Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • A point proven

    More good news from the TIE campaign:

     And entirely predictable news from one of the signatories, the journalist Angela Haggerty. Haggerty has been targeted by anti-trans activists. Other signatories have been targeted too. As Haggerty posted on Twitter:

    This is what the @tiecampaign letter was addressing. The tone and nature of this stuff is very distressing, and completely unnecessary.

    …Women supporting the trans community should not have to face malicious misrepresentation simply for speaking out. I hope others will join us and put their names to the @tiecampaign letter – this stuff is harmful.

    Once again there are very strong parallels between anti-choice activists, far-right figureheads and anti-trans activists: they’re all very well behaved on TV, but on social media the mask quickly slips.

  • A terrible lesson for children

    After ongoing protests, a Birmingham primary school has suspended its “no outsiders” programme, which teaches children about equality. The protesters have done the usual religious thing, accusing the school of “promoting gay and transgender lifestyles.” It’s been reported as a muslim protest but many of the parents protesting are christians; the lessons have been reported as “LGBT lessons” when they’re also about religion, race and disability.

    No Outsiders is about teaching children that “there are no outsiders here!” I know this because the programme is available online, as are presentations to parents about it.

    Here’s a slide explaining the ethos.

    The characteristics of the Equality Act are age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage/civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion/belief, sex and sexual orientation.

    As the course’s creator Andrew Moffat MBE explains: “we have to find ways to encourage children to choose to sign up to living in a multicultural and multi-faith UK, where they can live alongside, work alongside and get along with people who are different to them.”

    Cancelling the lessons sets a terrible precedent. The aim of the lessons is to teach children “to recognise and celebrate diversity and difference in their own communities and in the wider society.” Letting the intolerant shut them down is entirely the wrong lesson to teach children.

  • “The lucrative gas-lighting industry”

    Writing in New Socialist, Pete Mitchell does a thoroughly entertaining demolition of two books making the culture war argument that “the left” is somehow silencing free speech. The whole thing’s worth a read but I particularly liked these bits:

    In Lukianoff and Haidt’s account, college students aren’t distressed because they’re facing unprecedented debt and insecurity, because those safety nets they had are being stripped away from them, because they can no longer look forward to a recognisable future – or indeed because white supremacists keep trying to gather on their campuses to intimidate them, while their parents’ generation stands around finger-wagging about the importance of robust debate – but because they’re decadent, attached to their phones, full of self-pity, over-indulged and lacking in will.

    The well-worn argument here is that millennial snowflakes refuse to be exposed to opposing views from people who disagree with them.

    As anyone who’s spent any time around these debates knows by now, those “opposing views” usually turn out to be some variation of exactly the same one, and the “people who disagree with you” are always some variation of the same person: a well-paid white man who isn’t sure where all these women and brown people and queers came from but has some ideas about where he’d like to send them.

     

  • Feminists to columnists: you do not speak for us

    More than 70* notable women including politicians, representatives of vulnerable women’s groups, businesswomen and journalists have written an open letter to the Herald about the despicable coverage of trans women it and other newspapers publishes.

    In the Scottish Government’s recent public consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act (2004) a majority of respondents supported gender self declaration, as well as recognising non-binary people. As a collective of women, we urge that trans-exclusionary writers do not suggest that their narrow and archaic arguments are in any way representative of the women of Scotland. They do not speak for us.

    …When this conversation is reduced to allegations of “shutting down debate” whenever misrepresentation or misinformation is challenged, the result is to purposefully discount the position of many women – like us – who support the trans community. We will be heard.

    Trans people have played an integral role in every civil rights movement to date; from LGBT equality to women’s causes. Attempts to airbrush trans people from conversations regarding equality and human rights, or to exclude them from advancements for LGBT and women’s rights, have happened before. Such efforts may have re-energised, but they are nothing new, and we say as a collective of women: they are not representative of us. We support trans rights.

    • Since the letter was published, the organisers have been contacted by several hundred more women who want to sign it.

  • Stop us if you’ve heard this before

    On Twitter, users mimmymum and the implausible girl have shared a few newspaper clippings about the dangerous people tricking their way into bathrooms and locker rooms, demanding inclusion in education and other terrifying things. No, not trans people. Gay and lesbian people.

    Irony fans will appreciate this first one, about Martina Navratilova, because her recent comments about trans people have – surprise! – been used by anti-LGBT politicians to support anti-trans legislation.

    The fonts make me think it’s The Sun. It claims that because of lesbian athletes like Navratilova, “young girls were scared to go into tournament changing rooms” and were “being led into homosexuality.”

    This is a letter to the Daily Utah Chronicle in 1998 about whether gay people should be allowed to work as changing room attendants.

    This is from the Edwardsville Intelligencer in 1977. It’s not that gay people are wicked, it’s that they’re sick and should be kept away from children.

    1974, the Philadelphia Daily News.

    The Vancouver Promise, 1973, suggesting that homosexuality is spread by social contagion. The same argument against trans these days is called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. It’s still bullshit.

    The Indianapolis News, 1974:

    The Ottawa Journal, 1979:

    And way back in 1956, the Coos Bay Times on the fact that gay people aren’t really gay; they’ve been talked into it, and will revert to being normal if they’re kept away from evil gay influences.

  • “Respect for all”, apart from the gays and the transes

    There’s a predictable media storm in England (Scotland has a different, more enlightened education system) about plans to revise sex education, something that’s been overdue for decades now, to include “respect for all”. It’s predictable because various right-wing rabble-rousers have been banging on about the spectre of “gay and trans lessons” – a phrase you can thank the ever LGBT-friendly Times newspaper for. Education secretary Damian Hinds, who appears to be a coward, has now promised that “respect for all” does not have to include respect for gay or trans people.

