Conservative MP Nadine Dorries on Twitter:
Body language of traitor Major sat next to her is revealing. https://t.co/HNabKkr9dp
— Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) February 28, 2018
This is incredibly dangerous, and she’s not the only MP using such language. And of course certain newspapers run headlines about “enemies of the people”.
These aren’t words that anybody should use when violent nationalism is resurgent.
This is the kind of language that gets people killed.
Imagine if journalists writing articles about things spoke to people with expert knowledge of those things.
That’s what Caitlin Logan does.
To find out what concerns Scottish women’s groups may have about gender reform, trans people and self-ID, she spoke to women’s groups: Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Young Women’s Movement (YWCA Scotland), Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Forth Valley Rape Crisis, Edinburgh Women’s Aid, and Shakti Women’s Aid.
This is what a trans debate should look like: sober, sensible, well-informed. The reason we don’t get that debate is because all too often, the only opinions sought by journalists are from bigots and cranks.
The Scottish Government’s consultation on gender reform ends this Thursday, and has been the subject of a co-ordinated campaign by said bigots and cranks. If you have a more reasoned opinion, it’d be great if you could add your voice.Â
Here’s what the Equality Network has to say in its open letter to LGB people, our friends and our families.
This is a debate about how some of the most marginalised people in our community are treated. It’s about making things just that little bit easier for trans people. It’s about dignity but most of all its about making Scotland a more equal place.
As Logan’s article makes it clear, a great deal of what you’ve read about the proposed reforms simply isn’t true.
Here’s one of my favourite jokes.
A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He looks at the other patrons and realises that the man next to him has a small orange for a head.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I can’t help noticing that –”
“I have a small orange for a head?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to know why?”
“Yes. Yes, please.”
“Well, once upon a time I found a grimy old lamp. I cleaned it up with an old rag and to my great surprise a genie popped out. ‘O Master!’ he said. ‘You have freed me from my prison! I shall grant you three wishes!’ Great, I thought. So I wished for great riches and good health, and he granted me both.”
“My goodness!” said the first man. “So what on earth was your third wish?”
“My third wish?”
“Yes!”
“Oh,” said the man. “I just wished I had a small orange for a head.”
The case of Luis Padron reminded me of it, because he too has a small orange for a head.
No, not really. But he’s spent £45,000 to make himself look like an elf.
This, inevitably, is being reported as him being “trans-species”, which he isn’t, because elves don’t exist.
Also, he specifically says he isn’t trans-species. The Daily Mail:
During his appearance on This Morning Luis revealed that he is often described as ‘trans-species’ but says that this is not something he agrees with.
That said, this time last year he reportedly told the Daily Mail that he did consider himself trans-species “in the same way transgender people feel”.
The Mirror went with this headline:
‘Trans-species’ fantasy lover born in wrong body risked life for costly and painful £45,000 transformation into an ELF
Whether Padron believes himself to be trans-species doesn’t really matter, though. Some people do claim to be trans-species, and they’re problematic for trans people.
We’re the last people to want to police other people’s identities, but this stuff is inevitably used to delegitimise trans people: the “identify as” trope that’s used to belittle and mock us.
(Incidentally, there’s a fascinating article to be written about the surgeons who facilitate these transformations, like the US border surgeons who treat the mental illness of body dysmorphia by amputating healthy limbs: there’s a lot of money moving around. But again, this is problematic because people would lump them in with the surgeons who operate on trans people.)
I have absolutely no problem with anybody who wants to look like an elf, or a cat, or Barbie’s partner Ken. But there’s a huge difference between that and being transgender. Identifying as a werewolf, as some people do, is just dicking about on the internet. Getting yourself to look like an elf is akin to wanting a small orange for a head.
This matters because trans people are, as I’ve written before, the target of a wedge strategy attacking all LGBT people. The word “real” is used again and again. Equal marriage is not real marriage. Trans women are not real women. Being trans is not a real thing.
Rights are only for real people.
In other words, this shit has consequences.
