Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • “You invited us here to celebrate genitals, Karen”

    The blurb for this cake says: “Wheels for boys or heels for girls?…boys love cars and girls love heels”.

    Here’s a fun question for you. Which group of people is so obsessed with enforcing regressive gender stereotypes that they’ve killed a woman, injured several others and set fire to various bits of land?

    Is it:

    (a) LGBT+ people?
    (b) The straights?

    It is of course (b), thanks to one of the most awful facets of modern culture: the gender reveal event. Because a baby shower isn’t enough, some parents are trying to get others excited about the genitals of their imminent children in increasingly elaborate ways. And those ways are dangerous and sometimes lethal.

    Julie Beck in The Atlantic:

    At least one human life has already been lost as a direct result of the widespread obsession with turning the sex of one’s unborn child into an explosive (often literally) spectacle. In October, an Iowa woman was killed when her family inadvertently built a pipe bomb as part of their gender-reveal party—a gathering at which expectant parents dramatically and colorfully announce the sex of their baby.

    What started off with blue or pink cakes has become much more elaborate and dangerous. In recent months we’ve seen gender reveal plane crashes, gender reveal pipe bombs, gender reveal wildfires and many other examples of sheer genital-obsessed idiocy.

    Jenna Karvunidis, the blogger credited with starting the craze more than a decade ago deeply regrets it, not least because her own child is gender non-conforming. “I started to realize that nonbinary people and trans people were feeling affected by this, and I started to feel bad that I had released something bad into the world”, she said this year.

    That’s because you don’t need to blow up grandma or crash a crop-duster for gender reveals to be idiotic and regressive. There’s a distinct whiff of sexism to the whole thing. Beck:

    Not only does the very idea of gender-reveal conflate gender with biological sex, but many parties reinforce masculine and feminine stereotypes with themes like “touchdowns or tutus?” and “guns or glitter?” [CM: there are many more, such as “wheels or heels?” and “riffles or rifles?”] (These regressive overtones have made hating on gender reveals just as commonplace as the parties themselves.) Trouble can also ensue if a parent was hoping for one sex and their disappointment ends up immortalized online.

    The sheer wrongness of the whole thing is best summed up in a single tweet.

    If you’re gonna do a gender reveal party, don’t play coy with colored smoke or whatever. When you blow up that cake, I expect to see a giant sign saying “IT’S A PENIS!” Showers of dicks raining down like confetti. You invited us here to celebrate genitals, Karen. You wanted this.

  • The sin of omission

    Something that’s puzzled me for a while is how so many people believe that Donald Trump and his administration are pro-LGBT+ when they’ve been so viciously anti-LGBT+: from the transgender military ban onwards, they have mounted a sustained attack on the basic rights of LGBT+ people in an ongoing campaign to remove the most basic human rights such as protection from discrimination in housing, healthcare and employment.

    The most recent example of that is the November 1 rule that will allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBT+ parents. Agencies that receive federal grants will no longer have to abide by non-discrimination guidelines thanks to new “religious freedom” exemptions, exemptions that also apply to sexual health education, youth homelessness programmes, drug and alcohol recovery programmes and other key services.

    It’s a horrible backwards step that’s going to have terrible effects on some of the most vulnerable people, so why aren’t more people up in arms about it?

    Because they don’t know about it.

    A study by MediaMatters found that the majority of America’s top newspapers didn’t report it. Of the top 50 titles, 28 didn’t publish a single item in print or online about the new rule.

    Of the papers that did report it, many uncritically quoted extremist anti-LGBT+ evangelical groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. Only one paper, the New York Daily News, reminded its readers that these organisations have spent decades inciting hatred of LGBT+ people.

    The lack of context means that people are incredibly ill-informed.

    It is also crucial for media to cover individual actions like the new rule as one piece of the Trump-Pence administration’s broader, vehemently anti-LGBTQ record. The New York Daily News and The Washington Post provided two good examples of this in their reporting, as both contextualized the rule as part of the larger attack and rollback of LGBTQ rights. Most coverage unfortunately failed to do this, which may mislead readers into thinking the administration’s attacks on LGBTQ rights could be a one-off occurrence.

