I’m absolutely delighted to be featured on Damian Barr’s Literary Salon podcast as his book of the week, and I’m particularly pleased that Damian found lots of joy in the book.
You can listen to me reading an extract on Damian’s Soundcloud, which I’ve included below.
Carrie Kills A Man will be book of the week on Damian Barr’s Literary Salon podcast on Wednesday, and that means I also got the opportunity to recommend some books that I think are well worth your time.
Scotland’s parliament will begin debating the gender reform bill this week, so I wrote to my MSPs asking for their support. I suspect my email is unusual, because I know what the law is and what a GRC does. As I’ve been shown again and again, most anti-trans voices either don’t, or pretend not to.
I’ve had four responses, three of which – from the SNP, from the Scottish Greens and from Scottish Labour – were unequivocally supportive of reform. The fourth, from Conservative MSP Annie Wells, is extracted here:
However, I should add that I am aware there have been concerns raised regarding safeguards for children and young people in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. This is a very sensitive area, however the welfare of children and young people must come first. That means balancing the need to help those who are suffering from gender dysphoria with the need to protect vulnerable children and young people who are unsure of their identity and risk embarking on gender hormone treatment prematurely. We will not support any reforms that put the welfare of children and young people at risk.
Gender recognition has nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of children or any medical treatment. Nothing. This isn’t so much a dog whistle as an entire pet shop display of the damn things.
I don’t know what magic my publisher pulled to get Patton Oswalt to read and recommend my book, but as my best pal says, they have clearly sacrificed something.
Apple TV’s The Problem With Jon Stewart began its new season last night with an episode about the “gender wars”. It struck me that it couldn’t be made in the UK: it featured parents of trans children and experts in trans medicine, but not an audience of bigots shouting “penis!” and “groomer!” at them.
Instead, Jon Stewart let the Attorney General of Arkansas slowly hoist herself on her own petard by asking something really simple: what’s the evidence behind your anti-trans legislation? The answer, inevitably, turned out to be: there isn’t any.
This is a masterclass in interviewing.
It’s interesting to compare this with the last few days’ coverage of JK Rowling, who donned an anti-Nicola Sturgeon t-shirt designed by a far-right goon to protest against the Scottish Government’s plans for gender recognition reform and ended up on the covers of all the major newspapers. There hasn’t been any attempt whatsoever to ascertain whether Rowling’s anti-reform beliefs are right (spoiler: they’re not; the evidence, or lack of, is here: “when asked about evidence of abuse and concerns, no witness was able to provide concrete examples.”). Too much of our media has no interest in establishing the truth when there’s a culture war to push.
In the 30 days from 27th June this year, the UK press published 1,142 articles about trans people, mostly trans-hostile with claims of hate groups taken as fact. That’s 33 anti-trans articles a day. Between them, the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail publish up to 27 trans articles a week, most of them hostile. On just one day, those papers published 26 articles about trans people; the Telegraph alone published 11.
There’s a saying I like: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As Stewart so deftly demonstrates, the anti-trans mob don’t have any evidence to back up their assertions; they are at odds with the entire medical establishment, because ultimately their “reasonable concerns” boil down to a belief that trans people are icky weirdos.
If our journalists were doing their job, the current anti-trans moral panic wouldn’t exist and hate crimes against LGBT people wouldn’t be up 42% year on year, with anti-trans hate crimes up 56%. Culture wars may be a game in newsrooms, but they’re terrifyingly real for the people they demonise.
I did my first ever literary event last night at the University of Glasgow as part of Publishing Scotland’s Creative Conversations series.
To say I was terrified would be an understatement. I barely slept in the days before, and during the day itself I managed to break two glasses and prang one of my neighbours’ cars because I was so preoccupied.
I posted about my fear to Twitter and got lots of reassuring replies, including one from Rebecca Lawther: “You got this! Book people are good people.”
She was right on both counts.
I had a blast and really enjoyed the readings from my fellow panelists Chitra Ramaswamy (an old friend from radio and a brilliant writer), Cynthia Rogerson (hilarious), Malachy Tallack (inspiring), Trishna Singh OBE (just gorgeous writing) and Mark Woolhouse OBE (fascinating). Despite being the only person on my panel without an OBE I think I did okay, and I loved chatting with other writers, publishing people and bookworms afterwards.
It’s a real honour to be invited to events like these, and I’m not just saying that because they fed us. I’m still not entirely comfortable – my impostor syndrome was through the roof – but book people are good people and they went out of their way to make me feel welcome and valued, for which I’m very grateful.
Hopefully my next book events won’t involve me damaging anybody’s cars.
Just an admin note: I’ve reverted the blog to its previous template because the new one mangled some characters and did weird things with quoted text. It’s not quite right yet so please excuse the dust.
A typically incisive piece by Parker Molloy on the censorious clowns who claim that legitimate criticism of what they say and write is the same as the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.
That is the problem people have with the “cancel culture” discourse. It’s selective, it flattens important distinctions between horrific acts (beheadings and physical attacks!) and free speech (dissent, boycotts, protests). The “cancel culture” brigade sure loves to claim that speech it doesn’t like (dissent, boycotts, protests) is a threat to speech, while sitting mostly silently on actual threats to free expression, like the Republican plan to use obscenity laws to make certain books on LGBTQ topics illegal to sell, the Republican-led purging of books from school and local libraries, and the Republican-led re-writing of textbook standards to remove “divisive” issues. Funny how none of that is “cancel culture,” and yet they think someone speaking out against J.K. Rowling’s factually incorrect rants about trans people (i.e. using their freedom of speech) represents a threat to the very concept of “free speech.” The reason is simple: one of these advances their own agenda, the other doesn’t.
I posted something on Twitter last night that I could post pretty much any time, any day, in response to someone doing something utterly vile: trans people have been trying to warn you about this person, this organisation or this publication for years.
