-
It’s Sunday, so of course The Sunday Times is running more hit pieces on trans women. What’s wrong with this picture? The clue’s in the caption. Verity Smith isn’t a trans woman. He’s a trans man, assigned female at birth and now transitioning to male. The juxtaposition of headline and photo are clearly deliberate and… [more]
-
(Content warning: sexual violence) Sometimes magazines provide advice that’s genuinely dangerous. Here’s an example from Glamour UK: The screenshot comes courtesy of the group We Can’t Consent To This, which campaigns against the normalisation of sexual violence against women. Glamour is one of many fashion and health magazines (including men’s magazines) that have talked about… [more]
-
(Content warning: slurs) If it were possible to bet on the public pronouncements of terrible people, you could make a ton of money with a very simple rule: if someone has awful opinions on trans people, sooner or later you’ll discover that they have lots of other awful opinions too. Here’s just one day’s trawl.… [more]
-
Frankie Boyle went viral again yesterday for suggesting that there were “perfectly legitimate reasons” for being suspicious of Greta Thunberg. “For example, the fact that you’re a big stupid man-baby, tricked by an algorithm into taking your opinions from corporate power.” Inevitably, some people on the internet disagreed and thought it was a great idea… [more]
-
In Today’s Scottish edition of The Times, the odious yahoos at For Women Scotland – a single-issue anti-trans pressure group – get a headline claiming that women’s services are being “starved by trans funding”. Is it true? Of course it isn’t. Here’s Jeffrey Ingold, head of media for Stonewall UK, on Twitter. 1/ This anti-trans… [more]
-
One of the things I love about the internet is that it can bring you stories from voices you wouldn’t otherwise hear. This is a good example: it’s a long and interesting piece about sex work by Lorelei Lee. It’s a great article about something I know very little about, a series of pictures from a… [more]
-
The High Court in England has ruled that Guardian journalist Freddy McConnell, a trans man, cannot be named as the father of his child on their birth certificate. McConnell is his child’s dad, and as he has a gender recognition certificate he is legally a man. However, the court has taken the view that what matters… [more]
-
A few months ago, Irish TV channel RTE gave airtime to a notorious anti-trans bigot and bully in order to “balance” the insights of people who actually know what they’re talking about. The wonky-eyed washed-up yokel impersonator from a village currently missing an idiot was given multiple opportunities to spout ill-informed, often malicious nonsense; when… [more]
-
(Content warning: suicidal ideation) I was asked by LGBT Health and Wellbeing to speak at an event about LGBT+ mental health yesterday: the three other panelists and I were asked to share our own experiences of mental health provision, where it falls short and where it might be improved. This is a slightly more coherent version… [more]
-
(Content warning: extreme violence) Writing in The New Republic, Osita Nwanevu offers a recap of legendarily offensive comedian Lenny Bruce’s demise. Over the course of a six-month trial, critics, academics, psychiatrists, and even a minister spoke in Bruce’s defense—none more beseechingly than Bruce himself. “Don’t finish me off in show business,†he pleaded before his… [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.
