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The Gender Recognition Act consultation is now closed, thank God. In the short months since it began it’s been used by conservatives to mount a shockingly vicious campaign against trans people. Some 53,000 responses had been received by Friday. That isn’t a consultation. It’s a pile-on. It’s yet more evidence that human rights shouldn’t be [more]
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Many trans people don’t come out until later in life. We have partners, sometimes children. Revealing our secret is devastating. I’ve been asked the same question many times: Why didn’t you tell them? And sometimes the subtext to that is: Why did you lie for so long? The honest answer is that I didn’t lie. [more]
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Stephen Paton writes in The National about the mischaracterisation of gender reform as a “trans vs feminists” debate. With the debate so heavily influenced by these groups, it’s no wonder that a narrative proclaiming trans rights must come at the cost of women’s has found mainstream attention, while sneaky facts that contradict it have been [more]
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One big upside of being part of a demonised minority: it saves you a fortune. I cancelled my decades-long subscription to Private Eye yesterday: the current issue has three news stories about trans things in which it unquestioningly parroted anti-trans bullshit, picked on a trans charity and an LGBT charity and vilified a young trans [more]
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Dawn Foster has written a brave, gut-wrenching, important piece about online misogyny and abuse. The majority of men are not like this, but unbidden, I find myself more on guard than I ever was before. Too many men have proudly sent lengthy pen portraits of my imagined rape, murder or maiming, glutted with detail, and [more]
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My previous post about How To Write Good included some really inelegant pronoun use: I wrote about “she/he” in connection with an unnamed, entirely imaginary writer. That looked and read awfully, so I changed it to “s/he”. Which made it worse. It turns out that it’s better to avoid gendering things that don’t need to [more]
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The image is from an excellent blog post by Shane O’Leary, which you can read here. [Update: My friend Chris Phin, who is an editor and therefore always right, has pointed out that I am of course describing practical writing here, not writing as an art form in its own right. I’d better clarify that [more]
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This R.E.M. song came on in the pub tonight and I burst into tears. It used to make me cry a lot 20 years ago, and I couldn’t explain why. I said I’m not supposed to be like this / Let’s try to find a happy game to play / I’m not supposed to be like [more]
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The UK Government Equalities Office has issued a statement regarding the unhinged coverage of the Gender Recognition Act consultation in this weekend’s newspapers. [Emphasis mine] Neither GEO nor Ministers were approached for comment on today’s coverage on the Gender Recognition Act. Any speculation that decisions have already been made on the Gender Recognition Act is wrong. [more]
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We’re a selfish species, by and large. If something doesn’t directly affect us we tend to take the approach that “I’m all right, Jack.” Sometimes that means we resist changes that would make the world a slightly better place for other people. Sometimes we choose to believe the lone voice against the settled science because [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.
