant anti-LGBT bigotry previously limited to stallholders at the UKIP conference is now official party policy.
The phrase “Cultural Marxism” is always a giveaway: it’s right-wing shorthand for “boo hoo we’re not allowed to be bigots all the time any more”. UKIP says cultural Marxism “seeks to close down discussion and alternative views, so that only one extreme left-wing ‘politically correct’ viewpoint is allowed.”
You can see their point of view. You can’t turn on Newsnight or pick up the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Sun or the Daily Telegraph without being subjected to nothing but one extreme left-wing politically correct viewpoint.
The proposed solutions are the usual pie of guff: repeal of all hate speech legislation and guidelines, the end of Public Space Protection orders, repeal of the Equality Act 2010, and a free golliwog and Roy Chubby Brown DVD for every pure-bred Englishman, woman and child.
In a sane world we’d just laugh at these clowns. Sadly it’s not a sane world.