Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • We don’t need mental health awareness. We need action

    Today is World Mental Health Day, and the theme is suicide prevention. Many politicians and commentators will say or write suitably concerned things about the importance of getting help, without acknowledging that they are part of the reason people need help in the first place.

    Mental health is political.

    The causes are often political. And the shocking lack of support and treatment for people is political too.

    I’ve lost two friends  to suicide this year. One of them took his own life while on a too-long waiting list for treatment. His death was the result of political choices. The system might not have been able to save him. But the system never tried.

    The grotesque underfunding of the NHS, underfunding that makes vulnerable people wait years for treatment if they live long enough to access it, is not accidental. It’s the result of many years of swingeing cuts, of ideologically driven changes to the way the NHS works, of a deliberate lack of funding for the training of health professionals, of a refusal to fairly tax corporations and the most affluent people in society to adequately fund health and social care.

    I’m particularly aware of this because I’ve seen how desperately underfunded mental health services are. It’s even worse if you’re trans: people who are trans have to wait even longer for help, which is why the suicide, self-harm and substance abuse rates in our community are so frightening. In some cases the gap between initial referral and actual treatment can be four or even five years.

    That’s political too. Trans healthcare is a grotesquely underfunded and overworked subset of mental health provision. Once again, that’s the result of political choices – choices affecting the wider NHS, and choices such as the UK governments’ persistent refusals over many years to heed warnings of growing demand for trans-related healthcare. The current crisis in the gender clinic system was predicted years ago by credible experts. Politicians chose not to listen, let alone provide any additional funding.

    Commentators play their part too. My own mental health has been severely impacted by the daily demonisation of and scaremongering about trans people in mainstream media – Radio 4 was at it again this morning, platforming anti-trans bigots without any dissenting voices – and on social media, where I have to block thousands of people just to be able to use the apps normally.

    It’s not just us. It’s the immigrants blamed for putting pressure on the NHS to distract from funding cuts and creeping privatisation. It’s the EU nationals forced to apply for settled status to continue living here, the non-white people demonised in the national press as criminals and terrorists, the so-called “snowflakes” laughed at for daring to talk about their mental health, the people from ethnic, sexual and romantic minorities whose very existence is questioned and whose rights are deemed less important than those of others.

    And most of all, it’s poverty.

    There’s a reason people in Glasgow’s affluent West End live longer than those in the deprived East, and that reason has existed since the West End came into being: it isn’t race, it isn’t religion and it isn’t sexual orientation or gender identity.

    It’s money.

    Money enables you to buy better living conditions, better food, a better education for your children, in many respects a better life.

    That’s not to say affluent people don’t get mental health problems. Of course they do. But they don’t rot on the same waiting lists that poor people do. They aren’t bullied by the DWP like poor people are. They aren’t on zero-rights, zero-hour contracts like many poor people are. They aren’t reliant on desperately overstretched and underfunded community mental health services like poor people are.

    Mental health problems are not a sudden plague caused by who knows what. They are the inevitable result of successive governments removing the safety net for society’s most vulnerable people, the consequences of creating a society where the most privileged are able to deny their responsibility to help the less fortunate and incite hatred of those who need help most. They are the result of inadequate housing, of slashed funding for mental health services, of inadequate protection against hate crimes and discrimination, of a low-wage, low-rights employment market.

    They are the inevitable result of a society that works for the few and despises the many.

    It’s not enough to say “if you’re sad, get help”. There needs to be help available. All too often there isn’t. And that’s no accident. That’s political.

    We don’t need better mental health awareness. We need better mental health provision. We know we need help. For too many of us, the help isn’t there.

    Don’t let the politicians away with it. Don’t let them post “it’s OK not to be OK” and consider their job done. Demand answers. Demand action.

    Too many people aren’t OK. And that’s not okay.

  • Go and get the flu vaccine

    I was given the flu vaccine the other day. I hadn’t really thought about it but since a lung cancer scare a few years ago there’s a flag on my medical records and I’m considered high risk for pulmonary infections and COPD, so I get invited to this stuff.

    As you’d expect, the vaccine didn’t give me flu, make me grow horns or make me autistic, because vaccines don’t do that. What it did do was make me feel a bit crap for a few hours before protecting me from catching – and more importantly, spreading – a really horrible disease.

    As Frances Ryan writes in The Guardian, the flu jab saves lives.

    Flu is often thought of as nothing more than a week of feeling rotten, but it can be life-threatening, particularly for older people and anyone with an acute illness like cancer or underlying chronic health conditions, like me.

    In 2018 I developed flu complications that left me unable to breathe or move and on a ventilator for months. It’s left me with life-changing fatigue and pain, but in many ways I was lucky. Last year 1,700 people died of the flu – despite the fact that this was a relatively mild strain – and further hospital admissions put even greater pressure on an already overstretched NHS.

