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OpenDemocracy: British government proposals for strengthening free speech at universities cite an American anti-LGBT ‘hate group’ and a British ‘dark money’-funded think tank that has recommended no-platforming Extinction Rebellion. The hate group is the Alliance Defending Freedom, which you may remember from its campaign against Scotland’s hate speech laws, or its witnesses in the case… [more]
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An excellent piece in The New Republic about the women trying to remove trans girls from sports. It’s no coincidence that so many Christian Right groups and other anti-LGBT+ groups use “mums” or “mothers” in their statements: we associate motherhood with kindness, not bigotry and cruelty. But of course mothers can be just as bigoted,… [more]
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Justin Myers, aka The Guyliner, has written a really good post about LGBT+ History Month. Like him, I feel that there are big gaps in my knowledge of LGBT+ and feminist history. So it’s nice to be reminded that: Nobody will judge you for not being exactly sure who threw the first chunks of masonry… [more]
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This piece by Omar Khan was written a year ago and is even more timely now. The political right is angry, empowered around the world by electoral gains and successful campaigns. In many ways this is still the establishment, the people who hold the power, regardless of their attempts to pose as ‘populist’ voices. But… [more]
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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]
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.