    As MediaMatters explains, the mainstream US press was keen to portray Trump as pro-LGBT+ during his presidential campaign on his say-so, and it has conspicuously failed to report on anti-LGBT+ actions by his administration since he took power. That has left a vacuum the right-wing press and social media have been only too keen to fill with propaganda.

    In the absence of meaningful mainstream reporting on Trump’s anti-LGBTQ onslaught, right-wing and evangelical media often dominate coverage of the issue and twist the attacks on basic LGBTQ rights into a fight for “religious freedom.”

    The news media’s job is to report and contextualise, to educate and inform, to speak truth to power. When it fails to do that, whether by bias or omission, it becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

  • Daddy doesn’t know best

    Writing in Vox, Katelyn Burns’ piece about Luna Younger demonstrates why media outlets should have trans people covering trans issues: unlike pretty much every piece about the poor kid I’ve read so far, it eschews ill-informed scaremongering.

    If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a horrible battle in the US between two estranged parents over their 7-year-old child after the mum took out a restraining order against the father. The child has been consistent about her gender identity since she was three, and her mum has let her present as she wishes – as a girl. Her dad disagrees vehemently, and has taken to the courts and to the right-wing media, culminating in a judge’s decision to overrule the jury that granted the mother sole custody. It has become a cause celebre among US conservatives, with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz suggesting that letting Luna be herself is “child abuse”.

    As Burns notes:

    The case has hit a boiling point where lives feel threatened and trans families inside and outside of Texas feel unsafe — all over whether a child should be allowed to wear a dress and be called “she” and “her.”

    Much of the reporting over the Younger case has claimed that her mother, Anne Georgulas, wants to “chemically castrate” her and force her into medical transition because “she wants a girl”. But as Burns points out, Georgulas already has daughters from a previous relationship; and at age 7 there is no medical involvement whatsoever. Social transition for this kid is wearing her hair long and donning the odd frock, things that are completely superficial and reversible (albeit important to the child).

    Burns’ report paints a very different picture than the right-wing press, which has gone with the father’s side of the story and portrayed him as a saint battling political correctness and “gender ideology” gone mad. The court documents are considerably less favourable, suggesting a serial liar whose main concern is how to make money from demonising his estranged partner and bullying one of his children.

    According to court documents of the annulment of his and Georgulas’s marriage, the court found that Younger lied about multiple aspects of his life: his career, his previous marriages, his income, his education, and even his military service. It was enough for a Texas court to annul their six-year marriage because it was entered into under fraudulent terms.

    Judge Cooks also called out Younger for profiting off a violation of his family’s privacy. “The father finds comfort in public controversy and attention surrounded by his use of unfounded facts and is thus motivated by financial gain of approximately $139,000 which he has received at the cost of the protection and privacy of his children,” she wrote in her judgment, referring to a crowdfunding and merchandising scheme launched last year by Younger.

    Even conservative pundit Glenn Beck expressed concern over Younger’s past. On his radio show, he read the court’s findings of fact showing that Younger acted aggressively toward Georgulas’s older daughters, withholding their possessions, locking them in their rooms, and forcing them to do “plank push-ups” until they agreed to follow house rules.

    That aggressiveness was also directed at Luna

    There are of course two sides to every story, but the picture that emerges from the court documents hardly makes it sound like a case of fatherly love denied.

    The child’s father wasn’t particularly keen to exercise his custody rights, refuses to accept the recommendations of any of the professionals involved in his daughter’s care, does not attend appointments or seek the second opinions he claims to want, and treats his daughter in an aggressive and arguably malicious way: where her twin brother’s hair is left long, her father deliberately shaves her head.

    Burns:

    Luna’s hair figures so prominently in this case because at age 7, hair is often the only differentiating physical indicator of a child’s gender. Clothed, boys’ and girls’ bodies at that age are essentially the same, having not yet undergone any effects from puberty. A trans child at age 7 does not make permanent changes to their body, despite what Younger claims Georgulas wants to do.

