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Mark Hollis, singer in the critically acclaimed Talk Talk, has died. He was 64. The word “genius” is thrown around a lot in music, but Hollis was the real deal. I was mesmerised by Talk Talk as a young teenager and developed a deep love of their music that I still have today. They made [more]
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Being trans is a bit like Chinese water torture sometimes. It’s not that the individual drops hurt; it’s that they don’t stop. So for example being misgendered by someone who hears a male voice isn’t upsetting on its own if that’s the only occurrence that day, but being called a man four times during a [more]
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For years, we’ve been told not to panic. It turns out that maybe we should be panicking after all. Writing in the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells says “the age of climate panic is here.” We are living today in a world that has warmed by just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the [more]
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This is one of my new favourite things: it’s I Want My Hat Back, a children’s book by Canadian writer Jon Klassen. It’s just wonderful, a simple tale told with style and great wit. My son and I both giggle like loons when we read it and its follow-on books This Is Not My Hat [more]
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This week, Lily Madigan was asked to appear on a BBC radio programme to talk about trans women in sport. There’s just one problem with that. While Madigan is trans, she is not an endocrinologist or a sports scientist – so she can’t talk knowledgeably about the crux of the issue, which is whether raised [more]
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There’s a lovely, sad piece in The New Yorker by Jennifer Finney Boylan about the famous cartoon strip Peanuts. My favorite strip was “Peanuts,†which, if I’d been paying attention, contained some lessons for me about the world that lay ahead. “Peanuts†was just one broken heart after another. Charlie Brown loves the Little Red [more]
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The ever-entertaining A Thousand Flowers blog has resurrected its Weekly Wanker slot for the Herald newspaper columnist Iain McWhirter, who has appointed himself as defender of women against the sinister trans agenda. It’s an amusing read, but it’s also fuelled by righteous anger. If you aren’t familiar with ATF, it’s a Scottish blog that often [more]
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Last year, there was a concerted smear campaign by anti-trans activists against the Mermaids charity. It began with misleading articles in major newspapers such as The Sunday Times (articles that have since been corrected after IPSO found them to be based on false allegations) and culminated in an organised campaign to get the Lottery fund [more]
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Last year, TRNSMT festival head Geoff Ellis told the BBC that there was “a long way to go” with gender balance at festivals: women weren’t really getting a look-in. “We do have strong female representation across the line-up but we’re committed to doing more,” he said. How’s that panned out this year? Of the eight [more]
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You’re probably familiar with the “if you’ve been affected by the issues raised in this programme…” warning at the end of gritty BBC dramas, which tells you about the Action Line information service. But it was conspicuous by its absence from last week’s episode of Call The Midwife, in which a character died from a [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.
