Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Boo!

    Thanks to an important new study, I now realise that I have been possessed by a ghost.

    It’s not just me. As this wonderful PinkNews headline puts it:

    Completely legitimate, rational and not at all offensive study says 85% of queer people are possessed by ghosts

    It seems that even in the spirit world, ghosts are stuck with binary definitions of gender: gay men have lady ghosts inside them, and gay women have man ghosts. The study does not provide an indication of what kind of ghost people like me (assigned male at birth but now transitioning, attracted to feminine people and therefore a slightly harder-to-label kind of gay) have inside us. Maybe we have multiple ghosts. There could be a ghost party going on inside me right now.

    The PinkNews piece gets some good jokes out of a nonsense “spiritual group” and its scientific approach, which finds that the symptoms of being a ghost include absolutely everything in the world ever and that the cure is to chant while never, ever thinking about really hot gay, bi or lesbian men, women or non-binary people getting hot and naked and doing hot naked sexual things to your hot naked body as you writhe in orgasmic, ecstatic joy and end up having to wipe gloopy lumps of ectoplasm off the sofa.

    WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T THINK OF THAT.

    Cheap gags aside, though, here’s a question.

    What’s the difference between bullshit, evidence-free stories claiming that LGBT+ people are possessed by ghosts and bullshit, evidence-free stories claiming they’re brainwashed members of a sinister cult?

    The answer’s simple. The UK press is not currently commissioning and publishing endless articles claiming that members of the LGBT+ community are possessed by ghosts.

  • “Oh, the sickening greed”

    Former Smiths singer and current racist Morrissey appears to have reached a new low: the man whose latest look was wonderfully described on Twitter as “a member of the EDL who’s come to creosote your fence” has found a new way to fleece his long-suffering fans.

    I was a fan of The Smiths back in the day; they were a very important band for me, and for many other misfits. It’s been a shame to see his career since that band ended acrimoniously: I can’t think of many artists who’ve shat on their own legacy with such enthusiasm for so long.

    The latest example comes from his current tour, where Moz has been doing something that’s really unusual for him: he’s been turning up to the gigs. And when he does, you can buy mementoes from the merch stall such as signed vinyl LPs for a whopping $300.

    You might think “wow. $300 is a ridiculous amount of money for a Morrissey album, even a signed one.”

    They’re not Morrissey albums.

    You might think “Okay. It’s a ridiculous amount of money for a Smiths album.”

    They aren’t Smiths albums either.

    They’re Lou Reed’s Transformer, Patti Smith’s Horses, Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Morrissey isn’t connected to any of them. He just likes them.

    To be fair, they’re all great albums. And they’re just as great, arguably even greater, when they haven’t been signed by a racist and cost about £20 on vinyl from your local record shop.

    I’m not sure who’s more deluded. The person who thinks their signature on someone else’s album makes it 2,000% more valuable, or the super-fans who will presumably buy some of them.

  • Meat for men and little lunches for the ladies

    There’s a fun and fascinating piece from PBS News Hour about food and how it became gendered: steaks for the boys and salads for the girls. Although it’s specifically about American culture, that culture has long been exported globally; the trends there were trends here too.

    For most of history, men and women ate the same things. In the 1800s:

    Even though “women’s restaurants” – spaces set apart for ladies to dine unaccompanied by men – were commonplace, they nonetheless served the same dishes as the men’s dining room: offal, calf’s heads, turtles and roast meat.

    The changes started in the late nineteenth century with the rise of restaurants specifically marketed towards women, places they could have lunch without hearing a bunch of pissed workmen yelling over everyone. Those menus put more effort into their desserts than their mains, and the mains were what we’d consider light meals today.

    The change was served with large side of sexism. In the early 20th century:

    Self-appointed men’s advocates complained that women were inordinately fond of the very types of decorative foods being marketed to them. In 1934, for example, a male writer named Leone B. Moates wrote an article in House and Garden scolding wives for serving their husbands “a bit of fluff like marshmallow-date whip.”

    Save these “dainties” for ladies’ lunches, he implored, and serve your husbands the hearty food they crave: goulash, chili or corned beef hash with poached eggs.

