Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • Sheep laughs

    The kids and I went to see the new Shaun The Sheep film, Farmageddon, today. It’s warm, wonderful, and very British – in the best possible sense of the word. I laughed even more than my kids did.

  • Look who’s talking

    Piers Morgan, who used to write homophobic stories in The Sun before that became socially unacceptable, is currently making hay from the idea that there are more than 100 genders. It’s based on a comment made in a video where someone was rather clunkily trying to express the idea that gender is a spectrum.

    We’re familiar with the gender binary: male or female, boy or girl. But most binaries are shortcuts. There’s a whole world of colours between black and white. We use binaries to simplify that, but sometimes they over-simplify. The trick is to understand them for what they are: quick descriptions that apply a lot or even most of the time, but that aren’t the only possibilities.

    The thing about this 100 genders thing is that when I go to LGBT+ and trans-specific events, nobody’s talking about it: the most obscure identity I’ve ever heard somebody describe themselves as is “non-binary”. Nobody’s getting irate about this stuff because they’ve got more important things to worry about, like basic human rights such as access to healthcare and not being murdered.

    That’s not to say there aren’t people out there coming up with ever-longer lists of possible genders, but those people are generally in the corners of social media and academia. Going too far is what they do.

    It’s important to question who’s telling you a story that makes a particular group look bad. These myriad genders are regularly trotted out by the right-wing press, but I simply don’t encounter LGBT+ people talking about it. It appears to be a classic case of people taking a couple of really extreme and/or niche views and trying to persuade people that they represent the entire group.

    Put it this way. Piers Morgan isn’t talking about the healthcare crisis for trans people or the elevated suicide rates among LGBT+ teenagers, the things that really affect LGBT+ people and that LGBT+ people really do care about. He’s just pointing and laughing at them and trying to get you to point and laugh too.

    Here’s an example of a big story about genders: Facebook’s infamous 50-something genders, which were then increased to 71. This was widely reported as 71 genders. It wasn’t. It was 71 possible responses on a form, most of them duplicates or slightly different ways of saying the same thing. For example:

    Cis, Cisgender, Cis Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender Female, Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman

    …Trans, Trans*, Trans Female, Trans* Female, Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Trans Person, Trans* Person, Trans Woman, Trans* Woman, Transfeminine, Transgender, Transgender Female, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transgender Person, Transgender Woman, Transmasculine, Transsexual, Transsexual Female, Transsexual Male, Transsexual Man, Transsexual Person, Transsexual Woman

    The Royal Opera House in London used to do the same (and probably still does; I haven’t checked in lately). When you buy your tickets you can choose from these titles:

    Advocate, Ambassador, Baron, Baroness, Brigadier, Canon, Chaplain, Chancellor, Chief, Col, Comdr, Commodore, Councillor, Count, Countess, Dame, Dr, Duke of, Earl, Earl of, Father, General, Group Captain, H R H The Duchess of, H R H The Duke of, H R H The Princess, HE Mr, HE Senora, HE The French Ambassador M, His Highness, His Hon, His Hon Judge, Hon, Hon Ambassador, Hon Dr, Hon Lady, Hon Mrs, HRH, HRH Sultan Shah, HRH The, HRH The Prince, HRH The Princess, HSH Princess, HSH The Prince, Judge, King, Lady, Lord, Lord and Lady, Lord Justice, Lt Cdr, Lt Col, Madam, Madame, Maj, Maj Gen, Major, Marchesa, Marchese, Marchioness, Marchioness of, Marquess, Marquess of, Marquis, Marquise, Master, Mr and Mrs, Mr and The Hon Mrs, President, Prince, Princess, Princessin, Prof, Prof  Emeritus, Prof Dame, Professor, Queen, Rabbi, Representative, Rev Canon, Rev Dr, Rev Mgr, Rev Preb, Reverend, Reverend Father, Right Rev, Rt Hon, Rt Hon Baroness, Rt Hon Lord, Rt Hon Sir, Rt Hon The Earl, Rt Hon Viscount, Senator, Sir, Sister, Sultan, The Baroness, The Countess, The Countess of, The Dowager Marchioness of, The Duchess, The Duchess of, The Duke of, The Earl of, The Hon, The Hon Mr, The Hon Mrs, The Hon Ms, The Hon Sir, The Lady, The Lord, The Marchioness of, The Princess, The Reverend, The Rt Hon, The Rt Hon Lord, The Rt Hon Sir, The Rt Hon The Lord, The Rt Hon the Viscount, The Rt Hon Viscount, The Venerable, The Very Rev Dr, Very Reverend, Viscondessa, Viscount, Viscount and Viscountess, Viscountess, W Baron, W/Cdr

    Facebook’s 71 options are nothing compared to the 200-odd here. It’s exactly the same thing – titles that matter to the holder and maybe their peers, but hardly anybody else –  but you won’t find oleaginous presenters scoffing at that because they want to get an honorific one day too.

