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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]
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The Matrix, a fun if daft bit of sci-fi, is 20. Lots of publications are running retrospectives on its impact, which was significant: among other achievements it introduced the world to the concept of “red pilling”, where you take the red pill and finally see reality. Red pilling is a trope among far-right goons and… [more]
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OpenDemocracy previously reported the dark money being used by US evangelists to finance “grassroots” pressure groups. But the story is much, much bigger. US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the… [more]
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I think what I hate most about bigots is their laziness. The stuff they write about trans people is just the stuff they said about gay people, with “gay” Tipp-Exed out and “trans” scribbled in its place. The Implausible Girl on Twitter has some examples. First, the silencing of people by a sinister lobby (2000):… [more]
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This is wonderful. Fed up with the difficulty of finding decent stock photography of trans and non-binary people, Vice/Broadly commissioned its own – and it’s made the photos available for free under a Creative Commons licence, so pretty much anybody can use them. The Gender Spectrum Collection is online here and features 180 photos covering… [more]
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My friend drew this in the pub last night. I got a bit emotional. For the last 10 days I’ve been in enforced boy mode: because I’ve taken on quite a lot of extra electrolysis sessions to remove my facial hair, I haven’t been allowed to shave. You can’t zap and pull stubble out if… [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.