    …The 20th century saw a proliferation of cookbooks telling women to give up their favorite foods and instead focus on pleasing their boyfriends or husbands. The central thread running through these titles was that if women failed to satisfy their husbands’ appetites, their men would stray.

    One of the saddest details in the piece isn’t the blatant sexism. It’s how this nonsense gets internalised. The writer, Paul Freedman, describes how some young women would adopt a “steak strategy”: ordering steak on a first date not to reject gender stereotypes but to reinforce them. They ordered steak to demonstrate to the man that “should a relationship flower, their girlfriends won’t start lecturing them about what they should eat.”

    It sounds like something from 1907, but no. It was happening in New York in 2007.

  • How hateful conspiracy theories make it into the papers

    The Christian Post is yet another evangelical newsletter from America, and it’s part of an axis that includes the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council – two organisations with strong links to the British anti-trans movement. It’s just published an article about the “trans cult” that could have been lifted from The Sunday Times.

    You know how these things go by now. Sinister cult members stealing children by the dead of night, chopping bits off them, selling them to Satan.

    Here’s Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager for the US National Center for Trans Equality.

    The article is astonishing in its sensationalism, but quite typical of anti-trans fear mongering. The Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council use similar language. The goal is to activate disgust–an extremely strong emotion–in the reader.

    It’s why almost all of these articles talk about a sinister push towards surgery for children, even though children do not get gender confirmation surgery. When they can’t scare you about surgery, they’ll tell you that children are being given cross-sex hormones. That doesn’t happen either. And when they’ve ran out of things that don’t happen to scare you about, they’ll redefine “children” to mean “32-year-olds”.

    The Sunday Times was doing it today, in yet another piece about the “state-sponsored sterilisation of trans children”. The “children” in the article were 20, 21 and 32. The article is uncannily similar to the one in the Christian Post.

    It’s worth looking at the Sunday Times piece in a bit more detail, because the most shocking revelation was that one of the “children” – the 32-year-old – had committed suicide after a history of such attempts. The fact that the parent repeatedly misgenders their dead child suggests that lack of parental acceptance and support might just have been a factor. We know that the suicide rate for trans people with accepting families is the same as the wider population; for those with unaccepting families, it’s sky high.

    If like me you’ve experienced the gender clinic system, there’s a lot of this story that just doesn’t add up. If this person, as stated, had a history of clinical depression, anxiety and suicide attempts, nobody from the GP to their psychiatric assessors would have ignored that let alone recommended transition in any form as the way to fix their problems.

    Another parent, a father, said:

    “I couldn’t change my daughter’s mind so I have to change the minds of those doing this to her.”

    His child, who would presumably prefer to be called his son, is 20.  Does that sound supportive and accepting to you?

    My daughter is not transitioning, she is being transitioned by an LGBT cult and by medical professionals.”

    Which suggests that again, the adult child has undergone extensive psychiatric assessment by those “medical professionals”.

    Last but not least, our case study, now 21. They have been persistent, consistent and insistent about their gender identity for five years and did not access any NHS gender services until they were an adult.

    “I trusted the NHS with my child and cannot believe the harm it has done,” their mum says.

    What terrible procedures did they make her child endure?

    [The child] has had no medical interventions.

    So in five years of attending gender services, the NHS has pushed the woman’s child – her adult child – towards no medical treatments whatsoever.

    This, somehow, is evidence of the NHS pushing children – child children, not adult ones – into treatments that we know the NHS does not provide to children.

    But of course, nobody wants to let the facts get in the way of a good satanic conspiracy theory.

    The points Branstetter makes about the Christian Post piece, and similar pieces by the Heritage Foundation and FRC, apply just as well to the Sunday Times piece and most of the other anti-trans scaremongering in the UK press.

    But it also relies on tropes we see in any number of moral panics and conspiracy theories. PizzaGate + QAnon– like Satanic panics of the 80s–all rely on secretive cabals sacrificing children under cover of night. But it’s actually an ancient fear even older than that.

    One of my favorite reads this year was @annamerlan‘s deep dive into the state of conspiracy theories today. She does a wonderful job finding the common threads through 9/11 trutherism, anti-vaxxers, and many more to discover what makes these absurd ideas so appealing to so many.

