Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “Why now, after all this time?”

    I’m a big fan of the writer Jenny Boylan, and about a month back I posted a link to a Twitter thread where she talked about being a late transitioning trans woman. She’s now turned it into a column for the New York Times.

    People often ask late transitioners, why now, after all this time? What kind of woman do you think you can be, after missing your girlhood and your adolescence? But those aren’t the questions one should ask.

    The question is, how did you manage to go so long? What enabled you to keep carrying your burden in secret, walking around with a shard of glass in your foot, for all those years?

    This story may be less about what it is like to come out as trans than it is about finding the courage to do a difficult thing, even if you are no longer young, even if you do not know how. Trans people are surely not the only ones who wonder how to close the gap between the people they feel they have to pretend to be and their authentic selves.

  • The smallest of acts

    A tale of two tweets. The first, a news story tweeted by Glasgow Live:

    A Glasgow bridge has been decked in brightly coloured post-it notes with messages which aim to help bring people back from the brink of suicide.

    The notes, which appeared this morning (Monday), have been posted on the Squinty Bridge and on railings alongside the River Clyde between Glasgow Central.

    Handwritten messages read: “You matter”, “Just coz you’re struggling, doesn’t mean you’re failing”, “You are strong” and “Do not give up. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

    The second, a tweet by US trans support group CATS:

  • Cut it out

    I’ve written once or twice that the world is very different when you walk in women’s shoes: if you’re born and socialised as male you inhabit a completely different planet to women. It’s something many of my women friends find blackly funny when I’m outraged by an experience they have every day.

    There was a good example of that last night in my local, where as I often do I was sitting at the bar looking at things on my phone. From out of nowhere a pissed bloke had his arms around me and his head against mine, demanding I put down my phone so “we can have a chat”. I politely and then less politely told him to get his hands off me, which he did grudgingly. He didn’t actually do the fucking off I’d requested until one of my friends came over.

    He wasn’t a no-neck football fan or a sleazy middle-aged lech in a shiny suit. Just your run of the mill sensitive indie guy who no doubt owns a “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt. He’s got a child, a girl. I know this because I overheard his friend later, apologising to the bar staff for his drunken behaviour. “I’ve been trying to get him into a taxi for five hours. It’s his daughter’s first birthday tomorrow.”

    It’s not something I’ve experienced before, because for pretty obvious reasons I don’t tend to be the target of that kind of behaviour. But my women friends deal with it all the time. The same friend who came over last night told me of her own experience the night before: a complete stranger had grabbed her in a bear hug and kissed her on the cheek.

    It’s just part of the background noise for women, the entitlement of men who don’t just refuse to take “no” for an answer but don’t ask in the first place. And the more likely a man is to get away with it, the worse the behaviour can be. My great love, live music, has a real problem of men groping women at shows. It’s led to campaigns such as Safe Gigs For Women. And sometimes it’s even worse than that. Sweden has just held a “cis man-free” festival for women, trans women and non-binary people after multiple sexual assaults at a previous music festival.

    #NotAllMen, I know. But too many.

  • Think of the children

    This is Maddie. She’s 12.

    She’s “the transgender”, “the thing”, the “lil half baked maggot” that parents of other kids think should be sorted out with “a good sharp knife”.

    Maddie’s story went viral. I thought it was upsetting enough, but then I watched the Vice News video report. Seeing a wee girl pretending to be braver than she feels made the whole thing even more heartbreaking.

    Please watch it. One of the reasons anti-trans sentiment still spreads is because many of us don’t know any trans people. It’s easy to mistrust and even hate people you don’t know, people you’re told are different, and some of the worst people exploit that. But it’s a lot harder to hate when you see someone who’s just like your own kids (Maddie is only slightly older than my daughter. The thought of anybody, let alone parents, ganging up on her…), because of course trans people are just people.

    It’s not a long film, but there are plenty of moments to break your heart, to make you angry and sad. The police not so subtly implying that the filmmakers should get out of town or expect violence from the locals. The school board discussing everything but the case. The town mayor, who’s gay, having obvious difficulty defending bigotry. But the moment that really jumped out for me was an almost throwaway remark: when Maddie came to town, nobody knew she was trans until a teacher pulled the old records and told others.

