Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • We hate to say we told you so

    There was widespread revulsion on social media yesterday over this article.

    Mr Waiton here isn’t a tutor, he’s a senior lecturer. He’s also a Brexit Party candidate. And the newspaper this article is from, The Scotsman, is his occasional employer. He’s also a regular contributor to the Herald, Scotland’s other national daily, where he helps fuel the moral panic around the existence of trans people. Naturally he’s a regular Spiked contributor too.

    As ever, trans people told you he was a bad ‘un and nobody listened.

    As publisher and commentator Laura Waddell noted yesterday:

    Stuart Waiton was handed a microphone and met with applause at a Glasgow anti-GRA [Gender Recognition Act] event with subsequent national press writeups completely unequipped to see how the subject is like flypaper for those with broader reactionary, anti-feminist, anti-minorities agendas.

    …this abhorrent view is nothing new. And yet we have #buyapaper appeals from those papers who pay this guy and others like him for his views, while the press landscape in Scotland remains heavily skewed towards men? The problem isn’t just corporate cuts.

    Elsewhere in “people who are awful to trans people tend to be awful people full stop” news:

  • Straight-up hate

    The UK is rapidly approaching the point where there will be more anti-trans hate groups than there are actual trans people.

    The latest group. which launched this week, calls itself the LGB Alliance, and it’s a single-issue hate group: it wants to split the T from the wider LGBT movement. Despite (mainly straight) supporters saying it’s a pro-LGB group, it has no policies about any issues that affect gay, lesbian and bisexual people, issues of which there are many. It exists solely to target so-called “gender ideology”, a phrase beloved of the far right and the religious right.

    For a supposedly gay, lesbian and bisexual alliance it all looks very straight. Its Twitter account does not appear to follow anybody active in LGB rights, but it does follow every single anti-trans pressure group and bigot you can think of, most of whom are straight. Its membership seems to include an awful lot of straight people, and its online allies tend to be straight people too. Actual LGB people have been quick to distance themselves.

    As I’ve posted before, targeting the T in the LGBT community is straight out of the Christian Right strategy to attack the entire LGBT movement, a strategy discussed publicly  in 2017.

    [there are] three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to “divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.” In other words, separate trans activists from the gay rights movement, and their agenda becomes much easier to oppose. As Kilgannon explained, “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer.” For many, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”

    One of the people who pointed this out yesterday is Patrick Harvie, the Scottish MSP, who is a bisexual man. His posts attracted a great deal of negative comment on social media, much of it from straight people using far-right terms such as “cultural marxists” and “Christianphobia”.

    Isn’t it funny how straight, cisgender men who’ve shown no interest in, or active hostility to, feminism and gay/lesbian rights suddenly proclaim themselves defenders of both when it gives them an opportunity to attack trans people?

    Harvie:

    They’re already campaigning against sex education in this country. In others they’re rolling back abortion rights, domestic violence legislation, workplace equality… there are genuinely disturbing forces out there in the world, that threaten all the rights and freedoms we fought for. If they succeed and split our community against itself, don’t kid yourself that they’ll end with hostility to trans & NB people.

  • Freelancers deserve protection from abuse too

    Sexual harassment is primarily about power: it’s perpetrated by the people who have it against the people who don’t. So it’s deeply saddening but not surprising to see the results of a Musician’s Union study into sexual harassment in the music industry. It’s a huge problem.

    It’s not just that the music business is still horribly sexist, although too much of it is. It’s also because the music industry, like most creative industries, is staffed primarily by freelancers. That inevitably creates a power imbalance that some people are keen to exploit: tell anyone and you’ll never work in this town again.

    The MU wants the Equality Act’s workplace protections to be extended to cover freelance workers as well as staff. There’s a petition here.

  • The sound of silence

    I’ve posted this cartoon by Barry Deutsch before, I know, but that’s because it’s good.