    Ultimately, the dispute at this current stage — and several years into the future — is over Luna’s social transition: how she wears her hair, what clothes she wears, her name, and pronouns.

    Luna is not taking any medication, let alone undergoing any surgical intervention. Her care is in accordance with international best practice.  Those details are missing from almost all of the reporting.

    But then, the reporting isn’t concerned about the welfare of the child. The people who scream “think of the children!” rarely do.

  • Money for nothing

    Interesting developments at the LGB Alliance, the newly launched anti-trans group. It’s managed to raise over £25,000 in largely anonymous donations in just 11 days of existence, largely due to support from right-wing media here and in the US.

    The right-wing press and the US religious right like the Alliance because while it advances the same argument as the most hateful religious conservatives – trans people’s rights are at odds with LGB people’s rights, even though the majority of trans people are themselves LGB; trans people aren’t really people and don’t deserve human rights; trans people are icky – its figureheads are a black woman and a gay man. That means unlike straight white guys, they can’t be criticised because there have been no wicked, misinformed or bigoted black or gay people in the history of the world ever.

    The right-wing support has no doubt helped the fundraising, as it’s helped other anti-trans fundraisers in the past. But it’s interesting to look at this particular one, because this is very specifically claiming to be an alliance of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the UK.

    So why are so many of the supporters straight people from North America?

    Don’t get me wrong. It’s lovely to see so many straight people such keen allies of LGB people and putting their money where their mouths are.

    But it’s also rather strange.

    There are lots of fundraisers online for LGBT things. And almost all of them are struggling to meet their targets, whether that’s a few hundred quid for a poster campaign or a few grand to do up an LGBT+ community centre.

    What all those fundraisers have in common is the distinct lack of straight Americans and Canadians offering solidarity and throwing their money at them.

    But when a couple of people in the UK start a group designed to destabilise Stonewall, the trans-inclusive LGBT+ charity named after the Stonewall riots that were in part started by trans people, it’s a different story.

    Why would straight people from the US and Canada be so passionate about destabilising the UK’s main LGBT+ charity?

    If only there were some kind of explanation.

    Anyway. £25K and counting. That’s a lot of money. Where’s it going? It isn’t a charity yet so it doesn’t need to tell you.

    Here’s where it isn’t going. It isn’t going to help homeless LGB people, who – including trans kids – account for 24% of the UK’s under-25 homeless population. It isn’t going to lobby for proper funding of live-saving PReP medication for gay and bi men (and some trans women). It isn’t going anywhere near any cash-strapped LGBT organisations at all. It’s going on marketing, and on salaries, and on a launch event that will no doubt scaremonger about trans people.

    It’s possible that the £25, 257 and counting is being donated by people who are also donating to other organisations – real ones that are registered charities. But it’s unlikely. Anti-trans crowdfunders consistently attract a very different funding pattern from other charity crowdfunders, and this appears to be no exception.

    For two years now the crowdfunders of anti-trans organisations have all followed the same pattern: supposedly grassroots organisations raising five-figure sums within days of going online, with promotional support from the US Christian and conservative right on social media and sometimes in major publications too.

    The LGB Alliance has now raised its funding target from the initial £25,000 to £50,000. How much of that money will go to provide practical assistance for LGB people rather than demonising trans women? The answer, I suspect, is none.

    We know how this will play out. We know this because we saw endless “protect women!” crowdfunders raising five-figure sums incredibly quickly over the last few years. That money didn’t go to fight for Northern Irish women’s reproductive freedom or marriage rights. It didn’t go to fight FGM, or fund rape crisis charities, or help women’s refuges, or go to any vulnerable women or girls.

    At least a quarter of a million pounds was raised by a handful of anti-trans groups, and much of it was spent on newspaper adverts that lied about the law, on packs urging schools to break the Equality Act and bully children, and on providing a good living for people whose previous careers had ended in failure. In one case it even bought a bigot some bedding.

