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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]
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The latest Garbage Day newsletter, on online extremism, the manosphere and Taylor Swift conspiracy theories, is very good. Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to… [more]
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Over the last few days, I’ve read about two people who’ve been the subject of faked sexual images. Such images are typically created by grafting a person’s face onto the body of a porn performer, but increasingly this process is being handled by AI-type apps that can create very convincing-looking fakes with minimal human input.… [more]
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Following on from yesterday’s post about bots ruining social media, the excellent Ian Betteridge writes about what we can expect when creating crap is much faster than detecting it. This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources… [more]
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Via Joan Westenberg on Threads, here’s ReplyGuy. ReplyGuy is a bot that will find conversations on the internet and promote your product automatically by spamming those conversations while pretending to be people. Every day we take a step closer to the dead internet, where the bulk of online conversations are bots talking to bots and… [more]
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There’s an excellent example of how newspapers create and maintain moral panics in the Sunday Times today, when Camilla Long notes with horror that: One school in Wales has written to parents saying it will not be providing “litter trays” for children “who identify as cats”. The reason for the letter was to debunk the… [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.