    Teachers are supposed to be the protectors of our children.

    This particular case went viral, and strangers’ fundraising has enabled Maddie’s family to move to somewhere less backward. But there have been and will be many more Maddies whose stories you won’t hear, and for whom nobody will crowdfund anything.

  • “Self-knowledge rarely comes packaged in a single coherent narrative”

    Stock photo. Inclusion does not imply any model's gender identity or orientation.

    There’s a good piece in The Conversation by Tey Meadow, assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, on the hot-button topic of gender non-conforming kids.

    I know the language around this stuff can be confusing if you’re not steeped in it. By gender non-conforming we mean rejecting stereotypical gendered things, so for example a girl who refuses to grow her hair long or wear dresses is gender non-conforming, or GNC for short. A boy who’d rather play with Barbie than Action Man is GNC, and so on.

    Gender non-conforming doesn’t mean transgender. The overwhelming majority of GNC kids just have finely tuned bullshit detectors and a whole bunch of individuality.

    I can understand why parents might panic over gender non-conforming behaviour. For some, it’s the terror of having a gay kid, which still persists. But for others it’s the knowledge that to have a trans kid means dealing with a whole bunch of shit that parents of cisgender kids don’t have to deal with.

    In the current climate it’s to know that your child will face abuse from all kinds: not just arseholes in the street but school run mums on messageboards and middle-class women in newspapers. It’s to know that your child may have to make agonising decisions about their body and their place in the world that their peers won’t have to make. It’s to know that your child will be discriminated against, and demonised.

    But, again: most gender non-conforming kids aren’t trans.

    More importantly, they’re not being pressured to identify as trans.

    Quite the opposite. The few kids who are persistent, insistent and consistent about their gender identity have to spend months and sometimes years being assessed before even something as simple as puberty blockers may be prescribed.

    The media really doesn’t help when it flatly lies about the treatment offered to gender non-conforming kids, publishing propaganda from pressure groups claiming that the entire system is fast-tracking vulnerable kids on a high-speed conveyor towards surgery. It isn’t (and congratulations if you spotted the “they are coming for our children!” trope as used by every bigoted group since the beginning of time).

    A tiny, tiny proportion of gender non-conforming kids are trans; most aren’t, and those kids aren’t fast-tracked to anything.

    Meadow:

    [the] model doesn’t push kids toward a transgender outcome or even a linear narrative. Instead, clinicians teach parents to pause, absorb the messages their children are sending and then articulate what they are seeing back to their children. Parents and psychologists help children express their genders in authentic ways, and then work to understand the significance of the things they are saying and doing. It takes times and practice.

    The constant misinformation in the media and on social media is letting gender non-conforming kids, trans kids and their parents down.

    Meadow again:

    Gender-nonconforming children who are supported by their parents in expressing their identities by and large thrive. In fact, recent studies show that trans youth who are affirmed and supported by their families to transition are psychologically healthier than children who are gender-nonconforming but receive no such encouragement.

    The emerging consensus is about educating and supporting parents to help their kids thrive, not forcing kids into boxes they don’t fit into.

    The last thing any trans adult wants is for a cisgender kid to be wrongly diagnosed as trans. We know all too painfully what it’s like to be forced to be somebody you’re not.

  • “The journey, not the destination, matters”

    I recently started learning to play the piano. If it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, that means my neighbours will stop hating me in the year 2210, or 2114 if I practice a lot more often.

    Getting good isn’t really the point, though. As TS Eliot rightly put it, it’s the journey that matters.

    I like learning the piano. It’s fun, my tutor and I have a good laugh and week by week I get a little bit less shit at playing the piano. I’ll never be any good at it, but each time I make progress I get good enough to do a little bit more.

