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The UK has lost its measles-free status, which is deeply worrying. In response the BBC asks, “why are some children not being vaccinated?” Dr David Robert Grimes may have part of the answer. On Twitter this morning he posted this: Asked by regional BBC station to discuss falling vaccination rates – grand, except they wanted [more]
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I read this in a single sitting last night and cried through the whole thing. What would you do if your child came out as trans, or if your spouse did? What if both of those things happened? You may know Amanda Jetté Knox from Twitter, where she’s @mavenofmayhem. In this book she writes about [more]
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A few days ago, a thread about radicalisation went viral. In it, Joanna Shroeder spoke about the way in which far-right activists recruit boys and young men by weaponising shame. The process goes something like this: Boys are encouraged to transgress social norms by posting racist, homophobic, misogynist or anti-semitic jokes The boys are then called [more]
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The New York Times has put together a comprehensive series of reports on Gamergate, the poisonous movement that’s transformed politics for the worse. What began as misogyny would soon incorporate white nationalism; what began in video gaming circles would become a mass movement affecting everything. It’s impressive, powerful and frightening stuff, and the reverberations continue [more]
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Buzzfeed news: Two Transgender Employees Of The Guardian Have Quit Over Its “Transphobic” Reporting …Her resignation marks a flashpoint in what multiple sources at the Guardian have described to BuzzFeed News as a deepening internal war over the rights of transgender people – and how the organisation reports on them. Staff members across several departments [more]
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This, the result of a months-long investigation by the New York Times, is terrifying: How YouTube radicalised Brazil. A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life. Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos [more]
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I went to see Kathryn Joseph in Edinburgh last night, performing her When I Wake The Want Is album in its entirety. Incredibly, the performances this week haven’t sold out yet. If you can go, you should: it was an astonishing, emotional, occasionally terrifying and utterly bewitching performance by an extraordinary talent. [more]
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Writing in Metro, Owl Stefania writes about the importance of video games in her coming out process:Â “Growing up, video games were my escape, providing an avenue where I could explore who I was.” I’ve written about this too, and a version of the following article was originally published in 404 Ink magazine in late 2017. [more]
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Tea Uglow did an interesting thing. They took screenshots of articles containing the word “transgender” on a few English news outlets. Over the last 12 months, there were 878 articles. That doesn’t include publications such as the New Statesman, which has been home to a lot of anti-trans voices, and to regional press such as [more]
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Here’s The Sun newspaper in 1992. If you think that sounds familiar, have a read of Terry Sanderson’s Media Watch column from that month, May 1992. Sanderson spent a quarter of a century battling against bigotry in UK newspapers, and sadly the publications and the writers don’t seem to have changed much. There was Julie [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.
