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The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review… [more]
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Index on Censorship reports that 53% of school librarians have been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books from their shelves. In an Index survey of UK school librarians, 53% of respondents said they had been asked to remove books, with more than half of those requests coming from parents. Of those, 56% removed the book or… [more]
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One of the “keyboard warriors” who fuelled the recent English racist riots, Twitter user WayneGb88, appeared in court yesterday and was jailed for three years. During the trial, he told the court that he earns approximately £1,400 per month from posting hate speech on the former Twitter. This is why hate speech is everywhere: it… [more]
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This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review. As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in… [more]
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Via Benevolent Siren on Bluesky, here’s a piece written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941: Who goes Nazi? Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never… [more]
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My youngest is obsessed with skating right now, and that means I spend a lot of time taking them to skate parks, pump tracks and so on. For a bit of variety yesterday we went to one of the more far-away favourites, a track near the national football stadium in Glasgow’s south side, and that’s… [more]
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Scientific American reports that the Cass Review has led to “a plethora of abuses and humiliations” for young trans people, which for some includes forced detransition. We estimate more than 1,000 trans adolescents in the U.K. now find that their treatment is illegal. Families risk an up to two-year prison sentence for supporting a child’s… [more]
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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: politicians, the BBC and the press are reporting outright bigotry as “concerns” and one side of a “controversy” or “debate”. Not genital-obsessed weirdos this time, at least not today, although I’m sure the Venn diagram of those people and today’s bunch has a lot of overlap: this time… [more]
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I think in years to come the Cass Review, and the media’s complicity, will be viewed in much the same way as Andrew Wakefield’s infamous MMR scare and its promotion by Private Eye and UK newspapers. Unfortunately like Wakefield, it will continue to harm people until and long after it’s been fully discredited and its… [more]
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Update, 26/7: Vivian, Musk’s estranged daughter, has given an interview to NBC: “if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.” Elon Musk has given an appalling interview to the appalling Jordan Peterson in which he demonises and deadnames his trans daughter, claiming… [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.
