Last night I knowingly and deliberately broke the law. It wasn’t quite Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a lead pipe; it was me and my best friend in Kelvingrove Park with a nice bottle of red wine.

In Glasgow and the surrounding area, drinking in public has been illegal since 1996 under sections 201-203 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act. The law was tightened further in 2008 to include the carrying of open containers, even if the alcohol has already been consumed. So every nice day we see tons of police going around places like Kelvingrove, ordering people to pour away their plonk for fear of a fine of up to £500. The bylaw applies in every public place and is only relaxed on New Year’s Eve between 6pm and 6am the following morning. That’s a throwback to the days when George Square hosted a huge Hogmanay party.

The law was introduced because in the 1990s, Glasgow had still to shake off its No Mean City reputation. Public drinking was a public order problem, especially around football matches, and there was also a big problem with underage drinkers. Glasgow’s ban was partly motivated by the evidence from other parts of Scotland such as Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, which experienced a 46% drop in violent crime after implementing a public drinking ban.

The ban is widely ignored (hello!) and there’s still trouble. Every time the sun shines, Kelvingrove Park fills with drunks and litter; this weekend a teenage boy was facially disfigured in a fight. The last time I rode my bike through the park I saw almost as much broken glass as grass.

But judging by social media, the policing this weekend was massively over the top and there does appear to be a double standard in operation: while the police had set up a mobile command centre and brought vans and horses to Kelvingrove, there was no such presence in the nearby Botanic Gardens. There, as some people pointed out on Twitter, students and “yummy mummies” could sip their M&S mojitos in peace.

This is Garnock Academy, the secondary school (high school for my American friends) I attended in the 1980s. It’s near a town called Beith.

Like all schools of the era, there were no LGBT pupils or teachers. Or at least, there were no openly LGBT pupils or teachers; the ones who were LGBT kept their heads down. This was the era of Section 28, the law implemented just as I was leaving school that prohibited teachers from discussing LGBT issues for fear they’d be accused of “promoting” LGBT life.

I wasn’t happy there. I doubt I’d have been happy anywhere. It was an era of vicious homophobia, and the homophobia printed in the newspapers echoed in the playgrounds. “Gay” wasn’t just a taunt but a trailer: it was the shout that announced the bullies’ arrival. I heard it a lot.

I’ve linked elsewhere to people’s stories of growing up LGBT, and while the details differ there’s a common theme: we grew up believing there was something wrong with us, with a deep sense of shame and guilt about being ourselves. Instead of learning to thrive, we learned to hide, both metaphorically and literally. We policed our own behaviour and tried our best to avoid the bullies.

Garnock Academy is long gone – bulldozed a few years ago with a brand new school, Garnock Campus, opening up on the other side of town – but its effects linger.

Yesterday, on a whim, I popped into one of my favourite places: Category Is Books in Glasgow’s South side. It’s Scotland’s only LGBT bookshop (one of only two in the whole UK) and has quickly become a hub for the LGBT community; I’ve been there for book and fanzine launches as well as adding to my collection of enamel pin badges.

It’s the kind of place where you bump into people you know, and yesterday was no exception: I was delighted to see a few friends there, so what was supposed to be a five-minute visit turned into an hour of chatting with my friends and other customers. One of them was a young woman who really reminded me of my daughter: fiery, funny and fast-talking with that tweenage thing where your brain is moving too fast and your mouth is struggling to keep up with all the things you have to say. Like my daughter she’s confident in a way I never was, a firework in human form.

One of the things she talked about was her school. She laughed as she talked about being known as “the gay kid” in her class, something she’s clearly proud of. The school has an LGBT Club, where she’s made friends with other gay kids (and straight kids who just come along for the chat), and LGBT Champions, of which she’s one. She’s clearly thriving there, happy in her own skin.

“Your school sounds amazing!” I said. “What one is it you go to?”

“Garnock Campus,” she said. “It’s near a town called Beith.”

This really made me laugh.

Related:

[doctor looking at my xrays]

doctor: this is exactly what i was afraid of

me: what

doctor: skeletons

— Zilla (@GoodZiIIa) February 27, 2018

There’s an interesting piece in NY Magazine about the corrosive effects of highly partisan news.

I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.

It’s not just Fox, and not just America: the article notes that stories also came of families broken by left-wing partisanship, and by publications such as the UK’s Daily Mail – but Fox has a huge reach and is arguably the most biased of all the major news outlets.

Whatever the root, it’s incredibly saddening

“Maybe he was always like this, but lacked the exhaust chamber to say out loud what he was thinking. I’ll never know,” one person told me. “It just sucks because I know the people he hates so much are basically the same people as me.”

There is a lot online about gender dysphoria, the discomfort or even horror some trans people have about the gender they were assigned at birth. But there’s a flip side when you get to be your real self: gender euphoria, the feeling that at least for the moment, everything is the way it should be.

