The Kirkcudbright Book Festival line-up for March 2026 has been announced, and it’s a typically eclectic and interesting selection. I’ll be appearing on the Saturday morning to chat about Small Town Joy and the liberating power of music.
Author: Carrie
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Whay hae!
The lovely Alistair Braidwood of Scots Whay Hae! has picked Small Town Joy as one of his ten best non-fiction books of 2025. “If you love music, this is a book for you.”
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Junk science junked
The genital obsessed weirdos’ crusade against trans people is global, so there have attempts to bring in a UK-style “emergency” ban on puberty blockers for trans kids in New Zealand as part of the moral panic there. But unlike the UK, whose judiciary seems to be an easy mark for junk science peddled by dubiously funded hate groups, that country’s High Court is having none of it.
In a newly published judgement, the court ruled that there was “no evidence of a particular need to act urgently to prevent new prescriptions because of some immediate risk to physical health if young people commence treatment.” It also noted that “Puberty blockers are reversible. There is no evidence that they affect fertility. If they did, they would hardly be prescribed for children with precocious puberty and they have been prescribed for that purpose for decades.”
The judgement continued: “The evidence relating to mental health outcomes suggests negative outcomes from a ban are a far more immediate concern.”
In the words of the High Court, a ban on puberty blockers purely for trans kids is “discriminatory” because the supposed safety concerns are not being used to demand a similar ban for kids who aren’t trans.
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What happened
There has been a flood of despicable reporting around the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, much of it by people who clearly didn’t let a minor matter such as reading the actual judgement get in the way of publishing their pre-written pieces. This, by Rivkah Brown, should make them ashamed of themselves. It won’t, because they’re too far gone. But what’s detailed in the tribunal evidence bears little or no relation to what the majority of the press wants you to believe.
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“You’re not allowed in here.”
TransActual have published a document detailing people’s experiences of Britain’s EHRC-approved crotch cops. It makes grim reading, and demonstrates yet again that the piss police will be coming for anyone considered not sufficiently feminine enough.
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Criminal reporting
The BBC’s coverage of the criminal Graham Linehan, who was convicted yesterday of criminal damage to a trans woman’s phone (but not of his years-long campaign of harassment against her, despite abundant evidence of that harassment), shows the reality of the supposed “pro-trans bias” of the corporation.
The BBC news article about the court case has been repeatedly edited and now describes the young victim as “a biological male who identifies as a woman”. That’s language straight out of Sex Matters’ anti-trans activists’ style guide, and it flouts the BBC’s own style guide. The latter says:
Transgender, or trans, is an umbrella term for a person whose gender identity differs from their sex recorded at birth. A person born male who lives as a female, would typically be described as a “transgender woman” and would take the pronoun “she”. And vice versa. We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so. If that’s unknown – apply that which fits with the way the person lives publicly.
There’s definitely bias at the Beeb. But it’s not in favour of trans people.
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A state-sanctioned witch hunt
The EHRC, which hates trans people, has leaked its trans guidance to The Times, which hates trans people, in an attempt to bully the Equalities Minister into approving it. But no amount of positive spin can hide the fundamental point: the EHRC wants trans people’s rights to access spaces to be dependent on how they look, and enforced by the public.
They’re demanding a permanent, state-sanctioned witch-hunt by sour-faced curtain twitchers and SAVE ARE KIDS roundabout painters for whom anyone tall, butch, unconventional, not pretty enough, not white enough is Goody Proctor dancing with the Devil.
Séamas O’Reilly wrote about this in the Irish Examiner earlier this year. As he says today, “Trans people and their cis women allies have been sounding these alarms for years. It now seems clear that the UK government took all these dire warnings as policy proposals.”
We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against… Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity.
And how might they prove their “real” gender?…The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.
This, despite the abundant and obvious evidence that it will lead to more harm and distress for all British women, cis or trans, as a consequence. We must surmise that the pain and humiliation of all people is worth it, so long as trans people feel it most fiercely.
This is the world view of the people popping champagne outside the courts, or cackling with glee on their superyachts, rejoicing as Keir Starmer says “trans women are men” while demanding he roll back trans rights even further, and apologise for ever advocating for them in the first place.
