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Here’s a great example of how anti-trans activism works. On social media, some anti-trans activists are posting about stickers that prove how evil trans people are. The stickers, which were first spotted in Torquay, have the phrase “genital preferences are transphobic” over a rainbow flag. The stickers were made and posted by an anti-trans activist [more]
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If you’d like to understand the “debate” over trans people’s use of toilets, the academic paper “The toilet debate: Stalling trans possibilities and defending ‘women’s protected spaces’” by Charlotte Jones and Jen Slater is worth your time. whether naive, ignorant or explicitly transphobic, trans-exclusionary positions do little to improve toilet access for the majority, instead [more]
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Another blistering piece about Trump’s America, this time in Rolling Stone. Anthropologist Wade Davis describes “the unravelling of America” and argues that COVID-19 “signals the end of the American era.” Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the [more]
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There’s a new and important academic work about the current anti-trans moral panic: TERF Wars, The Fight For Transgender Futures.  TERF is an acronym used to describe people who identify as feminists but whose feminism explicitly excludes trans women and non-binary people. The book exists because: Analyses of trans-exclusionary rhetoric provide an important contribution to sociology. [more]
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When it comes to covering trans-related issues the difference between the UK and US versions of The Guardian is dramatic, with the latter demonstrating just how parochial, insular and reactionary the UK edition is. While the UK repeatedly commissions the same handful of writers to write the same column (variations on “someone told me / [more]
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This, in Slate, is devastating. The Trump Pandemic: a blow-by-blow account of how the president killed thousands of Americans. The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,†that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. [more]
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Writing in The National, Andrew Tickell notes that while there are valid criticisms of the Scottish government’s proposed hate crime legislation, “conspicuous by its absence in the first wave of criticism Holyrood’s Hate Crime Bill has received is any morally serious reflection on why hate crime might matter, and might merit being talked about in [more]
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I’ve just finished reading How To Survive A Plague by David French. It’s a book about the AIDS crisis and the activist groups, notably ACT UP!, who fought an incredible battle against prejudice, ignorance and inertia. Many of the cover quotes describe the book as uplifting, but that’s not a word I’d use: it’s a [more]
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The final track on our new Messengers EP is called Time Will Put Your Enemies In The Ground. I swithered about releasing a song with that title in the current climate, where body counts are so awful we don’t talk about them any more, but I think people are intelligent enough to understand that 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.