    The vaccine is free for at-risk groups and incredibly cheap for everybody else. You should get it, if only to prevent having to take time off work to feel like shit.

    Unfortunately we have a problem persuading people to take vaccines. Ryan:

    The UK, like much of the west, is battling an anti-vaxxing movement in which social media has become a gateway for scare stories and quackery. Diseases such as measles are on the rise in England, with the UK recently losing its measles–free status with the World Health Organization because a growing number of people believe dangerous myths about vaccines.

    Things are so serious that one newspaper is taking a stand. Here’s today’s Daily Mail.

    The crusading, campaigning Mail is going to fight against the forces of idiocy and darkness that have persuaded parents that vaccines are dangerous.

    Forces such as, er, the Daily Mail.

    The Mail scaremongered about vaccines for years, and while other UK papers (including the Guardian for a while) did the same it was by far the most vocal. Its sustained, decade-long campaign against the safety of the MMR vaccine continues to inspire and be cited by the global anti-vaxx movement.

    As late as 2005, the Mail continued to argue that debunking the MMR/autism scare was fake news and accused critics of disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield as perpetrating a witch hunt.

    The science editor of the Daily Mail argued that ‘the MMR scandal is getting worse. Urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered. The doctor who raised those questions is being subjected to what appears to be a witch-hunt. The parents’ recourse through the courts has been blocked. Now they have to put up with being told yet again that the evidence of their own eyes is fraudulent.’

    The Daily Mail spent a decade scaremongering about vaccines: Google “Daily Mail MMR” and you’ll find tons of uncorrected “the truth about MMR” articles and articles that push the long-debunked claim that vaccination causes autism.

    Its new campaign is laudable, but it won’t undo the damage it’s done to public safety not just here, but globally.

  • Useful idiots are still idiots

    I’ve written many times about useful idiots, members of minority groups who join anti-minority parties. One of the best-known examples is Winston McKenzie, the former Commonwealth spokesman for UKIP, whose presence in the party was used to prove it wasn’t racist. He ended up quitting the party because it was racist.

    Trans and gay people do it too. In the US, the “LGBT for Trump” campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans proved to be a bunch of idiots helping to rainbow-wash one of the most anti-LGBT presidents we’ve ever seen, a president whose campaign against LGBT people may see even basic anti-discrimination protections removed.

    Here in the UK we have ageing transsexuals joining anti-trans bigots to rail against the invented dangers of other trans people, and celebrity trans people pulling the ladder up behind them to leave other trans people behind. We even have transgender candidates standing for the thoroughly anti-trans Brexit Party.

    You’ll be shocked to discover that despite having trans candidates, the Brexit party – hardly the most progressive, inclusive party around – still hates trans people. Here’s PinkNews on its co-founder, Catherine Blaiklock.

    The only people this should come as a surprise to are the idiots who can’t see that they’re being accepted because they’re useful, not because they’re welcome. They are there for one reason and one reason only: to try and persuade the public that the organisation is less hateful than it really is.

  • Not so reasonable now

    Jezebel has posted a very comprehensive analysis of one of the LGBT+ human rights cases in front of the US Supreme Court.

    Tellingly, a who’s who of anti-trans bigots have signed on in support of Rost, from the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson to the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, all of whom are attempting to make the same argument: that trans women are not women and that giving trans women civil rights protections would harm other women. (For the members of WoLF, the fact that a ruling against Stephens would possibly reify gender stereotypes in the workplace apparently matters less than ensuring trans women have fewer rights.)

    That who’s who also includes some of the most prominent anti-trans activists from the UK. For example Linda Bellos, a regular contributor to UK radio, TV and newspaper discussions about trans issues, travelled to the US to address the primarily right-wing and straight crowd of anti-LGBT+ protesters outside the Supreme Court. Messages of support from other high-profile UK activists were read out to the crowd.

    Bear in mind that these people have said repeatedly that they are only speaking out about trans issues because they have “reasonable concerns” about possible unintended consequences of reforming the UK gender recognition system. Nothing more, nothing less. They are absolutely not motivated by a hatred of trans women, and to suggest so is a vicious slur.

    And yet here they are, proudly standing in front of supporters of, and in front of banners bearing the logo of and paid for by, the anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-diversity Alliance Defending Freedom.

    The links between British anti-trans activism and the US religious right are well documented, but they’re generally concealed on the grounds that holding hands with anti-women, anti-LGBT+ hate groups isn’t a very feminist thing to do even if you hate trans people as much as they do. And the ADF really is a hate group. It was classified as such by the SPLC in the US for its efforts to criminalise homosexuality and enable businesses to discriminate against LGBT+ people. It advises anti-LGBT+ organisations in other countries how best to keep anti-gay laws on the statute books, and it fought vigorously against the US decriminalisation of gay sex.

