Blog posts
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Moving away from WordPress – important* info
When I started this blog in 2017, I picked WordPress almost at random, just so I could get started with something. And it has worked well enough. But: it’s not cheap it’s a pain to make layout…
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Waking up: a fragmented autobiography in alarm clocks (draft)
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labels (draft)
esp within trans (and wider Lgbt etc.) umbrella also rain quilt bag gay(bar) moving from two genders to gender spectrum between (and beyond), looking at sexualities in relation to this (and sex – see…
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Singing (draft)
school gendered choral roles NYCoS have a national girls’ choir singing lesson contralto/countertenor voice (here or in another post) resonances (head and chest) vs…
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Institutional transphobia deepens in the UK – EHRC again
The United Kingdom’s descent into rabid transphobia continues apace with the announcement on 20 May 2025 of a consultation on updating the (so-called) Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s…
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Kishwer and pals try to flush trans people out of toilets
I dust down my long-neglected blog to release some of my pent-up rage over recent events, in particular the UK Supreme Court’s ruling last week (PDF document) in favour of anti-trans group For Women…
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Like blogger, like blog?
Since the start, I’ve known this was going to be ‘an aimless, unprincipled blog’, as the tagline says. But maybe that’s just because I know myself too well. Maybe I too am pretty aimless. (Am I also…
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The straight, the curved and the pointy of LEGO-compatible train track
Disclaimer: I’ll be offering my opinions on the merits of currently available LEGO and non-LEGO train track elements. This will be mainly from a theoretical perspective, as I haven’t had personal…
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Tie-ing myself in knots – more LEGO track, briefly
Once more returning to the theme of sleepers (or ties) on LEGO track (see The art of LEGO railway track), I wondered whether I could make a passable representation of modern concrete sleepers, which…
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Choosing a scale for LEGO trains
This is a follow-up to my post a couple of weeks ago, The art of LEGO railway track. I’m coming back to the topic because I had a small problem with a platform I’d built (from a Blue Brixx set) – it’s…
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The art of LEGO railway track
[2024-03-14: I’ve since written a longer and nerdier post on this topic, which calls into question the decisions I made here.] For me the most satisfying LEGO models manage to capture the essence of…
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A distinct lack of postiness
This unpost follows hot (-ish) on the heels of a post about LEGO railways, which took me down a little branch line that I may or may not revisit at some point … on this driftiest of blogs. I’m very…
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This could have been a mastodon post
Only my third blog post of the year (but lots of time spent writing others I didn’t publish). Six years to the day since I started the blog. That’s all I’m going to say – the last thing I want to do…
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Schrödinger’s legal sex
The political environment for trans people in the UK in 2023 is profoundly unsettling. It has been fraught for quite a few years now, but things seem to be getting still worse, as an ever more…
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Betwixt solstice and perihelion
Funny how so many of us mark a (Gregorian) New Year as if it were something more than just its own anniversary! This year it fell just a little over 11 days after the solstice (21 December 2022 at…
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MTG’s trans genocide plan
The opening section of MTG’s despicable bill On Saturday, I published a blog post containing the text of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill for a ‘Protect Children’s Innocence Act’, whose chief stated…
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An unpost about a day when things went wrong
Early this morning (before sleep) I published my last blog post (but set the wrong featured image). (It has had hardly any views – please read it!) Since I was up so late, I had very little sleep…
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MTG’s ‘Protect Children’s Innocence Act’
While the rights of women and LGBT+ people, especially trans people, are under attack at state level across the US following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier this year,…
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Sunday Times publishes transphobic article
Ok, that was a clickbaity headline. Sorry! Of course the Sunday Times has published a transphobic article: it does so every Sunday, and has done for a long time. (If you can find exceptions to this in…
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In a liminal state of mind
Vianne Rocher, in Joanne Harris’s magical-realist novel Chocolat, is fated never to settle for long in one place, always moving on with her daughter (and her mother’s ashes) when the North Wind tells…
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Eight Mastodon apps for iPhone
In a complete departure from my usual meanderings, I’m going to present an in-depth comparative review of eight iOS Mastodon/Fediverse apps. (Video: ‘What is the Fediverse?’) Given that I’m not alone…
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Live (almost) from Behind the Mask: Scottish Autism conference 2022
Earlier today, I live-tooted from Scottish Autism’s 2022 conference, Behind the Mask, the first conference the charity has held since 2019. Back then, it was held in person, in a fancy hotel, and I…
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Are you Aprilness-aware?
