-
There was widespread revulsion on social media yesterday over this article. Mr Waiton here isn’t a tutor, he’s a senior lecturer. He’s also a Brexit Party candidate. And the newspaper this article is from, The Scotsman, is his occasional employer. He’s also a regular contributor to the Herald, Scotland’s other national daily, where he helps… [more]
-
The UK is rapidly approaching the point where there will be more anti-trans hate groups than there are actual trans people. The latest group. which launched this week, calls itself the LGB Alliance, and it’s a single-issue hate group: it wants to split the T from the wider LGBT movement. Despite (mainly straight) supporters saying… [more]
-
Sexual harassment is primarily about power: it’s perpetrated by the people who have it against the people who don’t. So it’s deeply saddening but not surprising to see the results of a Musician’s Union study into sexual harassment in the music industry. It’s a huge problem. It’s not just that the music business is still… [more]
-
I tend to gravitate towards people who are clever and kind, and as a result I’m friends with a lot of people who work in charities, voluntary groups and other good places. They’re generally trans-inclusive places but they don’t always have many or any trans staff or volunteers, so from time to time my friends… [more]
-
Despite the best efforts of the DUP, Northern Ireland became a better place for women and for LGBT+ people last night. It’s testament to the hard work of grass-roots activists and campaigners who’ve fought for a very long time for Irish women and same-sex couples to get the same rights that the rest of the… [more]
-
Today’s shock-horror trans story is a case study in how certain newspapers deliberately misrepresent stories to make their readers hate trans people. You’ve almost certainly seen it, or read someone’s hot take on it. The story is this. In June, two people on the internet posted two tweets that asked whether the logos on the… [more]
-
The increasingly hateful rhetoric around trans people is going to get more people hurt, or worse. In Georgia, USA, a school district had to temporarily suspend its trans-inclusive toilet policy “as students and employees are facing extreme hate and death threats.” Of course, it couldn’t happen here, could it? It already does. The teacher at… [more]
-
Of all the evils Facebook has been involved in – it’s been implicated in genocide – spouting bullshit is fairly far down the list. But Mark Zuckerberg’s latest speech is a great example of how you shouldn’t trust the company to tell you what time it is, let alone fight for truth and justice. Here’s… [more]
-
The kids and I went to see the new Shaun The Sheep film, Farmageddon, today. It’s warm, wonderful, and very British – in the best possible sense of the word. I laughed even more than my kids did. [more]
-
Piers Morgan, who used to write homophobic stories in The Sun before that became socially unacceptable, is currently making hay from the idea that there are more than 100 genders. It’s based on a comment made in a video where someone was rather clunkily trying to express the idea that gender is a spectrum. We’re… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
