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Here’s a simple question. What’s the purpose of anti-discrimination legislation? Is it (a) to protect vulnerable people from discrimination, for example in employment, education or health care? Or is it (b) to enable people to be howling arseholes to vulnerable people? If you answered (b), you may be a religious extremist. I’ll preface this with my usual… [more]
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I caught this by accident today and absolutely adored it: the final episode of Between Ourselves With Marian Keyes, featuring the author reading some of her non-fiction and chatting with Tara Flynn. Some of it was deadly serious, some of it had me laughing like a drain, some of it was the sound of nails… [more]
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I sometimes wonder if a master satirist has seized control of parts of the mainstream media. How else to explain the Telegraph’s video that asks us to consider the plight of poor, marginalised, oppressed… Tories? I’m not joking. The video tells us that the only safe space – a term the Telegraph despises, yet uses… [more]
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Yesterday, Home Secretary Priti Patel threw immigrants under the bus. With obvious delight, she vowed to “end the free movement of people once and for all”; in a deeply sinister dog-whistle she added: “this daughter of immigrants needs no lectures from the North London, metropolitan, liberal elite.” The phrase “North London metropolitan elite” (also expressed… [more]
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One of my friends wasn’t born in the UK. Despite having lived here for a very long time, paying lots of money in tax and marrying the love of her life, a lifelong UK citizen, she does not currently know whether she will be allowed to stay in the UK post-Brexit. As you can imagine,… [more]
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Step 1: don’t buy headphones on eBay. Step 2: there is no step 2. I did a very un-me thing last week after losing my beloved Sony headphones: I bought a replacement set on eBay instead of paying a little more to get them from somewhere reputable such as John Lewis. Inevitably, they turned out… [more]
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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]
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(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]
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(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]
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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]
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.