    On PizzaGate, she notes the fear of child sacrifice is an anti-Semitic trope dating to the Middle Ages. Such “nocturnal rituals” are used to justify violence against other groups (namely Jews)

    You can find the same myths in anti-native writings of European colonialists, anti-Roma sentiment throughout the last few centuries, and anti-Semitism up to the current era.

    The primary purpose of these myths is playing into parental fears. They hope to animate a protective instinct against a ghostly “other”, unleashing an animalistic rage that will excuse any violence against the targeted group.

    …By animating fears of child abduction, ritual abuse, and sexual exploitation, anti-trans activists are–knowingly or not–following a very old roadmap for justifying oppression. The goal is to build so much fear that the cost trans people pay will be deemed a worthwhile bargain.

    They also try to fudge the other side of the equation–are trans people really oppressed? How suicidal are they? Are they really facing *that* much violence?

    It’s a two-pronged strategy: you tell people that trans people are dangerous even though you know they are not. And you tell people that trans people do not face any victimisation or discrimination, even though they do.

    …If trans people are a cult–dangerous and deranged–and the potential cost is your own children, then such framing justifies oppression of us by any means necessary. All the violence and rape and poverty and suffering trans people face is, in their eyes, an acceptable cost.

    Its important to note that the exchange posed by them is, of course, completely imaginary. Nothing about trans people, our rights, or our health care is a danger to anyone. Period.

    You’ll find that the majority of anti-trans hate groups claim to care about “real” trans people. But they don’t. That’s why they offer no solutions, accept no statistics, believe no experts. They are motivated not by a desire to help anyone, but to hate and hurt people.

    And if you don’t believe me, ask yourself: What is the conservative solution to anti-trans discrimination? How would these activists end anti-trans violence, raise trans people out of poverty, or stem the public health crisis taking trans children by suicide?

    Their solution, of course, is to deny that any of these issues exist.

    They don’t have an answer because they don’t care–and they need you not to care, either. They need you to believe trans people are a sickly cult of perverts unworthy of your empathy, let alone equality. They need you to believe the price is just too high to pay.

  • The world does not smell of paint

    There’s an old Billy Connolly routine where he talks about The Queen. “A guy once told me that The Queen thinks the world smells like paint, because ten feet in front of her there’s a guy going [mimes frantic painting].”

    Like the best jokes, there’s a grain of truth in it. When a dignitary comes to visit the flower beds are tidied up, the overflowing bins emptied, the rusty railings repainted, the homeless people moved to somewhere less embarrassing. It’s the same world we all live in, but the visiting dignitary sees a very different and much nicer version of it.

    I was reminded of it yesterday when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, spoke about coming out as a gay man in an interview with People En Espanol. When Cook came out five years ago, he was the only leader of a Fortune 500 company to do so. Ever since, he’s used his platform to advocate for a better world for gay and trans people: as he says, outside Apple the world is still a very unfriendly place for us.

    Back to the paint. In his interview, he talked about how he believes that being gay is one of the greatest gifts God has given him.

    at least for me, I can only speak for myself, it gives me a level of empathy that I think is probably much higher than average because being gay or trans, you’re a minority. And I think when you’re a majority, even though intellectually you can understand what it means to be in a minority, it’s an intellectual thing. It’s not intellectual for me to be in a minority. I’m not saying that I understand the trials and tribulations of every minority group, because I don’t. But I do understand for one of the groups. And to the degree that it helps give you a lens on how other people may feel, I think that’s a gift in and of itself.

    I think a lot of people in minority groups will relate to that. To be in a majority group (not necessarily a numerical majority; you can still be in power when there are fewer of you, so for example men have more power than women even though they’re fewer in number) is to live in a world that smells of paint and fresh flowers.

    I’ve certainly experienced that, and since coming out three years ago I’ve seen a very different version of the same world. It’s made me question pretty much everything, to look at the things I thought I knew and ask: is this true, or what I’ve been told is true? If this is how my particular tribe is treated, is this how other groups are treated too?

    The answer is often yes.

    As Tim Cook says, being gay (or trans, or a single mum, or Muslim, or…) does not mean you understand the trial and tribulations of every minority group. But it gives you a lens on how they may feel, and how they may be treated. And I think he’s right that it gives you a level of empathy that’s higher than average.

