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Director of British Future, Sunder Katwala, has posted an interesting twitter thread about whether the UK is undergoing a culture war. One of the points he makes is that a great deal of culture war stuff in our media is manufactured by the media. For example, a few weeks ago there was a kerfuffle about… [more]
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If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’ll know that from time to time I get fascinated by online misquotes, which often go on to have a life of their own. As I’ve written before, the urinal trough in the gents’ toilets in Glasgow’s King Tut’s venue is engraved with a quote from… [more]
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I know it’s hard for people who aren’t trans to understand what gender dysphoria is like. I thought this analogy, by Dr Emmy Zje, is pretty good. Imagine that you’re sitting with a bunch of people and you’re all drinking water. Their water is spring water, but yours is salt water – and you don’t… [more]
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I’ve been listening to the You’re Wrong About podcast, this time about the infamous Ford Pinto. It seems that almost everything I thought I knew about it was incorrect and largely based on a single Mother Jones article. The podcast makes an interesting point about that, and about journalism more widely: a lot of bad… [more]
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Do you remember when bigots were ashamed to be openly bigoted? When racists were too scared to say racist things? When it wasn’t okay to brag about grabbing women by the pussy? I do, and I’d like those days to return. One of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in is that far too… [more]
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The BMA’s annual conference has called on the government to protect the rights of trans and non-binary people both in healthcare and in wider society. Dr Helena McKeown, Chair of the BMA representative body, said: The BMA supports transgender and nonbinary individuals’ equal rights to live their lives with dignity which includes the right to… [more]
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The world’s on fire, everything is awful and it’s not a great time to be LGBT+, so it’s important to celebrate the little pieces of good news among the relentless misery of 2020. The luminous Sarah McBride won the Democratic nomination for a Delaware seat last night, which means she’s on track to be America’s… [more]
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Vogue contributor and trans woman Paris Lees posted something online yesterday that sounded too crazy to be true: More Americans claim to have seen a ghost than to have met a transgender person. But it is true. Huffington Post points out that a 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that 18% of Americans claim to… [more]
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This is heartbreaking, powerful and thought-provoking: Buying Myself Back, by Emily Ratajkowski. It’s about photographs and paintings and who can control images of you. And it’ll probably further damage your faith in human nature. Pictures meant only for a person who loved me and with whom I’d felt safe — photos taken out of trust… [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.
