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This, by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, is very good. Doyle, like me, came out in later life. It is increasingly possible to envision a future where being trans or nonbinary is as unexceptional as being left-handed. In that world, conversion therapy for trans children will seem as barbaric and nonsensical as the stories about left-handed… [more]
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The Atlantic, on hateful trolls finding new homes online: this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including Twitter, “radfem†Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum Lipstick Alley, and the British… [more]
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If you’re trans and talk about it online, people will imply – or sometimes state baldly – that you do it too much or too often. But like many trans people I don’t feel I have a choice: if we don’t speak, nobody is speaking for us. CaseyExplosion on Twitter: I so very deeply wish… [more]
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It’s been a terrible week for trans people. In England, the High Court effectively banned puberty blockers in England and Wales. The court essentially judged that the life of one cisgender teen was more important than those of all trans teens: in order to ensure that no cisgender teenager delays puberty and then decides it… [more]
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Jessica Valenti is on typically scathing form in this piece about cis, straight white men in US politics: Because to them, white men are a politically neutral group: the default choice. Any deviation from that standard must be about ‘identity politics’. It has never occurred to them that white men are the most political identity… [more]
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Sad news today: Adam Banks has died. Adam was the guiding light of MacUser magazine, one of the UK’s very best magazines, and while I never worked for him I was a great admirer not just of his magazine but of the love his contributors clearly had for him. He and I were friends on… [more]
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Former Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore is doing the “I’ve been silenced!” thing on the front pages of right-wing newspapers after rage-quitting The Guardian. A key reason for her departure, it seems, was a letter from staff to management expressing concerns about the (UK) Guardian’s relentless platforming of anti-trans views, something that has been criticised by… [more]
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There’s a damning section in this NYT piece about Facebook’s ongoing refusal to deal with misinformation and hate speech. The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world†or “bad for the world.†They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more… [more]
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The history of computing has its shameful parts. For example, you’ve probably read about how Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, was persecuted, lost his job and was ultimately driven to suicide for being gay. But you might not know about Lynn Conway, a hugely significant figure in modern computing who’s life was destroyed… [more]
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The first rule of being in a hate group is that you must never, ever admit that you hate the people you hate. A lot of effort goes into choosing the right euphemisms, coining phrases such as “reasonable concerns”, “family values” and so on. So the anti-trans groups affiliated with Fair Cop must be pretty… [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.
