Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • A five point plan to hate and hurt people

    A poster on Twitter reminded me of this 2016 story about the evangelical Family Research Council. It’s about the FRC’s five-point plan describing how to demonise trans people and make it impossible for them to live their lives.

    This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s on the FRC website, with the usual widely debunked nonsense.

    The points were:

    1. Policy-makers should strenuously resist efforts to legally recognize changes of sex or gender identity.
    2. The government shouldn’t force private entities to accept and recognise trans people’s gender identity, or protect them from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, education and business transactions.
    3. The government shouldn’t pay for trans people’s transition-related healthcare.
    4. Health insurance shouldn’t pay for trans people’s transition-related healthcare.
    5. Trans people shouldn’t be permitted to serve in the military.

    As the Twitter user pointed out, it’s kinda difficult to tell the difference between that plan, current US policy and the “talking points” of anti-trans campaigners both in the US and in the UK.

    As the article, by Brynn Tannehill, put it:

    Stop for a moment here, and imagine a world where you can’t get an accurate government ID. A world where you can’t vote, can’t drive without risking arrest, and can’t get a job. You cannot prove that you are who you are, because no one will believe your ID is real. You will never be treated as your correct gender by any government agency. What ID you have will constantly out you as transgender, inviting discrimination. Perfectly legal discrimination, if part two of their plan succeeds.

    Now imagine being constantly outed as transgender in this world where the law explicitly states that you are a target. Imagine having that scarlet A on every ID you possess making it clear that the bearer of this card is sub-human and has no rights: fire them, kick them out of their home, refuse to serve them, take their children away, verbally abuse them for your amusement at work—it’s all good.

    This is all because in the eyes of the anti-trans crowd, trans people were born a certain way and must not be allowed to change it. If we try, we’re subhuman.

    Imagine if they said the same things about infertile couples taking IVF.

    Sophie-Grace Chappell writes for the American Philosophical Association and compares the treatment of trans people to that of adoptive parents.

    Nobody sensible thinks that it’s all right, when you find out that someone is an adoptive parent, to get in her face and shout “Biology! Science! You’re running away from the facts! You’re delusional! You’re not a real parent!”

    …Nobody sensible thinks that it’s an infraction of Jordan Peterson’s human rights to impose on him a social, ethical, and sometimes even legal requirement that he call adoptive parents “parents.”

    …Nobody sensible thinks that adoptive parents are, typically and as such, a threat to other parents. Or that they only went in for adoptive parenting as a way to get their hands on vulnerable children or vulnerable parents.

    Of course, organisations such as the FRC are against same-sex adoption and lesbian couples having IVF too, but the difference is that their views are not presented as mainstream and echoed every single week in major newspapers and all over social media by people who claim to be feminists.

    The FRC is a US organisation but its hands reach across the Atlantic in the form of the Hands Across The Aisle Coalition, whose founder is regularly and approvingly quoted by UK anti-trans activists on social media. The coalition lists the UK groups Fair Play For Women and Transgender Trend among its members.

    TT is the group responsible for the anti-trans materials sent to UK schools, and it and Fair Play For Women are the source of much of the anti-trans rent-a-quote stuff you see in the Mail on Sunday and other newspapers. TT’s crowdfunding campaigns are promoted by right-wing sites such as Breitbart.

    It’s very odd to see supposed feminists becoming best pals with virulent anti-abortionists and conservatives who hate women.

    Brynn Tannehill has written about that too, in the aftermath of the anti-trans disruption of London Pride:

    These right-wing organizations don’t try to hide their relationship with so-called feminists. Indeed, they proudly display it in order to create the illusion that both the left and the right oppose inclusion of trans people in society. In reality, only one side’s interests are being represented here ― the radical religious right.

    …They are all anti-choice. They all want to ban access to birth control. They universally want to overturn Lawrence v. Texas and allow states to make homosexuality illegal again. They want to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, and Roe v. Wade. They want to ban same-sex adoption. They all are hostile to fair-pay-for-women laws. They oppose women working outside the home. They are all hostile to the Women’s March and Me Too. They are fake medical organizations and anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice hate groups. They have cheered the assassinations of abortion providers. They are publications that have published horrible things about women, such as “Does Feminism Make Women Ugly?”

    This isn’t a choice between transgender people and women. This is a choice between trans people and right-wing organizations pretending to represent women.

    Some of the anti-trans activists on social media hate trans people because they’re bigots: many of them have espoused straight-up racism and antisemitism too. But many of the people calling trans-inclusive women “handmaidens” are apparently unaware that they’re doing the work of the US religious right.