    The columnists, and the 100-odd-thousand parents who’ve signed a petition objecting to their children being taught basic human decency, appear to be misunderstanding a fairly basic point.

    In primary school, and for much of secondary school, sex and relationship education is not about fucking.

    Sorry for the language, folks, but that’s what the outrage is about here: the not-too-hidden message the likes of Melanie Philips are perpetuating is that gays will be teaching five-year-olds about poppers and fisting while the transes will be trying to persuade five-year-olds to chop their cocks off.

    We went through this decades ago with Section 28, which did incredible harm to LGBTQ people. Can we maybe not do it all over again?

    As the BBC reports, the guidance says in regards to LGBT content: “pupils need to understand ‘that some people are LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender], that this should be respected in British society’.”

    That teaching should be age-appropriate, so in primary school it’s nothing more than awareness that not everybody has a mum and a dad, and that that’s perfectly normal.

    I’m the trans parent of a five year old and an eleven-year-old. Some of my fellow parents are gay. To pretend that we don’t exist, to refuse to let children know that some of their peers have two mums or two dads or a dad who looks like a mum, to refuse to reflect the reality that every single LGBT adult was a child once is ridiculous.

    All it does is create a vacuum that bigots are all too happy to fill.

     

  • Free speech, not free reach

    After far too long, far-right puppet Tommy Robinson has been kicked off Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram for flouting the rules on hateful conduct.

    Which makes it a good time to link to this piece by Renee Diresta, Free Speech Is Not The Same As Free Reach.

    in this moment, the conversation we should be having—how can we fix the algorithms?—is instead being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online. It would be good to remind them that free speech does not mean free reach. There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.

    …The social internet is mediated by algorithms: recommendation engines, search, trending, autocomplete, and other mechanisms that predict what we want to see next. The algorithms don’t understand what is propaganda and what isn’t, or what is “fake news” and what is fact-checked. Their job is to surface relevant content (relevant to the user, of course), and they do it exceedingly well.

    That efficiency gives the likes of Robinson disproportionate visibility and influence, something the social media giants still don’t seem to have woken up to. If they can’t prevent the likes of the far-right from gaming the system, then they need to do a better job of keeping them off their platforms.

  • Schrödinger’s trans

    The Observer, this week, : “Gender identity clinic accused of ‘fast-tracking’ trans patients.”

    The Guardian, its sister paper, two days later, reporting the hellish, many-years wait for trans people to get any treatment whatsoever:

    Trans men and women are being left humiliated and desperate after seeking care from their GP, according to a Guardian investigation that has shed light on serious flaws in how the NHS treats transgender patients.

  • Mark Hollis RIP

    Mark Hollis, singer in the critically acclaimed Talk Talk, has died. He was 64.

    The word “genius” is thrown around a lot in music, but Hollis was the real deal. I was mesmerised by Talk Talk as a young teenager and developed a deep love of their music that I still have today. They made a string of extraordinarily beautiful records (and he made another one as a solo artist) and then they stopped, leaving an incredible musical legacy.

    It’s always sad when a favourite musician dies, but this loss feels devastating. Hollis wrote the soundtrack to so much of my life.

  • The silencers

    Being trans is a bit like Chinese water torture sometimes. It’s not that the individual drops hurt; it’s that they don’t stop. So for example being misgendered by someone who hears a male voice isn’t upsetting on its own if that’s the only occurrence that day, but being called a man four times during a ten-minute radio programme by a presenter who knows your name and pronouns is profoundly embarrassing.

    This is one of the reasons trans people do things like voice therapy or very stereotypical female presentation, incidentally. We do it because it makes life a little bit easier. If you don’t immediately hear my voice as male, maybe you won’t call me sir, or a man, or refuse to accept I’m the policyholder when I’m on the phone to your call centre. I don’t particularly want to modify my voice, not least because it’s a lot of work, but I can do without the arguments.

    The worst, though, is the constant attacks on trans people, the misinformation and propaganda that appears in the media. It’s not so much that it gets printed. It’s that it gets shared online by people you may come into contact with personally or professionally.

    For example, I’m supposed to be going to a music organisation’s launch day soon. The organisation is for women and it’s explicitly inclusive of trans women, something its organisers have also confirmed to me privately. And yet I’m not sure if I’m going to go, partly because a couple of the key figures who’ll be there on the day have shared anti-trans stories on social media.

    I don’t think these people are bigots; they shared what they thought were legitimate news stories in a kind of “oh, for fuck’s sake” way (I know one of them through work and we’ve always got on very well, although I haven’t met her since I started transition). But it means they have shared content that states people like me are fraudulently gaining access to women’s spaces.

    How do you sit comfortably in a women-only event when you know that?

    How do you read the room without wondering who else has those views, or who has much more extreme views? Are the informational and networking opportunities of the day worth the risk of some kind of confrontation from someone who does not believe you should be there?

    That’s what the drip, drip, drip of anti-trans polemic does. It makes you afraid. Afraid to take part in things even when you’ve been invited. Afraid to be in spaces you’re entitled to be in. Afraid to do normal things. Afraid to show up. Afraid to speak. Afraid to just sit in a room.

    The next time someone tells you and tens of thousands of other readers that they’re being silenced by those awful trans people, think about that and ask yourself: who’s really being silenced here?