It is, thankfully, nearly the end of another month with Aprilness. Another ‘Autism Awareness Month’ – or as the ever-so-slightly-more enlightened have started to call it, ‘Autism Acceptance Month’.…
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Welcome to the Fediverse
This is a very short post to check that the ActivityPub plugin I’ve just installed is working properly, and to invite you to follow my rambling blog from the comfort of your home in the Fediverse (for…
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Self-preservation
(Great) Cumbrae, as featured in a two-night holiday I had with my son last week My blog is a little tired, so I hope to refresh it soon with better organisation, a new look (using WordPress’s…
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Lonely and bored
Well it was either that or stay on Twitter and be anxious and depressed instead. I decided to take a few days off Twitter, and here I am just before bedtime, writing an unpost. I’m going to try and be…
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Daniel Geschwind on autism
This is my transcript of Dr Daniel Geschwind’s opening speech at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on 25 June this year. Daniel Geschwind (UCLA) is co-principal…
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Transmisogynistic framing in BBC interview with Lorna Slater
Following the announcement of a draft power-sharing deal between the Scottish Green Party and the Scottish Government, Lorna Slater was interviewed by Justin Webb for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on…
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Five years of Pride
Today, 8 August 2021, is the culmination of the week of the first Neuro Pride Ireland, fittingly ending on 8/8, which with a little imagination can be read as ∞/∞, the infinity sign being a symbol of…
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Add title (an unpost)
You can tell that I can’t be bothered to choose a catchy title for this unpost: since WordPress prompts with the text ‘Add title’, that seemed like as good a start as any to me. It’s been a while…
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This is so hard (2020 edition)
In the park in the summer By this, I might simply mean writing this blog post, but I could be talking more generally about writing anything, or communicating with people in any way, or doing…
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I’m still here
This is only my second post of the 2020s, and we’re nearly five months in already! It’s another unpost, because I still haven’t quite worked out what I’m going to write about next. But I’ve asked for…
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Review of the decade
This is an unpost. Unposts are now in their own category on the blog, so you can find them all easily. That’s a bit un-unposty, putting a link in there, but this is the first post of a new decade, so…
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Scottish Autism conference 2019: as it happened
Scottish Autism, a charity offering services, support and advocacy for autistic people across Scotland, held its 2019 annual conference in the Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow, on 14 November. I was…
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Scottish Autism conference 2019: a personal perspective
My other post on Scottish Autism’s 2019 conference gives a blow-by-blow account of the conference as it happened, based on my live tweets. This post is more of a reflection on my own personal…
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An unpost from the liminal zone
I have a few proper posts in various states of preparation, as well as several other outlines of posts that I want to share with you one day. But right now, my general state of existence precludes me…
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Yet more unpostiness
Today isn’t the day for a post about trans speech therapy and singing, or about discovering that I’m autistic and how I got my diagnosis, or about any of a number of other topics that I’d like to…
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A dreich unpost
The title reflects both the weather today (which came as a shock to me when I left my flat not that long ago) and my general mood of late. (I nearly wrote, for the benefit of non-Scots: ‘if you don’t…
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Two years of shiny new hormones: a brief update
It was 6 October 2017 when I stuck my first Evorel patch on my thigh and estradiol began seeping into my system. Patches, which irritated my skin, gave way to tiny foil sachets of Sandrena gel, and…
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A GRS quandary
Note that this post contains discussion of trans-related surgery and sexual activity. A little digression on terminology to start with. Three abbreviations are commonly used to refer to operations…
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The photographer’s error
At the pond I could get my phone out and take a picture. But I realised in that moment that looking at the photograph later would never conjure up the sense of being here. Never again would I…
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Nothing in mind (an unpost)
I have to write something. But I’ve been finding it so difficult to be interested in anything lately. Do you ever have times like that, when you go through all the things you normally like to do and…
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Festival unpost
No, I’m not going to write about the Edinburgh International Festival (in which I have sung in two concerts this year, with two remaining). Nor am I going to write about the Fringe (which I’m not…
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Prospecting for employment
Construction of a temporary venue at Edinburgh University This can be thought of as a companion piece to my earlier post To PhD or not to PhD. I haven’t made a firm decision yet on whether to…
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Unsleep: an early morning unpost
I say ‘early’. I realise that’s a relative term. But I’m starting to write this before getting up and having breakfast or doing anything else. (I’m sure I’ll take a break at some point.) Let me begin…
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Unpost 10: decimal
Ooh, the ratio! No, I’m not talking about the reply/retweet ratio considered indicative of bad takes on Twitter. Just that this is yet another ‘unpost’, pushing up the ratio of rambling to (I’d like…
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To PhD or not to PhD?
