Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “There is something even worse than being abused in the street”

    Molly Mulready is a mum-of-three, and one of her kids is trans. She writes in The Guardian:

    My son, in his distress, helped me realise that there is something even worse than being abused in the street, and that’s being told by strangers you’re not who you know you are, that the truth of you is not acceptable so if you want to be safe – be normal, please.

    Being thought of as funny-looking, a weak man or a manly, ugly woman, the titanic social pressure to look your gender, physical discomfort, even pain, are a small price to pay.

    A baggy jumper in summer heat, chest binders, hormone blockers, side-effects, surgery; being more likely to attempt suicide, be homeless, be the victim of violent crime, murder, sexual assault.

    Certain countries wholly out of bounds, a crime to be you, violence inevitable, media debates that aren’t kind, that make your mother flinch and rush to switch the radio off, change the subject, protect you.

    Having to be tolerant of intolerance, taking deep breaths and bracing yourself, standing tall – they don’t know how fast your heart is beating, how much your palms are sweating.

  • “I want to walk on water, or just walk unafraid”

    Let’s have some new music from David and I.

    I can hear echoes of Elbow and Talk Talk in this song: I usually throw everything including the kitchen sink into recordings, so this is exceptionally sparse by my usual standards. That’s something you’ll find runs through a lot of our new stuff.

    Lyrically this one is about masculinity: the pressure to conform, the calls to “man up” when life treats you badly, the policing of roles to make sure you don’t stand out. It’s a bittersweet song, I think: musically it’s quite sad but the message is positive, a rejection of limits: “this game is rigged, I don’t want to play…”

  • I’ve been waiting for yesterday all of my life

    I don’t usually travel for gigs, but I made an exception for The The’s Comeback Special: this is a band whose songs I’d long given up on ever hearing live. So off I went to the Royal Albert Hall.

    It was worth the trip. The sound was exceptional, the performance magical, and me and the guy next to me pretty much blubbed our way through the whole thing.

    The The had a huge impact on me: Infected came out when I was 13 and I was obsessed with it. As I got older I became obsessed with other The The records, many of which were about heartbreak and sadness and loss. The older I get, the more those songs resonate.

    But it’s not just a nostalgia exercise. The Beat(en) Generation (1989) predated social media with its call to people “reared on a diet of prejudice and misinformation”; Sweet Bird of Truth (1987) is just as pertinent to US foreign policy today. Love Is Stronger Than Death (1993) is timeless. And Heartland (1986). My god, Heartland.

    This the land where nothing changes
    a land of red buses and blue-blooded babies

    If you get the chance to see the tour, it really is something special.

  • Haters gonna hate

    I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but Rolling Stone’s piece on how the religious right decided to target trans people  as a proxy for everybody they don’t like is a superb piece of journalism.

    a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls.

    It’s worth bearing in mind any time you hear somebody parrot their talking points. They’re either malicious or they’re ignorant.

    On a related note, the UK government has responded to a bad faith petition about gender recognition act reform with one of the most diplomatically worded “what the fuck is wrong with you people?” replies I’ve ever read.

    The LGBT+ Lib Dems Twitter account is becoming quite the wise and witty source of accurate information about all of this stuff.

    The best we can work out is that the people doing the protests seem to think that the Gender Recognition Act has some provision that changes how the Equality Act sees you.

    But it doesn’t. It really, really doesn’t. They made that up.

    On a personal note, this week saw the first time I’d travelled anywhere using my new ID (passport etc) and being me full-time on planes, trains and automobiles. The life of the late-transitioning trans person is probably best illustrated by these two quotes, both from the same night in the same venue:

    “Would you like something to drink, madam?”
    “It’s through there on your right, sir.”

  • “Open Your Hands, Here Is Some Light”

    This piece made me cry.

    Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light.

    The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much like picking a flower — and then runs to me with empty hands.

    “Here is some light,” she says, matter-of-factly.

  • Skirting the issue

    My friend Chris Phin retweeted this pic of Grayson Perry’s alter-ego Claire earlier.

    He commented:

    Might it be true to say that people who have a problem with, eg, this are at some level reacting to the idea of _them_ wearing it, whereas I’m just really happy the world contains Claire wearing it. It’s wonderful.