I’m writing this sat on a bench on a sunny spring morning in Glasgow, the city I love. Because it’s Glasgow it’s still cold, but the sun is warm on my skin. The colours are spectacular: the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, the bright green of new leaves and new grass. I’m dressed for the season, bare-legged in a fun, flippy floral skirt teamed up with a plain t-shirt and a cardigan; today is a good makeup day, simple rather than striking or spectacularly hopeless, and for once I’m feeling pretty good about my appearance. I’m doing one of my favourite things: people-watching, enjoying the simple pleasure of seeing the world walk by and wondering what each stranger’s story is.

The late Kurt Vonnegut wrote of a relative who would often exclaim: if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. Vonnegut urges all of us to do the same, to recognise the little moments of happiness, to celebrate life’s joys, big and small.

If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

In response to Transgender Day of Visibility yesterday, I saw multiple social media threads hijacked by cisgender straight man, many of whom demanded to know why we needed transgender visibility day but not straight pride days. They demanded to know: what rights don’t trans people have?

How about the right to live free from abuse and violence?

This happened yesterday, while grown men were posting vomit emoji in response to transgender day of visibility posts.

In Essex, a transgender teenager was verbally abused by three teenage boys, who slashed the teenager’s face. The victim was treated in hospital for their injuries.

This is what dehumanising LGBT people leads to: a frightened kid surrounded, abused and slashed on a Sunday afternoon.

In an extract from his upcoming book Ruined By Design, Mike Monteiro explains the problem with social media and how it ruined the early promise of the internet.

The people who built Twitter (and other services) were a bunch of young men. This is important.

More accurately, they were a bunch of white guys. Those white guys, and I’ll keep giving them the benefit of the doubt and say they did it with the best of intentions, designed the foundation of a platform that would later collapse under the weight of harassment, abuse, death threats, rape threats, doxxing, and the eventual takeover of the alt-right and their racist idiot pumpkin king.

Women are woefully under-represented in the tech sector; ethnic minorities and LGBT people are barely on the radar. So straight white guys build systems that enabled such horrors because as cisgender straight white guys, they haven’t experienced the things that women and minorities experience in life and online.

Incidentally, nobody is saying there’s anything wrong with being a cisgender straight white guy. That’s not what Monteiro is saying, and it’s not what I’m saying. The point here is that people build stuff based on what they know.

Monteiro:

All the white boys in the room, even with the best of intentions, will only ever know what it’s like to make make decisions as a white boy. They will only ever have the experiences of white boys. This is true of anyone. You will design things that fit within your own experiences. Even those that attempt to look outside their own experiences will only ever know what questions to ask based on that experience. Even those doing good research can only ask questions they think to ask. In short, even the most well-meaning white boys don’t know what they don’t know. That’s before we even deal with the ones that aren’t well-meaning. (I see you, Travis.)

You don’t ask “could this be used maliciously by abusive exes?” if you haven’t fled an abusive ex. You don’t ask “could this be used to target gay people?” if you haven’t been targeted as a gay person. And so on.

Twitter never built in a way to deal with harassment because none of the people designing it had ever been harassed, so it didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with threats because none of the people designing it had ever gotten a death threat. It didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with stalking because no one on the team had ever been stalked. It didn’t come up.

This is one of the key problems with the internet as it is today: it’s been largely built by and for cisgender straight white guys. So for example Facebook enforces a real-name system that bans pseudonyms because cisgender straight white guys don’t need to hide their identities – but women fleeing abusive exes and LGBT people often do. Again and again we see platforms used maliciously because the people who built those platforms didn’t imagine such abuse, and don’t seem too keen on policing it either.

Technology is often portrayed as an unalloyed good, disrupting moribund industries and giving power to the people. But all too often it gives power to the wrong people: the oppressors, not the oppressed.

We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer.

One of the most telling signs that something is very wrong with social media is the flood of tech firm media founders and executives who won’t let their own children go online much, or at all. As Monteiro says:

When we refuse to let our own children use the fruits of our labor while still cashing the checks we’re earning by addicting other people’s children — all the while rending our garments over “what’s happening to kids today!” — we need to burn all our work down.
Nothing is happening to the children. We are doing something to the children. Let it all burn down, and let those that come after us sift through the ashes to learn from our mistakes.

When I came out, I knew it would probably mean spending the rest of my life alone.

A new study suggests I’m right.

Two Canadian researchers recently asked almost 1000 cisgender folks if they would date a trans person in a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

…Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences. Bisexual/queer/nonbinary participants (these were all combined into one group) were most open to having a trans partner, but even among them, almost half (48%) did not select either ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman.’

It’s not a surprising finding, although as with any study there are various caveats and considerations. But it’s indicative of the way we’re seen by wider society. As the Them.us article puts it:

The high rates of trans exclusion from potential dating pools are undoubtedly due in part to cisnormativity, cissexism, and transphobia — all of which lead to lack of knowledge about transgender people and their bodies, discomfort with these unknowns, and fear of being discriminated against by proxy of one’s romantic partner.

It’s very hard to accept yourself when you know that many others don’t see you as normal, let alone desirable.

More than 30 organisations have signed an open letter detailing why LGBT-inclusive education is more important than ever.

The full letter is online at PinkNews.

We must stand together to fight for a world where everyone is accepted for who they are. We must continue to work toward delivering an equal society which is free from discrimination.