A linguistic overview of the university In 1997, I abandoned a PhD in mathematics, which I had begun in 1993. It had started to go seriously wrong in 1996, if not earlier, but I persisted for a…
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unixpost (infix numeral edition)
Still in the land of unposts. Life at the moment is too chaotic for me to bring you sense or structure. Bear with me, or go and read something interesting by someone else. Life is short. I won’t hold…
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The eighth (8th) unpost
I’m back, after a bit of a hiatus. I know it’s just another unpost, but February 2019 was my first whole calendar month without a single post since I began my blog. Yikes! (Isn’t ‘eighth’ a weirdly…
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unpost vii no colon in title
I’m back – I have a new laptop now. Woohoo! If you’re on Twitter, you might be aware that my old one died at the end of 2018, leaving me unable to write my blog in comfort – yes, I could have used my…
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Unpost 6: extended café remix
I’m feeling quite drained of energy and whatever that other stuff is that goes with energy. I managed to drag myself out of the flat for a late lunch of a bowl of soup at my usual café, having bidden…
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Unpost in a gap
First of all, my NaNoWriMo (national novel-writing month)-inspired story is suffering a brief hiatus, for which I apologise. I find it difficult to write a chapter (or any other blog post) without…
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Chapter 7|Seven across
| Back to Chapter 6 | Back to the beginning It’s starting to get dark. The sun is just setting behind the straggly line of houses on the edge of town. A wonder of nature unfolds above them as a vast…
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A fantasia on aphantasia
Once again, I interrupt my as-yet-still-untitled long-form story to bring you a personal blog post. This one’s not quite an ‘unpost’ but might nevertheless be a bit on the rambly and ill-formed side,…
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Chapter 6|The top floor
| Back to Chapter 5 | Back to the beginning Walking from the station towards the small business park on the edge of town, Kate and Jude try to reassure each other that everything will be fine, despite…
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Remembering the beautiful people
All of us are broken in some way. Many of the beautiful people were more broken than most of us, even before their lives came to an abrupt end. And though they may not all have been beautiful in the…
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Chapter 5|Freyja’s journal
| Back to Chapter 4 | Back to the beginning Wednesday The ornithologist was outside the flat again this morning, with his binoculars round his neck. He gives me the creeps. Luckily he was gone before…
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Chapter 4|The bridge
| Back to Chapter 3 | Back to the beginning Kate leans over the parapet, fearful of what grisly sight will confront her. A broken body with limbs contorted at unnatural angles and blood pooling out…
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Chapter 3|Jude
| Back to Chapter 2 | Back to the beginning There is a bus stop a short way down the hill from the bookshop, and Jude joins the gaggle of passengers in the so-called shelter. (When it rains here, it…
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Chapter 2|Kate
| Not read Chapter 1 yet? The beginning is a very good place to start. Kate is a single mum, though she’s not too keen on having that pointed out by others. She’s certainly done the whole parenting…
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Chapter 1|Freyja
It’s eight o’ clock on Thursday morning – a cold, nondescript November sort of morning – and Freyja drags herself out of bed. The alarm clock first broke her slumber half an hour earlier, but Freyja…
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Out of place, out of time, out of date?
