Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Scare quotes

    Update, 16 October:

    This is even worse than it looked. The Newsnight article says this:

    The results of the study are yet to be published, but a number of concerns were raised to BBC Newsnight and the British Medical Journal:

    Let”s spell this one out.

    The original BBC Newsnight item and article were put together by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The allegations investigated by the HRA were made by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The article in the BMJ that Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes use to corroborate their own claims was written by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    The follow-up article strongly implying a whitewash was written by Newsnight’s Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes. 

    So a couple of BBC journalists filed a complaint, did a big item about how “someone” had made a complaint, and when the complaints were found to be groundless were allowed to cast doubt on the investigation into their own complaints.

    That’s shockingly, sickeningly unethical.

    Original post below… 

    In July, BBC’s Newsnight ran a feature raising significant concerns about the prescribing of puberty blocking drugs in London’s Tavistock Clinic.

    The story was based on claims that a key study that informed those prescription decisions was dodgy. It was alleged that researchers did not obtain proper consent, that they did not provide adequate information and that it was methodologically unsound.

    As Newsnight reported, those claims were being investigated by the NHS Health Research Authority.

    The investigation was ongoing at the time of the item, but a notorious anti-trans activist, a sociologist who was caught operating a pseudonymous Twitter account to post transphobic nonsense online, provided the BBC with documents he claimed demonstrated that children and their parents “were not given the information they needed in order to take this momentous life-changing step”.

    The HRA couldn’t respond in detail because its investigation was ongoing, so the Newsnight item was pretty much a hit piece based on allegations that couldn’t be disproved until the investigation was complete.

    Guess what? The investigation is complete and the claims were disproved.

    An official review by the HRA into the conduct of the study, has cleared the researchers of any wrongdoing.

    It found that researchers worked “in accordance with recognised practice for health research” adding that in some areas they were “ahead of normal practice at the time”.

    Don’t hold your breath for an equally prominent on-air correction. The BBC report about the HRA investigation quotes “experts [who are] only prepared to comment off the record for fear of reprisal”, and runs with the headline:

    Questions remain over puberty-blockers, as review clears study

    I’d interpret that as “study was wrong”, wouldn’t you? That’s certainly how it’s being framed on social media, where people are sharing the headline but not the detail.

    The piece concludes:

    While the evidence continues to emerge, debate will no doubt continue about use of puberty blockers in young people.

    Repeatedly giving trolls a megaphone isn’t a debate. It’s scaremongering, scaremongering that helps fuel the growing anti-trans sentiment in the UK: they’re coming for your children!

    Let’s see how that manifests, shall we? Here’s Danny Shaw, BBC News’ Home Affairs Correspondent, this morning:

    BREAKING: There’s been a ten per cent rise in hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales [in 2018-2019]… Transgender hate crime went up 37%

  • Lipstick for singers who want the stick to stay stuck

    I know what you’ve been thinking. “Carrie,” you’ve been thinking. “All this politics stuff is all very right-on, but where’s the #relateable #content? Why can’t you blog about interesting things, like how to find lipstick that doesn’t make you look like Robert Smith from The Cure’s granny?”

    This post’s for you.

    One of the things I have to think about now I’m back doing music is whether my lipstick will end up all over my face when I sing in my band. Some singers stand back a bit from the microphone, but I’m not one of those singers – so if I use anything more interesting than a nude colour, I end up looking like a messier version of this:

    We did some promo photos recently before rehearsing and I went for a pretty dark colour; after a few hours of singing afterwards I looked like a toddler who’d got into their mum’s makeup bag and also made a lot of really bad life choices.

    I’ve been trying to find something a bit less frightening for a while, and thanks to a recommendation on Twitter by National columnist, genuinely nice person and rocker of superb lipsticks Kirsty Strickland, I tried this stuff:

    It’s called Superstay 24 Matte Ink, it’s by Maybelline, it’s currently 3 for 2 in Boots and it’s brilliant. I can get through three hours of mauling the mic without moving a single molecule of it, and it’s so tough that it might be the only thing left after a nuclear war: we might end up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but at least we’d look pretty fierce.