    I agree. I’m a big fan of Perry – his book, The Descent of Man, is great – and I love the way Claire’s outfits are closer to the distorted art of Ralph Steadman or Quentin Blake than any kind of everyday clothing. I love the colours, the proportions, the exaggeration. I think Perry/Claire is fascinating and funny and provocative and generally winding up the kind of people who need winding up.

    I couldn’t respond properly to Chris’s point earlier because I was in the middle of something that couldn’t wait. But he’s right. There’s a subtext to the horror some people have for a man in a dress.

    Here’s why.

    Misogyny.

    Misogyny is why women still have to fight to get access to essential healthcare, why women in some countries are still campaigning for fundamental human rights and why victims of rape face aggressive questioning in court as newspapers worry about the effect on the rapist’s stellar career.

    For example, a few months ago, the BBC aired a phone-in about calls for women-only train carriages, the response to new research showing sexual assaults on women in trains have doubled in five years.

    That we’re even discussing segregation as a solution shows just how messed up things are: of course the solution is to stop men from assaulting women in the first place and to severely punish the men who commit such crimes.

    But you can’t fix that with extra rolling stock. You need to change the whole culture.

    That culture affects trans people too. If you aren’t obviously trans you just get the misogyny. If you’re visibly trans or non-binary you also get some extra fun in the form of homophobia and transphobia. People assigned male at birth get the lion’s share of that because to embrace any kind of femininity is to go against The Natural Order Of Things.

    Generally speaking nobody really cares what aisle a woman shops in; terms such as “boyfriend shirt” and “boy shorts” are part of everyday fashion, women cheerfully raiding or getting inspiration from men’s wardrobes for whatever they fancy.

    That’s not to say women aren’t judged for their choices or for their bodies and appearance, because of course they are, often harshly and publicly: body shaming and slut shaming are common online and in certain publications too.

    But in the west women needn’t fear public opprobrium or physical violence for wearing a man’s shirt.

    A man wearing a skirt evokes a very different reaction.

    Just look at the way gender-neutral school uniforms are reported in the media: nobody worries about girls in trousers or shorts. The drama’s always. always about the entirely invented prospect of boys being “forced” to wear skirts.

    What’s wrong with skirts?

    In terms of uniforms, quite a lot. Girls’ school uniforms are less practical than boys’ — climbing trees in a dress or skirt means someone might see your pants, a situation that must be avoided at all costs — and they’re policed in ways boys’ uniforms are not, apparently because boys and men are incapable of learning or teaching if they can see a female knee.

    In 2015 one school, Trentham High School in in Stoke-on-Trent, banned skirts altogether on the grounds that they were too distracting to male staff and students. 

    Imagine hiring teachers you don’t think can be trusted if young girls’ legs are visible. Imagine thinking the solution to that is to make all girls cover their legs.

    It’s not just skirts. In California in 2013, Kenilworth Junior High banned girls from wearing leggings, yoga pants or skinny jeans because “we want to keep the learning environment distraction-free”.

    Here are some of the responses to that story on Debate.org, a popular discussion site. ⁠1

    I bet you can’t guess which gender the posters are.

    You have no idea how it feels, physically and emotionally, to be a young boy surrounded by that which he desperately desires yet forbidden to follow his biologically urgent impulses.

    You don’t wear clothing because your looking at them, it’s for people that see you throughout the day. These boys aren’t guilty of anything other then noticing what your advertising. Sham on you for advertising perversion girls!!

    Leggings can be a distraction to boys. Educating young people today is difficult enough. Cut down on as many distractions as possible.

    Even it is more comfortable to wear it doesn’t matter. What does though is the end result. Fact is when you wear leggings boys will get aroused. It’s not even objectification, it’s just being a teenage boy, your horomones get wild. You put yourself in some revealing “pants” and then say that its the guys fault for being aroused. It’s not, we aren’t the ones objectifying you girls, you’re doing it yourselves.

    Get rid of all leggings from public. I am very disturbed of the lack of class women and young women have today. I guess modesty is a thing of the past. I’m tired of the “norm” being clothes that suck up into parts that should be kept private. Don’t get me started on what it looks like when they bend over. The bigger the body parts the less the fabric can cover it can only stretch so far. I feel like these women/young women are walking around naked with a thin layer of paint on.