    The converse can be true too. If you’re not part of a marginalised group, you can have a level of empathy that’s much lower than average. For example, here are some posts this week from the Daily Mail, a newspaper whose readership is primarily older, affluent, white, Christian, heterosexual and cisgender. The story was the horrific deaths of 39 people in the back of a truck.

    “I’m personally over the moon. Sneaking in and stealing our benefits.”

    “39 less people we have to support.”

    “Hope this serves as a deterrent.”

    “Tough.”

    “Thanks for the news, it’s brighten [sic] up my day it has.”

    #notallolderaffluentwhitechristianheterosexualcisgenderpeople, obviously. But there’s precious little difference between the hate in the comments and the hate in the pages.

    Here’s a promotional image from a paper that caters for a similar but slightly less affluent and educated readership. It’s a few years old now but you’ll recognise the name: she’s still saying much the same, and often much worse, on social media.

    Look at that banner at the bottom. The Sun used those horrific sentiments in a marketing campaign. Buy our paper! We’re racist and inhuman!

    The column also claimed that migrants were “cockroaches”. A few months later, Hopkins published her infamous “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants” column.

    Hopkins’ print career ended shortly afterwards, but not because of those columns – the management were fine with those. Her gig ended because her legal bills were getting too much for the paper’s accountants to bear.

    There’s no difference between Hopkins’ comments and the ones on the Daily Mail website.

    This is what you get when your media isn’t diverse, when you cater for (and in some cases, constantly try to stoke fear and anger among) a very specific group of people.

    Of course, members of minority groups can be hateful arseholes too, especially if they’re fed the same kind of bullshit against other groups: divide and conquer is the oldest strategy in the book. But it’s an interesting exercise to really look at the people who tell us to hate and fear others in this country, the ones fuelling transphobia or islamophobia, the ones telling you to hate foreigners and celebrate their deaths.

    Whether they’re writing columns or waving poisonous placards, they’re people whose worlds always smell of paint.

  • Burn the witches

    There’s a fascinating piece in the New York Times by Whitney Curry Wimbish, an American writer living in Scotland. It’s about our witch trials, the ones we didn’t get taught about in school.

    …the authorities targeted more than 3,000 people throughout the country, from the largest cities to the most remote and sparsely populated islands.

    The accused were teachers, nurses, domestic workers, tailors, farmers, ministers, coal miners, mostly female but also male, indicted by men and women alike. They were imprisoned, tortured with brutal creativity, and in many cases, executed. The intensity of the panic rose and fell more than once over these 200 years and, according to scholars, coincided with personal grievances and the state’s insistence that all citizens actively promote God’s will.

    In Scotland, as in the US, the victims were innocent. The cause of the hysteria has been attributed to lots of things – economic distress, changing attitudes to women, the power of the local Kirks and many other things – and was probably a mix of many different factors. Some of it was undoubtedly cynical hate mongering by the ruling classes, as Wikipedia describes:

    In the view of Thomas Lolis, James I’s goal was to divert suspicion away from male homosociality among the elite, and focus fear on female communities and large gatherings of women. He thought they threatened his political power so he laid the foundation for witchcraft and occultism policies, especially in Scotland. The point was that a widespread belief in the conspiracy of witches and a witches’ Sabbath with the devil deprived women of political influence.

    But a big part of it was technology.

    Across Europe, the hatred that led to witch trials was fuelled by the cutting edge technology of the time: the printing press. It did then what social media and mass media does today.

    One book in particular, Melleus maleficarum or The Witch’s Hammer, has been widely credited with fuelling the European witchcraft panic. As the excellent Text Technologies blog explains:

    Europe was in the midst of great social change at this time. The Reformation brought about a challenge to the moral authority of the church. Scientific and technological innovations where changing the way people lived, thought, and worked. People were moving into urban areas, which changed the traditional feudal order and hierarchy. All this change led to social instability and confusion. In a state of upheaval people look for moral guidance and authority to explain what is happening and what can be done about it. Melleus maleficarum offered this moral guidance and authority. Because of its contents, structure and printed form Melleus maleficarum provided a powerful new ideology that people were seeking.

