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The Guardian is laying off 180 staff. Inevitably and horribly, some people on the internet are being dicks about it and celebrating the imminent unemployment of sales staff, junior editorial staff and so on. These people aren’t losing their jobs because of the paper’s content. They’re losing their jobs partly because of the paper’s business… [more]
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A new study by Ipsos MORI reports that 7 in 10 Britons believe trans people face discrimination, that only 1 in 10 believe trans rights “have gone too far”, and that 6 in 10 women agree that gender and biological sex are not always linked. Given the tone and volume of anti-trans coverage in recent… [more]
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This arrived yesterday. Including obtaining medical reports, the process of getting my Gender Recognition Certificate took ten months and cost nearly £300. I have mixed feelings. That’s partly because I felt I had to get the certificate: the messages coming from the UK government make me worried that it may remove some anti-discrimination protections from… [more]
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Professor Paul Johnson, head of the department of sociology at the University of York, posted this on Twitter today. It’s from the judgement in a 2014 case before the European Court of Human Rights. Society’s problematic “yuk factor” concerning transgender individuals is not a normative idea that should be supported by the law. Sharing Johnson’s… [more]
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Every cloud has a silver lining. The ongoing delays to gender recognition reform in the UK enable us to analyse other countries’ experiences and judge whether the lurid claims of anti-trans activists have any basis in reality. Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act. It uses the same “self-ID” system that the… [more]
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Yesterday, there were thousands of posts on Twitter by anti-trans activists claiming that only women get cervical cancer. It was a deliberate attack on trans men and non-binary people; the hashtag began after a trans man posted on Twitter about his cervical cancer diagnosis and a bunch of awful people started abusing him. Think about… [more]
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A few hundred years ago, a bunch of men decided that every single human on earth could be divided into three (or sometimes five) distinct races. You could tell everything you needed to know about someone by looking at them and perhaps measuring the circumference of their heads: that would tell you what race you… [more]
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This is horrific. Lyz Lenz writes about a small town and its conversations on Facebook. It’s a nice Iowa town. In a way that many Iowa towns are nice, and they don’t like being called racist. So, when people called them racist, all hell broke loose. …Screenshots of comments sent to me by people in… [more]
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A personal and powerful essay by Katelyn Burns who, like me, is a late transitioning trans woman. As a child, I could not see positive examples of trans women having meaningful lives, so I could not be a trans woman who had a meaningful life. I’m a bit older than Katelyn so I didn’t discover… [more]
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There were two newsworthy trans-related stories in the last 24 hours. In one, a YouGov poll reported that most people, especially women, are in favour of gender recognition reform. This is quite important, given that Liz Truss is expected to announce her plans to kill gender recognition reform later this month. In the other, 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.
