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A popular anti-trans “gotcha” is to ask, “what rights don’t trans people have?” The question is never asked in good faith, so trans people generally ignore it: it’s the same assholes with the same bullshit all over again shouting “debate me, cowards!” But by not answering it, it enables the bad faith poster to claim… [more]
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Two unrelated but connected pieces today: first, Paul Mason in the New Statesman about QAnon. In the past seven days we’ve seen such a “lying world of consistency†inspire mass actions by far-right movements, from the far-right invasion of Portland, to the storming of the Reichstag by anti-lockdown protesters, to the Trafalgar Square demonstration, also… [more]
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Genderkit has collated the latest waiting list information for UK trans healthcare and it’s the grimmest read yet: there isn’t a single gender clinic for adults that has a waiting list of less than two years, and those waiting lists are growing ever longer. This image is telling: the only clinics without years-long waiting lists… [more]
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I’ve always considered myself to be terribly shy. That probably seems weird given that for most of my adult life I’ve been the singer in bands, but performing in front of people was always something I felt forced to do, not something I wanted to do. That’s because I had terrible stage fright, stage fright… [more]
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This, by Adam Ramsay in Opendemocracy, is magnificent. It’s about toxic masculinity, male depression and the siren call of bad actors, and it’s endlessly quotable: The event was a sort of rally for far Right forces hoping to storm the European elections. But the combination of speakers seemed a bit incongruous: Catholic bishops and alt-Right… [more]
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Nesrine Malik in The Guardian on fearmongering and culture wars: It is about order. The threats to order are always present, and always held at bay, just barely, by conservative leaders valiantly fighting the imminent deluge. This authoritarian populist strategy is founded on an essential fiction: the pretence of powerlessness among politicians, and their voters, who… [more]
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I’ve just finished reading Democracy For Sale by Peter Geoghegan. It’s a fascinating and forensic analysis of the corrupting effect of dark money on British politics, and it left me thoroughly saddened: the toxic combination of big money and big tech is having a ruinous effect, and I don’t see a light at the end… [more]
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Today in the Telegraph, a once serious newspaper: Lots of people on the internet is reading this in Darth Vader’s voice. But while that’s funny, the article isn’t. The right-wing press, when it isn’t telling us that racist murderers love their mum, is increasingly resembling the state media of far-right dictatorships. [more]
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The Times would never write something like this about a murderer if they were Black. “Found purpose as a vigilante” makes him sound like Batman, not a white supremacist with an illegally acquired weapon who murdered two peaceful protestors in cold blood and injured a third. [more]
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Nora Mulready writes in The Independent about her journey from “gender critical” fighter against “a new ‘woke’ orthodoxy” to trans ally. I read everything I could find that validated my instinct that the increase in transgender identity was a millennial fad, mental health issues, trauma, social contagion, fashion, patriarchy, you name it, I clutched at… [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.