    …Although the printing press was not the cause of the European witch craze of the 1400 through 1700’s, it was a technology that allowed for the mass production of material that was instrumental in the dissemination of information that fed the witch-hunt craze… Without the printed texts, the witch-hunts would never have been as devastating as they were.

    The Women’s Museum of California:

    The church and those in power made expert use of the printing press, weaponizing it to disseminate propaganda that declared magic and witchcraft inherently evil. With the intent of identifying and punishing women who did not submit to their will, then the church used reproducible media to associate independent women with witchcraft, regardless of their actual experience with magic.

    …From their very inception, witch hunts were organized, initiated, financed, and executed by the church and state in an attempt to control women and much of the imagery was disseminated through the mass production made possible through the printing press.

    It wasn’t just women. The anti-semitic blood libel, which has led to countless Jewish deaths, was spread by the printing press (and some of its most notorious titles have found new life fuelling new hatred on social media). The printing press reassured American Puritans that black slaves were supposed to be slaves because of the word of God. And so sadly, viciously, murderously on.

    Whenever people in power – whether those people are a race, a religion or a royal family – have wanted to crush people they see as enemies, they’ve used technology to allege and incite hatred of supposed deviancy. There’s very little difference between the lurid allegations made against so-called witches by the churches of the day and the lurid allegations made against black, gay, Muslim or trans people by more modern but no less hateful people today. They’re in league with the devil. Burn the witches.

    Back to the NYT:

    With the passage of the centuries we’ve come to understand that 100 percent of people accused of witchcraft were innocent. We recognize the nonsensical nature of a crime committed by being something, not doing something. But we still persecute people simply for who they are — or who we think they are.

    We know where the witchcraft panic came from, how it was spread and who benefited from it. Perhaps we need to spend more time studying and learning from the reasons why it stopped.

  • These people think you’re stupid

    It didn’t take long for the newly created LGB Alliance’s mask to slip. As if its supporters weren’t bad enough – it’s being promoted by the likes of racist far-right troll Katie Hopkins and what appears to be the entire US alt-right on social media, and the list of people it follows on social media could easily be a guide to “trolls you should block on Twitter” – someone who claims to be one of its founding members is connected to the US organisation The Heritage Foundation.

    That’s the anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-bisexual, anti-women Heritage Foundation.

    On Facebook, Gary Powell posted that “I was at the first pre-launch meeting” of the LGB Alliance to help develop its strategy. He’s been very vocal about his connection to the group and uses #LGBAlliance in his social media profile.

    Here’s what Gary did in his holidays.

    He’s not the only problematic person supporting the LGB Alliance, which has already set up the inevitable crowdfunder to process conveniently anonymous donations so we don’t get to see who they are.

    Some of its staunchest supporters have previously gone on record to say they don’t trust bisexual people who – wait for it – are “erasing women”, or they have histories of posting anti-gay stuff online, which makes their support for a supposed LGB organisation look rather suspect. The LGB Alliance itself has been accused of posting anti-bisexual stuff online too, which isn’t a great look for an organisation that’s supposed to be full of bisexual people. Their spokesperson’s response?  “Sorry! I”m (theoretically) bi myself.”

    Theoretically bi. Maybe all those straight guys posting so enthusiastically about how if you don’t support the LGB Alliance against trans perverts you’re a queer paedophile (yes, people really are saying that) are doing so because they’re theoretically LGB. They’re not LGB, but they could be, if they wanted to be, and if they didn’t hate LGB people so much.

    Expecting the LGB Alliance to post sensible things online is probably me being generous. Yesterday it suggested that the solution to transphobic violence was to “explain that you are trans long before you are in a vulnerable position”. That way “there will be no misunderstandings, and no dangerous situations”, which I’m sure is news to the people sexually and/or violently assaulted and even murdered by people who specifically sought them out because they were transgender. Remember, girls. If a man assaults you, it’s probably your fault.

    Let’s give the group the benefit of the doubt: you can’t necessarily choose your supporters (although the clown cavalcade of bigots it’s connected to on Twitter does suggest it’s done just that). But to have a Heritage Foundation supporter in your inner circle is careless to say the least.

