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What is journalism actually for? According to the late humorist Finley Peter Dunne: Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward. More recently, the… [more]
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I think most of us have had the classic anxiety dream where we’re standing up in front of people and we’re either naked or in our underwear. I pretty much lived it today – although, you’ll be pleased to read, I was neither naked nor dressed only in my underwear. I was at Stirling University,… [more]
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There’s a well-known gag on Twitter: “I can’t believe leopards are eating my face!” says woman who voted for the “Leopards Eating Your Face Party”. In the US and increasingly in the UK, self-described “radical feminists” who hate trans people are linking arms with virulently anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT groups such as the Heritage Foundation, convinced… [more]
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There were lots of things about being a parent I didn’t expect. Fear was one of them. Almost overnight I became hyper-aware of the world’s many dangers, bursting into tears at newspaper reports of terrible things. It felt as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off, exposing me to things I’d previously… [more]
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One of the more odious groups of people to crawl out of the internet are the pick-up artists (PUAs), who treat women as commodities and whose tactics are thoroughly awful. There has been plenty of (rightful) condemnation of these clowns, most recently over the BBC Social investigation of repellent Scots PUA A-Game, although it’s worth… [more]
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This is the latest version of the Genderbread Person, an attempt to clear up the differences between gender identity, sexual/romantic attraction and anatomical sex – differences that many self-appointed experts seem unwilling or unable to understand. The reason there are multiple versions is because it’s under constant review to make it as clear and understandable… [more]
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Harris Brewis just did something amazing. Brewis is a gamer, known online as hbomberguy, and he decided to annoy Graham Linehan. Linehan is famous for co-writing Father Ted and Black Books a couple of decades ago, but in the last few years he’s done little of note beyond spending pretty much all of his time… [more]
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Women are being warned not to put herbs in their vaginas after a Marie Claire article suggested that they should use parsley to “kick-start” their periods. It’s easy to laugh, but it’s actually quite a serious problem: time and again magazines and online magazines aimed at women print deluded and sometimes actively dangerous health advice… [more]
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As ever, the Daily Mash does a great job of skewering a news story: this time, the ridiculous outrage over a Gillette ad. A RAZOR blade company has expressed surprise that its latest advert has pissed off a lot of dickheads. In a stunning development, the company’s latest campaign – which calls on the #MeToo… [more]
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Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of the thinky thoughts of anti-trans columnists, we had some actual research into children, gender dysphoria and gender identity? Look what The Atlantic found! Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of… [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.