    Some crowdfunders didn’t even pretend to be about protecting women. One prominent anti-trans activist crowdfunded £2,000 for her own living expenses because being a bigot is so time-consuming; another, claiming to have lost their job for speaking out about trans people, raised a barely believable £64,000 for nothing in particular.

    Others raised money for specific purposes and then changed their remit, so for example one activist raised a five-figure sum to pay for legal representation in a case that didn’t then go to court. In one particularly egregious example, activists set up a crowdfunder as a thank you to a notorious anti-trans bigot; when the bigot declined to accept the money, much of it was spent on a new mattress for an anti-trans activist.

    Not all of the people running crowdfunders are grifters. But as a rule of thumb, when the first thing someone does to “protect group X” is to ask for your money, it means they’re only interested in helping one very specific group of people.

    Themselves.

  • Not all hate preachers have beards

    Imagine if members of the Scottish Parliament invited leading far-right “race realist” figures to address the parliament about The Great Replacement, the white nationalist conspiracy theory. They would tell MSPs about how political and social elites were harming ordinary white men and women by encouraging immigration. They would claim that this global conspiracy, a conspiracy many of their followers blame the Jews for funding, will render white people powerless, and they would advocate for the rollback of decades-old equality legislation so that black and brown people would not be entitled to protection from discrimination or hate crimes.

    Would they get away with it?

    Of course they wouldn’t. But swap brown people for trans ones and that’s exactly what MSP Joan McAlpine is doing.

    To mark International Trans Day of Remembrance, which mourns trans people murdered as a result of anti-trans hatred, McAlpine is hosting a bigot party that’s going to stir up even more hatred. That appears to be its entire purpose. Various “gender critical” extremists are going to tell MSPs that political and social elites are harming ordinary women by encouraging “transgenderism”. They will claim that this global conspiracy, which their followers often blame the Jews for funding, will render cisgender people powerless, and they will advocate for the rollback of decades-old equality legislation that protects trans people from discrimination and hate crimes.

    McAlpine, a former member of disgraced former First Minister Alex Salmond’s inner circle, appears to be one of several SNP figures who are using transphobia as a wedge and trans people as collateral damage in their attempts to undermine Nicola Sturgeon.

    But her position, and the people she’s platforming, have become much more extreme. What began with disingenuous assertions about “reasonable concerns” regarding the Gender Recognition Act has become what appears to be the very deliberate, malicious platforming of hate speech.

    This latest event is to promote a “Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights”, a declaration that’s entirely about trying to remove fifty years of protections for trans people. It is not about the Gender Recognition Act of “reasonable concerns” fame, which would be bad enough. It’s about trying to roll back the Equality Act of 2010 and pretty much any relevant protections introduced since the 1970s.

    And women’s rights organisations can see right through it.

    Here’s Emma Ritch, director of the Engender feminist organisation.

    This declaration… doesn’t include women’s rights to housing, pay equality, access to justice, social security, education, or political representation. When it talks about violence against women, freedom of expression, and children’s rights it does so entirely through the warped lens of antipathy towards trans people.

    CommonSpace has spoken to all the major Scottish women’s groups, and their view is the same. As a spokesperson for Scottish Women’s Aid put it:

    We are worried that some of the debate around trans inclusion has blurred the line between free speech and hate speech.

    Here’s Christine Burns MBE, one of the people who helped create the Gender Recognition Act.

    Let’s not beat about the bush: Elements within the SNP are advocating a policy on trans people that not only contravenes a unanimous judgement of the European Court of Human Rights in 2002 but suggests ignoring administrative principles established since 1970.

    And here’s the Scottish Equality Network:

    A “Declaration” recently circulated to MSPs says that trans people should always be treated, for all purposes (legal and otherwise) as the sex that they were registered at birth. That would breach the European Convention on Human Rights, and breach UK and EU equality law.

