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Journalist Pete Paphides asked his followers: Is there an aspect of your work that involves dealing with the public? Is there a particular thing that people say to you all the time whilst thinking they’re the first person to have said it? And oh my God, the replies. You’ll recognise yourself, and you’ll cringe. [more]
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It’s #timetotalk day today, a day when people are encouraged to open up and talk about mental health. I’m not going to be negative about it – the organisations involved are good ones and I’ve written a lot here and in my songs about the importance of opening up about sadness, anxiety and other mental… [more]
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I’ve written before about dubious “the sinister trans cult stole my children” articles: all too often they turn out to demonstrate that some parents find it easier to blame sinister, shadowy forces than their own shortcomings when their grown-up children cut all contact. But I’ve rarely seen an example as downright awful as this one.… [more]
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Starbucks’ lovely and groundbreaking advert, which features a young trans man summoning up the courage to ask for his new name on his coffee cup, is important: as I’ve written before, representation matters. Seeing someone like you in mainstream media, in this case on a major TV channel, can help you feel that you’re not… [more]
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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]
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.