    Here’s Opendemocracy:

    The global wing of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has a multi-million dollar budget but does not disclose who its funders are. It opened an office in London two years ago and is now spending hundreds of thousands in the UK.

    Recently, this group has publicly opposed ‘buffer zones’ around British abortion clinics and supported calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to independently object to providing legal abortion services.

    …It was recently denied ‘participatory status’ at the Council of Europe because of its opposition to a convention on preventing and combating violence against women.

    …ADF International has worked with the British Christian right for years. It previously collaborated with its “allied organisation” the Christian Institute, for example, to support a London registrar who refused to officiate for same-sex civil partnerships

    Imagine standing proudly with people like that.

  • Facebook is an enemy of democracy

    These stories are connected.

    Mark Zuckerberg says Elizabeth Warren’s policies are an ‘existential threat’ in leaked Facebook audio.

    Facebook exempts political ads from ban on making false claims.

    Facebook denies Biden campaign’s request to remove false Ukraine ad by Trump campaign.

  • You’re probably a target too

    Arwa Mahdawi writes in The Guardian about the US court cases on LGBT+ discrimination.

    These cases are, to put it mildly, a huge deal – and not just for LGBT people. The ruling will have serious implications for straight people who don’t comply with gender norms. It could allow employers to fire women who don’t wear heels or makeup. It could allow companies to discriminate against men who are not considered manly enough. It could give employers a green light to act as the gender police.

    That’s not an accident. It’s part of the strategy. Globally we’re seeing a very well-funded attempt by the Christian Right to remove the separation of church and state, and to make the non-religious  and the non-Christian subject to Christian law.

    If this were a campaign to introduce Sharia law in secular democracies the mainstream media would be outraged; because it’s a strategy to create Christian theocracies many newspaper proprietors support it and actively promote the key players.

    It’s not, and it never was, just about LGBT+ people.

    Here’s the Guardian again, this time reporting on the Australian Christian Lobby. Like the ADF in the US, it’s demanding the power for employers to fire people based on the employers’ most regressive religious beliefs. And like in the US, it’s part of a wider move to protect discrimination by, not against, Christian extremists.

    ACL director Martyn Iles:

    defended the prospect of hiring and firing based on the “Christian sexual ethic … that sexual relations are for one man and one woman” to the exclusion of others.

    Once again Christian extremists are asking not just for protection from discrimination, but for the legal right to discriminate against anyone they disapprove of in the workplace, in housing and in healthcare. Gay people. Unmarried mothers. Feminists. Trans people. Women who aren’t saving themselves for marriage. People of other faiths. Anyone who doesn’t conform to a regressive view of human rights and behaviour.

    The headlines may say LGBT+, but even if you’re straight and cisgender you’re a target too.

    Mahdawi:

    We can’t draw a line between feminism and the fight for gay liberation or trans equality. LGBT rights are human rights – we are all in this together.

  • It’s not just the headliners who are stuck in the past

    A company has analysed the gender balance of various UK festivals. The best was Latitude, which achieved a gender balance of 48.1% women; next up was Glastonbury, with 44.6%.

    And then there was Download, home of superannuated rock bands whose commercial and artistic peaks happened decades ago.

    14.4%.

    That’s all performers. Female artists or bands?  2.9%.

    Here’s what the poster looks like with the male acts removed.

    Pathetic, isn’t it?

    It gets worse.

    According to festival booker Andy Copping “women like watching bands more than being in them. They just haven’t felt inspired enough to pick up a guitar or be the singer of a rock band.”

    There are lots of reasons why women aren’t on big festival stages, but not feeling inspired isn’t one of them. Sexist bookers, on the other hand…

  • A scary day for LGBT+ people in America

    Today, the US Supreme Court will hear three cases with massive potential consequences for LGBT+ people.

    The court will be asked to declare whether it’s legal to fire people on the grounds of their sexual orientation or gender identity. If the court rules that it is, it’ll be a very bleak day for human rights.

    Reuters:

    Trump, a Republican with vigorous support among evangelical Christian voters, has pursued policies taking aim at gay and transgender rights. His administration has supported the right of certain businesses to refuse to serve gay people on the basis of religious objections to gay marriage, restricted transgender service members in the military and rescinded protections on bathroom access for transgender students in public schools.

    …A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would give gay and transgender workers greater protections, especially in the 28 U.S. states that do not already have comprehensive measures against employment discrimination. A ruling against the plaintiffs would mean gay and transgender people in those states would have few options to challenge workplace discrimination.

    Kate Sosin covers LGBT issues for a number of outlets. As they posted earlier:

    To be clear, they don’t get to rule on our humanity. They’re ruling on their own.