    The speakers at McAlpine’s event will include Sheila Jeffreys, a lesbian separatist who isn’t very keen on bisexual people or straight women and who has claimed that trans people – who she calls “parasites” – are part of a government-sponsored plot to enforce gender stereotypes and wipe out homosexuality, because that’s a completely reasonable and not batshit insane thing to say. She bases this on Iran, where – according to her – cisgender gay men are transitioning to become women in incredible numbers because it’s easier to be trans than gay.

    As Wikipedia notes: “The belief that cisgender homosexuals have actually undergone sex change due to social pressure is not supported by evidence.”

    Here’s a typically measured, sensible, reasonable bit from Jeffreys where she advocates making it illegal, globally, for trans people to have gender confirmation surgery:

    Janice Raymond does not consider that legislation outlawing surgery is the right way forward. I am not so sure, and classifying transsexualism as a human rights violation would be a step towards making surgery illegal.

    – Journal of Lesbian Studies, p71, Vol 1, 1997

    Note the date. Jeffreys has been banging her hateful gong for decades.

    Jeffreys and her fellow speakers, inevitably, are the supposedly silenced free thinkers who talk endlessly about how they’re being prevented from sharing their crackpot conspiracy theories about trans people as they share their crackpot conspiracy theories about trans people in their books, in their lectures, in their national newspaper interviews and in their national broadcast interviews. And now, they’re getting to share their crackpot conspiracy theories about trans people in Parliament.

    The CommonSpace piece does a good job of showing the big picture, but the rest of Scots media almost certainly won’t: the Herald, the Scotsman and The National, as well as the tabloids, have followed London’s lead and consistently amplified anti-trans extremists.

    They have effectively silenced not just trans people and LGBT+ groups, but also the many women’s groups who recognise hatred when they see it.

  • Lies, dame lies

    The president of actors’ union Equity has written to The Sunday Mirror about its story claiming “men could be banned from playing panto dames to free up the roles for trans performers”.

    Guess what? It’s bullshit.

    Here’s her letter.

  • Sometimes I wouldn’t want to be seen dead with me

    I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of makeup as warpaint. It can be a kind of disguise, a metaphorical suit of armour you can hide behind when you’re feeling far from cute or confident.

    I use makeup as warpaint quite a lot. If my eyes are smoky, my lips ruby red and my lashes thick with mascara, you can be reasonably sure that I’ve done it to distract from how I really feel. It’s not just the makeup. It’s my entire presentation. If I’m in a baggy top with bits of fried egg on it you know I’m feeling comfortable and confident in myself. If I’ve really dressed up it means that I’ve spent most of the day in a pit of self-loathing, that I’ve forced myself to come out when I don’t feel like it or because I’m scared of going somewhere new, or a combination of those things.

    The makeup and the clothes enable me to get into character. The character is still Carrie, but it’s a more confident, more self-assured and a lot less frightened version of me. When I’m feeling scared or sad I can send her out as an advance party until the real Carrie feels safe enough to show up.

    Sometimes I send her out because I want other people to see the right version of me.

    I spend a lot of time being seen as the wrong version of me. I’m under no illusion that anybody looks at me and thinks “Oh my god! It’s the beautiful and talented actor Emma Stone!”. But I’m aware that a lot of people don’t look at me and see an overweight middle-aged woman either. They see the gender I was assigned at birth, the person I pretended to be, not the person I actually am.

    I’m not making that up. It’s pretty obvious quite a lot of the time. It’s there when people stare openly at me on public transport, or talk about me in voices that aren’t quite quiet enough. And it’s there when I’m misgendered, when despite my best efforts I’m coded as male.

    So sometimes I want to kick back against that. I’m naturally a jeans and baggy cardigan kind of girl, but sometimes I’ll go what’s called High Femme: ultra-feminine presentation, whether that’s a little black dress and red lipstick or something more suited to skipping through a meadow with a flower in my hair. When I do that I want to be seen, not as who I used to be but as who I am. And if that means turning the femme stuff up to eleven, so be it.

    I was out with an old friend the other night, someone who’s been a strong ally since I first came out. I put a lot more effort than usual into my presentation. Part of it was because I was feeling pretty crappy and wanted to try and cheer myself up with a cute dress I’ve been meaning to wear for ages, but if I’m honest with myself a lot of it was because I wanted him to tell his wife later that “honestly, Carrie’s looking amazing.”

