Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • This is what trans looks like

    This is wonderful. Fed up with the difficulty of finding decent stock photography of trans and non-binary people, Vice/Broadly commissioned its own – and it’s made the photos available for free under a Creative Commons licence, so pretty much anybody can use them. The Gender Spectrum Collection is online here and features 180 photos covering useful categories such as relationships, work, school and health.

    Editor Lindsay Shrupp explains:

    Broadly editors have worked diligently to think more thoughtfully and critically about how we represent trans and non-binary people in our work. But even at our best, we have been limited by the stock imagery available to us. Today, we’re launching The Gender Spectrum Collection, a stock photo library of over 180 images of 15 trans and non-binary models, shot by artist and photographer Zackary Drucker, and made available to the public for free.

    Transgender and non-binary people are likely more visible in mass media today than ever before in history, but they’re often portrayed in ways that are misrepresentative, and at times outright destructive. Because only 16 percentof Americans say they know a transgender person, the majority of Americans understand what it means to be trans through the media they consume, making media imagery depicting transgender people particularly significant.

    This isn’t the first big name to offer good stock photos of trans people – Adobe Stock launched a decent collection last year and Getty has some nice shots too – but it’s significant because of the size and scope and the normality of it. Unlike other collections these are shots of normal people doing normal stuff.  The other stock libraries tend to be much more model-y, so for example the next two are from Getty:

    Portrait of happy transgender female with handbag and tattoo

    Portrait Of Transgender Couple Against Gray Background

    The Getty Images are great shots, but you’re not going to use them to illustrate a piece on, say, trans discrimination in the workplace or trans teens in school. Whereas with the Vice/Broadly collection, I’ve seen a few publishing friends nod approvingly at the images: these are photos that picture editors will actually want to use.

    I think the photos are great, and it’s particularly important to see people of colour and non-binary people represented: all too often, images of trans people focus on binary trans men and women. My only criticism is that the photos are very American, but then they’re from an American publication aimed at an American audience. It’d be nice to see a UK equivalent. I’m up for a bit of modelling if there’s a free makeover in it ;-)

  • The girl in the picture

    My friend drew this in the pub last night. I got a bit emotional.

    For the last 10 days I’ve been in enforced boy mode: because I’ve taken on quite a lot of extra electrolysis sessions to remove my facial hair, I haven’t been allowed to shave. You can’t zap and pull stubble out if there isn’t any stubble to zap or pull.

    It’s been really horrible. I normally get electrolysis once a week, a necessary evil that I’ve timed so I can stay smooth-faced over the weekend and into Tuesday, but I haven’t been able to do even that.

    One positive is that with the extra stubble I could see how much progress I’m actually making with the electrolysis – where I would previously have had a full ginger beard after a week without shaving, now I just have a bit of white stubble on my face and a bunch of white hairs on my neck. After eight months you do start to feel that the sessions will go on forever, so it’s good to see visual evidence that you’re making progress.

    But that’s about the only good thing about it. The sessions have been painful, more so than usual, and I’ve spent ten days with a red, swollen, stubbly face feeling hideous, feeling I’m taking a massive step backwards.

    I hate presenting as male now. I feel like a fraud, an actor playing a part I was never any good at and which I’m even more hopeless at now.

    Going to work at the BBC yesterday in boy mode for the first time since I came out felt particularly horrible. I bumped into people I like and respect, people who haven’t seen me in boy mode for a very long time, and couldn’t help wondering what they thought of seeing me like that. It brings back all the negativity of being trans, the feeling that people are looking at you and laughing behind your back.

    Being mid-transition is horrible. My hair isn’t long enough yet. I still have stubble. HRT has made me put on weight but hasn’t yet redistributed fat deposits and given me a more feminine shape. You’re stuck between two lives, or at least I am: presenting male in front of the kids and until electrolysis, then trying to cram being you into Sunday and Monday. All the while you hear the voices: what the hell do you think you’re doing? There’s nothing remotely feminine about you. You’re not right in the head. You’re a laughing stock.

    I was finally able to get rid of it all yesterday, so I made a bit of an effort before heading to the pub. I wore a nice, flattering dress and put a lot of effort into my make-up, and when I was done I looked in the mirror and saw something I haven’t seen for a couple of weeks now, something I was told for too many years that I would never see.

    Me.

    Last night, after I took it all off, I paused at the digital photo frame in my hallway. It’s packed with family photos, me and the kids, and I was stopped in my tracks by one in particular. It’s me and my son, about three years ago. We’re both laughing; he has long hair and I have a beard, which is how I can date the photo: that was before I came out so it’s early to mid 2016.

