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The writer Julia Serano has organised an online protest today: LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back. It’s a US protest but has worldwide support: the message to the Democrats, and to supposedly left-of-centre political parties elsewhere, is that human rights, healthcare and safety for LGBTQ+ folks are not and should never be negotiable. Serano has… [more]
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I meant to post this a while back: a piece I wrote for Gutter magazine about the “content industry” and what it means for artists. Of course there has always been business around art. The music business, the art market, the publishing industry, the comedy circuit, the comic book trade and others have all seen… [more]
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The UK isn’t the only country where there have been reviews into the effectiveness and safety of puberty blockers. And it’s interesting to see what such reviews conclude when they’re not created to deliver, and staffed by people promised a peerage if they deliver, a pre-determined conclusion to support a political goal. The latest such… [more]
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This, by Girl on the Net, is very good. Love doesn’t hurt you on purpose. Love does not repeatedly make selfish choices that will damage you physically or emotionally. It doesn’t yell at you, or lie to you, or gaslight you or tell you you’re worthless. Love doesn’t vote for someone who doesn’t believe you’re… [more]
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I was honoured to lend my voice to The Missing, an episode of The Quilt, the LGBTQ+ audio exhibition and podcast in association with the Queer Britain museum. It’s an oral history of queer lives in the UK; this episode, the third in a series of eight, focuses on Scotland from the Highland Clearances to… [more]
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The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they… [more]
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Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result. The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both… [more]
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In the US, the Trump campaign has spent nearly one-third of its campaign funds on anti-trans attack ads around major sporting fixtures and other popular events. Vox: Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most… [more]
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I came out as trans eight years ago today, so if this is just a phase then it’s proving to be an awfully long one. [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.
