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The Caledonian Sleeper train is in the news after the latest concerted “pile-on” (their words) by anti-trans activists who organise on Mumsnet: they don’t want trans people on sleeper trains. (It’s interesting to see people with hateful views, many of whom advocate violence against minorities, hiding behind the label “mumsnet user” and abusing the stereotype… [more]
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The leading trend on UK Twitter today is #PunishAMuslimDay. The Guido Fawkes political blog’s comments section is full of staggering, blatant anti-semitism. Social media has become a cesspool of racism and every other form of bigotry and stupidity imaginable. The world appears to be getting considerably dumber by the day. For many years I… [more]
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Today is international trans day of visibility, and the excellent Overtake asked me to write a piece about what it’s like to go out in public as yourself for the first time. I hope you find it as funny as I did writing it. [more]
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Profits! This is disturbing, to say the least. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal rumbles on, here’s Adam Ramsay’s view of “what happens when you privatise military propaganda”: If you privatise war, don’t be surprised if military firms start using the tools of war on ‘their own’ side. When Eisenhower warned of the Military Industrial Complex, he… [more]
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This photo made me cry. It’s #Project84 from the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which aims to reduce the number of men who kill themselves. 84 is the number of men in the UK who kill themselves every week, and there are 84 of these sculptures on the London skyline. It’s stark and beautiful in a… [more]
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Here’s a happy story: Jake and Hannah got married this week. Jake’s an actor, Hannah’s an army officer and the photos show a clearly delighted couple in love. I don’t know Hannah but I’m connected to Jake on Facebook and he strikes me as a thoroughly excellent human being, so it’s really lovely to see… [more]
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I’m doing something I should probably do more often: unfollowing a lot of people on social media. It’s not that they’re bad people. Quite the opposite. It’s that unfortunately good people often share bad things. I block or filter out a lot of people on Twitter and other networks: nazis, bigots, people who point at… [more]
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I’m not the best person to opine on Facebook: during its original meteoric rise I believed its momentum would slow and it would be overtaken by something less obviously dismissive of its users. After all, this was a business built on the belief that its users were “dumb fucks”, as Mark Zuckerberg famously said. So… [more]
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As you can probably guess, some of these titles are working titles. And some of the “last modified” dates are sitting there making me feel bad. We’re also trying to come up with a better band name – the GM bit of DMGM no longer applies, and it wasn’t a brilliant name anyway. My latest… [more]
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I retweeted a post by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty last night. If you’re not familiar with the social network Twitter, retweeting is when you copy somebody’s message so that the people who follow you on Twitter can see it. As part of a thread on Twitter’s toxic abuse problem, Haggerty wrote: Social media abuse is… [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.