    I’m so vain, I know. But I wanted him to report back because – and I remember this with the incredible high definition clarity of all my worst, most embarrassing memories – shortly after I started to come out, my wife and I went for dinner at his house. It was the first time I’d tried presenting as me in front of friends, and I realise now that I looked like an ironing board somebody had drawn a face on.

    In the last three years I’ve learnt a lot about makeup, about clothes, about not looking like an ironing board with a face on it. At the time, I hadn’t learnt any of those things.

    I felt good before I left the flat, but when I got to the pub I started feeling different, self-conscious. And it wasn’t until a friend at the bar asked me if I was on a date that I realised what it was.

    Embarrassment.

    The self-consciousness I was feeling was embarrassment.

    I wasn’t embarrassed for me. I was embarrassed for my friend.

    I was embarrassed because, well, imagine people thinking you’re on a date with that.

    This is what’s called internalised transphobia. Instead of being flattered or amused (We’re friends! I like women!), I’m ashamed and embarrassed. I’m ashamed and embarrassed because for most of my life I’ve been told that people like me are shameful and embarrassing.

    As I’ve written before, this goes through the culture like the word “Blackpool” through a stick of rock.

    One of the most famous scenes in Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is when Carrey discovers he has kissed somebody who’s trans. This revelation causes him to throw up twice into the toilet bowl and then clean his teeth so vigorously he goes through an entire tube of toothpaste.

    It happened in The Crying Game too, and in Naked Gun 33⅓. Horror at trans women is also played for laughs in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Hangover Part II and in a particularly repellent example, in the cartoon The Cleveland Show. The “trans as disgusting trickster” trope is widespread on social media.

    Still, it makes a change from portraying trans people as murderers.

    It’s everywhere. Comedy gigs, TV shows, newspapers. A constant drumbeat of trans people are this, trans people are that, trans people aren’t really people.

    You try not to let it get into your head but it’s like trying to stay dry in a monsoon. And it affects everything. How you feel when you’re out with friends, how you feel when you go to work, how you feel when you walk into somewhere you haven’t been before. It’s what stops you going to the thing you said you would go to, what stops you from swiping on anyone on a dating app because you don’t believe anybody could ever possibly desire you.

    What I felt for my friend had nothing to do with how my friend felt. As I wrote earlier, he’s a strong trans ally and a good friend; he couldn’t care less what other people think. But I do. I try not to, but I do. The reason I’m so quick to assume what other people are thinking, so quick to feel shame and embarrassment, is because that’s what I think, because that’s what I’ve been told to think for so much of my life.

    When I look in the mirror, I don’t think “honestly Carrie, you look amazing“.

    I think “imagine being on a date with that.”

  • When people show you who they are, believe them

    There’s a famous quote by Maya Angelou: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

    It means that when someone shows you a clear red flag, you shouldn’t ignore it. Someone who disrespects you will continue to be disrespectful. Someone who is violent will continue to be violent. Someone who is hateful will continue to be hateful.

    So I’m not joining in today’s surprise that Rod Liddle has written another hateful, racist piece for the hateful, racist Spectator. Liddle showed us who he was when he accepted a police caution for punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach, when he was found using a pseudonym to post racist remarks on football forums, and in pretty much every column he’s ever excreted for The Spectator and other vile rags.

    Here in Scotland, a whole bunch of people have decided to show who they are thanks to a fabricated furore over a census question.

    If you haven’t actually seen the question, here’s a screenshot from the census’s quality testing report, which this entire story has been based on.

    The above question has been reported as the PC lobby forcing Scots people to choose from a “baffling” list of 21 sexualities. The reality is much more tedious. The list is for autocorrect entries so that if people choose the “another way” option, it’ll offer some other suggestions (and help harmonise the data by ensuring consistent spelling).

    The story originated in the Murdoch press and was quickly picked up by the Scottish Daily Mail. We already know who these publications are, but they’re showing us again.

