Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Damned lies and statistics

    In my previous post I wrote about the easily debunked claims used against trans people. I should probably provide some evidence.

    First up, here’s some actual stats on detransitioning among trans people. The source is the NHS in London from 2016 to 2017, the sample size 3,488, the detransition rate 0.47%.

    Not 80%, the figure you see again and again in op-eds about trans people. 0.47%.

    The 80% figure is long-debunked nonsense.

    And here’s item number two, an analysis on the “rapid onset gender dysphoria” study that’s been quoted in multiple newspapers to suggest that trans people are only going through this shit because they think it’s cool.

    Some highlights:

    …reflects a certain preexisting non-neutrality bias

    …The article continues to pathologize gender dysphoria and affirmation of trans identification through social network peers and online environments as an example of “deviancy training,” and describing it as an unhealthy pattern of reinforcement with trans-identified peers and linking it with a behavior that is “deceiving parents and doctors”

    …Providing this premise prior during the consent process provides an opportunity for motivating a specific group of parental-respondents, particularly those who agree with the premise, to elect to participate in the survey. Furthermore, providing the premise of the study in this way sets expectations of the survey before parental-respondents can even begin to provide their answers

    …Also of concern is the demographic profile of the parental-respondents in this paper. The parental-respondents displayed very narrow demographic stratification despite being sampled from a very specific venue: 82.8% were female sex at birth, 91.4% were White, 99.2% were non-Hispanic, 66.1% were aged 46–60, and 70.9% had attended college. Notably, 76.5% believed that their child’s trans identification is not correct, and recruitment relied heavily on three particular Web sites known to be frequented by parents specifically voicing out and promoting the concept of “ROGD.” Thus, these are not just “worried parents,” but rather a sample of predominantly White mothers who have strong oppositional beliefs about their children’s trans identification and who harbor suspicions about their children having “ROGD.”

    …it is plausible that these data may contain multiple responses from the same parental-respondent.

    In other words, it’s a shitshow of Andrew Wakefield proportions, horrifically biased propaganda pretending to be science.

    Then there’s trans women in sport, where some 55,000 Olympians have competed since trans people were allowed to participate more than a decade and a half ago, and in the US NCAA athletics where more than 450,000 athletes have competed, without any sign of men enduring chemical castration for a year so they can compete against women.

    And then…

    You get the idea.

    Finding the facts takes seconds. If someone isn’t doing it it’s because they’re incompetent or malevolent.

  • Singal minded

    There’s an interesting piece in The New Republic by Josephine Livingstone, who analyses the idea that debate is always a good thing. She begins by looking at a US journalist called Jesse Singal, who’s notorious in LGBT circles for what appears to be an ongoing campaign of damaging misinformation about trans people and trans teenagers in particular.

    When readers get angry with him, which happens often, he sees them as curtailing a productive conversation that he has prompted in the spirit of a free and vigorous exchange of ideas.

    …Singal and others who are critical of the social justice left—a group that ranges across the ideological spectrum and includes Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, Daphne Merkin, and Katie Roiphe—accuse the left of being footstampingly insistent on their views, to the detriment of healthy debate. In fact, it is the “debate me, coward” crowd that has made it impossible to have arguments in good faith, because they demand, unwittingly or not, to set the terms.

    Livingstone rather brilliantly describes this as “vacuous fight-picking” and “a howling canyon filled with misdirected energy”, using the familiar idea that we must hear both sides of any story in order to form our own opinions.

    But these people are not interested in letting people hear both sides. They want you to hear their side and only their side, and if you disagree with them they’ll shout you down and accuse you of trying to silence them.

    It is telling that critics of the social justice movement are obsessed with free speech and debate: It is the one inviolable principle they can fall back on when argument on the actual issues fails.

    All too often, the argument being made is based on (deliberate or accidental) misunderstanding, or straightforward bad faith: so for example many so-called debates about trans people simply ignore decades of research or dig up long-debunked talking points. Again and again demonstrably false claims are presented as incontestable fact: the number of trans people who detransition, the medicine given (or not given) to young people, the content of existing and proposed legislation.

    And it’s usually asymmetric. Journalists have power that other people do not; a journalist or public figure with tens of thousands of social media followers has a disproportionate amount of power compared to the people they may write about. For example, the supposed quality press in Scotland and elsewhere consistently regurgitates the claims of extreme anti-trans activists about legal or medical issues but never asks legal experts or medical experts whether those claims are true and certainly doesn’t give trans people the right of reply.