    Powell, a Conservative councillor, writes for Public Discourse. Public Discourse is the journal of the Witherspoon Institute, one of the leading Christian Right organisations opposing gay marriage, surrogacy and women’s reproductive rights. Powell knows this, because until he took his Twitter account private last night he linked to the Witherspoon Institute from his Twitter profile. He’s clearly proud of the connection.

    One of the Witherspoon Institute’s most famous creations is the Regnerus Study, a study of LGBT parents that was used repeatedly in court to argue against equal marriage for gay and lesbian people on the grounds that it is harmful to children. It’s a favourite of violent Russian anti-LGBT groups and a core plank of the movement to stop LGBT+ people being allowed to adopt.

    As you’ve probably guessed, the study was bunk. The scientific community called it “a disgrace”. It was financed by anti-LGBT organisations, it was peer-reviewed by the people who did the research, and it was motivated not by a desire to find the truth but to manufacture ammunition to be used against LGBT people. It was ideologically driven, methodologically flawed and did not meet the most basic standards of academic research.

    I’ve written before about the links between the US Christian Right and anti-trans activism in the UK, and how it’s part of a wider battle against women’s rights and LGBT equality. The Witherspoon Institute is one of many US organisations that’s pivoted from demonising gay men to demonising trans people with the same arguments about social decay, harm to children and so on. But the core goal is the same: legal protection for people who want to discriminate against, and refuse to provide healthcare for, LGBT+ people and women who need or have had abortions.

    The methods used to attack trans women, to attack LGBT+ equality and inclusive education and to attack women’s reproductive rights are almost identical, because they come from the same people. Science denial and the creation and promulgation of pseudoscience. Dark money. The creation of fake grassroots groups and the influencing of real ones. Alliances with the far right.

    It’s happening across Europe and it’s happening here in the UK too.

    OpenDemocracy:

    Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

    They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights advocates

    Here’s Sian Norris on the rise of US-funded anti-abortion groups in the UK.

    The anti-abortion movement is also not in a silo. Its rhetoric often goes hand-in-hand with far-right groups. For example, the founder of the UK Life League, Jim Dowson, is also involved with the far-right political group, Britain First. Articles published in their bi-annual Rescue magazine in 2018 blame abortion for a low birth rate in the “indigenous” population and describe a future where “the empty cradles, playgrounds and school chairs where our own children should be are occupied by aliens” unless abortion is made illegal.

    …Beyond graphic and aggressive imagery, there is another US-imported tactic being employed by the anti-choice movement in the UK: the sharing of false medical information in order to undermine abortion law.

    In a sane world, those are the alliances the press would be reporting on.

    Many anti-trans activists are close to the far right too, which is why Katie Hopkins’ and the alt-right’s support for the LGB Alliance isn’t so surprising: some of the highest-profile UK anti-trans activists are antisemitic, racist and religiously conservative. They too are connected to the Heritage Foundation and other Christian Right organisations.

    The Christian Right thinks that people are stupid. The people who are happily linking arms with them suggest they may have a point.

  • Less than human

    Yesterday was just another day in the UK press. The Telegraph suggested that trans people should be made to carry ID cards in order to go to the toilet. The Times lauded a new anti-trans hate group specifically set up to exclude trans people from the wider LGBT+ rights movement. The Daily Mail and The Sun continued to make hay from claims that two young trans people “forced” a multinational corporation to “erase women”.

    It was just another day on the internet too, with trans people being abused 8 times a minute. That abuse ranged “from insults and harassment to calls for the genocide of transgender people and their allies”, with people suggesting that it’s OK to kill trans people because they’re “less than human”.

    That’s courtesy of the anti-bullying charity Ditch The Label, which has co-authored a report about online transphobia.

    It makes for incredibly grim reading. On Twitter, 12% of posts relating to trans issues or people are abusive; elsewhere abuse makes up 18% of blog comments, 19% of news comments, 40% of forum discussions and 78% of YouTube comments. And that’s just clearly abusive posts. It doesn’t include dog-whistles where bigotry makes its point more carefully.

