-
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]
-
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]
-
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]
-
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]
-
This week, various outlets gave yet more publicity to the LGB Alliance, a single-issue anti-trans hate group that purports to be about LGB people’s rights but has no policies about, er, LGB people’s rights. This hasn’t stopped Scotland’s press and BBC Radio Scotland giving them uncritical coverage and endless opportunities to scaremonger about trans people.… [more]
-
I’ve just finished One Of Us by Ã…sne Seierstad. It’s very similar to Dave Cullen’s Columbine in that it’s an incredibly powerful piece of non-fiction about a massacre largely inspired by white supremacist rhetoric. In this case, the massacre is the 2011 bombing and subsequent gun massacre by Anders Brevik, who slaughtered 77 people. It’s… [more]
-
After a lot of delays, I’ve finally received the psychologist’s report I need in order to apply for my Gender Recognition Certificate. Unfortunately I can’t actually afford the application fee for said certificate because why should anything be easy – I’ve also had to halt my weekly electrolysis sessions because paying the equivalent of some… [more]
-
An important new survey from the US has investigated the effectiveness and risks of puberty blockers in trans teens. The short version: they’re safe, reversible and life-saving. The study is significant not just because of what it found, but how it found it. Mostly when you read about puberty blocking in the press it’s based… [more]
-
Novelist and journalist Huw Lemmey asks why the UK media is so obsessed with demonising the “woke”. The English media is in the middle of a full-throated culture war, from bendy bananas to woke snowflakes, Stormzy to burqas, trans rights to free speech on campus. It seems like over the past decade the intensification of… [more]
-
This week, the BBC introduced people to the “tradwife” movement – “a growing movement of women who promote ultra-traditional gender roles”. The tone of the piece is warm and fluffy, and says that people who claim “tradwives” are connected with the far right are mistaken. The BBC is very wrong on this. “Tradwife” is yet… [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.