    I tend to gravitate towards people who are clever and kind, and as a result I’m friends with a lot of people who work in charities, voluntary groups and other good places. They’re generally trans-inclusive places but they don’t always have many or any trans staff or volunteers, so from time to time my friends will ask me about trans-related stuff.

    I’m not going to name any of the organisations for reasons that should become pretty obvious.

    The other day, one of my friends wanted my opinion on something. Her organisation is happily trans-inclusive, and it was considering publicly supporting this year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s an annual event to mark the people murdered for their gender identity (21 so far in the US alone this year), and it’s an opportunity to show support for the wider trans community. It wouldn’t involve any time, effort or money, just a statement of support on social media.

    My advice: don’t do it.

    That’s because some of my other friends also work for or with organisations that are happily trans-inclusive, and when some of those organisations have said so publicly – usually in response to social media queries – they’ve been the victims of ongoing campaigns of social media abuse. One of my other friends recently told me of the weeks of sustained abuse one particular organisation received over every social media channel, abuse that a year later still happens almost every day.

    These aren’t politicians or contrarians who say hateful things online and then run to the newspapers claiming abuse when people criticise them. These are good people in good organisations who can’t express the most innocuous sentiment –  we don’t hate trans people – without inviting sustained and often co-ordinated campaigns of abuse accusing them of the most terrible things.

    This happens on an individual level too. I was at a social media workshop for LGBT+ people the other day, and one of my fellow attendees was the mum of a trans kid. She was considering going on networks such as Twitter to help humanise trans people, to share her story so that others could understand.

    My advice to her: don’t do it.

    I know several mums of trans kids who use social media. Without exception they face constant, vicious abuse. People try to find their home addresses and private photos of their children. People repeatedly accuse them of child abuse. In some cases people even report them to social services in the hope of getting their children taken into care.

    Some of those women are much stronger than I am and continue to try and do some good online, but you need to be a very special, very strong and very secure person to deal with that every day. And the reality is that most people aren’t special, strong or secure enough to invite such hatred into their lives.

    As I’ve written endlessly, lots of people are making a good living from claiming to be “silenced” in their frequently published and handsomely paid articles for The Guardian, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, The New Statesman and many, many more, as well as on national radio and on television and on the lecture circuit.

    These people claim to be oppressed, to be silenced, to be victims. And they do so while sending tens of thousands of social media followers to hound, harass and humiliate ordinary women. To claim victimhood while orchestrating online abuse against women who don’t have power, a platform or the Today Programme on speed dial is beneath contempt.

  • Love finds a way

    City Hall, Belfast

    Despite the best efforts of the DUP, Northern Ireland became a better place for women and for LGBT+ people last night. It’s testament to the hard work of grass-roots activists and campaigners who’ve fought for a very long time for Irish women and same-sex couples to get the same rights that the rest of the UK takes for granted.

    It’s also worth pointing out that none of the UK groups stirring up fear and hatred on the grounds of “protecting women’s rights”, “protecting women and girls” or “standing up for lesbians” campaigned to end restrictions on abortion or introduce equal marriage in Northern Ireland.

  • No, trans activists aren’t forcing anybody to do anything

    Today’s shock-horror trans story is a case study in how certain newspapers deliberately misrepresent stories to make their readers hate trans people. You’ve almost certainly seen it, or read someone’s hot take on it.

    The story is this.

    In June, two people on the internet posted two tweets that asked whether the logos on the packaging on one brand of sanitary products might upset trans men – that is, people transitioning from female to male – or non-binary people who were assigned female at birth. As they pointed out, many trans men and non-binary people have periods too: one of the posters knows this because they are a trans man.

    The company had a look, said “oh, we hadn’t thought of that” and made a minor change to the packaging.

    That’s it.