  • All the world’s The Stage

    There’s been a thoroughly predictable outcry against The Old Vic theatre’s move to gender-neutral toilets, and trade magazine The Stage invited two cisgender women to write about it. A Twitter storm ensued and the articles were both taken down again, but it’s been reported on social media and on the BBC as the silencing of critics. That isn’t true; the supportive article was taken down too.

    That one was by writer and arts producer Amber Massie-Blomfield, who has published the piece on her website.

    When I tweeted a pretty innocuous comment in response to the Old Vic’s announcement – ‘This is fantastic, thank you for making this important change to help those of all genders feel welcome at your venue’ – I found my notifications inundated with aggressive responses calling me ‘an idiot’ and asking ‘why do you want women to be assaulted?’. As a cis woman, it was an unwelcome reminder of the levels of intimidation and harassment faced by trans* people every day. Many of those attacking me were apparently, like me, privileged, cis women – and it has made me more committed than ever to use my own privilege to stand alongside the trans community.

    Besides, it’s not only trans* people who benefit from these changes. It’s carers looking after someone of another gender to them, parents, and any woman who has ever stood in a long queue waiting for a cubicle to become available, watching men sailing freely in and out of the toilets designated exclusively for them.

    These orchestrated pile-ons – and yes, some trans people do it too, albeit not in the massive numbers that anti-trans pile-ons attract– are making it impossible to have any sensible discussions about anything. People take the most extreme positions (eg. thinking gender neutral toilets are a good idea means you want women to be sexually assaulted) and just scream them endlessly.

    And some of that screaming is being done deliberately by people who know better.

    Here’s Ruth Pearce, whose expertise is in trans healthcare.

    One of the most frustrating things about being a trans researcher on Twitter is seeing lies and misrepresentations which are *demonstratably* wrong propagated by journalists and commentators. Anti-trans activists call for “debate” but there is literally not enough time in the day.

    Debating trans issues online feels like banging your head against a brick wall. You can produce evidence, appeal to human decency, point out logical inconsistencies – to absolutely no avail. If you manage to bring around one person, others have been spreading the lie elsewhere.

    Part of the problem here is that “debate” rarely works to persuade – it’s more frequently a form of political theatre… it’s hard not to feel massively disheartened when I’ve spent days, months, years interviewing people, reading publications, visiting clinics etc, and meanwhile people are running around the internet propagating myths because they read a thinkpiece and all their mates agree.

  • “Hold me love me or leave me high”

    One of my musical heroes and a contender for the title of Most Beautiful Man In Rock, Michael Stipe, has released his first solo record. The song, Your Capricious Soul, is the welcome return of one of the most extraordinary voices in music.

    Your Capricious Soul – Michael Stipe from JMSPROJ on Vimeo.

    I can’t be unbiased about Stipe. I know his voice is a love/hate thing but I’m firmly in the love camp: I could happily listen to him singing the phone book and I’d probably be in floods of tears throughout. As the singer in R.E.M. he was responsible for some of the most important music in my life.

    Here’s an example: Walk Unafraid, from the mid-2000s. This is the live version; on record it’s more focused and to me, more powerful (and here’s a bonus: a great cover of it by the excellent First Aid Kit).

    The lyrics are stunning.

    Imagine listening to this as a closeted LGBT+ person:

    Everybody walks the same / expecting me to step the narrow path they’ve laid… how can I be what I want to be / when all I want to do is strip away these stilled constraints / and crush this charade / shred this sad masquerade? / I don’t need no persuading / I’ll trip, fall, pick myself up / and walk unafraid

    I made the mistake of playing the song in the background as I started to write this, so of course I’m blubbing now. Don’t even get me started on The Wrong Child.

    Walk Unafraid is a really important song to me. It’s what I hear in my head when I’m scared, when I’m pushing out of my comfort zone yet again to do something that makes my heart race. Sometimes it’s all I have on my side.

    If I have a bag of rocks to carry as I go / I just want to hold my head up high / I don’t care what I have to step over / I’m prepared to look you in the eye / look me in the eye

    I miss R.E.M. so much. I like a lot of bands, but I loved R.E.M. They had a magic to them, a magic that really connected with me in a way other bands don’t. You’ll hear the influence sometimes in the guitar sounds I use or the way I sing some lines.

    I only got to see them live once – my second attempt was spoiled because I was in hospital getting back surgery. When they broke up eight years ago I was absolutely devastated: their latter albums might not have been as incredible as their earlier work, but every one of them contained some genuinely beautiful songs – and of course, every one of them featured Michael Stipe’s unique and beautiful voice.

    I doubt they’ll ever reform, but if they ever do tour again you really don’t want to get between me and the ticket office.