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I went to see Kathryn Joseph in Edinburgh last night, performing her When I Wake The Want Is album in its entirety. Incredibly, the performances this week haven’t sold out yet. If you can go, you should: it was an astonishing, emotional, occasionally terrifying and utterly bewitching performance by an extraordinary talent. [more]
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Writing in Metro, Owl Stefania writes about the importance of video games in her coming out process:Â “Growing up, video games were my escape, providing an avenue where I could explore who I was.” I’ve written about this too, and a version of the following article was originally published in 404 Ink magazine in late 2017.… [more]
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Tea Uglow did an interesting thing. They took screenshots of articles containing the word “transgender” on a few English news outlets. Over the last 12 months, there were 878 articles. That doesn’t include publications such as the New Statesman, which has been home to a lot of anti-trans voices, and to regional press such as… [more]
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Here’s The Sun newspaper in 1992. If you think that sounds familiar, have a read of Terry Sanderson’s Media Watch column from that month, May 1992. Sanderson spent a quarter of a century battling against bigotry in UK newspapers, and sadly the publications and the writers don’t seem to have changed much. There was Julie… [more]
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(Content warning: violent misogyny) This piece by Andrea Stanley in Cosmopolitan is astonishing. It’s about a woman, identified only as K, whose job is to stare into the abyss. She infiltrates the places mass murders come from, the places where angry men start their journey to actual killing. K’s focus has been pulled toward the… [more]
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This, by Jonathan Lis, is an interesting column about the problem with media coverage of modern despots. Across the so-called ‘advanced’ democracies, leaders are no longer playing by the old rules. Our media still is. Lis argues that the media is failing in its coverage of one despot in particular. The one in the White… [more]
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In the aftermath of the latest US gun massacres, there have been lots of attempts to pin the blame on things. Despite at least one shooter leaving yet another manifesto that says “I did it because I’m a huge Nazi”, US Republicans and right-wing types generally have been quick to apportion the blame for gun… [more]
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In a study that’s caused much appalled amusement, researchers at Penn State have discovered that men avoid things such as using reusable shopping bags for fear others will perceive them as gay. It’s interesting but not surprising that the policing of this stuff is done by both men and women. In a series of studies,… [more]
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One of the many things that annoys me about anti-trans activists is that on one hand they accuse trans people of perpetuating gender stereotypes, and on the other they viciously mock trans women who don’t conform to stereotypical ideas of female beauty. As the wonderfully named Tranna Wintour writes in The Walrus, it’s very difficult… [more]
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Emily Todd VanDerWerff is a critic at large for Vox, and she’s reviewed an interesting video by PhilosophyTube that addresses the issue of men’s mental health. I thought this bit of her review was particularly interesting. Thorn suggests that one project worth undertaking, should you have a platform like his to do it, is to increase… [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.