    I’m not suggesting we should shoot the messenger, as appealing as the thought of Piers Morgan in front of a firing squad might be. But it’s important to look at who the messenger is. Not all messengers are honest.

    For example, when I first came out my options about the supposed trans lobby were very different from the ones I have now. And the main difference is that back then, I didn’t know many trans people or organisations. My information came from a handful of journalists and an even smaller handful of idiots on the internet. Some of those journalists turned out to be in cahoots with bigoted pressure groups; some turned out to be listed as formal supporters by US evangelical outreach groups; still others just turned out to be hateful arseholes. They were deliberately framing stories in the worst possible way in order to demonise what I now know to be a very ordinary group of perfectly decent people who often have very difficult lives and who don’t deserve to live in the climate of fear and hatred that’s being created around them.

    I’ve written before about the loony-left reports of the 1980s, many of which were entirely fabricated, and about the anti-trans (and anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim, and anti-disabled people, and anti-working class people) stories routinely run by certain outlets today. The idea that newspapers and other media outlets don’t lie is a wonderful one, but it just isn’t true.

    The stories we’re told are shaped by the people who tell them. All too often those people have an agenda.

  • How to make the world a slightly better place

    I went to see Richard Hawley at the Barrowland Ballroom last night. The Barras is rightly known for being one of the world’s best music venues, and I go there a lot. But until last night I’d never been as me because I’ve been scared of doing it.

    So that’s what I did last night.

    Moving swiftly past the fact that there are far too few women’s toilets, the whole evening was a textbook example of how to treat people with thoughtfulness and respect. Every single person I dealt with – security staff, stewards, bar staff – was a credit to the organisation: friendly, helpful and treating me according to my gender presentation without any hesitation whatsoever.

    At the merchandise stall I got an abject lesson in how to be a complete badass who makes the world a slightly better place.

    I was looking at the T-shirts and asked the woman what sizes they had. Now, I’m there as me but I’m hardly Audrey Hepburn. How do you answer without making any assumptions?

    Here’s how:

    “These come in two versions: the women’s cut is smaller and quite fitted; the men’s is a lot roomier. I’m wearing the women’s in size XL, and as you can see it’s quite a small fit, but I often wear the men’s and roll up the sleeves. Which one do you think you would like?”

    I don’t know who you are, merchandise lady, but you made my night.

    The gig was pretty good too.

  • Hateful words cause hateful acts

    The latest Home Office figures show once again that hate crimes are soaring in England and Wales. The number of reported hate crimes has doubled since 2013.

    The majority of hate crimes are racial, and there were a shocking 78,991 such crimes in 2018 – an increase of 11%. And there are also worrying increases in hate crimes against disabled people (up 14%), Jewish people (up 50%), gay and lesbian people (up 25%) and trans people (up 37%).

    Remember too that the majority of hate crimes are never reported, and the ones that are rarely end in prosecution.

    As the Home Office reported last year:

    offences are less likely to be reported if they are considered more minor by the victim (such as verbal abuse) and not worth police time, or when committed against people who are regularly victimised and have normalised it as ‘part of everyday life’. Certain barriers are more specific to the victim community. For example, qualitative research with the LGBT community found that fear of being ‘outed’ was a frequent concern

    Part of the increase is better recording, but that isn’t the whole story. If it were, you would have consistent increases across all categories, and you wouldn’t see spikes such as the increase in race-hate crimes around the EU referendum and the 2017 terrorist attacks.

    If you look at those numbers again, the biggest increases are among the groups most commonly singled out by social media and mainstream media. Anti-semitism has come roaring back thanks to far-right social media users, who frequently spread hatred about disabled and LGBT+ people too; the massive rise in hate crimes against trans people corresponds with a period of hysterical scaremongering about them by supposedly respectable newspapers and broadcasters.

    Once again you’ll be told that this is the result of a snowflake generation reporting free speech on social media, but the Home Office’s own analyses in recent years show that that isn’t true. These are not arseholes being arseholes on Twitter; these are hate crimes that happen in the street, perpetrated by people who often commit other kinds of crimes, especially violent ones. More than half of hate crimes are public order offences and a third involve “violence against the person”.  Online hate crimes are a tiny amount (2% in 2016/17, mostly racist).

    Hateful words lead to hateful acts.