One thing that's worth repeating: There is *zero* evidence that "substack helps you get readers". The only thing that we've ever seen that helps grow an audience is other authors mentioning your blog or newsletter, which is not the platform's doing. Substack just takes credit for that!
This is the takeaway from the running robot, tbh
Yuuuuup
I mean there's a legacy there, right...?
So to paraphrase their old t-shirts, their stance now is "some people are transphobes, get over it". What a useless woman, what a useless organisation.
I believe the normalisation of bigotry towards vulnerable minorities has a lot to do with it.
Vulnerable minorities like the trans people, whose rights you are happily selling down the river to a billionaire who spends her money on trying to destroy us.
Yet here in the UK such bans are defended by "sensible" politicians
If only there was some billionaire who could help this charity out.. oh, wait…
It's true that Stonewall, attacked by the press, Charity Commission and the Right, came to the brink of collapse because it advocated for trans people. In the UK you can no longer do that work as a charity. But ceasing to be useful, genuflecting to hate, is not the answer. Better to cease to exist.
When @kezdugdale.bsky.social talks about being worried about the *potential* rolling back of rights, that feels pretty bad for a trans person who is experiencing *actual and active* rolling back of our rights!
I didn't expect @kezdugdale.bsky.social to be returning to the days of S'onewall, and it's hugely disappointing that this interview suggests she's heading in that direction.
Highly recommend @portalbookshop.bsky.social for this purpose, lovely queer bookshop and run by a fan!
I’m looking for an automated way to read others’s scientific data without giving credit or acknowledgement, and also claim full credit for insights from it. And I want it to have a fitting name
OAI: say no more
Hiring a part time bookseller!
Ah! Change!
If you fancy joining our tiny team and yelling about queer books on a regular basis, now's your chance
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
This Is How You Lose The Hundred Years' War
The nub of so many of this government’s problems is that there is a Keir Starmer where the prime minister should be.
Very much one of those things where I'm not convinced it's true but it is so likely, based on previous experience, that I might as well proceed as if it's true.
People are going to point to Starmer's unpopularity as to why Sarwar won't be FM but like the Scottish Tories, Scottish Labour very much did this to themselves by courting a radicalised cohort of the electorate that loathes Holyrood with the heat of a thousand suns.
I keep coming back to how absolutely BRAINDEAD this argument of Jesse’s is.
Let me summarize his argument - “the moral arc of the universe is long, but if there’s any sustained backlash, give up.”
• Delivering single-sex spaces on the basis of biological sex, in NHS wards, schools, sport and everyday life by upholding the Equality Act and delivering clear instructions to public services on how to comply with their legal obligations to women and to trans people. • Keeping women's prisons for women, instructing the Scottish Prison Service to remove all biologically male prisoners from women's prisons within days of the election. • Recommit the NHS to delivering single sex wards on the basis of biological sex, and ensuring patients can request same sex provision wherever possible.
Scottish Labour manifesto is out, don’t vote for them
On that note, always remember that Bolsonaro was voted out, tried to do a coup, failed, was tried and convicted, and is now under house arrest. And Duterte was constitutionally banned from running again, arrested by the ICC, and is currently awaiting trial in the Hague.
At Scottish Labour Conference in Feb 2025, a leadership-backed motion to adopt a transphobic policy on single-sex spaces in schools was defeated. Party members and affiliates voted it down.
Today Scottish Labour's leadership put that transphobic policy into its manifesto for May's election anyway.
For the avoidance of doubt, following the publication of the explicitly transphobic Scottish Labour manifesto this morning, I will not be campaigning for any Scottish Labour candidates in the upcoming election, and I will not be voting Scottish Labour either.
#NoVotesLabourInMay #TransRightsNow
The section discussing god is sublime, on that very thing, in fact.
As with Samantha Harvey's Orbital, it isn't science fiction, but it also so very much *is*, though it's more... human than Harvey is, I think. But it is so much about love, not just for people, but also for *space* and *science*; some of its best passages are in that vein.
Adults in charge: the trouble is, little boys just don't like girls
Little boys: I love Rumi and Bluey and Elsa and Ms Rachel and the Lionesses and my friends and
Adults in charge: EW. NO. You're supposed to be a chauvinist by now. Probably because of phones.
Atmosphere is, for anyone wondering, very, *very* good. Taylor Jenkins Reid really delivered with that one, damn.
(fake) Tom Scott video thumbnail featuring 1973's The Wicker Man. "Can this ritual bring their apples back?" I will be blocking anyone who makes an "oh god the bees" reference, that is a different movie not worthy of discussion.
"The Scottish island of Summerisle, home of the best fruit in Britain. The first thing you notice? No churches. The farmers here practice a fascinating form of pre-Christian worship…and I just learned I'll be playing the lead role in their annual May Day festival. First stop: my costume fitting."
A harking back to, and longing for, a mythologised 'freer' past; a focus on nature over industry; a resistance to formalised authority; esotericism... very Romantic indeed!
I have been an editor in genre publishing for thirty-five* years and "mantasy" is the single most ridiculous notion I've come across in all that time.
*Oh my sainted aunts