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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]
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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]
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There were some beautiful scenes in London yesterday when an estimated 22,000 people marched for Trans Pride. That number is absolutely astonishing: the crowd easily filled Trafalgar Square, and I saw lots of Pride veterans posting that the first London Prides – which were attended by people from the entire LGBT+ community, not just the [more]
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With Twitter doing its best impression of the Titan submersible, the race is on to find the next big social network. Previous contender Mastodon missed its opportunity the last time there was a Twitter exodus (I saw it described today as puritan, inward-looking and Protestant, which I think is very accurate), so the current favourite [more]
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I do love a good, righteously angry column. This, by Patrick Lennon in The Shot, gives anti-trans bigots both barrels: The toilet police are here and they want you to know they are very serious. They want you to think they’re asking important questions about women’s rights (despite overwhelming evidence that most cis women support [more]
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Jill Foster, a Daily Mail journalist, confirms on Twitter what we already surmised: UK anti-trans journalists collude in secret WhatsApp groups. This isn’t limited to the UK. In the US, anti-trans writers including one of the most prominent “just asking questions” jerk-off, Jesse Singal, demonised trans women in a private discussion forum that had been [more]
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The UK cat panic continues, with journalists who absolutely know better now offering cash for people to tell lies. This was posted, widely mocked and deleted earlier today. Offering money for stories is considered a bad thing in journalism, because as columnists’ drivel endlessly demonstrates, people will say any old shit for money. As a [more]
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Earlier today I wrote a post about the newspapers claiming that trans kids are identifying as cats, horses and the moon, a classic piece of demonisation straight out of the classic text Folk Devils and Moral Panics. This morning, Elon Musk – whose trans daughter has cut all ties with him, and whose wife apparently [more]
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We’ve been in the “making shit up” stage of the anti-trans culture war for a while now, but this story takes the biscuit: the completely invented tale of a school pupil identifying as a cat has moved from the Telegraph and the Independent into Radio 4, because our media is hopelessly broken. Imagine calling yourself [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.
