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The High Court has reversed the Office for Students’ (OfS) decision to fine Sussex University over half a million pounds for supposedly suppressing free speech (ie, not stopping people from criticising a vocally transphobic academic). The verdict is damning and makes it very clear that the OfS was operating from a position of blatant bias… [more]
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This is a hard read: Trans people are dying of suicide more than the general UK population. And UK government policy, which is to deny trans kids healthcare, to underfund mental health provision and to push people into conversion therapy, is a key reason why that’s the case. Data obtained by freedom of information request… [more]
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There’s a good piece by Sasha Baker about how the UK has enshrined “trans panic” in law. Trans panic is a variation of the gay panic defence, which is a tactic used in murder and assault cases to blame the victim rather than the attacker. In the UK it’s sometimes known as the Portsmouth Defence.… [more]
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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]
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.