Claiming to be trans-species (or trans-racial, a term used in adoptions but appropriated by a white woman called Rachel Dolezal amid much controversy) gives people yet another stick to beat transgender people with.
It filters through the culture, too.
Here’s David Sexton, sniggering in The Standard over books by two people pretending to be animals in order to get book deals:
Transgender has a challenger. Once the Kardashians have become leaders in the field, transgender can hardly claim to be transgressive…Â Time to move on. A new frontier beckons. Trans-speciesism is the future. There are plenty of people out there who suffer from species dysphoria these days. They feel they are a non-human species trapped in a human body, rather along the lines in which transgender people feel gender dysphoria. We may just be at the start of a major new liberation movement.
Does he finish with the “I identify as…” trope? Of course he does.
For myself, I have long identified as, essentially, a parrot, a blue-fronted Amazon I think: cheerful jabbering and plenty of nuts.
Here are some tweets and comments about Padron’s story.
“See what happens when we give a bit of understanding to nutters? Trans has now moved on to this. But we must accept this as normal in our schools I suppose.”
“He looks like a fairy. Maybe one day he will realise he wants to be a woman.”
“I was waiting for species to be added to the list of trans identities.”
“This BE WHO YOU REALLY ARE trend has got to stop!”
In many cases trans-species is used to argue against the whole trans political-correctness-gone-mad thing, with commenters urging others to check out the videos of virulent alt-right bigots.
This is part of the drip-drip-drip I’ve blogged about previously. Seeing somebody described as “trans-species” on breakfast television might not mean much to you or have any effect on your day, but for us it’s different: it’s yet another thing people use against us, yet more “evidence” that we aren’t real.
This is absolutely terrifying: YouTube has a “conspiracy ecosystem”.
YouTube viewers who started searching for information on “crisis actors†— people who supposedly play roles as mass shooting survivors to push gun control — could soon find themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about the the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the JFK assassination and Pizzagate, the hoax about a supposed child molestation ring run by Democratic Party luminaries out of a Washington pizzeria.
“It’s a conspiracy ecosystem,†said Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “It’s growing, not only in size but in depth.â€
Exactly the same thing happens on Facebook.
The problem is “trending” content, the stuff you’re recommended by Facebook and YouTube’s algorithms, which then leads to other things.
As Frederic Filloux writes in his Monday Note newsletter:
For both YouTube (the world’s main provider of videos) and Facebook (the dominant vector of fake news), solving this problem would actually be easy: kill Trending Topics, which has a terrible track record. But neither tech giant will do that, because that’s where the advertising money is.
That money is mainstreaming extreme views. Some of the people who subscribe to the “crisis actor” bullshit are violent bigots; therefore if you view some crisis actor bullshit you’re likely to see other content relevant to violent bigots. It’s not long before you’re in very disturbing territory.
As the columnist Christopher Mims notes:
Facebook is a unique enabler of extremism, full stop. “If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious†is literally the bedrock, fundamental modus operandi of its engagement-optimizing algorithms.
This is wonderful, and made me cry. It’s a phone ad, showing first wedding dances shot on iPhones. But what’s significant is that these weddings are in Australia, where equal marriage has just been made law. These are the first dances of the first Australian LGBT weddings.
I recently cancelled my long-standing subscription to The Times and Sunday Times because I was getting fed up with its selective reporting.
As any writer knows, you can change a story by choosing what to include and what not to include – so if you leave out important details you can create a misleading impression.
I can’t comment on subjects I don’t know about, but when the Times/ST reports on trans-related subjects it does that all the time.
As I’ve written before, parts of the UK media automatically side with people who bully children, and trans children in particular. And in recent months The Times and Sunday Times have been particularly bad.
Here’s an example from yesterday: Police Called In Over Gender Row.
Police were called when a tutor refused to address a transgender pupil by the correct pronoun, it emerged yesterday. Officers became involved because the behaviour counted as a hate crime, it was alleged.
