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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]
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Here’s one of my favourite jokes. A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He looks at the other patrons and realises that the man next to him has a small orange for a head. “Excuse me,” he says. “I can’t help noticing that –” “I have a small orange for a head?”… [more]
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This is absolutely terrifying: YouTube has a “conspiracy ecosystem”. YouTube viewers who started searching for information on “crisis actors†— people who supposedly play roles as mass shooting survivors to push gun control — could soon find themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about the the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the JFK assassination… [more]
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This is wonderful, and made me cry. It’s a phone ad, showing first wedding dances shot on iPhones. But what’s significant is that these weddings are in Australia, where equal marriage has just been made law. These are the first dances of the first Australian LGBT weddings. [more]
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I recently cancelled my long-standing subscription to The Times and Sunday Times because I was getting fed up with its selective reporting. As any writer knows, you can change a story by choosing what to include and what not to include – so if you leave out important details you can create a misleading impression.… [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.