    Evangelicals’ bigotry didn’t go away when the battle for equal marriage was won. They just changed tactics and went looking for new friends. Sadly, they seem to be finding an awful lot of them.

  • Mobile phones still don’t cause cancer

    No it can’t.

    When it comes to conspiracy theories, there are two kinds of theorists: the batshit insane, and the people who genuinely believe they’ve stumbled on a conspiracy.

    There was a good example of what I assume is the latter last week in The Observer, which published an astonishing piece about the link between mobile phones and cancer. It turns out that mobile phones really do cause cancer, and there’s a global conspiracy to cover it up.

    No they don’t, and no there isn’t.

    This is something I know a fair bit about, because I’ve covered the subject a lot over the last two decades. Whether it’s phones or wireless networks, every now and then someone comes along and misunderstands the science to conclude that our brains are being cooked and there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.

    Part of the problem is the word “radiation”. We assume that all radiation is ionising radiation, the kind that gives you skin cancer. But radiation also includes the radio waves that bring you Radio Scotland and the light waves coming from your light bulbs.

    The radiation from phones and wireless routers is very low powered, non-ionising radiation. As far as science is aware, there is no possible way the radiation from these devices can cause cancer.

    The Observer has run a follow-up piece this week, this time by somebody who knows the science. It gives the authors of the previous article a very polite but very thorough kicking.

    That the authors attribute this lack of evidence for their claims to the machinations of a nebulous big telecoms is indicative of a mindset more conspiratorial than sceptical… Scaremongering narratives may be more alluring than the less sensational, scientific findings, but they are not harmless. We need only look at any vaccine panic to see the cost in human life when superstition outpaces science. In an age where misinformation can perpetuate rapidly, it can be difficult to parse fact from fiction, but it’s imperative that we hone our scientific scepticism rather than succumb to baseless panics – our very wellbeing depends on it.

    If you’re a journalist considering writing an “ordinary thing causes cancer!” piece it’s worth applying Occam’s Razor, which suggests that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Which is more likely: a) there’s a global conspiracy that’s willingly sacrificing thousands or even millions of lives and which has operated for decades without leaving any evidence whatsoever, or b) you’ve got it wrong?

    A journalist’s job is to report what the evidence says, not to cherry-pick the evidence to support the story the journalist wants to tell.

  • The right words matter

    Dr Louise Raw on Twitter:

    Every time @DailyMirror reports a domestic violence murder I have to @ them about their repugnant coverage.

    A FLING DID NOT DESTROY THIS FAMILY. A FLING DID NOT KILL ANNE SEARLE. HER HUSBAND DID.  A woman died in terror- this is a tragedy, not a sexy romp.

    This is an example of something that’s very common in newspaper reports, especially reports of domestic violence and other violence against women. These are real examples:

    BBQ dad “killed 6 over wife’s affair” (The Sun)

    Breakup Ignited Dad’s Deadly Rage (Seattle Times)

    Dad Killed 5 Kids Because Wife Was Leaving (Yahoo News)

    and from BBC Scotland News today:

    Jealous Kilmarnock husband’s ‘frenzied knife attack’ on wife

    These are just randomly chosen examples, but they all have the same thing in common: the implication that if it weren’t for the woman’s behaviour or decisions, the crimes wouldn’t have happened. Similarly in the Mirror example above, the implication is that if the wife hadn’t had a “fling”, her husband wouldn’t have killed her.

    You’ll see similar headlines about rape, where the crime is framed in terms of the victim’s behaviour, dress or sobriety. And you’ll often find the subtext carried across to the body copy, which goes into great detail about what a nice guy the man was.

    The reality is that very many abusers and murderers are nice guys. The majority of violence against women is perpetrated by their current or former partners. The majority of abuse of children is perpetrated by relatives or step-relatives.

    We don’t want to think of our neighbours, our cousins, our partners as potential criminals because it’s too terrifying – so when it is a perfectly ordinary guy, we attempt to explain it away instead. There are some fascinating studies into this, and the concept of the “ideal criminal” as a complete stranger.

    Jane Gilmore’s #FixedIt campaign attempts to highlight the problem. She corrects “Belfast man to spend three years on probation for Lagan Towpath Sex Assault” to “…for sexually assaulting a woman”; “staff subjected to abuse” becomes “man chokes woman”; man “planning sex with 2yo” is corrected to “planning rape and sexual abuse of 2yo”, because of course raping a toddler isn’t sex.

