-
The ever-entertaining A Thousand Flowers blog has resurrected its Weekly Wanker slot for the Herald newspaper columnist Iain McWhirter, who has appointed himself as defender of women against the sinister trans agenda. It’s an amusing read, but it’s also fuelled by righteous anger. If you aren’t familiar with ATF, it’s a Scottish blog that often… [more]
-
Last year, there was a concerted smear campaign by anti-trans activists against the Mermaids charity. It began with misleading articles in major newspapers such as The Sunday Times (articles that have since been corrected after IPSO found them to be based on false allegations) and culminated in an organised campaign to get the Lottery fund… [more]
-
Last year, TRNSMT festival head Geoff Ellis told the BBC that there was “a long way to go” with gender balance at festivals: women weren’t really getting a look-in. “We do have strong female representation across the line-up but we’re committed to doing more,” he said. How’s that panned out this year? Of the eight… [more]
-
You’re probably familiar with the “if you’ve been affected by the issues raised in this programme…” warning at the end of gritty BBC dramas, which tells you about the Action Line information service. But it was conspicuous by its absence from last week’s episode of Call The Midwife, in which a character died from a… [more]
-
Let’s talk about toilets, shall we? Writing in The Daily Dose, Ingebord van Lieshout describes how “pee’d off” Dutch women are waging war for gender-neutral toilets. It’s an issue throughout the world, where so-called “potty parity” doesn’t exist: if you use the ladies’, you can expect long queues at any kind of public event. In… [more]
-
Every few months, a new bunch of ageing transsexuals will write a letter to The Guardian or they’ll write an open letter on the internet in which they moan about the “transgender umbrella” and how it’s just too broad. Various different people have been writing the same thing since about 1973, and while the names… [more]
-
I wrote about the horrors of unvaccinated children the other day. This is a great example of the problem. The article is about Shanelle Cartwright, the wife of an Australian rugby player. Over 400-odd words it regurgitates nonsense she posted on social media, describing her refusal  to vaccinate her kids as a “controversial decision”. It’s… [more]
-
When was the last time you had objectionable content rammed down your throat? Because according to the internet, it’s happening constantly. All over the world, people are getting things rammed right down their throats. Except, of course, they aren’t. Here’s an example. Today, one of my friends was reading a Facebook thread about a children’s… [more]
-
One of the most widely circulated anti-trans stories is that Soham child murder Ian Huntley is trans. The Star reported it 10 months ago, and it’s regularly trotted out by anti-trans groups and repeated in newspapers. Look what Jeremy Vine posted today. It’s from yesterday’s Star. Like the vast majority of such stories, it was… [more]
-
The Times, on Twitter: Almost 50 geoscientists have urged the government to commission an urgent review of the fracking earthquake limit, which they suggest should be raised to allow the industry to expand Sam Knight, a writer, also on Twitter: Of the 48 people that signed the letter, I could not confidently identify 9. I… [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.
