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I’m a big fan of the writer Jenny Boylan, and about a month back I posted a link to a Twitter thread where she talked about being a late transitioning trans woman. She’s now turned it into a column for the New York Times. People often ask late transitioners, why now, after all this time?… [more]
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A tale of two tweets. The first, a news story tweeted by Glasgow Live: A Glasgow bridge has been decked in brightly coloured post-it notes with messages which aim to help bring people back from the brink of suicide. The notes, which appeared this morning (Monday), have been posted on the Squinty Bridge and on… [more]
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I’ve written once or twice that the world is very different when you walk in women’s shoes: if you’re born and socialised as male you inhabit a completely different planet to women. It’s something many of my women friends find blackly funny when I’m outraged by an experience they have every day. There was a… [more]
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This is Maddie. She’s 12. She’s “the transgender”, “the thing”, the “lil half baked maggot” that parents of other kids think should be sorted out with “a good sharp knife”. Maddie’s story went viral. I thought it was upsetting enough, but then I watched the Vice News video report. Seeing a wee girl pretending to… [more]
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There’s a good piece in The Conversation by Tey Meadow, assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, on the hot-button topic of gender non-conforming kids. I know the language around this stuff can be confusing if you’re not steeped in it. By gender non-conforming we mean rejecting stereotypical gendered things, so for example a girl… [more]
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I recently started learning to play the piano. If it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, that means my neighbours will stop hating me in the year 2210, or 2114 if I practice a lot more often. Getting good isn’t really the point, though. As TS Eliot rightly put it,… [more]
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Neo-nazi poster boy Milo has posted a big rant to Facebook about how his career has hit the skids. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to read it without laughing. There’s more to this than well-deserved schadenfreude, though. It’s yet more evidence that refusing to give vicious rabble-rousers a platform kills… [more]
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There’s funny, and then there’s the kind of funny where you end up a crying. honking mess. Cris Shapan’s fake posters and book covers leave me helpless with laughter. His Facebook page is a joy. What I love about Shapan’s work isn’t just the jokes, although the fake pulp novel Maelstrom Of Pee made me… [more]
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What would it be like if some of the world’s greatest horror writers got together to pitch each other stories? Mike Rosen of Guttersnipe Comics thinks he knows. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes by quoting them here. The whole thing made me laugh like a drain (language NSFW). [more]
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I’ve had all three generations of Apple Watch, but it’s time to call time on it. It is an incredibly clever device and it felt very futuristic when it first came out. But it does absolutely nothing to make my life better. That’s not to say it can’t be useful. It can. But it’s not… [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.
