-
[Content note: slurs] The Morning Star has decided to prove once again that you don’t have to be right-wing to be hateful towards trans people. This is from the print edition: There’s a sour joke among trans people that anti-trans bigots have one joke, which is “I identify as / I’m transitioning to X”. But [more]
-
Just when you think things are as miserable as they can get, a new piece of idiocy turns up. Now, in our post-Brexit wonderland, it seems that the only live bands and classical musicians that’ll be able to tour the UK from the EU as of 2021 are the ones who are able to pay [more]
-
The former deputy editor of the New Statesman, now of The Atlantic, posted this to Twitter: There’s a lesson there, but it’s not the one Lewis thinks it is. The reason the GRA wasn’t turned into “culture war fuel” wasn’t anything to do with the Blair government. It was because we didn’t have people spending [more]
-
There’s a superb piece in Vox by Emily Todd VanDerWerff about the costs of being a trans woman. I found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of it. I’ve done exactly this, albeit not quite so expensively: I’m more of a Boots No.7 person. The thing about self-acceptance is that when you’re just getting [more]
-
The BBC has discovered that many trans people are stuck on waiting lists for so long they have to buy their own medicine from overseas. The report, while accurate and worthwhile, also serves to demonstrate that the BBC clearly doesn’t have any trans people or experts on trans healthcare anywhere near the newsrooms it so [more]
-
[Content note: suicide] Last night I stepped off a stage and ended up in 1971. My brother and I were the featured act at an open mic night I’ve played at many times before, a mix of musicians and comedians. It’s fun, although inevitably you have to put up with the odd person whose pub [more]
-
I’ve written before about my admiration for the writer Jenny Boylan, aka Jennifer Finney Boylan: her memoir, She’s Not There, is warm, witty and often desperately sad. I didn’t realise she’d written another memoir, but when I found out about it I suspected it might also be warm, witty and desperately sad. It is. Stuck [more]
-
I’ve just finished reading The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein. It’s often a very hard read – it’s a biography of someone who cleans up crime scenes and the homes of deeply troubled people, and who’s experienced terrible things in her own life; it goes to some very dark places – but it’s an incredible [more]
-
There were two trans-related court verdicts yesterday, although only one of them has received significant coverage. In the one you’ve probably read about, Harry Miller had a partial victory in his case against Humberside Police, who turned up at his work to quiz him about his anti-trans tweets. The verdict chimes with what most people [more]
-
The anti-violence charity GALOP has published its latest online hate report, based on a sample of 700 LGBT+ people. It makes for grim reading, with social networks and newspaper website comment sections leaving even clearly illegal abuse untouched. As you’d expect, almost all of us are used to being insulted online. But the prevalence of [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.
