No Joke

Today a comedy writer who has become known for his 'views' about transgender people joked on Twitter that he had been commissioned to write some YA novels from a 'gender critical' standpoint. I had written a long post about it, and in particular why he might have picked YA novels to make that joke. But I got bored. I am tired of transphobia. I am tired of people picking on young people and talking about teenagers as if they are puppets in a world of meddling and misguided adults. I am tired of earnestly pointing people towards Googleable information written by experts. So I'll just say this: as long as I am writing YA it will never be a joke to me. The concerns of marginalised young people will never be a joke to me. My next novel is out in September and I have started work on another, so I am relying on YA readers to hold me to account, and perhaps that is all that matters. Here is a picture of the sky outside my back door the other morning. Sometimes it's good to get off social media, open the door to the outside and realise that nature is queer and bigger than people's opinions, and that it tells itself in many more ways than we can hope to express on Twitter, or even in a novel. It's going to be OK.

Transing the sky