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If you think we’ve got problems with fake news now, wait until deepfake is mainstream. The Guardian: Show a neural network enough examples of faces from two celebrities and it’ll develop its own mental model of what they look like, capable of generating new faces with specific expressions. Ask it to generate a set of… [more]
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Metro asked me to write about International Women’s Day from the perspective of a trans person. There’s no method to this madness, no reason for it. Men aren’t from Mars, women aren’t from Venus, and nobody’s made of slugs, snails or puppy dogs’ tails, let alone sugar and spice and all things nice. The only… [more]
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Good news for anybody stuck in 1818: The Sun and The Times have both shared the incredible revelation that according to “snowflake students”, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus should be pitied. Here’s The Sun: Next the snowflakes will be telling us that The Metamorphosis wasn’t really about cockroaches and that… [more]
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Secondary ticketing – the sites ripping off consumers by charging enormous fees on top of industrial scale ticket touting – is in the news again today. We need more transparency about their charges, apparently. That’s true: the sites use every trick in the book to hide their fees, which are ridiculous. There’s a huge service… [more]
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This video, by Sarah McBride, is very good. It asks a very simple question: if your loved one came out as trans, what kind of world would you want them to live in? [more]
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This one’s about being enormously sociable on the internet and completely alone in real life. David came up with the main riff while messing around with the SoundPrism app, and despite my best efforts to turn it into a punk-metal song it ended up much more floaty. You can imagine Snoop Dogg rapping over it.… [more]
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This one’s three years old, and it’s about optimism: after a year of treatment my depression seemed to be on the way out, and I wanted to try and capture that in music. I love David’s guitar in this: it’s woozy and languid, which fits the subject perfectly. Most of the time when I write… [more]
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I posted the other day about supposed trans-species people, but I think my point got a bit lost. Transgender people are real. Werewolves, elves and dragons aren’t. There’s no such thing as a dragon spectrum, where some people are a little bit dragon and others quite a lot. There’s no chromosome that makes you an… [more]
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Conservative MP Nadine Dorries on Twitter: Body language of traitor Major sat next to her is revealing. https://t.co/HNabKkr9dp — Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) February 28, 2018 This is incredibly dangerous, and she’s not the only MP using such language. And of course certain newspapers run headlines about “enemies of the people”. These aren’t words that anybody… [more]
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Imagine if journalists writing articles about things spoke to people with expert knowledge of those things. That’s what Caitlin Logan does. To find out what concerns Scottish women’s groups may have about gender reform, trans people and self-ID, she spoke to women’s groups: Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Young Women’s Movement (YWCA Scotland), Edinburgh… [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.
