Something Off My Chest 11.08.17 I've been on hormones for a year, and perhaps it's time to say something about the way my body's changing. How to do so without sounding crude? But I'd earlier thought a suitable title for this post might be Tits Up, so already this post is better than it could have been. For a few weeks now, I've started to go out w...

Edinburgh Just Festival 11.08.17 I haven't been on stage before as a trans person, but I will have my fifteen minutes this coming Friday, on 11 August, at Edinburgh's Just Festival. The festival-within-a-festival serves to create a safe space for dialogue, and I'm joining that dialogue, as I discuss perceptions surrounding trans people in modern so...

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets 05.08.17 It's meant to be terrible, but all I can think about right now is how Luc Besson's Valerian is better than James Cameron's Avatar (2009). There are, I insist, comparisons to be made, none of them flattering to the inexplicably lauded Avatar. Let's start with the overview: they're both sci-fi bloc...

Donald Trump's Latest Transgression 29.07.17 It's a slow news day, so I've decided to write about the latest travails of the USA's 45 th and current President, Donald Trump, whose views on trans people seem to drift ever further from friendship to compromised indifference (see the Mike-Pence inspired repeal of trans rights in high schools...

Dunkirk 29.07.17 Dunkirk is a strange film, as much about the channel of water between two countries as the aforementioned nations at war. I read somewhere that director Chris Nolan sailed the English Channel in his youth and the experience was formative to him. This is evident, the film's photography sometimes shows the war as pinpricks on th...

Dining Out 28.07.17 Edinburgh is well into pre-festival mode, and I have already attended its film festivals (one quite good film for £10), its jazz and blues festival (one quite good band, also £10) and its food one (one burger for £5, a single-scoop ice-cream for about £3 and a bit of free cake). You may say: Gina, you're really splashing the cas...

Summer in London is a play written and directed by celebrated playwright Rikki Beadle-Blair, and is currently being performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London (8-29 July). It features an all-trans cast, including up-and-coming star Ash Palmisciano, who has kindly agreed to be interviewed by me for Edinburgh Trance. Ash, first of all, c...

My Love of Ozzy Osbourne 23.07.17 That's of, not for, in that the object of my passion is a band whose 1980s heavy rock I still feel something for. As for the man called Ozzy Osbourne who fronted and sang, and whose charisma and status gave the band its stardom, I have mixed feelings. Why write about him, about them, the band? Perhaps simply, I've ...

War for the Planet of the Apes 22.07.17 Another slick, exciting offering from the Planet of the Apes franchise, War for the Planet of the Apes (WFTPOTA) is as tense a piece of story-telling as it is emotionally uninvolving afterwards. I left wondering not what happens next in this franchise, but why I felt so detached beyond the screening room door...

David Lynch: The Art Life 16.07.17 I had a choice, to go and watch the latest Planet of the Apes blockbuster, or a documentary about a director whose art deeply disturbs me. Well, there's always next week for the apes, or next year for the sequel. I don't think there will be a sequel for David Lynch: The Art Life , simply because his storytelling i...

Friendships in Edinburgh 15.07.17 Saturday evening, and outside a band is playing. It's July and the festivals are coming back to Edinburgh; already, the park at the centre of George Square has been taken over with fences and security and people in red coats whose purpose is mysterious. Just over two weeks from now, this city will become the larges...

What's On? 15.07.17 I remember the disturbing nature of Planet of the Apes when I was young. Not so much the first one with its iconic, Statue-of-Liberty ending (1968), but subsequent ones including the creepy Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) with its scarred, surviving ancestors of humanity's nuclear victims. Then Escape (1971), imbibed with ...

Song To Song 14.07.17 Wendy Ide of The Guardian says of this film that 'it all adds up to a beautiful nothing.' But is 'beautiful' ever only nothing? Do I now sound like a character in a Terence Malick film by voicing such a question? Malick's Song to Song is the kind of movie I would watch in multiple, accidental viewings in my previous life, as t...

Finding Work as a Trans Person 08.07.17 A second week of part-time teaching work passed on Friday, and already, it's not about being trans. I enter the classroom, the lesson begins, and I am from planet teacher. The students are nice, and everything is about them, not me. I always wondered how it would be as a trans-female teacher. Last year I...

Spiderman: Homecoming 08.07.17 Hardly anyone was there in the theatre auditorium and I was surprised, at the first Friday night showing of this third iteration of Spiderman at the Cameo cinema. Perhaps people are going to Cineworld , Vue and Odeon for the super-technology experience. I had the intimate cinema screening room almost to myself. I'm gl...

What's On? 06.07.17 The international football competitions are over, I have no TV or Internet (at home), it's time to re-focus on what's important. And that means Spiderman . The third iteration of Spiderman. Why can't we have Spiderwoman? I remember the animated series of Spiderwoman back in the eighties, she was able to fly and looked pretty coo...

Escapist Thoughts: On Germany 02.07.17 To watch them is to be seduced by their hypnotic passing rhythms, Kroos to Ozil, Ozil to Kimmich, Kimmich to Ozil, Ozil back to Kroos. They usually win, and when they don't, it's controversial, or at the very least, surprising. I'm talking about a cycle of individuals who I've watched with growing passion, eve...

Baby Driver 01.07.17 The reviews have been effusive (97% on Rotten Tomatoes), yet what to make of a film whose ending seems to have been directed by Roland Emmerich? But I'm getting ahead of myself, especially when there's the beginning to discuss, with its similarity to Spiderman 3 . Baby Driver has, let's be clear, received five-star reviews from...

What's On? 29.06.17 Everyone's talking about the five-star movie Baby Driver and it's out this weekend at the Cameo . It has ingredients I'm not partial to, including the presence of Jamie Foxx and a story line about a teenager(ish) boy. With nothing else of interest out there, though, this is one of those times to watch a film that doesn't seem 'y...

On the Issue of Accommodation 24.06.17   I have a place to stay,that's not the issue. My friend and I, though, are looking for somewhere toshare, to reduce our rent. Edinburgh rent; I'd like to talk about this. For acold and basic flat some 40 minutes' walk from the centre, I'm paying £7200 peryear, or if you prefer, £600 per month, as a mostl...