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If you had any remaining doubts that trans people are the go-to bogeymen for the bigoted, the venal and the incompetent, look no further than disgraced former prime minister Liz Truss. Despite only being in office for 44 days before resigning, Truss managed to spook the markets, send borrowing rates into orbit and tanked the… [more]
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Grief is a horrendous thing, and it’s something we all process in different ways. And Brianna Ghey’s mum, Esther, is grieving something no parent should have to go through: the death of her child, a death whose brutality and ferocity are beyond most people’s understanding. With grief comes guilt, an endless parade of what-ifs and… [more]
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It’s very hard to see any light at the end of the anti-trans tunnel; just yesterday, it emerged that a teenager has been charged for the attempted murder of a trans teen in North London. The 18-year-old trans girl was stabbed 14 times in a confrontation that began with strangers shouting transphobic slurs at her;… [more]
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Kate Watson’s blog post on the scourge of events, the “more of a comment than a question” guy, is worth your time. It does a great job of explaining why he’s a menace, and what you can do to stop him derailing the Q&A. If and when the mic goes to someone and the dreaded… [more]
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It’s been said so often that it’s a cliché, but the job of journalism is to report the truth. Its job is to investigate, to find facts, and to follow those facts to see where they lead. It is a process of discovering, of uncovering, of seeing and telling what’s really going on. In order… [more]
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The biggest ever survey of trans people in the US has found, unsurprisingly, that transition makes our lives better. Which of course is why we do it, often at great personal cost. And why so few of us detransition, despite what the anti-trans mob would have you believe. Depending on the category, between 94% and… [more]
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As I’ve said once or twice, Jude Doyle is one of the most insightful people writing about being trans today. This piece, about writer’s block, erasure and being “a gender traitor”, is particularly good even though much of the subject matter is horrible people doing horrible things. One of the reasons I love Jude’s writing… [more]
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Content warning: child murder, transphobia, slurs When primary school children were massacred in Dunblane in 1996, the UK responded with severe restrictions on gun ownership – and when twenty children and six adults were massacred in Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, most people expected the US to do the same. No sane person can… [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.
