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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]
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In an excellent Twitter thread, Slate writer Lili Loofbourow explains why it’s pretty much impossible to have a debate on the internet. “Why would you refuse to debate someone who’s simply saying that All Lives Matter?” is the kind of question an Enlightenment subject longing for a robust exchange of ideas might ask. Well, the… [more]
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An interesting poll in PinkNews: despite more than two years of relentless and increasingly vicious scaremongering in pretty much the entire national media and online, most UK women are still in favour of self-ID for trans people: 57%, compared to 21% against. It’s welcome, of course, and it echoes many other polls (and trans people’s… [more]
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The Times published an article today about so-called “cancel culture”, aka powerful people being criticised by marginalised people, and gave examples of the kind of wonderful humans whose careers have supposedly suffered as a result of it. The list includes some truly awful people. For example: The singer R Kelly’s career was damaged hugely after… [more]
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This collection of photos is fascinating: it’s the Athlete series by Howard Schatz, and it shows bodies. Big bodies, little bodies, stocky bodies, thin bodies, light-skinned bodies, dark-skinned bodies… the only thing they have in common is that the people pictured are all elite athletes. The collection has been doing the rounds again as a… [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.