The article quotes Susie Green of the charity Mermaids:
“Recently we had to get the police involved because a young student was being regularly misgendered by his tutor. The tutor dismissed it until he was informed that it counted as a hate crime. The matter has now been resolved by the police.â€
And that’s pretty much it. I’m quite sure many people would read that and think “Police? For God’s sake, what an overreaction.”
Here’s the same story, this time in the Telegraph, with the same source (a story about supporting trans kids in schools in the Times Educational Supplement [paywall]):
Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, a charity which supports transgender children and their families, told how the teacher had laughed in the child’s face and said “if you don’t want to be called a girl then don’t look like oneâ€.
She said that the teacher and school’s management ignored three months of pleas from the transgender child and their parents and dismissed their requests, until she was informed by police that her actions constituted a hate crime.
…She said that the child was so distressed by the teacher’s actions that their mental health suffered, and they took two weeks off school with anxiety and depression.
The pupil’s parents contacted Mermaids, and with their help, escalated the matter to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the police.
Ms Green said: “We spoke to a member of the police force, who contacted the CPS and clarified the position. The CPS said it was a hate crime.†[Emphasis mine]
Reading that, it’s a completely different story: here we have a teacher who deliberately flouts the Equality Act 2010, who deliberately bullies a child for three months and who only stopped when they were informed that they could be prosecuted.
In this version I’d suggest that the reaction is likely to be “Police? Quite right. What an arsehole.”
The majority of people aren’t trans and don’t have trans kids, of course, so whether The Times has some kind of anti-trans agenda may not seem relevant to them. But if the paper is willing to mislead its readers about something as easily checked as this, what else is it misleading you about?
I was going to come to this one later in the series but given yesterday’s post on anti-depressants I thought I’d post it today.
As the title suggests, this one’s about the drugs. As I’ve explained in the YouTube description, this is our Everybody Hurts, a song about keeping on when you feel that everything’s falling apart around you.
The music basically appeared fully formed in David’s head, but it took me forever to get the vocal right. The one here is actually a guide vocal, because while I could probably sing it technically better I haven’t been able to recapture the feel of the vocal we’ve used here.
I don’t particularly like the sound of my own voice: I’m the singer by default because good singers are hard to find, make herding cats seem easy by comparison and are often madder than a satchel full of knees. I’d love to hear this sung by someone who isn’t me.
While I’m here I’ll quickly mention another of our songs, Hope and Faith. I wrote it in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum but it’s about hope generally, the (naive?) belief that things can actually change for the better.
Musically it’s a bit of an in-joke: in my previous bands I was occasionally criticised for veering dangerously close to Big Country territory (for younger readers, Big Country were an anthemic and frequently excellent Scots post-punk band whose guitars often sounded like bagpipes), so when early versions of this were clearly doing exactly what I’d previously been accused of I decided to embrace it and ride proudly into Jockrock tartan anthem territory.
This is pure Restless Natives Big Country, DMGM on a motorbike that runs on Irn-Bru and deep-fried pizza, a song so shamelessly tartan that David had to physically refrain me from adding bagpipe samples. If we’d made a video for it we’d have had to film it on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile with kilts, shortbread, wee Scottie dugs, ginger wigs and tartan bunnets.
It’s not our best song, no. But it was fun to do.
The BBC reports that a new study, published in The Lancet, finds that anti-depressants really do work.
The study, which analysed data from 522 trials involving 116,477 people, found 21 common anti-depressants were all more effective at reducing symptoms of acute depression than dummy pills.
It’s timely given the massive and largely uncritical publicity recently given to admitted plagiarist Johann Hari, whose book Pull Your Socks Up You Miserable Bastards (I’m paraphrasing) argues that everything we – that is you, me and the medical establishment – know about depression is wrong.
Dean Burnett’s critique is worth your time; it’s a rare bit of common sense in a sea of credulous coverage. He debunks many of Hari’s key claims, such as the idea that anti-depressants are the only treatment offered for depression or that nobody but Hari has considered the link between life events and depression.