The same people who’ve so thoroughly debased this debate that sensible moderates can profess nothing but mealy-mouthed agreement alongside quiet calls for “calm” and “dignity”, without realising this is offering us a choice between those who light cigars as they legislate trans people out of the public square, and those who say they’re awfully sorry while they do the same.
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Twenty-eight
Section 28, the law that prohibited the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools and libraries, was scrapped on this day in 2003 (three years after Scotland repealed the local version, Clause 2A). I’ve written about it a few times now, including in the anthology Twenty-Eight.
Section 28 came into force just as I was leaving school, so it didn’t affect me directly. But the climate that created it – the viciously anti-LGBTQ+ newspapers, the viciously anti-LGBTQ+ politicians – damaged an entire generation of queer people. As I wrote in my contribution to Twenty-Eight:
Section 28 was largely a creation of the right-wing press, and many of the people, publications and proprietors who contributed to the anti-gay panic back then are at the forefront of the anti-trans panic today…
It’s all so horribly, sickeningly, wretchedly familiar. Once again we are told we need to “protect children” from a sinister “lobby”, an evil “ideology”. And once again that poisonous narrative is peddling hatred towards the entire LGBT+ community. Just look at how supposed “reasonable concerns” about trans kids’ healthcare have become death threats to Drag Queen Story Hours, at the widespread use of “groomer” against LGBT+ people and allies online, at the growing number of reported anti-LGBT hate crimes. What’s printed in tabloids and broadsheets is amplified on the streets. And as US Republicans are currently demonstrating in states such as Alabama and Arizona, Tennessee and Texas, worse is coming.
Abolishing Section 28 didn’t abolish homophobia, transphobia or any other -phobia. It just told the people who had those views, that quarter of the population that voted to keep the clause, to be quiet about it. And now those people are being given permission to be loud all over again.
I wrote that in 2022. There’s no joy in being able to say “I told you so”.
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It’s good to talk (about books)
I took part in this year’s Aye Write! book festival with a different hat on: I was there as a host rather than a panellist.
I was asked to chair three very different events: with former pop star Anthony Kavanaugh, aka Kavana, to discuss his memoir; with Mae Diansangu, Louise Welsh and Lewis Hetherington to discuss the queer spaces anthology Who Will Be Remembered Here; and with debut novelists Seth Insua, Michael Amherst and Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin to talk about their books Human, Animal, The Boyhood of Cain and Ordinary Saints. And I was absolutely terrified, because hosting is way beyond my comfort zone: I’m used to being the panellist, not the host.
I’m glad I said yes, though, because books and book people are often fascinating – and that was definitely the case for all three events here. And we were blessed with three very excellent audiences too, so the events were a real joy to host.
I’m done hosting for now, but I’m not done with book events: I’ll be at Sunny Govan Radio to talk about my own books later this week, and I’m doing a talk with students next week. Or at least I will be if my voice holds out: the downside of doing literary festivals at this time of year is that everybody involved comes out of the event with a stonking head cold.
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A fantasy of victimhood
There are some fascinating reports in the latest edition of the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, including a piece about the LGB Alliance’s Role in the UK Media’s Anti-Trans Moral Panic and this in-depth analysis of radicalisation on sites such as Mumsnet.
It describes how posters attempt to reframe themselves as victims rather than victimisers, to depict themselves as brave, marginalised people silenced by assorted imagined oppressors rather than the vicious bullies they have so gleefully become.
This isn’t a new observation, of course: we’re familiar with DARVO (deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender) as one of the most favoured tactics of the genital-obsessed weirdos and grifters. But this is much more in-depth.
we encountered story after story of posters who—as they became further entrenched in GC [“gender critical”, aka transphobic] community practices—found themselves alienated from their families, friends, and coworkers.
These heartwrenching narratives intentionally confuse the axes of oppression.
The tragedy of GC members’ vacillation as victim-aggressor is that GCs claim that they are the ones being oppressed even as they publicly dramatize, with pride, their harassment of strangers and coworkers and the emotional abuse of children and partners.