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I used the term “man babies” on Radio Scotland this morning and pretty much immediately I received a private Facebook message demanding an explanation of the term. I’m not going to reply for two reasons. One, I don’t think the listener is asking in good faith, because it was perfectly clear what I meant. I [more]
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While commentators whip up hysteria over the imagined threat of trans people in toilets, here’s the reality. Reuters: Transgender youth, along with those who do not identify as male or female, are at increased risk of sexual violence in schools that force them to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender assigned at [more]
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The New Yorker has published a lovely essay by Emma Rathbone, Before The Internet. Before the Internet, you could move to a new state and no one at school would know anything about you. You’d have no online history. You could be anyone. You would lean against the lockers with a faraway expression on your [more]
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This case could be very significant. Former Times night editor Katherine O’Donnell’s employment tribunal raises an interesting question: does the content that newspapers publish fall under their duty of care to their employees? O’Donnell alleges multiple counts of illegal behaviour towards her after she transitioned to female, and her claims lift the rock to show [more]
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[Content note: vicious transphobia, racial epithets and trauma] This is a photo of Tyra Hunter. She died in 1995. Hunter, who was 25, was injured in a car crash. When first responders arrived on the scene, they cut off her clothes and discovered that she was transgender. Instead of treating her they verbally abused her and [more]
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When Michael Phelps, who is a straight white man, became the most decorated Olympian of all time he was hailed as a “legend” and greeted with glowing newspaper profiles on how “a biomechanical freak of nature” had a competitive advantage over other athletes because he had a “body made to swim”. When Caster Semenya, who [more]
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A picture tells a thousand words, especially this one. For me at least, most of the thousand words are swears. [more]
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Many newspapers have based their digital strategy on lazy clickbait: contrarianism, hyperbole and trivia. There’s just one problem with that. It’s a road to nowhere. Writing in The Irish Times, former Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris describes the new media operations of Ireland’s beleaguered Independent News & Media group. A decision was made to prioritise [more]
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The writer Aidan Comerford, who’s ended up getting a lot of online abuse for being supportive of trans people, asked women who support trans rights to share their photos so he could put them in a collage. The collage was to show that the anti-trans crowd are not acting in their name. In just a [more]
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Today’s stupid ideas: rape victims should hand over their phones to police or have the investigations dropped. There are two big problems with this. One, it’s victim-blaming: the number of false allegations is incredibly low and massively overshadowed by the solid, evidence-backed allegations that don’t lead to prosecution. The idea that a victim’s communications history [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.
