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There’s a comic strip I really love in which a trans woman travels back in time to talk to her younger self. It makes me cry every time. Here’s a page: I occasionally daydream about doing the same for the younger, sadder, pre-transition me, but I know it’s a waste of time. Not just because [more]
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A new report says that right-wing academics are being silenced by the thought police. Inevitably they’re talking about that silencing on the front pages of right-wing newspapers. Here’s Newsweek. There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges. Or, more accurately, hundreds of experiments at different campuses, directed at changing the consciousness of [more]
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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]
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.