    The Sun story is around 650 words. Its interviewees are an anti-trans academic and activist (this story has no connection to trans people at all), an unnamed Tory spokesperson, an evangelical anti-LGBT+ Christian group and the Catholic Church. The Daily Mail sought comment from an additional, extremely fringe, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT evangelical group who railed against “gender madness”, even though the story has no connection with anybody’s gender.

    You’d think such obvious, politically motivated culture war framing – concoct a story about so-called identity politics, get the evangelical rent-a-gobs to damn it, tell your readers that the queers have gone too far this time and encourage them to post foul homophobic and transphobic vitriol in your comments sections – would prevent grown-ups from sharing it.

    But you’d be wrong. People who previously limited their online abuse to abusing trans women, including senior newspaper journalists, bloggers and political figures, have seized upon this non-story, abusing the entire LGBT+ community for something the Murdoch press made up and standing proudly alongside some of the most viciously anti-women, anti-LGBT groups in the country.

    They showed trans people who they were months and in some cases years ago. And now they’re showing you.

    When people show you who they are, believe them.

  • A lot can happen in three years

    When you’ve made big changes to your life various dates have significance, good or bad. Today’s one of them, because it’s the third anniversary of me beginning to come out.

    I thought about doing one of those “what I’ve learnt” anniversary posts, but I changed my mind. I haven’t learnt much, or at least I haven’t learnt much that doesn’t sound like it should be on one of those annoying positive thinking Facebook posts with a sunset or a rainbow behind it.

    I’ll make two exceptions, though. The first is to say that the most important thing I’ve learnt in the three years since I started coming out is how much privilege I had.

    I didn’t experience sexism, homophobia or transphobia, never feared for my personal safety, didn’t have politicians and pundits arguing over whether I should be allowed human rights or healthcare, didn’t get stared at with open contempt in public places and didn’t have to fear abuse or even violence when I used a public toilet.

    And the second is to say that people are pretty great.

    Not all people, sadly.

    But while social media or newspapers might suggest otherwise, my real-world experiences tell me that the world is full of people who are good, and who are kind, and who look for what we have in common rather than for things to divide us.

    Those people have made the last three years worth living.

  • A greedy few ruin everything for everyone

    This is a story about two different social media posts that demonstrate the same problem: that the greed and/or stupidity of a few people on the internet can ruin things for everyone else.

    First up, there’s Film Stories Junior. To the best of my knowledge it’s unique: it not only caters for under-15s, but it commissions and pays under-15s to write for them. It’s produced on a shoestring budget by very good people.

    Here’s editor Simon Brew, a man who is usually one of the most even-tempered people on social media.

    To the absolute shitheads who are pirating copies of Film Stories Junior magazine: stop and think for a minute.

    I’ve sunk my savings into this magazine, trying to pay under 15s for writing about film work, showing them that their brains and words have real value.

    It is so hand to mouth. I stay awake pondering ways to bring more interest and industry support to it. I’ve put everything on the line for these magazines. And you just steal them.

    You steal a kids’ film magazine, and threaten the future of it.

    You threaten me being able to print more of their work. You threaten them earning for their work.

    You’re stealing a magazine that’s written by kids.

    Meanwhile on Facebook, Cris Shapan – as in Cris Shapan, maker of incredibly funny fakes – has found that the content he shares for free online is being stolen and sold for profit.

    I have discovered that there are MANY examples of my work being sold on eBay by people who have no connection to me whatsoever. They have simply taken it from the net, printed it, and put it up for sale, often in the $30-$50 range.

    Shapan’s initial and entirely justifiable reaction was to decide not to post any more of his work online.

    I can’t see the logic in allowing others to make a buck off of my work while I’m eating crackers for dinner. Thanks, and sorry…really, really sorry. I have some really great fans.

    After a lot of supportive posts from those fans he’s decided to leave the existing content up for the time being – “the damage has already been done” – but he’s really wary of posting anything new. Why give your work away for free so that others can profit from it?