    Despite this, these are still very minority views. As the report notes: “constructive, pro-trans conversation far outweighs the negative. Transphobic conversation is in the minority, but it’s still very loud and very damaging.”

    These may be minority views, but they represent the majority of trans-related coverage in most of the UK press and broadcasting media. A vicious, vocal minority is being repeatedly platformed by editors and broadcasters who should, and I suspect who do, know better.

    Every single trans person I know is tired of this and terrified by it too.

  • I’m a fan of Fangirls

    There are two kinds of music. There is music for boys, which is good music. And there is music for girls, which is bad music.

    It’s not true, of course. But it’s a sadly common belief.

    When teen girls get upset at the breakup of their favourite band, we mock them. When the boys mourned Bowie, we devoted entire arts sections to their emotional pain. Kurt Cobain is deified and his widow, who wrote one of the greatest rock albums of their era, is damned. One Direction fans are silly little girls; Radiohead fans are cerebral music mavens.

    This is not reserved for corners of the internet. Friends of mine have been told by supposed grown-ups that their musical taste is stupid and rubbish because they like pop. It’s music for girls! Ewwww!

    I listen to a lot of music and go to a lot of gigs, and the greatest musical experiences of my life have involved listening to music for girls in the company of ecstatic female fans. There is an incredible joy to sharing a concert by The 1975 with ten thousand teenagers, dancing to Bananarama with two thousand middle-aged mums or having a soulless shed made magic by a few thousand glittery girls and a farewell show by Girls Aloud.

    All of this probably explains why Hannah Ewens’ Fangirls is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in years. It’s about female fans of rock, of pop and of dance music, and it’s one of the warmest, most empathetic and fascinating books about any kind of music that you’ll read.

    Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

    From Beatlemania in the early 1960s to the Directioners and Beyhive of today, female music fans have long driven the objects of their affection to the dizzying heights of life-changing fame. But marginalized fan groups are never given appropriate credit. Frequently derided, their worlds and communities are self-contained and rarely investigated by cultural historians and commentators.

    Yet without these people, in the past, records would have gathered dust on shelves, unsold and forgotten. Now, concerts wouldn’t sell out and revenue streams from merchandising would disappear, changing the face of the music industry as we know it.

    In Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture, journalist Hannah Ewens is on a mission to give these individuals their rightful due.

    What I liked about Fangirls is that it doesn’t patronise its subjects. It doesn’t make value judgements about the music the young women and non-binary people listen to; it’s about the euphoria, the camaraderie and sometimes the sadness of being a music fan.

    Fandom is a powerful, extraordinary thing. It can be all-consuming, something we discover just at the time of our lives when we need to feel part of something bigger and accepting. It can help us define who we are – to this day there are particular T-shirts I can see complete strangers wearing and think, “oh yeah. One of us.” – and it can help us find friendship and connection when we’re struggling to do either in the rest of our lives. It’s a joyous and often profound thing, and Fangirls treats it as such.

  • A bad idea from history

    In the Telegraph, David Thomas wrote this:

    Thomas’s argument is simple. “If drivers, pensioners, students and disabled citizens have cards that establish their bona fides”, why shouldn’t trans people?

    There are two answers to that.

    One, drivers, pensioners, students and disabled people don’t have to produce ID so they can go for a piss in safety or get on with their lives without being beaten up.

    Here’s Ellen Murray from TransgenderNI:

    Having this for trans people “voluntarily” is against the law, absolutely unenforceable, breaches human rights grossly and is a very dangerous direction to go down.

    And two, because they have been tried before.

    Here’s one.

    These passes were “transvestite passes”, which were granted by German police until 1933 based on diagnostic interviews by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Research. The holders were allowed to wear the opposite gender’s clothing in public without fear of arrest.

    They weren’t granted after 1933 because on the 6 of May that year Nazi students and soldiers stormed the Institute, destroyed equipment and materials (the most famous photo of book-burning Nazis is of those people destroying Hirschfeld’s work), and seized the records of people who’d been interviewed by Hirschfeld. Those people were then specifically targeted by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps where they were ostracised by other prisoners, abused, experimented on and killed.

    If Thomas isn’t aware of this terrible history, he should educate himself. And if he is aware but chose to ignore it, he should be ashamed of himself.