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This, by Annie Lowrey, is fantastic. You have met Facts Man before if you have spent any time online in the past half decade or so. He’s inescapable. He podcasts. He makes YouTube videos. He traffics in Medium posts. He burns up Facebook. And he loves—loves!—Twitter. What does he serve up there? Truth. Facts. The… [more]
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Here’s the New York Times last year: Who Cares What Celebrities Think? Last week, just ahead of back-to-school season, New York State health officials issued emergency regulations limiting medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for kids attending schools or day care centers. What do celebrities think about this development? Hopefully, the public won’t find out —… [more]
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Crossing gender lines is interesting. On the one hand you suddenly need to learn and live by rules and roles that other people have known their whole lives; on the other, you have to unpick and unlearn the rules and roles you internalised before your transition. Depending on your direction of travel you will either… [more]
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According to some people on the internet, that is. Owl Stefania in Metro: On this occasion, the conversation that caught my eye involved discussions and videos about celebrities who are allegedly ‘secretly transgender’. This included names like Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, Holly Willoughby, Jodie Whittaker, David and Victoria Beckham, Keira Knightley, and all of Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriends. The site… [more]
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When people scaremonger about proposed legislation, it’s a safe bet that they are ignorant of the existing legislation and of similar legislation in other countries: if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be scaremongering. The manufactured controversy over Scotland’s proposed hate crime legislation – a controversy largely fuelled by religious groups and the right-wing press – appears… [more]
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I’ve been reading Heather Havrilesky’s writing online pretty much since I first went online. This, on friendship in a time of Covid, is superb. In the past, whenever I met someone I liked a lot and admired, I was often too fearful to stick my neck out and assert my interest in becoming friends. I… [more]
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If it wasn’t for the internet, I don’t think I’d ever have come out. Not because I was somehow talked into being trans; forced feminisation is something that only happens in niche pornography and in the lurid fantasies of anti-trans bigots. The internet helped me come out because it finally let me see that there… [more]
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This, by author Mia Violet, is very true. It’s a shame that the first section should be in any way controversial: being trans is hard in a world that treats trans people so badly. [more]
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Every now and again, someone on the internet will read a few articles about something, decide they’re an expert on the subject and start arguing with others. At its most entertaining, they pick fights with actual experts without realising who they’re talking to and get their arse handed to them on a plate. Sadly it’s… [more]
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Caitlin Logan in The National writes about how the US Christian Right ended up with uncritical coverage in Scottish newspapers. Somewhat unsurprisingly to anyone who has been paying attention to public debates over apparently controversial legislation in Scotland over the past two decades, Free To Disagree is a campaign led by The Christian Institute. The… [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.