    Gilmore is a journalist, and she wants her peers to do better.

    …it is not our job to erase the truth so our audience is not made to feel uncomfortable. Our job is to describe what is happening in our society. And the sad truth is that around 90 percent of violent crimes are committed by men. Avoiding this fact doesn’t make it less true but it does make it much more difficult to address the underlying cause.

  • We don’t see the same things when we see the same things

    Here’s a fascinating piece by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post: her (white, male) friend Tom felt that white men were vanishing from TV, so she sent him links to evidence that they weren’t. “I felt Tom was watching TV from another planet,” she recalls. Hesse tried to prove that Tom was wrong with easily verifiable statistics.

    It didn’t work.

    Tom diligently read these stats but was convinced that they didn’t represent what he saw.

    “I’ve noticed it,” he told me. “I’ve noticed white men aren’t there. I’m not making this up.”

    If you’ve ever debated anything on the internet you’ll be familiar with this: the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that somebody is wrong, but they refuse to accept that the evidence is accurate. That’s because we’re not as rational as we think we are.

    As Hesse notes, “Our worldviews are shaped by our experiences. We all obsess over our own scars until we start to think they’re symbols for broader injustice. We believe what we feel. And then we believe our feelings are facts.”

    There’s also the issue of investment. It’s much easier to fool somebody than to get someone to admit they’ve been fooled. There’s a point in many debates where one party will simply shut it down and refuse to engage any further.

    As Hesse writes:

    How do you address beliefs when they’re not rooted in reality? How do you tell someone, I’m trying to treat your fears seriously, but your facts don’t exist? How, as individuals, and how, as a country?

  • Follow the money

    Have you been wondering how the odious racist Tommy Robinson has managed to attract so much apparent support? The answer’s simple. He’s being bankrolled by US right-wingers.

    This is by no means unusual. US evangelicals are driving anti-trans groups over here and tried to derail the Irish campaign to repeal anti-abortion law. The Russians, as you may have noticed, are pulling all kinds of strings. But it’s rarely quite so overt. This is a press release from the US Middle East Foundation, a right-wing, anti-Muslim group with deep pockets:

    MEF is sponsoring and organizing the second “Free Tommy Robinson” gathering in London on July 14. MEF previously provided all the funding and helped organized the first “Free Tommy Robinson” event held June 9 in London.

    …The Middle East Forum is aiding Mr. Robinson’s defense in three main ways:

    • Legally – By using Legal Project monies to fund his legal defense.
    • Diplomatically – By bringing foreign pressure on the UK government to ensure Mr. Robinson’s safety and eventual release.
    • Politically – By organizing and funding the 25,000-person “Free Tommy” London rally on June 9 and now the July 14 protest, also taking place in London.

    It’s not a conspiracy theory when the conspirators publish press releases about what they’ve done.

  • It’s time to regulate social media

    According to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, holocaust deniers don’t really mean it. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”, he says, explaining why so much hate speech remains online on Facebook.

    The real reason, of course, is that hate speech makes money for Facebook. Hate platforms such as Infowars and articles about holocaust denial generate lots of page views and audience interaction, which is the lifeblood of any social network.

    As the Irish Independent reports:

    Moderators in Dublin were instructed not to remove extreme, abusive or graphic content from the platform even when it violated the company’s guidelines.

    An undercover investigation found that while nudity is almost always removed, violent videos involving assaults on children, racially charged hate speech and images of self-harm by children all remained on Facebook after being reported by users and reviewed by moderators.

    This, from the UK Independent:

    far-right and racist content is given special protections that stop it being deleted quite so easily. Trainees are shown being told that content that racially abused protected ethnic or religious groups would be removed – but if that abuse is limited to immigrants from those groups, the posts would stay up.

    In the footage, moderators are shown explaining that a post targeting Muslims with racist language would be removed, for instance. But if the posts specifically targeted Muslim immigrants, then that could be allowed to stay up because it is a political statement, Facebook has suggested.

    Facebook, and other social networks, are out of control. They’ve proved beyond any doubt that self-regulation doesn’t work. The claim that Facebook isn’t a publisher is bullshit. It’s bigger than any newspaper or TV network, and it’s time it was regulated as such.

  • Pride in my country

    The festival may have been a shambles, but to see your country’s First Minister leading the Pride parade is really something. This image was tweeted from the FM’s official account.

