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Sometimes columnists accidentally reveal more about themselves than they perhaps intended. Iain MacWhirter in The Herald: Doing any of those things without consent is sexual harassment, and the Herald’s self-appointed Defender of Women should know that. Emma Rich of Engender Scotland: Sexual harassment is sex discrimination & a human rights violation. For decades, unwanted hair [more]
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The rather dull headline undersells this sensitive, fascinating and terribly sad piece about the death of Angela Martinez last month in LA: Death of an Indigenous essential worker sparks debate over gender identity. Martinez died of COVID-19, but the manager at the Burger King where she worked claimed she died from a “hormone overdose”. It [more]
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One of my friends has been watching with horror as a former school friend has plummeted down the rabbit hole of online radicalisation. The former friend is a university educated middle class woman; think stereotypical Waitrose shopper. Six months ago, the friend started posting on Facebook about her doubts over the official COVID death tolls. [more]
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One of the things that helped keep me sane during lockdown was writing and performing music, and the Songs From Lockdown project was a big part of that: each week, songwriters would give the group a challenge and we’d go and write songs based on that challenge. You can listen to all the tracks here, [more]
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We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump and the Republican Party intend to demonise trans people and trans allies in their election campaign to distract from that whole “killing 170,000 people and being corrupt on a scale never seen before” thing, and the first shots in that attack have now been fired. With the [more]
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Writing for Jezebel, Katelyn Burns tells an extraordinary story of medical malpractice, litigious surgeons and people whose lives are changed irrevocably by medical mistakes: When Surgeons Fail Their Trans Patients. Warning, it’s pretty graphic in places. It’s important to note that the vast majority of trans people’s surgeries have positive outcomes: gender reassignment surgery has an [more]
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As ever the people who need to read this won’t, but Mermaids has attempted to address the myth that parents are rushing their kids to the gender clinic* at the first sign of their boy with a Barbie: Are kids being identified as trans because of the toys they play with or the clothes they [more]
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Something I’ve seen a few times now is people (including staunch trans allies) expressing their surprise when someone in a TV programme is revealed to be trans. It’s interesting to analyse that, because it says a great deal about how trans people, particularly trans women, are usually portrayed. I think for many people, the words [more]
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I’m a great believer that almost anybody can sing: it’s more of a craft than an art and the more you do it, the better you get. I stumbled across this 2011 piece, which suggests I’m wrong about 5% of people. NBC News: Why some of us are terrible singers [A] study found that anywhere [more]
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Billboard has published an interesting profile of Dolly Parton, who Wikipedia describes as “an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, actress, author, businesswoman, and humanitarian”. That’s selling her short. She’s an incredible talent, incredibly generous and quite clearly the smartest person in any room. NME profiled her in 2017: A ferocious talent who grew up in [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.