    I looked at the photo of the man I used to be. And I looked up, into the mirror.

    He wasn’t there.

    It’s more than makeup, more than a nice dress, more than jewellery. It’s about a couple of years of hormones making subtle changes, changes that don’t seem like much individually but that make a difference over time, changes that you don’t necessarily notice until you really look at a picture of who you used to be.

    I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t see him. I saw the girl in the picture, the me I am and should always have been.

  • Preying on people with cancer

    The Cancer Act 1939 is one of the few pieces of legislation that outlaws pseudo-scientific medical bollocks. As Cancer Research explains:

    At its heart, the current incarnation of the Cancer Act is designed to protect cancer patients and the public from being bombarded with adverts for cancer treatments, from any source, including medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, alternative practitioners, or anyone else.

    One of the reason the act exists is because charlatans prey on people with cancer. If you’re convinced that you’re going to die, or that the treatment that may save you could be almost as bad as the disease, you’re a soft mark for sharks peddling expensive miracle cures.

    Maybe the Mirror’s lawyers should have a word with its editorial team. This article is appalling.

    Terminally ill mum who hid cancer claims tumour shrunk 75% after ‘alternative care’

    After a friend told her about an alternative cancer treatment centre called ‘Hope4Cancer’ in Cancun, Mexico, Kate re-mortgaged her home and dug into her life savings in order to afford the £35,000 three-week program.

    And following her first treatment in late October, Kate was amazed after scans revealed that the tumour on her lung had shrunk by 75 per cent – going from the size of an apple to the size of a grape – while there is now zero traces of cancer in her lymph nodes and limited cancer in her liver.

    There’s just one little problem with all of that. From the same article:

    I was put on a target therapy drug called Alectinib

    Over to you Clive Peedell, NHS consultant clinical oncologist with a particular interest in lung cancer:

    Sorry, but as a lung cancer specialist, I can confirm that this story is nonsense. The lady was on alectinib, which is a highly effective targeted therapy used in ALK+ve lung cancer ie her dramatic response had nothing to do with the alternative therapies.

    So what we have here is an advert for a bullshit facility in Mexico that takes enormous sums of money from people at their most vulnerable. Sadly the Mirror could argue that this is editorial, not advertising, and therefore exempt from prosecution under the Cancer Act. But while it may comply with the letter of the law, it certainly doesn’t comply with its spirit.

    Then again, it might not comply with the letter of the law after all. Cancer Research again:

    The Cancer Act still covers social media and any websites that are accessible within the UK, if they’re aimed at the general public rather than the specific groups of people mentioned above, and Trading Standards can still choose to prosecute people advertising through them.

  • A new axis of evil

    The Christchurch killer wrote about “the great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that effectively says the other – in this case, Muslims – intend to take over the world by having so many children they outnumber the white Christians.

    According to this theory, feminists are part of the problem: they aren’t doing their duty to the white race by submitting to their men and popping out babies to counter the brown ones.

    Nellie Bowles, writing in the NYT:

    As far-right groups have grown across the world, many of their members have insisted that the most pressing concern is falling birthrates. That concern, which they see as an existential threat, has led to arguments about how women are working instead of raising families. The groups blame feminism, giving rise to questions that were unheard-of a decade ago — like, whether women should have the right to work and vote at all.

    …The birthrate conversation — and the question that goes with it, of women’s continued freedom — has become a key recruitment tool for white supremacists. It is often the first political point of agreement a white supremacist recruiter online will find with a target, especially with young people.

    …Once a group of people in an online forum agree that declining white birthrates are an existential threat, then the conversation turns to policies. In some cases the response is that nonwhites should be killed. Often the response is white women need to be re-educated.

    Re-education means the removal of women’s rights, of their reproductive choices, and of their right to vote.

    As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, here’s Rewire News on US politicians’ and hate groups’ support for that ideology in Hungary.

    Trump administration officials and prominent anti-choice activists appeared at a conference hosted by the Hungarian Embassy earlier this month designed to promote government policies to encourage women to have more babies.

    …Tony Perkins, president of the anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, also spoke at the event, as did representatives from the Heritage Foundation and Concerned Women for America. Perkins praised Hungary’s commitment to what he called “pro-family” policies in a blog post the day after the event, though he noted that the United States isn’t likely to support direct subsidies to increase the birth rate.

    …According to a Christian Post report, Orbán’s plan is designed to boost the country’s birth rate to “replacement level,” the fertility rate at which a population sustains itself, without taking a more open approach to immigration policy.