I’d always assumed the role of life events was widely accepted, and has been for decades. In psychiatry/medicine/psychology, this is often known as the Biopsychosocial model, and any decent professional will be very aware of it. Far from being a revelation of Hari’s, it was mooted back in the 70s, and has been part of standard teaching for at least 20 years.
Anti-depressants work. They work differently for different people, and some people respond differently to different antidepressants. Others develop a tolerance or intolerance. Regimes may need changed, or doses adjusted. Some people experience side-effects, or don’t get the outcomes they expect. But that’s medicine for you.
What anti-depressants don’t do is magically make everything okay, and nobody sensible claims that they do.
They’re medicine, not magic. If part of your depression is because your life is shit in every conceivable way, a course of Sertraline (or whatever drug) isn’t going to change that.
Think of it this way. Forget what you know about depression and just imagine being followed around all day by
WHACK
a man who
WHACK
for no reason
WHACK
keeps punching you
WHACK
in the face.
WHACK
It’ll take more than
WHACK
Nurofen to stop
WHACK
him from doing that
WHACK
but it’s impossible
WHACK
to think about what
WHACK
you need to
WHACK
do to make him
WHACK
stop when you’ve
WHACK
got a constant
WHACK
headache.
Anti-depressants don’t stop life from punching you in the face, but they can help you feel less punch-drunk. They can give you the clarity to see where the punches are coming from and to maybe dodge the next one, and the one after that.
I was on anti-depressants for a couple of years. I don’t need them any more. The drugs didn’t cure me, but they gave me the space I needed to see what had to change.
For those of you who aren’t of the Windows persuasion, a three-fingered salute (in this context) is the keyboard combination you press when a computer program crashes.
This song began with David’s string part, which I really love: it set the mood and tone for the whole song. David is incredibly self-deprecating about his musical ability, especially when it comes to creating new things, but he’s constantly creating things that surprise me. Generally speaking, if something in these songs is musically or sonically interesting it’s probably got David’s fingers all over it.
I think we put two live bass guitars in here (one for the low notes, one to play a melody) and turned up the reverb to get a nice swampy electric guitar: I don’t know what David was thinking but I was thinking The B-52’s instrumental Follow Your Bliss. I love that growly, 1950s American guitar sound.
If I were to re-record it I’d play the drums myself instead of using loops – you get a more fluid feel, especially on the hi-hats, when an imperfect human is hitting things with sticks – but that’s my usual inability to stop fiddling. The vocal isn’t technically perfect but it’s got a feel subsequent, more technically accurate attempts lacked.
The temptation with a song like this is to do the Full Bono thing and start emoting all over the chorus, maybe really ramping up the bombast towards the end, but that wouldn’t fit the lyrics. They’re about feeling tired, blank… the human equivalent of a computer crash. Hence me paraphrasing the IT in-joke: “have you tried switching it off and back on again?” and having the song stop dead. It’s the audio equivalent of a computer glitch, the sudden stop in a game or application.
The recording’s from December 2014 but I wrote the lyrics quite a long time before that, so they’re from a period when I was trying to fix my mental health. It turns out that I really did need to switch myself off and on again and “feel like a new thing”, but I didn’t do so for another three years.
I wrote about posting personal songs yesterday, but I want to start with one that isn’t. This one’s called All Messed Up.
I can’t remember who did what – David and I move between programming, keys, loops whenever we feel like it – but I love the way this sounds.
There’s a thing I love in music that I call the Godzilla Stomp, the feeling that a song could soundtrack you laying waste to a large urban area while making monster noises. This song has that.
Although it also has an unrecorded backing vocal melody I hear in my head every time I listen to it. That’s one of the reasons things take so long for David and I; there’s always One More Thing that we want to do. Sometimes you need to haul yourself away from a song and accept that you can’t work on it for eternity.
Lyrically it’s about heroes turning out to be zeroes: politicians mainly, but anybody charismatic who has people believing in them only to leave a trail of false promises.