    It’s not perfect. It feels tacky on your lips – you know how gloss paint feels when you touch it and it’s almost but not quite dry, and you leave a fingerprint? That – and the darker colours are a nightmare to get off when you’re tired and just want to go to bed. It’s also a menace to fix if you get your line wrong.

    But if like me you’re all over the mic when you perform and you’d rather not end up looking like a bad hallowe’en costume, or if you’d just like to go for a night out without having to reapply every half hour, it’s worth the downsides. This lipstick stays stuck.

  • School bully

    Guess which newspaper is making a false distinction between children with special needs and school pupils, and suggesting that the former are harming the latter? Here’s a clue: it rhymes with “fuelling hate crimes”.

    We’ve been here before: in June, the Times wrote an awful article implying that care experienced kids were going to damage other kids’ education, making a false distinction between care experienced children and “bright children”.

    Here, the people who are forcing presumably “bright” children to “lose out” are other children whose additional support needs are “seen by some parents as a ‘golden ticket’”.

    It’s the worst possible spin on a fairly simple story: the government isn’t backing up reforms with money.

    Councils have a statutory responsibility in England to fund special needs support, and that mandatory support has not been accompanied by adequate funding to pay for it. So councils are using their existing budgets in an attempt to provide care that the government mandates but refuses to pay for.

    In any sane worldview the headline would be damning the government. But no, the enemy here is kids with learning difficulties.

    As the journalist Frances Ryan posted:

    This is such irresponsible framing from The Times. It parrots prejudice that disabled children are a drain, a high cost harming the education of ‘normal’ pupils.

    This is happening far too often to be the result of genuine mistakes: these articles aren’t written in a vacuum and posted without anybody seeing them. There is something very wrong at the heart of the organisation, which repeatedly fails to meet even the most basic journalistic standards and which seems to take particular relish in scaring its readers about minorities. But even by its standards, going after children is a new low.

  • Voter ID: a solution that doesn’t work for a problem we don’t have

    To paraphrase Mrs Merton: what first atttracted the Conservative government to voter ID, a scheme that would stop many non-Tory voters from voting?

    After an unsuccessful attempt to introduce it in 2017, voter ID is back! Back! BACK! This version is slightly more sensible than Theresa May’s version from two years ago (unlike May’s proposals it has plans to try and address postal fraud too), but it suffers from the same fundamental flaw: voter ID is a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that we don’t have.

    We have a problem with election rigging in the UK, but it isn’t happening in person at ballot boxes. It’s happening in campaigns that flout electoral law with little regard for the consequences, and on the ground it’s happening with postal voting. Voter ID doesn’t affect either of those things.

    The number of people prosecuted for the offence of personation in 2017 was 1.

    The number of people in the UK without photo ID is 3.5 million.

    We know voter ID disenfranchises people, because we already have it in the UK: it’s part of the Northern Irish political system, and it disenfranchised 1/10th of the electorate. That’s with the same system the UK government is proposing here, where photo ID will be available for free (when you’re poor, £43 for a driving licence or £85 for a passport is a lot of money). In the UK’s trials of voter ID so far, significant numbers of people were denied a vote. When some majorities can be as small as two, every vote matters.

    Voter ID being sold as a solution to a problem that we do not have, but the government doesn’t want it because it believes it’ll stop one or two people from committing personation. It wants it because voter ID reduces the number of people who vote, and those people tend to be the ones who don’t vote for right-wing parties. That’s why it’s a favoured tactic of the Republican Party in the US, which the UK Conservative party increasingly resembles.

  • I regret to inform you that the Sunday Times and the Christian Legal Centre are at it again

    Another weekend, another bunch of anti-trans stories in the Sunday Times (following on from four stories in the Saturday edition). Today’s selection includes a 3/4 page tale of a deeply troubled man who transitioned and then de-transitioned, something that’s incredibly rare but that does happen, usually because some trans people face terrible hostility when they come out.

