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I’m indebted to Tennessee Pete on Twitter for the link to and commentary on this story: As he put it: This is such a good case study for manufacturing consent because it’s just… ‘in response to Iran’ In response to Iran doing what? No, not in response to any provocation, just in response to Iran. [more]
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Imagine if the BBC had been taken to a tribunal over allegations of bullying, bias and malpractice so serious the entire management team were made to appear as witnesses. Newspapers would be all over the story, with good reason. As award-winning journalist Liz Gerard points out on Twitter, if you swap the BBC for The Times [more]
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These are the politicians who passed the horrific anti-abortion bill in Alabama. Notice any similarities? It’s easy to look across the Atlantic in horror at Dark Ages throwbacks such as these yahoos, but don’t forget that right here in the UK abortion is still illegal in Northern Ireland, as is equal marriage. In Northern Ireland, [more]
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Scotland’s only openly transgender elected official has resigned over “institutionalised transphobia” in the SNP. Dundee councillor Gregor Murray has repeatedly clashed with senior SNP figures including Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine. Murray: The SNP has a major institutional problem with transphobia, and is doing nothing to rectify this. While they rightfully condemn Labour for anti-semitism, and [more]
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One of the witnesses in Katherine O’Donnell’s employment tribunal against her former employer The Times  is Christine Burns MBE. Burns played a key part in the creation of UK equality legislation, and she’s been monitoring and reporting on the press coverage of trans issues for very many years. In her submission to the tribunal, she describes [more]
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Writer Erynn Brook has posted an important thread on Twitter that begins with a simple question: why does she, a Canadian woman, care so much about abortion law in the US? The answer isn’t just that it’s a moral position, that if you care about women’s rights you should care about women’s rights everywhere. It’s [more]
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Danah Boyd recently gave a talk at the Digital Public Library of America conference. It’s chilling stuff and chimes with my own thoughts about the internet: what we once thought would be a powerful, enlightening force for good has been weaponised and by people who want to tear our world apart. What’s at stake right [more]
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In Scotland, one of the most pernicious bits of anti-trans bullshit is the claim that gender recognition reform is a sudden development, something the Scottish Government is doing in secret and trying to rush through so that women’s groups can’t object. Not only does that overlook the extensive, well publicised public consultation on gender recognition [more]
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I’m not the only one to notice the growing links between anti-trans groups, religious extremists and reactionary conservatives. Writing in Jezebel, Esther Wang explores “The Unholy Alliance of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists and the Right Wing.” In a sign of how their thinking mirrors one another, it can be remarkably difficult to distinguish between the talking [more]
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Writing on Medium, Jessica Valenti discusses the horrific anti-abortion legislation in Georgia, which from 2020 will ban abortions after six weeks – a period during which many women aren’t even aware that they’re pregnant. It’s going to ruin the lives of many women. The law may also consider women who have miscarriages as murderers in [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.
