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Owl Stefania writes in the i Paper about the singular “they” pronoun, voted word of the year and word of the decade, and pronouns more generally. Pronouns themselves might not seem important to people who’ve always been comfortable with theirs, but for non-binary people (and transgender people in general), pronouns carry a lot of weight.… [more]
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What’s in this picture? Is it (a) a tasty-looking meal? Or is it (b), an Orwellian nightmare pushed by sinister “vegan extremists”? Let’s ask Sun columnist Dan Wooton, who tweeted the picture and wrote: This is the plant based meal being given to all guests at the Golden Globe Awards this year. No option with… [more]
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Over at Ask Polly, Heather Havrilesky responds to a reader who’s finding it hard to find joy any more. Engage with this crisis instead of trying to cut it off. Let these feelings in instead of blaming yourself for them. Be more patient with your own sadness. And look for joy everywhere you can, every… [more]
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Katelyn Burns writes about the Maya Forstater case for The New Republic. Cases like this—which pit the actual lives of trans people against the beliefs of somebody who decided to test her colleagues’ patience by posting over 150 anti-trans tweets in a single week—are a win-win for anti-trans activists. If they prevail, they have a… [more]
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Last night I performed at a small open mic night, doing something I’ve never done before: I sang and played to a small audience without amplification. There was a PA there, but I didn’t use it. It wasn’t planned: the battery in my guitar was flat so its pickups weren’t sending any signal to the… [more]
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The picture above is of the Impossible Whopper, a meat-free burger from Burger King. Like many vegetable, seed and nut-based products, it contains phytoestrogens – structures that are similar, but different to, the estrogen in people. Here comes the internet. The above claims, and many like them, are currently circulating on social media. Let’s not… [more]
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As someone wrote in a song: I hope you have a good one; I hope your Christmas is fun I hope you’re with your family and there’s something for you under the tree And I hope you thank your lucky stars I’m thanking my lucky stars this year: in the run-up to Christmas I’ve been… [more]
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I’ve just been to pick up my Christmas food order. It was too early to bother with putting on my face or worrying about wigs so I did the lazy-tran thing of slapping on a beanie hat to hide my hairline before jumping in the car. At the checkout, the man on the till and… [more]
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Today’s story of JK Rowling and an anti-trans tweet is a good example of how lazy reporting reinforces bullshit. If you missed it (and you probably didn’t; it’s been all over the media today): last night, the author tweeted in support of the anti-trans activist Maya Forstater, claiming that her defeat in a tribunal was… [more]
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One of the many similarities between anti-trans activists and anti-LGBT evangelicals is their belief that they have an absolute right to be nasty to anybody they disapprove of. Inevitably, that means some of them lose their jobs for breaking the terms of employment or find their employers unwilling to renew their contracts when those contracts… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
