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How often have you heard the phrase “born in the wrong body” about trans people? And how many times have you heard it said by trans people? Chances are the first number is much, much higher than the second. That’s because the BITWB trope is primarily used by cisgender people who are writing or talking… [more]
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18,400 The number of one-click, template-based responses the UK’s main anti-trans group managed to get its supporters to send to the UK government’s gender recognition act consultation in a three-month period through constant social media activity, expensive full-page print adverts and the support of almost all the UK media. 125,089 and counting Number of signatories… [more]
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I don’t want to go on too much about the UK government’s pathetic response to its gender recognition consultation, but I thought it was worth drawing attention to The Times and Sunday Times’ assertions that the consultation was “skewed” by an “avalanche” of responses by “trans rights groups” who twisted the consultation to say 70%… [more]
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Interviewing isn’t always easy: if you’re poorly prepared or if you’re trying to lead the subject down a road they don’t want to go down, you can easily find yourself getting your arse handed to you on a plate. It happened to me once with Terry Pratchett, a brilliant author who taught me a valuable… [more]
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The Westminster government has finally published its response to the public consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act. The short version: it’s going to be slightly cheaper to get a GRC and some of the forms will go online. There are no significant changes otherwise. This is for England and Wales; officially at least… [more]
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Journalist Jane Fae writes on Medium about the bogeymen and women the press likes to call “activists”. Just last week, for instance, Gillian Phillip kicked off in the Mail about the “violent, hate-filled language that has become chillingly familiar to anyone who has had the temerity to question the prevailing orthodoxy of the transgender activist… [more]
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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]
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.