    Update: I realise I didn’t explain why it was really something. I grew up in the era of Section 28/Clause 2A, when the UK government made it illegal for teachers to talk about LGBT people in schools. It came into force in 1988, when I was 15, and remained in place until 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales. To have the First Minister of Scotland at the head of a Pride march is a sign of how far most of us have come.

  • Back to the day job

    I don’t usually post links to my work because I do an awful lot of it, but it’s been a while since I’ve had the thrill of seeing my name on the cover of a book.

    Business Writing for Technical People is part of a series I’ve written for the British Computer Society, and I believe the ebook is now available for BCS members. Other editions will come out in September.

    The book is aimed at technical experts who want to communicate more effectively, and like all my work it contains some really bad jokes. However, it also contains some good advice on getting your message across in the most effective way.

    I don’t get to see endorsements before publication, so it’s a nice surprise to see quotes like this on the Amazon page:

    Carrie takes the fear factor out of writing. Her clear tips and guides will make your writing instantly more readable. Practice what Carrie preaches and start to get complements on the style, persuasiveness and impact of your written work. Don’t write another word until you have read this book from cover to cover. — Prof. Brian Sutton, Professor of Learning Performance at Middlesex University and author

    I love the cover designs too.

    I’ve been a professional writer for 20 years now, and I still get a rush seeing my name on a cover or spine. And when that name is “Carrie”… let’s just say I got a little bit emotional when I saw the cover proofs.

  • Street hassle

    On Thursday, I was verbally abused in the street for being trans.

    I wonder, what kind of person do you imagine doing that, and where? Are you thinking lower working class, poorly educated, teenage, rolling down Sauchiehall Street after a night of promotional jaegerbombs? Or maybe a shaven-headed neanderthal, drunk, in a pub I should have the sense to avoid?

    Nope. Middle-aged man, a packed Buchanan Street, 5.30pm on a sunny weekday evening.  I was standing to the side waiting to meet a friend for dinner.

    The man took a moment from his busy schedule to look me up and down and then snarl “my fucking god” at me before continuing on his way home from work.

    What did you do today, darling?

    We like to think hate is the preserve of people who are worse than us. They’re not as sophisticated as us, or as well educated, or as clever. But that isn’t true. Hate can wear a suit, have multiple degrees and subscribe to current affairs magazines. I feel more welcome at a rock festival full of taps-aff neds than I would at a dinner party for readers of The Spectator.

    I don’t worry about shaven-headed drunks. You can see them coming.

  • Brace yourself for the backlash

    The UK government publishes its new LGBT strategy today. Part of the strategy includes publishing the findings of a survey that show – surprise! – life is often really shit for LGBT people.

    The plans include improved hate crime protection, a ban on dangerous quackery such as conversion therapy (aka “pray the gay away” cures for being gay or trans), reform of the Gender Recognition Act to make things less bureaucratic and other positive things.

    Much of the strategy only applies to England, as a lot of LGBT-related issues are covered by devolved legislation. But the anti-LGBT backlash we’ll see online and in the media will affect the entire UK and beyond.

    I don’t envy equalities minister Penny Mordaunt, who’s trying to improve things and reform the Gender Recognition Act in a climate where just 13% of Conservative voters think the GRA should be reformed (coincidentally, the vast majority of anti-trans misinformation and outright falsehoods about GRA reform is printed in newspapers and periodicals read primarily by Conservative voters; The Guardian and New Statesman do their best to compete, but their circulations are tiny by comparison):

    The current process doesn’t work for people. It’s overly bureaucratic and it’s highly medicalized with people making decisions about you who have never met you.

    There’s also huge inconsistencies throughout the process – you have one identification document in one sex and another in another.

    It doesn’t work, it needs to be radically improved, and that’s why we’re going to consult on that. Really the outcome we’re looking for is that people are supported through that process… it is a challenging enough thing to go through without the state and its bureaucracy adding to people’s stresses.

    We will get the best results from this consultation if it is done in that environment with people being sensible, people looking at the facts and not making things up, and ensuring people are respected.

    There hasn’t been much in the way of facts or respect so far.

    I hope I’m wrong, but I think the next couple of months are going to see some really shameful reporting of LGBT issues and more demonisation of trans people in supposedly respectable publications, as well as online. Some of it will have the dread hand of religious evangelism behind it; some will be from people building personal media brands by stepping on vulnerable people; all of it will be damaging.

    Knowing that the perpetrators are on the wrong side of history doesn’t make the present any easier to live through.

    If you would like to better understand the truth about being LGBT in the UK, the Government has published its full survey online. It’s available here in PDF format.