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There’s been a fun discussion on Twitter about the various kinds of writers, how they organise their workflow and what apps they use. This image has made a lot of us laugh. The last option, “write directly into the CMS”, is listed under Chaotic Evil. And it is. If you’re a working writer and you [more]
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The UK, which is very far away from China, has a population of around 66 million people and has officially recorded 635,000 cases of COVID-19 and 43,000 deaths. Vietnam, which has a long land border with China, has a population of 95 million people. It has recorded 1,113 cases and 35 deaths. The difference isn’t [more]
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Helen Rosner, the New Yorker’s roving food correspondent, is a great writer. And this is a great article: although it’s about New York I think it has resonance here too. It’s called The Uncertain Promises of Indoor Dining in New York City. This grinding moral calculus leaves us with a fallacious sense of personal responsibility [more]
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The COVID-related adoption of the rainbow flag to mean “I like the NHS” has caused dismay for many LGBT+ people. It’s not because they’re snowflakes. It’s because some of the flags, badges and other merchandise have appropriated two things: the Pride flag, and the logo of a very specific NHS initiative that’s been running for [more]
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The UK government’s decision to relax food standards to allow imports of poor quality, appallingly produced and potentially hazardous US beef, poultry and pork is disgusting, of course, but some people are arguing that it isn’t a big deal: we can just read the labels and choose not to buy it. But that’s only true [more]
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There’s a good piece by GenderGP head of patient services Adi Ni Dhálaigh Gourdialsing in PinkNews about trans people accessing private healthcare. In 2016, the Women and Equalities Commission bravely and unreservedly found that: “The NHS is failing in its legal duty under the Equality Act in this regard. There is a lack of continuing [more]
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This is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever read. Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman, for Jezebel: How the ‘Girl Watching’ Fad of the 1960s Taught Men to Harass Women. In the spring of 1968, 21-year-old Francine Gottfried began working as an IBM machine operator at a data processing plant in lower Manhattan. Gottfried [more]
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The anti-trans mob and their evangelical Christian pals are behind a judicial review that could have chilling effects on young women’s access to contraception. That’s not a potential unintended consequence. It’s the whole point. Stonewall’s Nancy Kelley, writing in the i Paper: If [we] chip away at the idea that children and young people are [more]
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This week, the BBC and The Times both went after the private GP service GenderGP, an ongoing target of the anti-trans mob. I’ve written about GenderGP before: it’s a practice that enables trans people to access healthcare privately when the NHS expects them to wait for many years for an initial assessment. I’m a former [more]
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Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A bigot does bigoted things that reflect badly on their employer, they get the boot, and the Christian Legal Centre tries to make them a free speech hero. Said centre is then handed its arse on a plate by a tribunal judge who points out the bleeding obvious: [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.