    The truth is out there, but too many journalists prefer “truthiness”: what feels true to them, not what’s actually true.

    People like Singal can bang on about free speech and debate endlessly without ever conceding a) that the deck may be stacked in their favor, and b) that certain ideas may be beyond their understanding.

    And this is why marginalised people can become so angry. Singal’s work, and similarly distorted reporting, has often been comprehensively demolished by people with a greater understanding and a less blinkered view of the things being written about. But they aren’t the ones given the column inches to fill.

    Livingstone:

    The exhaustion that comes of teaching something over and over again, only to witness people re-educated by poorly-read journalists, is profound. Exhaustion makes a person angry. Anger makes a person seem like a hyperzealot. You cannot believe that somebody is asking you to go around the same block—the very same block!—yet another time.

  • I fought the law

    Last night I knowingly and deliberately broke the law. It wasn’t quite Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a lead pipe; it was me and my best friend in Kelvingrove Park with a nice bottle of red wine.

    In Glasgow and the surrounding area, drinking in public has been illegal since 1996 under sections 201-203 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act. The law was tightened further in 2008 to include the carrying of open containers, even if the alcohol has already been consumed. So every nice day we see tons of police going around places like Kelvingrove, ordering people to pour away their plonk for fear of a fine of up to £500. The bylaw applies in every public place and is only relaxed on New Year’s Eve between 6pm and 6am the following morning. That’s a throwback to the days when George Square hosted a huge Hogmanay party.

    The law was introduced because in the 1990s, Glasgow had still to shake off its No Mean City reputation. Public drinking was a public order problem, especially around football matches, and there was also a big problem with underage drinkers. Glasgow’s ban was partly motivated by the evidence from other parts of Scotland such as Cumbernauld and Kilsyth, which experienced a 46% drop in violent crime after implementing a public drinking ban.

    Image from Twitter: Kelvingrove Park, Easter weekend 2019

    The ban is widely ignored (hello!) and there’s still trouble. Every time the sun shines, Kelvingrove Park fills with drunks and litter; this weekend a teenage boy was facially disfigured in a fight. The last time I rode my bike through the park I saw almost as much broken glass as grass.

    But judging by social media, the policing this weekend was massively over the top and there does appear to be a double standard in operation: while the police had set up a mobile command centre and brought vans and horses to Kelvingrove, there was no such presence in the nearby Botanic Gardens. There, as some people pointed out on Twitter, students and “yummy mummies” could sip their M&S mojitos in peace.

  • Trans people don’t swim

    Today’s Glasgow Herald has an offensively framed, scaremongering article about trans people in council swimming pools causing an invasion of “cross-dressing males”. It’s labelled new and exclusive, but it’s neither. As Duncan Hothersall put it on Twitter:

    Not exclusive. Not new. Simply the result of an active anti-trans campaigner seeking out the most scaremongering situation possible and pitching it to a newspaper desperate for clicks. We need to talk about these issues and resolve them; this sort of coverage doesn’t help.

    I wrote about the reality last year: people like me don’t use public swimming pools because we’re scared of people like you.

    I’m not scared of much any more, but I’m scared [of] public humiliation. Scared that someone will be scared of me. Scared that even in gender-neutral changing facilities where the only time I’m naked is in a locked, private cubicle, someone will loudly object to my being there and claim I’m somehow dangerous.

    Dangerously clumsy, maybe. But dangerous? The only risk from my presence anywhere near a swimming pool is if I fall on you or belly flop nearby.

    Two weeks ago, I swam in a hotel pool. It’s the first time I’ve been swimming in three years, and it was wonderful. Maybe next year I’ll go on holiday and be able to swim again.

  • “outsiders are coming to steal our icepoles, destroy our long held traditions and do crimes”

    The ever-inflammatory A Thousand Flowers has made SNP politician Joan McAlpine their Wanker of the Week. ATF’s language, as ever, is robust – but it’s tame compared to the stuff McAlpine’s fellow travellers say and do on Twitter to trans people and any woman who doesn’t think trans people are demons.

    One of the points ATF makes is that “I support equal marriage” is the new “some of my friends are black”.

    You don’t get to leverage supporting one part of a community years ago as an excuse to undermine a more marginalised part of that community now.  As a gay person, I’m not going to accept a straight cis politician using past support for limited legal rights for gay and lesbians people to justify their current anti trans nonsense.  If you mess with the T, you’re messing with Big Gay Me and anyone else in the LGBT community who won’t abandon our trans siblings when their rights are on the line. Judge a society – and a person – by how they treat the most marginalised, not how they treat those with more power.