    This is the true face of supposed family values organisations: racism, xenophobia and a plan to take women’s rights back to the Stone Age. And yet rather than fight against this pernicious, hateful, lethal ideology, some supposed feminists ally with these groups because they hate trans people. That makes them useful idiots at best, collaborators at worst. The women they harm may not care about the difference.

  • The damage done

    Last year, anti-trans rabble-rouser James Kirkup wrote an article in The Spectator about the terrible rise of trans rights. Today, IPSO forced The Spectator to admit that the lurid claims at the centre of the story were complete and utter bullshit, invented by the writer. This happens an awful lot with trans stories: many of Andrew Gilligan’s lurid claims in The Sunday Times have been quietly rescinded too.

    The article was a cover feature; the admission that it was based on bullshit is buried in a corner; the damage was done a year ago and no amount of corrections will undo it.

  • You’re not special. You’re lucky

    Writing for the Association of Independent Professionals and Self Employed, Ben Capper wants to share his hard-won wisdom: when it comes to freelancing, there’s no such thing as luck.

    His tale of nine months freelancing reads very much like a tale of luck: his ex-boss had moved to a new gig, giving him his first sizeable project; while stuck on a train, he decided to check LinkedIn and found a job ad. But Capper argues that luck has nothing to do with it. You make your own luck.

    While Capper has a whole nine months of experience, Adam Banks has 18 years.

    Ben has been freelancing for nine months and benefited from considerable luck.

    I’ve freelanced for 18 years and know many other freelancers. It has everything to do with luck. It’s vital to understand this when the time comes that yours runs out. Don’t blame yourself. Cling on x

    I’ve been a freelance for 20 years now, and I can honestly say that luck has been much more important than talent or hard work. Not just luck, but privilege too. For example, BBC Scotland recently ran courses to help women get invited to talk about stuff on air. As a man, I didn’t have to do any courses; simply working for a magazine was qualification enough to be invited on air. That was over 15 years ago and I’m still doing it.

    Capper again:

    You can create the business you want, the work-life balance you want, and the client list you want; and it’s entirely in your hands.

    That isn’t true. Working hard is good. Being open to opportunities is good. But luck still plays a part, and privilege has a huge influence on how “lucky” you are.

    For example, in 20 years of freelancing I have been lucky not to have doors slammed in my face because of my race, or because of my gender, or because of my background. As someone who appeared to be a straight, white, reasonably well educated cisgender man I was never discriminated against. Lucky me.

    I mean it: lucky me. Would I have been invited on air as often if I’d had a thick Scots Asian accent, or if I’d come out as trans 20 years ago? Would my career have been different if I’d been subject to the sexism and the online abuse my female peers have been forced to endure for years?

    I think it can be hard for some of us to admit just how much a factor luck and privilege have played in our careers. Our ego much prefers to believe that we’re where we are because we’re smarter and work harder than everybody else, that we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, but that isn’t true. There are plenty of people who are smarter than us and work harder than us, but they didn’t get the opportunities that we did because those opportunities were never open to them.

    In mythology, hubris led to nemesis: people who thought they’d outsmarted the gods would soon be the on the receiving end of a godly arse-kicking. In employment, it works in much the same way: if you don’t believe that luck plays a part in what you do, you won’t be prepared for the day when your luck runs out. And as every freelancer who’s been doing this for more than 9 months can attest, sooner or later the luck does run out.

    Craig Grannell, another long-term freelancer:

    There’s a lot of luck in freelancing.

    I’ve got major clients from an unlikely combination of connections, reputation, and timing.

    But I’ve also twice lost 50% of my income in single emails/calls pre-announcing mag closures.

    The road is bumpy, and you can’t easily plan for it.

  • A lonely path

    When I came out, I knew it would probably mean spending the rest of my life alone.

    A new study suggests I’m right.

    Two Canadian researchers recently asked almost 1000 cisgender folks if they would date a trans person in a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

    …Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences. Bisexual/queer/nonbinary participants (these were all combined into one group) were most open to having a trans partner, but even among them, almost half (48%) did not select either ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman.’

    It’s not a surprising finding, although as with any study there are various caveats and considerations. But it’s indicative of the way we’re seen by wider society. As the Them.us article puts it:

    The high rates of trans exclusion from potential dating pools are undoubtedly due in part to cisnormativity, cissexism, and transphobia — all of which lead to lack of knowledge about transgender people and their bodies, discomfort with these unknowns, and fear of being discriminated against by proxy of one’s romantic partner.

