Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • TIE a rainbow ribbon ’round school bigotry

    I liked this photo: it shows members of the Scots parliament wearing rainbow-coloured ties to mark their support for the TIE campaign.

    The TIE Campaign only three years old but is doing great things in Scottish schools. It aims to reduce bullying and ignorance by encouraging LGBT-inclusive education in schools, and it works.

    The Sunday Herald:

    MORE than three quarters of Scots pupils who’ve attended LGBT inclusive assemblies in schools stopped using homophobic language as a direct result, new research has revealed.

    Nearly all pupils, 96 per cent, said the events in schools had made them more aware of the impact of homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying and attitudes on others, while 92 per cent said they’d since reflected on their own use of language.

    Furthermore, of those pupils who said they previously held negative views towards the LGBT community, 86 per cent said their attitudes had changed positively after attending the assemblies.

    If that was all the TIE Campaign had achieved in three years it’d be impressive enough: reducing bullying is an incredible thing. But there are more benefits to inclusive education. It’s encouraged kids to seek better information about safe sex and relationships, and by questioning gender norms it’s helping non-LGBT kids too. As guidance teacher Chloe Divers from Motherwell told the Herald:

    One of my colleagues, a computing teacher, has found she has more female students signing up when traditionally it was more male. She thinks because we’ve tackled this as a whole that we’ve challenged stereotypes and broken down gender norms. So we’re finding it’s breaking through into choices now as well.

    Also in the Herald, Angela Haggerty writes:

    …schools are still only emerging from the shadow of Section 28. The law, repealed in 2000, prevented teachers from discussing LGBT issues with children in schools.

    We can’t reverse the mistakes of the past, but we can ensure we don’t repeat them today.

  • Some venues are bigger than others

    Morrissey has cancelled his UK and Ireland tour citing “logistical problems”. Various well-informed sources say those problems are of the “persuading people to buy tickets” variety.  In one Scots venue with a capacity of 2,900, I’m told, he barely sold 400 tickets after weeks on sale.

    In the last six years, Morrissey has cancelled 134 shows. Between that, poor record sales and increasingly divisive on-stage banter, it’s a miracle he managed to persuade anyone to buy tickets at all.

  • Words and weapons

    Another day, another mass killing in America by a man who – surprise! – has a history of troubling behaviour towards women.

    The target, the Capital Gazette newspaper, had previously reported the shooter’s online harassment of a woman; he tried and failed to sue them. So three years later, he picked up a gun instead.

    The shooter, Jarrod Ramos, appears to be a Trump supporter.

    President Trump has previously said of journalists: “I would never kill them, but I do hate them.” This week, he once again referred to mainstream news journalists as “the enemy of the people”, a claim he’s been making for two years now. Also this week, alt-right darling and thoroughly reprehensible troll Milo Yiannopoulous said he couldn’t wait for “vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”

    You don’t need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.

  • Civility only goes so far

    This is from the New York Times in 1934.

    There are quite a few of these things being shared on social media at the moment, including old articles urging black people to be civil to people who want to keep them segregated, and more recent articles urging LGBT people to be nice to howling bigots.

    The sharing is in response to a non-story about Trump henchwoman Sarah Sanders, spokesperson for a vicious, intolerant, authoritarian regime, being politely refused service in a restaurant: some of the staff are LGBT and didn’t want to serve an apologist for the ban on trans people in the military.

    Naturally, the right-wing press have engaged in a bad-faith argument about the supposed intolerance of the left – people who, the last time I checked, weren’t caging children and attempting to return the world to the glory days of the 1930s. That’s all okay. Politely saying “you’re not welcome here”, on the other hand…

    This is based on Karl Popper’s writing from 1945.

    Trump fans are protesting outside the restaurant. This image is from ABC News.

    The signs being held by the people demanding civility say “Homos are full of demons” and “Unless they repent, let God burn them”.

  • No, the government hasn’t said it’s okay to discriminate

    Imagine I started a petition claiming that the government was going to ban bees and demanding that it didn’t.

    “We’re not going to ban bees,” the government would respond. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

    How would you report that? Would you:

    (a) Conclude that ‘arseholes create petition about imaginary problem’ wasn’t newsworthy in the first place?

    (b) Write a brief story noting that some arseholes created a petition and that the government told them to get stuffed?

    Or (c) Run the story with the headline “Bee friends force government into humiliating climbdown”?

    If you chose (c), you’re probably writing about trans issues for national newspapers.

    (I have a more mature version of this going live on Metro today, where I’m not allowed to call people “arseholes” or say “fuck”).

    Over the weekend, multiple newspapers ran a story that the government said trans people can be banned from toilets, changing rooms and other single-sex spaces.

    That isn’t true. Doing so is illegal.

    Here’s what actually happened.

    • Anti-trans activists created a petition demanding the government consults them before changing existing equality legislation;
    • The government politely told them to fuck off on the grounds that they aren’t considering changing existing equality legislation.

