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I hadn’t seen this before: a Q&A on gender recognition by the Fawcett Society, a leading feminist charity campaigning for women’s rights. It strikes me as nuanced and fair-minded, so for example: The tone of the debate in some quarters, and on extremes of both sides, has been a problem. Amplified by social media, a small… [more]
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One of the things I’m really interested in is where words come from and how they’re used. For example, I’ll happily bore you senseless about how “shambles” has changed meaning several times. In the 15th century what originally meant a stool or money changer’s table became used to label the table butchers used to display… [more]
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It’s world kindness day today, which is a great excuse to post one of my favourite Kurt Vonnegut quotes: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule… [more]
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Here’s a fun question for you. Which group of people is so obsessed with enforcing regressive gender stereotypes that they’ve killed a woman, injured several others and set fire to various bits of land? Is it: (a) LGBT+ people? (b) The straights? It is of course (b), thanks to one of the most awful facets… [more]
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Something that’s puzzled me for a while is how so many people believe that Donald Trump and his administration are pro-LGBT+ when they’ve been so viciously anti-LGBT+: from the transgender military ban onwards, they have mounted a sustained attack on the basic rights of LGBT+ people in an ongoing campaign to remove the most basic… [more]
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Writing in Vox, Katelyn Burns’ piece about Luna Younger demonstrates why media outlets should have trans people covering trans issues: unlike pretty much every piece about the poor kid I’ve read so far, it eschews ill-informed scaremongering. If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a horrible battle in the US between two estranged… [more]
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Interesting developments at the LGB Alliance, the newly launched anti-trans group. It’s managed to raise over £25,000 in largely anonymous donations in just 11 days of existence, largely due to support from right-wing media here and in the US. The right-wing press and the US religious right like the Alliance because while it advances the same… [more]
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Imagine if members of the Scottish Parliament invited leading far-right “race realist” figures to address the parliament about The Great Replacement, the white nationalist conspiracy theory. They would tell MSPs about how political and social elites were harming ordinary white men and women by encouraging immigration. They would claim that this global conspiracy, a conspiracy… [more]
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The president of actors’ union Equity has written to The Sunday Mirror about its story claiming “men could be banned from playing panto dames to free up the roles for trans performers”. Guess what? It’s bullshit. Here’s her letter. [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.