    ATF has been criticised in the past for its language. Such tone policing (avoiding debate by attacking the way somebody speaks instead of addressing what they say; Everyday Feminism has a great comic strip about it) is really common in discussions about trans people: trans people will be called all kinds of unspeakable things, shouted down and piled on, and when they inevitably snap and tell someone to fuck off it’s proof that trans people are all violent aggressors. Minorities aren’t allowed to get angry no matter how badly and blatantly they’re provoked.

    Tone policing is used to protect privilege, to silence marginalised voices.

    McAlpine’s response to be called on her nonsense fits a pattern where opponents of trans rights grind down trans people, then try to label the slightest bit of anger as “misogyny” “male aggression” and “machismo.”  But history tells us something else: when you target marginalised groups, they don’t politely sit back and take it forever.  That’s not how resistance to a violently unequal society works.  As the old adage/historically accurate fact goes: Stonewall was a riot.  No debating occurred, at least not with the polis (but of course, loads of  useless “allies”/half arsed gay rights groups said it was terrible and damaged the cause and made us look bad yada yada).   Joan’s yet to condemn the Suffragettes who argued in the marketplace of ideas repeatedly bombed and blew up stuff enroute to winning their rights for their “toxic masculinity” because that isn’t what happened – and it’s not what’s happening when trans people stand up for themselves now.

  • School’s out

    This is Garnock Academy, the secondary school (high school for my American friends) I attended in the 1980s. It’s near a town called Beith.

    Like all schools of the era, there were no LGBT pupils or teachers. Or at least, there were no openly LGBT pupils or teachers; the ones who were LGBT kept their heads down. This was the era of Section 28, the law implemented just as I was leaving school that prohibited teachers from discussing LGBT issues for fear they’d be accused of “promoting” LGBT life.

    I wasn’t happy there. I doubt I’d have been happy anywhere. It was an era of vicious homophobia, and the homophobia printed in the newspapers echoed in the playgrounds. “Gay” wasn’t just a taunt but a trailer: it was the shout that announced the bullies’ arrival. I heard it a lot.

    I’ve linked elsewhere to people’s stories of growing up LGBT, and while the details differ there’s a common theme: we grew up believing there was something wrong with us, with a deep sense of shame and guilt about being ourselves. Instead of learning to thrive, we learned to hide, both metaphorically and literally. We policed our own behaviour and tried our best to avoid the bullies.

    Garnock Academy is long gone – bulldozed a few years ago with a brand new school, Garnock Campus, opening up on the other side of town – but its effects linger.

    Yesterday, on a whim, I popped into one of my favourite places: Category Is Books in Glasgow’s South side. It’s Scotland’s only LGBT bookshop (one of only two in the whole UK) and has quickly become a hub for the LGBT community; I’ve been there for book and fanzine launches as well as adding to my collection of enamel pin badges.

    It’s the kind of place where you bump into people you know, and yesterday was no exception: I was delighted to see a few friends there, so what was supposed to be a five-minute visit turned into an hour of chatting with my friends and other customers. One of them was a young woman who really reminded me of my daughter: fiery, funny and fast-talking with that tweenage thing where your brain is moving too fast and your mouth is struggling to keep up with all the things you have to say. Like my daughter she’s confident in a way I never was, a firework in human form.

    One of the things she talked about was her school. She laughed as she talked about being known as “the gay kid” in her class, something she’s clearly proud of. The school has an LGBT Club, where she’s made friends with other gay kids (and straight kids who just come along for the chat), and LGBT Champions, of which she’s one. She’s clearly thriving there, happy in her own skin.

    “Your school sounds amazing!” I said. “What one is it you go to?”

    “Garnock Campus,” she said. “It’s near a town called Beith.”

  • Intolerance dressed up as concern

    It’s not surprising to see yet another anti-trans op-ed in The Scotsman; once again it portrays all trans people as abusive internet trolls in killer heels, trampling on the anti-trans women who are just lovely people who care about all kinds of stuff.

    But even by those low standards, it’s galling to see the horrific practice of female genital mutilation being used to demonise trans people.

    [one woman’s] life was destroyed by female genital mutilation (FGM), an unspeakably cruel practice that regards female biology as “unclean” and “unworthy”. In far too many cultures, men still decide what is a “real” woman.