    Young men like looking at women’s butts, especially when they are wearing tight and revealing clothing. Anyone who thinks a young man will be respectful and not be affected by this is kidding themselves or childishly naive. If women really don’t want to be sexually objectified, they should know better than to wear such clothing around large groups of young men. This is the type of common sense people have had for generations and is somehow deteriorating in this country.

    Gilrs (sic) wear what they wear, to a degree, for attention. They secretly love the attention, they just don’t want to be objectified….Also they don’t like it when guys whom they deem as “creeps” and “pervs” are noticing them. Guess what girls? Youre in public, theres no filter on who does and does not see you… Girls saying boys are the problem for looking is ridiculous. You walk around wearing something that reveals bodily form what do you expect?

    There are many, many more in a similar vein.

    The reason some people fear boys being “forced” into skirts is because they have beliefs very similar to the ones above: girls exist solely for the enjoyment of men, and their clothes advertise their sexual availability. A boy in a skirt would be sending the same messages. 

    And that’s what a lot of the outrage boils down to. We don’t want boys to be treated like girls, because we all know how badly girls are treated.

    anImage_2.tiff

    1 http://www.debate.org/opinions/california-school-bans-leggings-should-this-be-the-norm

  • Block party

    One of the reasons I haven’t binned Twitter is the existence of block lists. These enable you to automate the blocking of various bad people; they can’t see your messages (there’s a way around that, but few bother with it) and more importantly you don’t see theirs.

    The numbers can be quite terrifying. One of the block lists I use, a list of anti-trans trolls, has thousands of people on it. I’m sure a few of them are falsely listed but for me that’s a small price to pay for relative freedom from online abuse.

    One of the most high-profile block lists I’ve seen recently is Repeal Shield, which attempted to filter out the nastiest abuse aimed at Yes supporters in the Irish abortion referendum. Aidan O’Brien discusses the list and the interesting, if unsurprising, patterns that emerged.

    Repeal Shield ended up blocking 16,000 people with very few false positives. Many of the troll accounts had clearly been set up purely to harass pro-repeal women; others had been around longer and also shared far right and/or anti-semitic content.

    You’ll be shocked – shocked! – to discover that nearly three-quarters of the accounts were American. Some of them were quite clear about that; others claimed to be from Ireland but used US time stamps or only posted when everybody in Ireland had gone to bed.

    I’ve written before about the malign influence of US social media users on other countries’ politics; the numbers demonstrate how big a problem it is.

    It also demonstrates how big a problem abuse is on Twitter. Of all the accounts blocked by Repeal Shield, just 2.42% of them have since been suspended by Twitter’s abuse team.

    This is important for various reasons. There’s the fact that Twitter is clearly doing next to nothing to curb the abuse that’s a fact of online life for women, members of minority groups and anybody the far right doesn’t like. And there’s the fact that social media is being used to sway elections.

    Twitter’s response to the growing problem – it’s not just here; right now there are concerns over political bots in Malaysia, where over 17,000 bots tweeted over 44,000 pro-government messages in a single week  – is typically useless. It has just announced new rules on political advertising.

    The company will require advertisers running political campaign ads for federal elections to identify themselves and certify they are located in the U.S… Twitter said it won’t let foreign nationals target political ads to U.S. residents.

    That’s the advertising around tweets, not the tweets themselves. And that means it won’t change a damn thing.

    The problem with Twitter has never been the display ads, the electronic equivalents of billboards. It’s the tweets and retweets, the fake news and the vicious abuse.

    Social media has been weaponised.

  • Not an innocent Spectator

    Another day, another bad article in The Spectator.

    The answer is no. The EDL founder was arrested for deliberately breaking the law on Contempt of Court.

    Whether Liddle or his editor Fraser Nelson actually believes his nonsense or is just trolling for money is irrelevant: by continually trying to paint racist clowns as free speech martyrs The Spectator is becoming the house rag for right-wing bigots of all stripes. It’s become a despicable publication by and for despicable people.

    Update, 28 May

    Liddle also writes a column in The Sunday Times. Axel Antoni takes his latest one apart in a series of 12 tweets.

  • Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

    30 years ago today, Section 28 (Section 2A in Scotland) was introduced to ban the “promotion” of gay and lesbian “lifestyles” in schools to protect children from the entirely invented dangers of gay and lesbian people. It wasn’t repealed until 2003 in England and Wales, although Scotland canned it in 2001.

