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This piece made me cry. Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light. The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much… [more]
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My friend Chris Phin retweeted this pic of Grayson Perry’s alter-ego Claire earlier. He commented: Might it be true to say that people who have a problem with, eg, this are at some level reacting to the idea of _them_ wearing it, whereas I’m just really happy the world contains Claire wearing it. It’s wonderful.… [more]
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One of the reasons I haven’t binned Twitter is the existence of block lists. These enable you to automate the blocking of various bad people; they can’t see your messages (there’s a way around that, but few bother with it) and more importantly you don’t see theirs. The numbers can be quite terrifying. One of… [more]
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Another day, another bad article in The Spectator. The answer is no. The EDL founder was arrested for deliberately breaking the law on Contempt of Court. Whether Liddle or his editor Fraser Nelson actually believes his nonsense or is just trolling for money is irrelevant: by continually trying to paint racist clowns as free speech… [more]
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30 years ago today, Section 28 (Section 2A in Scotland) was introduced to ban the “promotion” of gay and lesbian “lifestyles” in schools to protect children from the entirely invented dangers of gay and lesbian people. It wasn’t repealed until 2003 in England and Wales, although Scotland canned it in 2001. I was 15 when… [more]
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James Kirkup of The Spectator has written many articles that unquestionably parrot the propaganda of anti-trans bigots, but he reached a new low this week with the story of sniggering arsehole David Lewis. Lewis is – or rather, was; Labour suspended him for, well, being a sniggering arsehole – standing for election as a women’s… [more]
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My friends at Fashion Fix Daily asked me to write a piece on something I’ve touched on a few times in this blog: the US money that’s attempting to influence laws in other countries, most notably the campaign to repeal the anti-abortion Eighth Amendment in Ireland. Ireland votes this Friday. What used to be an… [more]
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A few weeks back I posted a link to a superb literary kicking of right-wing charlatan Jordan Peterson. Here’s another, this time via the writer Daniel Karasik. Karasik wrote a column defending Peterson’s views on trans people’s pronouns, which is what made Peterson infamous in the first place, and Alexander Offord has written a glorious… [more]
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I got a message from my lawyer today: my divorce paperwork has been curtly rejected by the relevant court because the introductory page uses the pronoun “she” to describe me; the court wants it to be “he”. This is despite the accompanying evidence of my name change in the form of my amended birth certificate,… [more]
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I blogged a few days ago about the problem with mental health services: it’s all very well to urge people to get help, but the help needs to be there for them. This excellent piece by Vic Parsons explains how the system is failing many LGBT people. People are still being left in limbo, on… [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.