There are a lot of things I want to write about – I have a dozen sketched-out blog posts waiting in the wings, but some of them are on quite big topics, and I’ll need a bit of time to do the necessary…
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Scottish Green Party reaffirms trans positivity
I’ve been a member of the Scottish Green Party since early 2014; for various reasons I hadn’t felt it important enough to nail my political colours to the mast before then. One thing I love about the…
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Emergency post: extended GRA consultation deadline
This weekend the Scottish Green Party holds its annual autumn conference, and I was looking forward to going along as a (mostly inactive) member to participate in its democratic decision-making…
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Unpost four: another hour
I’m giving myself a little less than an hour to write this off-the-cuff meandering piece of irrelevance. Why I should subject you to this is anybody’s guess, but I reckon a gap-filler like this might…
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I would go out tonight …
Confidence … but I haven’t got a stitch to wear! So croons Morrissey in The Smiths’ song ‘This charming man’, released in 1984. It was in that year, my first year at university, that I was…
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Chinks of darkness: a visual postscript
In my previous post, I described how my mood had sometimes felt almost totally dark, but with occasional chinks of light breaking through, while at other times it had seemed almost relatively…
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Questioning my neurotypicality
If this feels like déjà vu to you, it’s probably because you’re on Twitter and not because of a glitch in the Matrix: most of this post has already appeared in slightly less organised and slightly…
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Chinks of darkness
This was very nearly an ‘unpost’, but I think I have given it just a little too much thought for it to fall into that category. I’ve had a lot of issues surrounding a wedding I was at this…
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Shame and shamefulness
In June 2001, a friend (now a Church of Scotland minister) forwarded me an email from the Evangelical Alliance (EA) advertising the appearance of Joel Edwards (who was at the time their General…
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Unpost III: simulcast
This post will be broadcast simultaneously here and on Twitter. I probably don’t have time to write very much today (which is perhaps just as well given that my uncollated thoughts are being spewed…
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Image, mirror, selfie
Time for a proper blog post drawn from my cabinet of writing ideas. This one seems apt, since – according to Twitter – today is #NationalSelfieDay. Unhelpfully, the hashtag doesn’t tell us which of…
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Unpost the second
Another stream-of-consciousness ‘unpost’ written on the bus to and from speech therapy. I’m very conscious that it’s been a long time since I last posted anything. Perhaps that's because I have grand…
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Close reading: Hinsliff on gender
It’s been three weeks since my last blog post. (I’m sorry if that’s inconvenienced anyone who’s come to rely on at least one post a week from me!) Although I have plenty of blog-posts-in-waiting, I…
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My first Anna-versary
Edinburgh in the spring (at last) On 20 April last year, I made my way to court, accompanied by a friend. There, in a tiny side room, in the presence of a lawyer, I completed and signed a…
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Laying down: the law
Just slipping in a short post between the previous post (which was long) and the next one (which is likely be of ‘normal’ length). Back to linguistics for this one, and its application to…
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Commuting on the Number Line
The first station on the Number Line You almost certainly came across the Number Line at school (even if you didn’t pursue mathematics or the history of underground railways to an advanced…
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Half a year of new hormones
An estradiol molecule – full of oestrogenic goodness It’s been more or less exactly half a year since I switched from testosterone to estradiol as my sex hormone of choice. Thanks to seven…
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the end of reading
poems have ends stories have ends even epic sagas have ends but I never knew reading could have an end until the reading stopped yes, it was my voice no, not the voice of the last two decades not the…
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Café culture
Coffee My last blog post was written almost entirely on the number 24 bus. I began this one sitting on a bench in the freezing cold waiting for a building to open. That seems apt in a way,…
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Unpost (live)
This blog post (or unpost) is being written on a bus. Although I have 12 embryonic posts in draft at the moment, I’m not inspired to write about any of those topics just now. So instead you’re going…
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How was Mother’s Day for you?