    Leaving aside the sheer offensiveness of the argument (and the framing: “men still decide what is a ‘real’ woman” is a dog whistle: it’s meant to characterise trans women as men), it’s perfectly possible to support trans rights and fight against horrors such as FGM.

    It’s also possible to campaign against trans rights and also campaign against FGM. So you’d expect the “protect women” crowd to be doing just that.

    So let’s talk about the anti-trans crowd, the ones who only care about protecting women and girls and definitely aren’t motivated by transphobia when they hold meetings where speakers call us “bastards” and “parasites”.

    Let’s focus on the examples of horrors detailed in the Scotsman article.

    How much time and money do the anti-trans “feminist” organisations, the ones raising money with crowdfunding campaigns and t-shirt sales, spend campaigning against female genital mutilation?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on fighting domestic violence and other forms of violence against women and girls that leaves 140 women murdered by men in the UK every year?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on fighting against poverty wages for women, the gender wage gap and the underrepresentation of women in STEM subjects?

    Zero.

    I’ll add a few the writer missed. How much time and money do they spend on campaigning to end the systemic, endemic abuse of women in prison by other inmates and even staff, or the system that sends a disproportionate number of women to prison for minor offences?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on campaigning for equal marriage and women’s reproductive rights in Northern Ireland?

    Zero.

    Can you see the pattern emerging here?

    It’s almost as if this isn’t about protecting women at all.

  • The violence causes silence

    I didn’t know Lyra McKee, the extraordinary young woman shot dead by terrorists in Derry this week, but some of my friends did. They’re devastated. The loss of a friend is always a tragedy, but to lose them in such circumstances is particularly horrific.

    McKee’s death has been marked by some fine, angry, fearless writing. This, by Paraic O’Donnell, is one such tribute.

    ‘The violence causes silence’ – ‘Zombie’, by The Cranberries, gave us one of the most dreadful rhymes in rock music, and one of its starkest truths. When a journalist is murdered, as Lyra McKee was, we see the dark corollary of this truth, the viciousness of the circle. In the North, as she knew better than most, it was never a secret. The Provos used to put it on their trashy posters, next to a sniper in a gimp mask and baggy army surplus: ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’

    In the North, the silence isn’t even silent. It’s violence taking you aside, wanting a word with you. It’s violence saying the quiet part out loud.

    …Lyra McKee was one of us. She was our people. She didn’t think she was, not at first – Belfast isn’t the easiest place in the world to grow up gay – but she found a way to belong here, a way to tell her story. She was our people because that includes a lot now, and it included her. It’s not like it used to be. But it doesn’t include them, not any more. Whatever you say, say that.

  • The problem isn’t us. It’s them

    It’s interesting to compare the media’s treatment of extremely rich far-right ideologues who want to watch the whole world burn – reasonable people with legitimate concerns, as the papers might put it – with environmental protesters trying to raise awareness of the very real and present dangers of climate change. They’re loonies, terrorists, privileged middle-class sandal-wearers who ought to get a real job.

    One of the familiar allegations repeatedly thrown at this week’s Extinction Rebellion protestors is that they’re hypocrites: some plastic water bottles have been spotted and Emma Thomson was in a plane, therefore their entire argument is bunk.

    On Twitter, Rosie Swayne explores that argument.

    [they] are NOT protesting about individual consumer behaviour, so however satisfying it feels to point out they prob drive cars/their superglue is prob not vegan/weed lamps are prob CO2 intense etc etc, it’s not actually relevant to their objective.

    The whole point of the protests is to raise awareness of the way in which the media and successive governments have painted climate change as something only individual actions can fix – so there’s no need to regulate big business until every one of us rides a bike and drinks only from containers made from hemp.

    Whereas the reality is that individual action is utterly meaningless for as long as giant corporations continue to trash the planet without fear of consequence. Just 100 companies are responsible for nearly three-quarters of global carbon emissions. Whether you or I drive cars or ride bikes is irrelevant in that context. It’s better if you cycle, of course, but the problem isn’t us. It’s them.

    As Swayne says, the protests are about “GOVERNMENT inaction on climate change. Carping at personal habits has been the RW [right-wing] tactic against environmentalists for over 30 years.”

    Enviro/ist: global warming will kill us
    RW: ahh! but your Citroën 2CV runs on PETROL so your point is INVALID!

    The newspapers picking on environmental protesters aren’t exposing hypocrisy. They’re defending corporations’ rights to put profits over human lives.

  • There’s no such thing as a stupid question about skeletons

    This really made me laugh.

    Related: