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There’s an interesting piece in NY Magazine about the corrosive effects of highly partisan news. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They [more]
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Writing for the NYT, Jennifer Finney Boylan compares anti-trans rhetoric to anti-immigration rhetoric. When members of the present administration claim that people like me should be “erased,†are they not saying, in so many words, “Build that wall?†Are they not echoing the cries of every xenophobic bigot throughout history in furiously demanding that I Go [more]
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You can tell a lot about the UK newspaper industry by the people the Society of Editors chooses to garland in its annual UK Press Awards. This year, as if anointing the Mail on Sunday’s Sanchez Manning “specialist journalist of the year” for her ongoing campaign of anti-trans scaremongering and vilification wasn’t bad enough, the [more]
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There is a lot online about gender dysphoria, the discomfort or even horror some trans people have about the gender they were assigned at birth. But there’s a flip side when you get to be your real self: gender euphoria, the feeling that at least for the moment, everything is the way it should be. [more]
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Most of the discussions about trans people are about us and without us. That means the terms of the debate are set by people who aren’t trans, so misrepresentation, mischaracterisation and myths abound. This isn’t new, but two recently published pieces provide a good illustration of some of the more persistent tropes. Two of the [more]
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In response to Transgender Day of Visibility yesterday, I saw multiple social media threads hijacked by cisgender straight man, many of whom demanded to know why we needed transgender visibility day but not straight pride days. They demanded to know: what rights don’t trans people have? How about the right to live free from abuse [more]
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In an extract from his upcoming book Ruined By Design, Mike Monteiro explains the problem with social media and how it ruined the early promise of the internet. The people who built Twitter (and other services) were a bunch of young men. This is important. More accurately, they were a bunch of white guys. Those [more]
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It’s Mother’s Day today (hi mum!), and it’s also international transgender day of visibility. The former is a celebration of mums; the latter, a celebration of their sons and daughters. I know Mother’s Day can be hard for some women, cisgender or transgender: not everybody who desperately wants to be a mum can be one, [more]
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This is from BBC Question Time this week: the question was pre-vetted, selected for broadcast and posted on social media to get publicity for the show. Is it morally right for the nation’s broadcaster to imply that “LGBT issues” may be immoral? If you don’t have your thesaurus handy, here are some synonyms for immoral: [more]
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Every week, I pay around £150 to lie on a table for two hours and have a procession of heated, electric needles jabbed into my skin. I’ve been doing it for about eight months now, and I’ve got at least another eight months to go. Electrolysis permanently removes facial hair, but for me it’s exceptionally [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.