    His story is being used to demonstrate that children are being coerced into surgical transition, even though it doesn’t do anything of the sort.

    Point one: he was middle-aged when he began transition.

    Point two: his transition was DIY and ignored the specialist advice that he should consider social transition before considering any medical treatment.

    In other words, the story demonstrates something rather different: that troubled middle-aged men who decide to ignore medical advice don’t always get the happy ending they hope for.

    It’s a sad story about a sad individual with various personal problems who faced terrible hostility (hostility the Times and its sister titles help to fuel) after a transition they began despite medical advice.

    That’s not how it’s being spun here, though. The Sunday Times is using it as yet more evidence of the fictional transgender cult – and the fact that the Christian Legal Centre is representing him casts even more doubt on the whole thing. The CLC is very good at coaching people to make lurid but conveniently unverifiable claims that fit its culture war narratives, claims that frequently turn out to be untrue. The Times has published many of those stories, but doesn’t return to them when they’re thrown out of court.

    The CLC are a bunch of culture war ambulance chasers, and they tend to represent two kinds of people: howling bigots and deeply troubled individuals. This looks like the latter. I feel sorry for the man in the story, but he’s just the CLC’s latest useful idiot.

     

  • “Abominable” isn’t

    I took the kids to see Abominable yesterday. I didn’t have high hopes: the marketing made it look like another school-holiday by-the-numbers animation, and I already knew it made extensive use of one of Coldplay’s worst songs. But it turned out to be a wee gem of a film, and my two loved it.

    It struck me while I was watching it that kids’ movies, especially animated ones, are often much more diverse than adult ones. One of the best cartoons I’ve seen with the kids, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, featured a black hero, a black villain and a multi-gendered, multi-racial supporting cast; Ralph Breaks The Internet was a two-hander with a strong young female character; Abominable’s hero is a young Chinese girl and the characters are also primarily Chinese, albeit in a westernised cartoon form.

    That diversity is a good thing, of course. Kids come in all shapes, sizes and colours, and films should reflect that – and they often do, even if studios aren’t quite ready to give Elsa from Frozen a girlfriend. And films for older audiences are becoming more diverse too. Last year’s top-grossing US films featured more diverse casts and lead characters– although as Deadline reported, “the only way to go is up when the numbers have been so low for over a decade.”

     

  • Spreading hate

    What does hate look like?

    In many cases, it looks just like you.

    When we think of hateful bigotry, we tend to imagine stereotypes: the bomber-jacketed skinhead, the spittle-flecked preacher and so on. We don’t imagine nice people: our neighbours, our friends, the mums on the school run.

    But the stereotypes are often wrong. To take just two examples I know a bit about: those skinheads are often proudly anti-racist and their gigs raise money that goes directly to refugees; those school run mums are posting poison on the internet.

    Here’s an example. Yesterday, Flora margarine’s parent company terminated an endorsement deal with Mumsnet. It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last major advertiser to cut ties with the wholesome-sounding message board over its inability to police a hard core of viciously bigoted users who use part of its feminism forum to post hate speech about trans people.

    Mumsnet posters are claiming a co-ordinated campaign against the site by sinister trans activists, but what really happened is that one woman, the mother of a trans kid, messaged the company and said “are you sure you want to be associated with this?” The company investigated and concluded: hell no.

    It’s important to be clear about this. Talking about trans people is not transphobic. Having worries about legal changes is not transphobic. Discussing even anti-trans articles is not transphobic. But that’s not what a hardcore of users are doing, and it’s not why advertisers leave.

    The new face of hatred is not a screaming skinhead shouting slurs. It’s nice middle-class people who choose their words carefully.

    Writing in Out magazine, Gillian Branstetter talks about the US hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and its relationship to the Westboro Baptist Church. Both organisations are hateful, but the ADF understands that wandering around with placards saying “God hates fags” is counterproductive. The ADF is much smarter, and much more dangerous.

    Alongside branding standards, the ADF instructs its employees to replace words like “transgender” with “sexually confused,” “gay” with “homosexual behavior,” and “intersex” with — I’m not kidding — “sexually mutilated.”