    Right now, I’m doing a terrible version of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games and a terrible, basic chord version of John Grant’s Caramel. These are not difficult songs, I know, but until recently I was convinced they were impossible. Now, they’re achievable. I can’t do it now, but I know that eventually I’ll be able to play and sing Video Games without messing it up and do Caramel perfectly while honking into a kazoo for the synth solo.

    Not only that, but it’s given me the confidence to write on piano too. We’re not talking piano symphonies here, but having moved from painstakingly programming keyboards one note at a time it’s enormously liberating to be able to actually play things.

    I will never be good at this. But the list of things I’m good enough to play will keep getting longer.

    In A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut suggested that “we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” Getting slowly better at something you previously found impossible is one of the most glorious forms of farting around I’ve ever experienced.

  • No-platforming Nazis

    Neo-nazi poster boy Milo has posted a big rant to Facebook about how his career has hit the skids. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to read it without laughing.

    There’s more to this than well-deserved schadenfreude, though. It’s yet more evidence that refusing to give vicious rabble-rousers a platform kills their careers. Of course it does. They built their careers using those platforms to abuse free speech and other people’s tolerance of extremist views.

    We’re told that de-platforming white supremacists and other bigots makes them stronger and louder. But the evidence shows that it doesn’t. Milo’s the one mewling now; not so long ago it was the neo-nazi Richard Spencer. Infowars’ Alex Jones will be next.

    It’s time once again for the famous XKCD cartoon about free speech:

  • Cris Shapan’s incredibly funny fakes

    There’s funny, and then there’s the kind of funny where you end up a crying. honking mess. Cris Shapan’s fake posters and book covers leave me helpless with laughter. His Facebook page is a joy.

    What I love about Shapan’s work isn’t just the jokes, although the fake pulp novel Maelstrom Of Pee made me laugh so hard something important popped inside me. It’s the attention to detail. Shapan’s work is just extraordinary.

    The fake advert above is on urban myth debunking site Snopes: it’s so convincing that many people have shared it online thinking it’s a real advert from the fifties. A similar thing happened with another of Shapan’s fakes, a foodstuff called Rolled Pig.

    There’s so much joy and silliness in this stuff. It’s glorious.

  • Presented for the approval of the Midnight Society

    What would it be like if some of the world’s greatest horror writers got together to pitch each other stories? Mike Rosen of Guttersnipe Comics thinks he knows.

    I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes by quoting them here. The whole thing made me laugh like a drain (language NSFW).

  • Calling time on my Apple Watch

    I’ve had all three generations of Apple Watch, but it’s time to call time on it. It is an incredibly clever device and it felt very futuristic when it first came out. But it does absolutely nothing to make my life better.

    That’s not to say it can’t be useful. It can. But it’s not useful for me. The longer I have it the more things I turn off, and the more annoying I find things that didn’t used to bug me quite so much. For example, the lack of an always-on display has become intensely irritating, especially when the display doesn’t always come on when I want it to. Of all the things I want a watch to do, showing me the time straightaway is the most important thing for me. And it still doesn’t do that properly.

    Siri voice control still doesn’t work reliably, and dictation is still incredibly patchy. I don’t run or swim so its fitness tracking is irrelevant. I don’t need a remote control when I’m listening to music on my iPhone. The Hue complication doesn’t do what I want it to do. I keep notifications turned off because I don’t want to be interrupted when I’m doing something else, which is most of the time. I don’t use the weather app complications any more because more often than not, they don’t update. I don’t use Apple Pay on it because paying with your wrist is stupid and it means having to tap in a PIN code every time you want to unlock the watch. It wakes me up when I’m trying to have a nap. When I travel it means Yet Another Bloody Charger, and when I go to gigs it’s Another Bloody Thing To Put Into Airplane Mode.

    Also, it’s ugly. I’ve experimented with endless colours and strap colours and fabrics, but it’s still a small computer screen rather than a piece of jewellery.

    I like to point out that often, technology answers a question people aren’t asking. That’s definitely the case for me and the Apple Watch. For me, it doesn’t answer the only question I have about it, which is: why am I persisting with a device I don’t particularly like any more?

    Time for a Timex instead. All it does is tells the time. That’s all I want a watch to do.