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On Friday, hundreds of US parents protested against the vaccination of children. I liked the Huffington Post headline: Parents Protest For Kids’ Right To Suffer From Preventable Illness. The protest was in Washington State, which is currently in the middle of a measles epidemic. The parents are trying to stop a bill that would remove… [more]
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As long as people have made music, other people have tried to censor it. The famously miserable song Gloomy Sunday, originally published in 1933, was banned by the BBC until 2002. George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows was banned in 1940 for its supposedly smutty lyrics. More recently, bands were banned from airplay during the… [more]
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You don’t need me to tell you about the horrors of the Holocaust, of the brutally efficient attempts to wipe out Jewish people, Roma and LGBT people. But somebody clearly needs to tell the yahoos of Turning Point, the Trump-aligned, MAGA hat-wearing political group that’s just set up shop in the UK with the endorsement… [more]
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You might not be aware of this, but the anti-trans stance of English (and more recently, Scottish) newspapers is greeted with bafflement in the rest of the world. The New York Times tries to explain English anti-trans activism for its readers. If the idea that transphobic harassment could be “feminist†bewilders you, you are not… [more]
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This is the latest story in the Times and Sunday Times’ ongoing campaign against trans people. Even by those low standards, it’s a pathetic attempt at turning something innocuous into a hit piece. The tweet in question was posted in November. Here it is: Excellent @scotgov #TransInclusion event bringing #colleagues together with inspirational trans role… [more]
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What’s that? The Sunday Times has printed a load of old bollocks again? I’m shocked! Shocked! My lecture yesterday was about calls for internet regulation, and I mentioned the media panics over “suicide sites” in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016… you get the idea. We’re in the middle of another panic now. Enter the… [more]
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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]
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.
