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I’m indebted to my old friend, the inimitable Professor Batty, for telling me about this excellent essay on the internet and reality and our feelings and quite a lot of other things too. Do it now. Fight the new pace of thinking designed to keep us in Facebook fights and make Facebook more money. Resist getting… [more]
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I know, I know, another trans post. But this is really funny and packs a pretty hefty emotional punch at the end. Some people reading it won’t agree at all, but it really resonated with me. [more]
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I enjoyed this piece by Lindsay King-Miller in Rolereboot.org. In You Can’t Kill Racism with Kindness, King-Miller writes:Â “My goal is not to create a country where everyone tolerates each other, agrees to disagree, and goes about their business. I cannot agree to disagree on whether poor people deserve medical care, whether black people deserve… [more]
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I’m wary of saying “bye†to 2017 and celebrating the demise of a terrible year. I did that to 2016, which turned out to be a walk in the park compared to the shitshow that 2017 quickly became. I’m with Paul Bettany on Twitter: “In January I dismissed my mate’s theory that David Bowie was… [more]
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I was at the Royal Concert Hall tonight for my daughter’s latest on-stage adventure, this time being in the East Dunbartonshire Children’s Choir as part of the Glasgow schools’ Christmas concert. As you’d expect, it was too long. There were too many people being thanked. The supposed finale was — surprise! — false hope,… [more]
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Dig, if you will, the picture. It’s 1987. You’re fifteen, trans — although you don’t know that’s what it’s called yet — and you live in Scotland, home of anodyne pop singers such as Sheena Easton. You turn on the TV, and there’s bona fide musical genius Prince. And there’s… Sheena Easton? But it’s Sheena… [more]
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Gendered language is weird sometimes. The comedian Frankie Boyle does a hilarious and uncharacteristically safe routine about the early French deciding which gender various inanimate objects were, so for example a lemon was clearly maleâ 1 because a lemon is a little yellow man. And some language is unnecessarily gendered, such as “firemen†when “firefighters†would… [more]
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I’ve belatedly realised that the time when the media really wants to talk to trans people – the “baby trans” phase when they’ve just come out – is both the easiest and the worst possible time to talk to them. That’s certainly true in my own case. I was interviewed by a few different… [more]
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I wrote about male friendships for Metro with a little help from my friends. Even when we do have friends, we’re loath to tell them our troubles. Some 84 per cent of men admit to bottling up their emotions. That’s not doing anybody any good. [more]
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This week is both anti-bullying week and transgender awareness week, so some newspapers have chosen to celebrate both by, er, bullying transgender people (see my previous post). I’m not going to get into the arguments or unpick the bullshit — Alex Sharpe does a superb job of that here. I’m just going to share a trans… [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.