    It’s very hard to accept yourself when you know that many others don’t see you as normal, let alone desirable.

     

     

  • All children have the right to exist, love and be loved

    More than 30 organisations have signed an open letter detailing why LGBT-inclusive education is more important than ever.

    The full letter is online at PinkNews.

    We must stand together to fight for a world where everyone is accepted for who they are. We must continue to work toward delivering an equal society which is free from discrimination.

  • When human lives are an optional extra

    Boeing’s 737 Max: is safety an optional extra?

    Two very different but equally shocking stories in the papers today: The New York Times reports on the safety features missing from two Boeing 737 Max plans that crashed, killing dozens, while The Guardian publishes an extract from Beth Gardiner’s book about “dieselgate”, the car emissions scandal. 

    The stories do have a common thread: corporations putting profits above human lives. In dieselgate, car firms deliberately cheated on their vehicles’ emissions tests, putting God knows how many lives at risk from very damaging air pollution (the emissions from diesels, if not dealt with properly, are particularly dangerous).

    With the 737 Max, Boeing withheld crucial safety features, making them an optional extra. The planes that crashed didn’t have them.

    The NYT:

    For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

    Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

    Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them.

    There appears to be a significant problem with sensors on the 737 Max, and those problems can make the planes crash. Boeing has a fix for that problem, but it’s not included as standard when an airline buys a 737 Max.

    Multiple informed sources claim that the problem is structural: the way the 737 Max has been designed makes it much more prone to stalling. Its software makes corrections to try and stop that from happening, but it’s dependent on a single sensor. According to AviationCV.com, if that sensor fails “you’re essentially doomed”: the software doesn’t get data from other sensors and there’s no backup.

    Back to the NYT, describing the safety measures that would prevent these planes from crashing:

    “They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.”

    Horrific, isn’t it? And yet these examples of corporate wickedness pale into insignificance against the firms spending huge sums battling climate change regulation. Plane crashes kill a few hundred people a year; diesel emissions are believed to kill around 5,000 people a year in Europe. Climate change has the potential to kill millions.

    That isn’t stopping fossil fuel firms from trying to stop regulation as they expand their operations. Such firms are spending millions on advertising and social media campaigns designed to undermine, delay and block attempts to clean up our energy sources.

    The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report.

    Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil were the main companies leading the field in direct lobbying to push against a climate policy to tackle global warming, the report said.

    One of the firms, ExxonMobil, faces a ban from the EU parliament over allegations that it is funding and spreading climate change denial.

    This is not new – think of cigarette companies selling proven carcinogens, suppressing the evidence of their ill-effects and battling regulation for decades – but the danger is on an even greater scale. The one cost the world’s biggest companies don’t want to consider is the human cost of what they do.

  • Follow the money

    OpenDemocracy reports that the US anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom has been funding supposed “grassroots” organisations in the UK. In this particular case it has been funding groups that campaign against euthanasia; it also funds anti-abortion campaigners and other lovely people.

    Here are some interesting coincidences.

    The ADF works closely with another anti-LGBT hate group, the Family Research Council. In late 2017 the FRC outlined its “divide and conquer” strategy to roll back LGBT equality by attacking trans people.

    “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer… if we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.” The strategy would specifically seek out allies such as separatist feminists, “ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty” and “female athletes forced to compete against men and boys”. It would wrap its intolerance in feminist rhetoric to try and recast rolling back LGBT rights as protecting women. Its key talking points would focus on the supposed dangers of trans people in toilets, in shelters and in prisons, of the supposed unfairness of trans people in competitive sport and of the “erasure of women” by trans people.

    Since late 2017, a number of suspiciously well-funded “grassroots” organisations have put anti-trans scaremongering at the top of the UK news agenda. They have attempted to split the T from LGBT, and have been joined in their efforts by ethnic minorities “who culturally value modesty” – the ones currently shouting through megaphones outside primary schools – and female athletes. They campaign to roll back LGBT rights in order to “protect women”. Their key talking points have been the supposed dangers of trans people in toilets, in shelters and in prisons, the supposed unfairness of trans people in competitive sport and of the “erasure of women” by trans people.

    Some of the most high-profile anti-trans activists were listed as members of the Hands Across The Aisle coalition (a list now conveniently deleted from its website), which brings US evangelicals together with anti-trans activists. Hands Across The Aisle is one of the coalitions the FRC praised in 2017 in its description of how to use grassroots organisations to help it roll back LGBT rights.

    As I said. Interesting coincidences.