Category: LGBTQ+
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How journalism should work
Imagine if journalists writing articles about things spoke to people with expert knowledge of those things. That’s what Caitlin Logan does. To find out what concerns Scottish women’s groups may have about gender reform, trans people and self-ID, she spoke to women’s groups: Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Young Women’s Movement (YWCA Scotland), Edinburgh […]
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A mental elf issue
Here’s one of my favourite jokes. A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He looks at the other patrons and realises that the man next to him has a small orange for a head. “Excuse me,” he says. “I can’t help noticing that –” “I have a small orange for a head?” […]
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How journalism works
I recently cancelled my long-standing subscription to The Times and Sunday Times because I was getting fed up with its selective reporting. As any writer knows, you can change a story by choosing what to include and what not to include – so if you leave out important details you can create a misleading impression. […]
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Sense and sensitivity
“So a tran walks into a bar…†I went to a comedy show last night, and the comedian didn’t make any jokes about trans people. I knew he wouldn’t – the comic, Jimeoin, doesn’t do that kind of joke – so I felt safe enough to go as me. By “as me†I mean as […]
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“What would a less gendered world look like?”
Buzzfeed has a reputation for daft listicles, and deservedly so. But the traffic those listicles generates also pays for long form content like this personal and thought provoking essay by Shannon Keating. It’s important to recognize when “sex†or “gender†doesn’t have anything to do with the matter at hand at all — that workplace […]
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“Oh, honey. Who do you think they’ll come for when they’re done with us?”
I wrote a piece for Metro about the religious right’s wedge strategy to roll back equal rights legislation. The religious right knows it lost the equal marriage battle. But it thinks it can win the war against LGBT equality and women’s rights by using trans people as a proxy. Scratch an anti-trans bill, of which […]
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That’s not really funny
I was chatting with a comedian pal about comedy last night: we both went to see Chris Rock last week, and it turns out we’ve been to a lot of the same comedy shows over the years. One of the things we talked about was Rock’s rage, where he’d take things out of the audience’s […]
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Fight the power
There’s been a fascinating spat between Irish feminists and anti-trans English people over the last few days: noticing that the secretive A Woman’s Place speaking tour was coming to Ireland, the Irish feminists promptly wrote an open letter telling the group to sod off: We can see from your social media posts about your tour […]
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Ask me anything
I’ve been chatting with Common Space editor and Sunday Herald columnist Angela Haggerty about a recent barney in Scottish political twitter: some of it has descended into a trans/anti-trans argument where everybody’s shouting at everybody else and nobody’s listening to anybody. As she wrote on Twitter, wishing people would “please stop ripping each other apart”: […]
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“Our shared progress toward a more equal society has depended on people standing together”
The Green MSP Patrick Harvie has always struck me as a good man. He was namechecked in an anti-trans piece in Scots newspaper The National yesterday, a piece that dragged up the usual “trans people are silencing women” bullshit and accused Harvie of not listening to women. Harvie responded on the Scottish Greens website. It’s […]