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A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI.… [more]
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The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK… [more]
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My friend was humiliated on the Glasgow subway last night. My friend is a conventionally attractive thirtysomething cisgender woman with great fashion sense and brightly coloured hair. This, apparently, was enough to convince a carriage full of men that she was transgender. In between breaks to snort cocaine from a shared bag, the men loudly… [more]
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The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is… [more]
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I don’t generally comment on modern horrors such as the deaths in Gaza or in US classrooms because I don’t have anything to say beyond heartfelt but trite platitudes. But there’s a detail about the ongoing situation in Maine, where a man recently discharged from a mental hospital has killed nearly 20 people, that’s worth… [more]
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Over at Stained Glass Woman, Doc Impossible has written a fun piece about HRT and what it does regarding DNA. As ever, the “basic biology” crowd are ignorant about actual biology: the super-short version is that DNA is an instruction book but hormones decide which specific instructions your body will actually follow. Change those hormones… [more]
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There’s a fascinating piece in Scientific American that brings together many years of debunking: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong. Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook… [more]
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From Popbitch: The intensity of internet discourse can sometimes create an overinflated sense of just how interested the general public is in certain stories. For instance, Graham Linehan’s new memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy sold 390 copies in its first week – including pre-sales. A figure that fails to… [more]
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I went to see the Taylor Swift tour film last night. It’s one of the greatest live music things I’ve ever seen, and if you’re even vaguely interested in pop music it’s definitely worth a trip to the IMAX. Swift is a fantastic songwriter, an incredible performer and the sound and staging of the show… [more]
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Huffington Post: The Conservative government has upped its anti-transgender rhetoric recently, leaving people “scared, tired and alone”, charities have told HuffPost UK. …It’s not just the prime minister, either. The health secretary Steve Barclay used the Tory conference to announce that he wants to introduce a policy where trans women would be banned from female-only… [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.
