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There’s a lovely piece by Jude Doyle in The Cut: What coming out as transgender taught me about parenting. I won’t spoil the main narrative but this bit really resonated with me. I came out as trans just before my daughter’s 3rd birthday. I did it because it was not possible for me to be [more]
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You’ll see a lot in the papers about the Cass review of NHS care for gender-questioning kids today, as the report is finally released. What you won’t see are any suggestions that it’s a political project, not a medical one. Its job was to undermine healthcare for trans people, and that’s exactly what it’s delivered. [more]
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AR Moxon has published another incisive piece about one thing that’s actual about another thing: The Thing That’s Coming. Cargo ship Dali lost power and from there it was only a matter of time before it destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge. We hadn’t maintained the bridge for collisions of this type, we’re learning. You’d [more]
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Today’s Observer reports: A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up policy briefings for politicians. The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder [more]
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I’ve been away for a bit, and while I was out of the country we had yet another completely invented scandal around trans people. This time it was around the new Scottish hate crime legislation, which does not make it an offence to misgender trans people. Despite it not being an offence to misgender trans [more]
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I was talking to an acquaintance earlier who was saying that they’ve never seen Glaswegians look so miserable, that “everyone’s going around with their face tripping them”. This NY Review of Books piece by Gary Younge may help explain why. This is one of the bleakest sentences I’ve read for some time. After more than [more]
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Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news: the announcement of my new book is in today’s Bookseller. It’s been *so* hard to keep this quiet so I’m really delighted to say we’re putting the band back together for another 404ink book, this time celebrating Scots music of all kinds. The book is called Small [more]
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There’s an interesting piece in Semafor about the ongoing cowardice crisis in journalism. It’s about the US but many of the problems it identifies are just as prevalent in the UK. Of all the issues – fear of litigation in the form of SLAPP suits designed to silence legitimate criticism; fear of losing your job [more]
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The news that NHS England is banning the prescription of puberty blockers to trans teens (but not cis teens) is surprising if you look at the results of the consultation into that very plan: the overwhelming majority of responses were against the ban, pointing out that it flew in the face of all available evidence [more]
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Like many incompetent, idiotic arseholes, former PM Liz Truss – who crashed the UK economy and was famously outperformed by a lettuce – has found new friends among the US far right and the right-wing press by parroting their bigotry. And to please them she’s introduced a private member’s bill that attempts to bring the [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.