    Perhaps most telling, however, is how Mr. Trent and his colleagues are instructed to describe their own work and the policies they defend. They don’t engage in “bigotry,” according to the style guide. They’re merely “defending biblical, religious principles.” They don’t oppose “sex education programs” in schools; they oppose “sexual indoctrination.” It’s not “gay marriage”; it’s “marriage imitation.”

    The Mumsnet crowd do this too. They use the debunked faux-diagnosis of “autogynephilia” as a way to call trans people fantasists, fetishists and perverts. They use “protecting sex-based rights” to agitate against trans people’s rights. They say they’re just a place where nice, friendly harmless women come together to debate the issues, campaign against Childline, try to defund trans-supportive charities and force charities to cancel discussions on preventing child abuse.

    To borrow a phrase from the feminist philosopher Kate Manne’s recent bestseller Down Girl, these tricks of language rely on the “naive conception” of bigotry. The ADF, allies of the president, and many others in Washington hope to manipulate the view that racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia cannot be called for what it is until it’s screaming in your face, carrying a five-foot poster declaring your eternal damnation.

    …The Alliance Defending Freedom — as well as the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and many others — are fighting for a world without LGBTQ+ people in it, where anyone can feel free to deny trans people our most basic rights because they feel God hates us. That fact should not go unnoticed simply because they aren’t holding signs declaring it.

  • “We come out in order to tell our young people that they can be loved”

    It’s National Coming Out Day in the US today. It’s often pitched as a celebration, but National Coming Out Day began as activism. For LGBT+ people, the personal is political – so coming out is a political act.

    Life is different if you’re LGBT+. The US Supreme Court is not currently discussing whether it should be legal to fire people for being heterosexual. Radio 4 does not invite lobby groups to tell its listeners that cisgender women will attack them in hospital wards. Straight people do not have to worry that strangers will beat them up for holding their partner’s hand in public*. Cisgender people do not have to pass extensive psychiatric assessments to get simple medication. Nobody’s protesting outside schools that tell children straight people exist. Cisgender people do not give themselves bladder infections because they’re too scared of being yelled at or worse to use public toilets. Heterosexual teenagers don’t need to fear homelessness or physical or sexual abuse if they tell their parents they’re straight.

    By coming out, by simply getting on with our lives, we can help fight that prejudice and bigotry.

    But not everybody can come out, or is ready to. It’s hard enough dealing with your own stuff without also setting yourself up as a target for every arsehole on Earth, bringing 57 varieties of bigoted bullshit into your life.

    We’ve come a long way in a fairly short time, but even in supposedly enlightened countries like the UK there are people who hate LGBT+ people. Those people do not always keep their bigoted beliefs a secret, wrap them in “reasonable concerns” or keep their hatred in the closet. Many of them are vocal. Some are violent. And not everyone is strong enough to come out and have to deal with that.

    Helen Boyd, author of the insightful and thought-provoking memoirs My Husband Betty and She’s Not The Man I Married, has written a powerful open letter about that very thing.

    your visible pride flag is for the young people who are LGBTQ+, who can’t come out, or be out, because they have so little autonomy in their lives, who don’t get to choose who their parents are or what their religion is or even where they go to school. It’s for the young people who are bullied because they are different and no one at their school is helping. It’s for the young people who worry about disappointing their mom or dad or grandma or uncle, who think it’s impossible to live a happy, productive life as an LGBTQ+ person, or who believe there is something wrong, or evil, about them because of who they are or who they love.

    …We come out in order to tell our young people that they can be loved, feel safe, have a job, be successful, have families. We come out so they know their elders are out here loving them even when we don’t know who they are yet. We come out so they know we’re here and that someone cares about them living their lives to their fullest potential. We come out so that those young people live to be adults because too many of them don’t.

    We come out because we can and we know others who can’t, won’t, shouldn’t – yet, or maybe ever.

    * Not all straight people, of course. People dating people from ethnic or religious minorities can be attacked for who they love too.

  • 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.