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On Twitter, users mimmymum and the implausible girl have shared a few newspaper clippings about the dangerous people tricking their way into bathrooms and locker rooms, demanding inclusion in education and other terrifying things. No, not trans people. Gay and lesbian people. Irony fans will appreciate this first one, about Martina Navratilova, because her recent… [more]
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There’s a predictable media storm in England (Scotland has a different, more enlightened education system) about plans to revise sex education, something that’s been overdue for decades now, to include “respect for all”. It’s predictable because various right-wing rabble-rousers have been banging on about the spectre of “gay and trans lessons” – a phrase you… [more]
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After far too long, far-right puppet Tommy Robinson has been kicked off Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram for flouting the rules on hateful conduct. Which makes it a good time to link to this piece by Renee Diresta, Free Speech Is Not The Same As Free Reach. in this moment, the conversation we should be… [more]
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The Observer, this week, : “Gender identity clinic accused of ‘fast-tracking’ trans patients.” The Guardian, its sister paper, two days later, reporting the hellish, many-years wait for trans people to get any treatment whatsoever: Trans men and women are being left humiliated and desperate after seeking care from their GP, according to a Guardian investigation that… [more]
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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]
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.
