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I linked to a Roy Greenslade piece the other day about the way UK newspapers invented a so-called immigration crisis. In it he wrote: If you want to understand the populist media’s underlying agenda then you have to look not only at what gets published, but what doesn’t. Here’s a great example of that. Every [more]
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I sent off my application for my Gender Recognition Certificate this week. So far it’s cost me £140 for the application, £48 to get a statutory declaration notarised, £30 for medical reports and £7.40 in postage; they’ve asked for additional evidence so that’s another trip to the Post Office today. It’s good to finally set [more]
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And so it begins. South Dakota has made the first step towards making evidence-based medicine illegal. Doctors who try to help trans teenagers face a year in prison. Another seven US states are set to follow suit; anti-trans groups in the UK want similar bans here. As Christine Burns MBE put it: Can we all agree [more]
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Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes about the “anti-woke backlash”. She argues that in the 1990s and 2000s socially liberal values became the “new normal”, with even the Conservative party becoming nicer and introducing legislation such as equal marriage. It seemed unimaginable at the time, but that consensus is unravelling very quickly. …as the tide of 90s social [more]
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Katelyn Burns reports on the coordinated assault on trans kids’ healthcare by right-wing US lawmakers. eight state legislatures — including Missouri, Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado, South Carolina, Kentucky, and South Dakota — have already introduced bills this year that would criminally punish doctors who follow best practices for treating adolescents with gender dysphoria. In South Dakota, [more]
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There’s a really good interview in today’s Guardian with Michael Cashman, whose many achievements include founding the Stonewall charity. Remember the tabloid outrage about the first gay kiss in EastEnders? Cashman was the man they were demonising. The clipping above, incidentally, is by Piers Morgan. Morgan would also write article such as “the poofs of [more]
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My Twitter feed is full of concert announcements today. Edinburgh’s hosting shows in August by the likes of The 1975 and Tom Jones. Glasgow Green has concerts including the TRNSMT festival, Guns N Roses and Green Day. Kelvingrove bandstand has Belinda Carlisle, KT Tunstall, Richard Hawley and even Rick Astley. As much as I love [more]
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Yomi Adegoke writes about the increasing use of polarised, gladiatorial “debates” to try and get social media attention. The BBC has said it will no longer have climate change deniers in debate with climate change activists, as it’s a “false balanceâ€. Yet the topic of racism is handled in the same way a TV programme might [more]
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NHS Greater Glasgow and NHS Lothian have teamed up to research the experiences and health needs of LGBT+ people in Scotland. The full report is here. It’s part of a wider study that includes a literature review and that will help inform future planning. It’s a long and often very saddening report, with people sharing some [more]
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Writing in The Guardian, august journalism commentator Roy Greenslade writes about a crisis that never existed: the supposed immigration crisis facing the UK. “It never was news. It was a wholly media-manufactured ‘crisis’,” he writes. Editors “readily published evidence of individual misbehaviour as if it was a universal problem”, published “dodgy figures, as if plucked [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.
