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There’s yet another worrying development in the parents vs education story: Conservative politician Andrea Leadsom says that parents should get to decide when their children “become exposed to that information”. Writing in the TES a few weeks ago, Natasha Devon explains why the “kids are too young” argument and two others are wrong. When it… [more]
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We told you so, #1. When religious groups protested about inclusive education in a Birmingham primary school, LGBT people said it was the thin end of the wedge. Protests have now expanded to more Birmingham schools who have abandoned their #NoOutsiders “respect everyone” lessons, and complaints have now been made to schools in Manchester too.… [more]
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BBC Scotland’s flagship news programme, The Nine*, appears to be making the same mistakes  that affect current affairs programming nationally and on radio: it’s trying to get on-air bust-ups instead of trying to inform its audience. I don’t know how much of this is deliberate – one of the channel’s aims is to create content… [more]
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MySpace, the leading social network from the pre-Facebook days, has accidentally (?) deleted more than a decade’s worth of music. Every piece of music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015, some 50 million songs from 14 million artists, is gone like tears in the rain. This is an important lesson: digital does not… [more]
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Every Friday for more than two years, The Root has responded to reader emails and comments. Last week, it only replied to one. In a powerful piece of writing, Michael Harriot responds to a teacher who feels that “the rhetoric has grown increasingly anti-white, especially from the black community.” The email is long, but here’s… [more]
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In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attack, every newspaper has been asking the same question: how did this happen? It’s a mystery. How could anti-muslim terror occur in part of the world where Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers ran 2,981 anti-muslim articles in a single year? Of course, Murdoch’s media empire isn’t just antipodean. He controls… [more]
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Thomas Page McBee regularly writes about his experiences as a trans man. On Them.us he writes about the tension between wanting to be masculine and wanting to avoid toxic masculinity, and there are some really engaging ideas in the piece. I particularly liked this bit. I have another body within this body — we all… [more]
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I’m not usually affected by news events but the terrorist attacks in Christchurch had me in tears this morning. As if the events weren’t horrific enough, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Sun have all put auto-play video from one of the terrorists’ cameras on their front page and surrounded it with adverts… [more]
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Last year, lesbian women used the #LwiththeT hashtag to declare solidarity with trans people. Now it’s the men’s turn, with an open letter proudly labelled #GwiththeT. Stonewall: In solidarity with the hashtag #LWithTheT that sprung up last summer, the outpouring of support for the #GWithTheT movement and support from all parts of LGBT communities shows that… [more]
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This is Maria, who you may recognise from the 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis. I met her at the weekend, and if you pop along to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh you can meet her too. She’s one of the attractions in the museum’s robots exhibition, which is great fun – there’s a Terminator!… [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.