Mother’s Day daffodils Yesterday was Mothering Sunday, being the fourth Sunday in Lent, and historically a religious holiday. It’s now the day that we in the UK celebrate ‘Mother’s Day’, our…
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Dè na riochdairean a th’ ort?
Boireannach tar-ghnèitheach ag ath-chruthachadh sealladh bhon fhilm 5.3 (aig 3m20d) Ma leughas tu na puist eile air a’ bhlog seo – gach fear dhiubh sa Bheurla thuige seo – chì thu gu bheil ùidh…
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Confessions of a serial impostor
Early attempts A cat peeking out through the stained glass – or is it? Although I didn’t know the term ‘impostor syndrome’ back then, I think one of my earliest memories of feeling that I didn’t…
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From a place of fear: responding to Leya
Subversion of the Aristotelian chain of being (source: Metropolitan Museum of Art; public domain) In Bella Caledonia’s promised six-part series on ‘the debate around trans issues, identity,…
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GRA reform in Scotland – the rest in one go
This post addresses Parts 4, 5 and 7 of the Scottish government’s consultation document on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It is the fourth and last in a series of posts on the…
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Throwing off the shackles of masculinity
Corporate rainbow-washing in a local bank window A sudden sense of liberation. I was just walking along the street on my way back from buying bread in a local deli when I became aware of it. I…
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Our Tribe: coming out
This afternoon – 11 February 2018 – I had the pleasure of taking part in the relaunch of the monthly LGBT gathering Our Tribe at Augustine United Church in Edinburgh. Held during LGBT History Month,…
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Whistling for dogs (transphobic ones)
Trans rights now! Vociferous transphobia has become endemic to parts of the UK media in recent months. (I’d love to know why, but I won’t speculate about that here.) Some of the articles that…
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GRA reform in Scotland – 3: the need for change
This post addresses Part 3 of the Scottish government’s consultation document on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It is the third in a series of posts on the consultation. I am not a…
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Another month on HRT (a whole third of a year!)
So many things I should be doing. Stuff just seems to keep coming at me – even though I’m not working at the moment. Since I ought to have tons of free time, I thought it would be easy to write a…
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GRA reform in Scotland – 2: the 2004 Act
This post addresses Part 2 of the Scottish government’s consultation document on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It is the second in a series of posts on the consultation. I am not a…
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GRA reform in Scotland – overview
The UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) was introduced in response to a 2002 European Court of Human Rights ruling against the UK (Christine Goodwin v. the United Kingdom). It legislated against…
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Hoarse and hair
In The longest journey, I bemoaned the nine-month wait between my first gender identity clinic (GIC) appointment and starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT). I didn’t mention the other NHS-funded…
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Anna was a girl once, she says
Anna aged about nine I was sorting through some old photos recently and found one of me as a girl, when I must have been about nine years old, I think. I look quite happy in the photograph, but…
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Assumed normal
People always seem to assume other people are ‘normal’ (i.e. like them). Here’s a random list of five ways I’ve been assumed normal. 1. ‘Hope the roads are clear!’ I told at least a dozen people we…
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Then was not the time
— Why on earth am I doing this at this age? — Because you’ve been on earth while it’s gone round the sun that many times. — Um, no, that’s not quite what I meant. — Oh, I see. You mean you think that…
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Alone
Extroverts are ‘energised’ by company, while introverts are ‘energised’ by time spent alone. Or so a little pop psychology would have us believe. But if that were the whole story, wouldn’t introverts…
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Three months on HRT
Do a quick search on the web using your favourite search engine, and you’ll find lots of trans women (and trans men and non-binary people too) sharing their experiences of hormone replacement therapy…
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The longest journey
I’ve taken a long time to get to where I am, and I’m still not where I want to be. I suppose that’s what makes life worth living: if any of us had got to where we wanted to be (really and truly), what…
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Sticks and stones may break my bones …
Let me begin by recounting a couple of incidents from the past week. Firstly, on Tuesday, I was walking through a crowded shopping centre and came across a young man who is involved in customer…
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What am I doing here?
Obviously, I’m writing a blog post. More specifically, the first post on this blog. More specifically still, the first blog post I’ve ever written, on my first ever blog – despite having had all kinds…