    To see that presented as a victory for anti-trans campaigners is quite something.

    Here’s how the law works. Under the Equality Act, which has been in force for eight years now, you cannot discriminate against trans people. In very specific circumstances, such as women’s refuges, you can exclude trans people provided that doing so is legitimate and proportionate.

    Over to you, Stonewall:

    The exemptions in the law (which the Government referred to) only apply where services can demonstrate that excluding a trans person is absolutely necessary, for example, if inclusion would put that trans person at risk. However, these exemptions are rarely used and in almost all situations trans people are treated equally as is required by our equality laws.

    …This kind of reporting also doesn’t reflect reality; trans people can and have been using toilets that match their gender for years without issue. This is another media-generated ‘debate’, and it’s actually having a negative effect on many people who aren’t trans too; people whose appearance doesn’t fit the stereotypes of male or female are increasingly being challenged for simply going into a public loo.

    This lazy and/or wilful misreporting is dangerous. It completely misrepresents the law, and it’s contributing to a culture that’s already seen cisgender (ie, not trans) women chased out of bathrooms for not looking feminine enough. Trans people are victims, and newspapers repeatedly take the side of the bullies.

    If you’re regurgitating press releases from pressure groups and failing to check even the simplest facts, you shouldn’t be in journalism.

     

  • “We are in the same sea, trying to swim”

    Same Star is another of David’s compositions and another vocal where I appear to be channelling E from Eels, which of course is never a bad thing. It’s a musical version of the Scots phrase “we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns”: we have much more in common than what divides us, and we’re all busking it. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

  • “There’s no joy in being right”

    A Hollow Victory was one of the first songs David and I wrote for the current crop of music, but it took a while to get right: the superbly retro electro stomp was there from the outset but it took a bit of fiddling to find a version we both liked.

    It’s a companion piece to Barren Ground, written earlier but set later: it’s about how you feel when you’ve been thrown under a bus that promptly crashed into a wall: what you said would happen happened, but there’s no schadenfreude: being proved right is a hollow victory in a war you didn’t want to fight.

  • “Some rock you proved to be.”

    This is Pushing Air, a song about sound and fury signifying nothing. Ironically, it started off as sound and fury: I love noisy guitar rock and that tends to be my go-to for songwriting, but sometimes you need a stiletto, not a blunderbuss. This is a stiletto, written during a time when I really needed help and help didn’t come.

  • It’s okay to be offensive if you’re a white guy

    There’s a good piece in The Pool by Yomi Adegoke about Alan Sugar’s racist tweet, or rather the reaction to it from media types such as the odious Piers Morgan.

    As Adegoke points out, there does appear to be a double standard here. When a black presenter says something that appears to be racist, they’re gone. White presenters? Not so much.

    It’s interesting to contrast Morgan’s spirited defence of Alan Sugar, who is white, with his criticism of trans model Munroe Bergdorf, who is not.

    According to Morgan, Bergdorf was “rightly fired” from her role at L’Oreal for “calling all white people violent racists.” That isn’t quite what she said, but Morgan’s never been great at facts. As far as Morgan is concerned, because Bergdorf said something he finds “deeply offensive”, it’s right and proper that she should lose her job.

    Adegoke’s piece notes that Morgan doesn’t feel the same way when it’s white people being deeply offensive about black people.

    If only there was a word for somebody who treats people differently based on the colour of their skin.

    Incidentally, I was at the recording of a (non-broadcast) TV show pilot the other night where one of the topics was offensive speech. It was introduced via an unfunny video by a straight, white, cisgender male comedian who said that he had the right to say whatever he wanted and if anyone had a problem with it they should just fuck off.

    The issue was then discussed by the three panellists, two of whom were straight, white, cisgender men (a pundit and a comedian respectively). They concluded that the right of straight, white, cisgender male pundits and comedians to offend people was much more important than minorities’ right to be treated with dignity and respect. One panellist disagreed with them and attempted to explain the importance of intent and context, but she was a woman so her opinions didn’t count.

  • “For all the promises, you’ve never known a loneliness quite like this”

    This is another one for which David wrote pretty much all the music (the quiet strings from the second verse are mine). There’s something really dysfunctional about it, deliberately so: the timing of the main keyboard part has a great tension to it, which really makes the song.

    It’s another really close-miked vocal, and again it’s designed to be almost uncomfortably intimate because that’s what the song’s about: me as the elephant in every room, the thing you wish wasn’t there.

    I wrote it about the period after I’d come out as trans, but it’s just as relevant to anyone who’s faced challenges or sadnesses: sometimes you’re going through something that other people just can’t cope with, not because they’re bad people but because they don’t want to put their metaphorical foot in it. So the conversations you’re included in avoid the elephant in the room, but you overhear the ones that do through the “doors ajar” I mention in the lyric.