    I was 15 when Section 28 was passed. It was an era of vicious anti-gay bullying, encouraged by vicious anti-gay propaganda in mainstream newspapers. AIDS was “the gay plague” and a book with two gay dads, “Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin” was denounced as “vile”, “perverted” and a threat to children by multiple newspapers.

    Piers Morgan monetised homophobia by writing about “The Poofs Of Pop”, and The Sun’s headline about the first gay kiss on the soap opera EastEnders was “EASTBENDERS”. The accompanying story described “a homosexual love scene between yuppie poofs… when millions of children were watching.”

    The barrage of bigotry had a terrible effect. Social Attitudes Surveys of the time saw anti-gay sentiment, already high, rise during this period: the percentage of people who believed same-sex activity was “always or mostly wrong” was nearly 80% in both the US and the UK.

    National newspapers frequently ran homophobic front page stories. The “Keep the clause” anti-repeal campaign was particularly vicious.

    The period leading up to the repeal of Section 28/Clause 2A was particularly unpleasant in Scotland, with billboards and newspaper articles urging us to keep the clause to protect our children.

    Won’t somebody think of the children?
    We’re not homophobic. We just have genuine concerns.

    History repeats.

    Where Richard Littlejohn used to write about “the government’s determination to lower the age at which schoolboys can be sodomised”; he now rails against the supposed evils of trans people.

    Many other columnists who once railed against gay people now battle “Transgenderism” and the “sinister transgender agenda”.

    Innocuous kids’ books such as “Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity?” have been slammed by the likes of the Mail on Sunday, Lord Tebbit and Sarah Vine (“We are threatening the sanity of – and yes I’m going to say it – normal children”).

    Piers Morgan monetises transphobia on TV.

    Social attitudes surveys show that after years of gradual improvements, anti-LGBT sentiment is on the rise.

    History is supposed to be a warning, not a how-to guide.

    Update:

    The ever-excellent Another Angry Woman is thinking what I’m thinking. And Stonewall’s Ruth Hunt draws parallels in The Independent.

  • “That’s not how it works”

    James Kirkup of The Spectator has written many articles that unquestionably parrot the propaganda of anti-trans bigots, but he reached a new low this week with the story of sniggering arsehole David Lewis.

    Lewis is – or rather, was; Labour suspended him for, well, being a sniggering arsehole – standing for election as a women’s officer in his local Labour Party. Hilariously, he says he identifies as a woman “on Wednesdays, between 6.50am when my alarm goes off and around midnight when I go to bed.”

    Lewis’s motive (other than look-at-me self-publicity) was to raise awareness of, you’ve guessed it, the sinister trans agenda. Unfortunately by setting out to prove how easy it is to abuse the system, he ended up demonstrating that it isn’t easy to abuse the system. This is what the internet calls a self-own.

    In The Guardian, James Morton wrote a thoughtful response to the stunt.

    Self-declaration is not a frivolous process. Making a false statutory declaration is a serious crime of perjury. Evidence of malicious intent, whether it be to invade women’s safe spaces or to try to make a mockery of the very real struggles that trans people face to live their lives as who they are, could rightfully lead to severe penalties including up to two years in prison.

    Anti-trans campaigners who treat this process as if they can just wake up one morning and say they are a woman or a man and change nothing else about their lives are mocking not only trans people but the concept of identity itself. Identity is not some random feeling we have just on Wednesdays or Fridays, but our deeply held sense of ourselves and how we fit into the world.

    …Puerile stunts, deliberate misgendering and hateful comparisons to parasites and paedophiles is not constructive discussion.

    The good news is that, like shouting “penis” during televised debates, these stunts tend to backfire terribly. The vocal activism of anti-trans activists within Labour (many of whom are currently being suspended from Twitter for repeated acts of hateful and harassing conduct) has led Labour to double down on its support for trans people. On the left, some of the most radical voices are standing alongside trans people and arguing that it’s the anti-trans crowd who are hateful and dangerous. On the right, Theresa May has reaffirmed her support for Gender Recognition Act reform: “being trans is not an illness and it shouldn’t be treated as such.”

    And it isn’t a lifestyle choice, either. I didn’t choose to be trans, but you can choose whether you want to treat trans people with basic human dignity or be like Kirkup and Lewis. One day even they’ll see sense: