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I should be annoyingly happy right now. I’m doing another book festival this weekend, and the day after I’m off to London for the British Book Awards where I’m shortlisted for Discover Book of the Year – quite exciting given that I wasn’t sure anyone would want to read my book, let alone enjoy it.… [more]
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The local election results demonstrate something we’ve seen in other countries, such as Australia: using a “war on woke” as your election strategy is a sure-fire way to be rejected at the polls. Byline Times: As the nation’s leading pollster Sir John Curtice told the Byline Times in an interview this week, “If you look… [more]
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One of the leading organisations fighting against women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s existence is the American College of Pediatricians, a right-wing evangelical lobby group that pretends to represent the medical establishment. The organisation has accidentally leaked over 10,000 documents, many of them damning evidence of its hateful, unscientific bullshit – hateful, unscientific bullshit that’s… [more]
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Another good piece by Vice: “Gender Critical” feminism isn’t feminist. It’s just transphobic If you read the news, it’s easy to think that gender-critical thinking is the dominant mode of British feminism. That can be terrifying for trans and non-binary people, especially when we are increasingly bombarded with transphobic headlines; an IPSO report in 2020… [more]
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This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon. The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the… [more]
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The Conservative government has been stuffing the EHRC – the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – with anti-equality bigots for some time, which is why it recently and very publicly u-turned on its guidance regarding trans people and the Equality Act. But even knowing that, the latest minutes from the EHRC’s Scotland Committee are absolutely… [more]
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There’s been a very significant uptick in the amount of anti-trans bullshit in the newspapers this month, with papers such as The Express doing exactly what Express editor Gary Jones said in 2018 was “offensive… I wouldn’t want to be party to any newspaper that will publish such material”: running endless fabricated stories about a… [more]
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Two days ago, Police Scotland Greater Glasgow posted an appeal for information about a missing woman, Amy Campbell. She hasn’t been seen since the middle of March and was reported missing on 4 April. As you’d expect from a missing-woman appeal, there are hundreds of comments. But those comments, by and large, aren’t expressing concern… [more]
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This Wired piece by Katherine Alejandra Cross is excellent. IT’S DIFFICULT TO overcome the momentum of algorithmic suppression, but our hearts and minds remain our own. We can defend them against colonization by hate-campaigners, who feed on our despair like some demon in a German fairy tale. What is needed instead of ceaseless portents of doom… [more]
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The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat. Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that: …That tipping point… [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.
