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This is very useful: a selection of peer-reviewed scholarship about trans and non-binary people. It is absolutely crucial that media outlets and universities begin to recognise that like climate denial, trans denial is based on unscientific views that are wildly out of step with peer-reviewed scholarship. When GC activists suggest that trans rights ought to [more]
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ILGA-Europe is an umbrella organisation for multiple human rights organisations across Europe, and its annual review is deeply worrying. The full report is linked in the quoted text below. Reporting from every country in the ILGA-Europe ‘Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI People in Europe and Central Asia 2021’ is a glaring [more]
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A new poll in The Scotsman report that the majority of SNP voters and almost half of all Scots women support the sacking of Joanna Cherry. The ones who don’t are primarily older, more conservative voters, particularly Tory voters. It also reports, once again, that even after three years of misleading and scaremongering coverage across [more]
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Via The Implausible Girl on Twitter, this is from the Sunday World in Ireland in 1999. You’ll note the horror at “same sex marriages” in the article. Well, it was a long time ago. 22 years, in fact. Anti-trans activism is using the classic moral panic technique of pretending that something is both new and [more]
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Kimi Chaddah writes in Gal-Dem about the Tory government’s use of social media to attack journalists for simply doing their job. These Tory attempts to delegitimise journalists parallel the accusatory tone of internet call out culture, which thrives on sowing doubt. Ministers publicly draw attention to individual journalists, rather than a faceless publication, deliberately drawing [more]
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This, by Jessica Valenti, is angry and true: The People ‘Cancel Culture’ forgot. That’s why a man who is accused of sexual harassment or abuse is ‘canceled’, while the women who accuse him are said to be taking part in a ‘witch hunt’. It doesn’t matter if those women left their school, jobs, or town [more]
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I have lots of thoughts about the ‘sacking’ of SNP MP Joanna Cherry, but for now I’ll just post some tweets by Tristan Gray of the Green Party. What happened: The SNP leadership silence as transphobia swallowed their party crossed a line, triggering dozens of resignations by young activists and office-holders. Sturgeon issued a statement [more]
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This comic, by Joey Alison Sayers, is lovely. [more]
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Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is one of the most malign forces in the world today, and it specialises in fuelling division. Media Matters has identified a good example of that in the way Fox News has covered President Biden’s anti-discrimination order. Despite the order’s myriad protections, over the following week, Fox News aired 19 segments [more]
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In the nineteenth century, scientists were very interested in the differences between men and women. Not because they wanted to know more, but because they wanted to justify oppressing women. So they came up with ever more inventive ways to define who was superior and who was inferior. As historian Susan Sleeth Mosedale writes in [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.