    Except, of course, it’s not. Those two tweets became “pressure” that “forced” the company to “ban” its packaging, which somehow is all trans women’s fault because reasons. Cue yet more anti-trans hatred, most of it directed towards trans women, across social media. It’s become so ludicrous that I’ve seen trans women angrily posting about it, saying it’s crazy to suggest that trans women have periods, even though nothing in the story has anything to do with trans women and nobody’s suggesting anything of the sort.

    Both of the posters have of course already been hounded off social media by irate Daily Mail, Sun and Telegraph readers.

    “Two people on the internet got mildly miffed about something that most people didn’t even notice” is not and should not be a news story, let alone part of a campaign to demonise minorities.

  • Careless talk costs lives

    The increasingly hateful rhetoric around trans people is going to get more people hurt, or worse.

    In Georgia, USA, a school district had to temporarily suspend its trans-inclusive toilet policy “as students and employees are facing extreme hate and death threats.”

    Of course, it couldn’t happen here, could it?

    It already does. The teacher at the centre of the anti-education protests in England has received death threats; threats of violence are common against LGBT+ people and their supporters online. I posted the latest England and Wales hate crime figures a few days ago; in the days following, my news feed has been full of local press stories detailing even higher increases in specific parts of the country. For example, the 25% national increase in hate crimes against LGBT+ people was bad enough, but in North East England the figure is up by nearly 60%.

    One of the reasons for the increasingly hateful climate is that people are now being told that LGBT+ rights, and trans rights specifically, are part of a war. That means it’s okay to make death threats to children: they’re enemy combatants.

    As ever, this framing began as Christian Right messaging and it’s since been adopted by anti-trans activists and bigoted trolls. The long-standing Twitter hashtag #waronwomen, used to tag issues such as right-wingers trying to remove women’s rights, has been hijacked by right-wingers trying to roll back LGBT+ rights – rights that of course include rights for cisgender women as well as trans women.

    Framing a minority as the enemy in a war is deliberate and dangerous. In a war, there are no shades of grey. The enemy must be destroyed. No quarter shall be given.

    This kind of language has been poisoning social media for some time now. For example, yesterday the SNP’s new women’s convener, Rhiannon Spear, was warned by multiple social media posters that she was now “the enemy” in the so-called war on women.

    Poster 1: You are the enemy now of the very people you dare to claim to protect. The enemy. And should be treated as such.

    Poster 2: I agree entirely. Rhiannon Spear is an enemy to women.

    Poster 3: #handmaidrhiannon #enemyofwomen #waronwomen

    Spear, a young pregnant woman, has been on the receiving end of this stuff for months now.

    There’s lots of this online, and of course it never gets reported because it doesn’t fit the narrative of sinister trans people silencing debate.

    Any woman who dares to say she isn’t against basic dignity for trans people is hounded and often abused by people using increasingly violent rhetoric. And the social networks, our press and even some senior politicians are turning a blind eye to it.

  • Everybody lies, especially Mark Zuckerberg

    Of all the evils Facebook has been involved in – it’s been implicated in genocide – spouting bullshit is fairly far down the list. But Mark Zuckerberg’s latest speech is a great example of how you shouldn’t trust the company to tell you what time it is, let alone fight for truth and justice.

    Here’s how Zuckerberg described the origins of Facebook.

    When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.

    Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, and I got to see my beliefs play out at smaller scale.

    I’m not taking this out of context: the full speech is on Facebook’s newsroom page. It attempts to put Facebook in a lineage that also includes Martin Luther King Jr and the Black Lives matter movement.

    Isn’t that wonderful? Mark created Facebook because of the Iraq War and his passion for justice.

    Except he didn’t. He created Facebook – then called Facemash – so people could vote on people’s pictures and decide how fuckable they were, with particular emphasis on humiliation. As he blogged at the time:

    I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous [sic] facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.

    …Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals …), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.

    In 2004, he told a friend:

    Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

    Just ask

    I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

    People just submitted it.

    I don’t know why.

    I don’t know why.

    Dumb fucks

    Martin Luther King Jr he ain’t.