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It’s Trans Day of Visibility today, a day to celebrate trans people’s lives and raise awareness of discrimination. And like any other day, it’s a day when trans people continue to be invisible and powerless. There are no trans people elected to any of the UK’s parliaments; no trans columnists with regular gigs on national… [more]
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Two things can be true at the same time. Meta (and other platform providers such as X) is a wicked and dangerous organisation that does wicked and dangerous things. And Meta losing in court over supposed “social media addiction” is bad because it will have chilling effects. Writing in the New Statesman, Séamas O’Reilly explains the… [more]
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Two of the highest-profile anti-trans extremists in the UK have done what we always knew they would do: they’re standing alongside the religious right to restrict women’s reproductive freedom. The Times reports that Sharron Davies and the former EHRC chair Kishwer Falkner are demanding a ban on “pills by post” as part of a wider… [more]
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Writing for Queer AF, Ludovic Parsons has written an excellent history of the UK’s severely broken system of trans healthcare. It’s a tale of a system built to control people rather than help them, a system that even today considers trans people a problem to be solved rather than people who need healthcare. And it… [more]
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NHS England has banned the prescription of hormones to 16 and 17 year olds, formalising a policy that already existed in practice, and as with the Cass Review they’ve committed medical fraud to justify a ban based on ideology rather than evidence. The review of evidence they undertook excluded almost 97% of studies from inclusion,… [more]
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British athletes have been told they’ll have to pay £185 out of their own pockets for compulsory sex testing if they want to compete internationally, but only if they’re women: men don’t have to do the tests. The goal is to ensure that trans women and women with DSDs (disorders of sexual development, such as… [more]
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There’s a piece in Politico urging the media to stop normalising the far right. The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a… [more]
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There are lots of entertaining things about the Greens winning the Gordon and Denton by-election, but perhaps the funniest is the disastrous performance of the vocally transphobic Conservative candidate. Cadden, a trustee of the anti-trans lobbyist/lawfare group Sex Matters who co-founded and chaired the anti-trans police group Police SEEN UK, got just 1.9% of the… [more]
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A new paper in Nature (PDF document here) confirms what many of us already knew: it acts as a radicalisation engine, shifting people’s political views permanently to the right. By using an algorithmic feed – where X decides what you see rather than the chronological feed of Bluesky – and comparing it to people using… [more]
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Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time. …any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? 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.
