-
A new study from Germany adds more evidence that violent online speech leads to violent attacks in the streets. The Economist: A paper by Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz of the University of Warwick finds a strong association between right-wing, anti-refugee sentiment on German social-media sites and violent crimes against refugees. For every four anti-refugee… [more]
-
On Friday, 27-year-old Travis Ikeguchi murdered a 66-year-old mother of nine, Lauri Carleton, because he took exception to her shop’s Pride flag. According to US police he tore down the flag and hurled homophobic slurs before killing her in cold blood. Ikeguchi’s social media is still available to view, and it’s interesting to see how… [more]
-
Graham Linehan, the comedy writer who sacrificed his marriage and his career so he could hurl abuse at trans people and their allies on the internet all day, has been all over the press in recent days. But the only piece worth reading is this one, by Caitlin Logan in The National. Some of the… [more]
-
I thought the panic about trans women in sport had reached its nadir when they banned us from badminton, but I was wrong: this week, trans women were banned from the famously physical endurance sport of… chess. I’m not making this up. The reason elite international chess has some gendered categories is for positive discrimination;… [more]
-
I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the Tories’ culture war bullshit, of which a thinly disguised bathroom ban appears to be the current unlawful idea, but it’s always worth pointing out when ministers tell very obvious lies in support of their bigotry. Like this one, written in yesterday’s Telegraph by equalities minister… [more]
-
In my book, I write briefly about a significant subset of the anti-gender movement: the “bored straight white women who spend too much time on social media and have taken up bullying as a hobby, claiming to be ‘the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn’ and trying to incite stochastic terrorism against inconvenient women… [more]
-
One of the things I write about in my book is that transphobia largely relies on people not knowing, or not thinking they know, any trans people. I make a very good joke about it that you’ll need to buy the book to read. And the same point is made in this report from LGBT… [more]
-
This commencement speech, by Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, is wise. It’s all over the internet but in case you missed it, Pritzker talks about idiots and empathy: The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us,… [more]
-
There’s a great piece by Parker Molloy about the “eat your vegetables” argument over social media: the idea that if you use social media, you should be compelled to read or hear views you disagree with. Like Molloy, I disagree. People get to pick what they watch on TV, right? And they get to decide… [more]
-
This article, by Doc Impossible, talks about something I think we often shy away from: the role of kink in trans people’s self-discovery. As the Doc writes, many people have asked the question: it’s just a fetish, right? This hopeful, terrified question that bears so, so much weight. Hopeful because, to the person asking 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.
