Category: Books

  • BOOM!

    I’m delighted to reveal the cover for my book, Carrie Kills A Man, which you can pre-order directly from my lovely publisher here. The cover, by the hugely talented Wolf, is just perfect. You have no idea how hard it’s been to keep this secret.

  • A quiet place

    I haven’t posted for a while, I know, and I’m sorry. Various personal dramas, work projects and family things have left me very short of time to blog here, and I’ve also found that constantly wading into the bad-faith dialogue and constant repetition of bullshit about trans people’s human rights has taken quite a toll.…

  • Carrie Kills A Man

    I’ve been wanting to tell you about this for months, and now I can. My book, Carrie Kills A Man, will be published by 404 Ink next year. Here’s the link to my publisher’s blog about it. For us, Carrie’s submission was a joy to land in our inbox. Having published some of her writing…

  • Two brilliant books

    Here are two books you should buy. The Transgender Issue, by Shon Faye This is a book I’d very much like to have written, because it’s a clear-eyed, well researched and well argued response to the evidence-free scaremongering and barely laundered antisemitism of cisgender authors who claim to know more about trans people than trans…

  • “You can get married, but can you walk down the street holding hands?”

    This interview with Shon Faye is a must-read. You can’t be fired or denied a  service for being trans, you can legally change your gender, we have technically free healthcare… [but] because these rights exist, it gives people license to assume that everything’s fine when, actually, it’s far from fine. It doesn’t matter if gender…

  • The reality for trans kids

    It’s ironic that The Guardian, a newspaper that – alongside its Sunday sibling, The Observer – has helped normalise transphobia in the UK, has published one of the best pieces I’ve read on the effects of transphobia in the UK. It’s an extract from Shon Faye’s forthcoming book, The Trans Issue, and I can think…

  • The Appendix is out

    I’ve been looking forward to reading The Appendix, by Liam Konemann: it’s one of 404 Ink’s “Inklings”, pocket-friendly books by interesting voices. Konemann’s book is beautifully written, fascinating, joyful and sad. It left me reeling. Here’s the blurb: In 2019, Liam Konemann began collating what he called ‘The Appendix’, a simple record of ongoing transphobia…

  • Irredeemable bullshit

    Dianna Anderson reviews Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The book is at the centre of yet another trumped-up free speech row because US retailer Target chose not to stock it and Amazon chose not to take adverts for it. Some trans people are unhappy that it’s number one in the Amazon transgender…

  • Handsome is not a personality

    Writing in the Independent, Ceri Radford has an interesting review of some gender-swapped fairy tales. the co-authors used an algorithm to flip all gendered language (‘he’ becomes ‘she’, ‘daughter’ becomes ‘son’) in the classic Fairy Books, a series published in the late 19th century that collected and popularised many traditional folk tales. While fairy stories…

  • One writing app to rule them all

    There’s been a fun discussion on Twitter about the various kinds of writers, how they organise their workflow and what apps they use. This image has made a lot of us laugh. The last option, “write directly into the CMS”, is listed under Chaotic Evil. And it is. If you’re a working writer and you…