Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • The minister for the Heritage Foundation

    Like many incompetent, idiotic arseholes, former PM Liz Truss – who crashed the UK economy and was famously outperformed by a lettuce – has found new friends among the US far right and the right-wing press by parroting their bigotry. And to please them she’s introduced a private member’s bill that attempts to bring the most hateful anti-trans legislation from the US to the UK.

    If it passes, which thankfully it probably won’t, it would undo the Equality Act, force teachers to bully children and criminalise doctors who provide healthcare in line with international standards of best practice.

    It is a vicious, hateful bill proposed and supported by vicious, hateful people – people who have made it abundantly clear that the war they’re waging on trans people’s healthcare and human rights is a war they want to wage more widely against all women and the entire LGBTQ+ community too.

  • Freedom to choose

    There’s an interesting and provocative piece in New York Magazine by Andrea Long Chu, in which she advocates for trans people’s freedom. It’s a long read and quite dense in places – and I don’t think she makes it clear enough that the only medical intervention available to trans kids is puberty blocking, which is fully reversible – but she’s very good on the role of transphobic liberals in laundering far-right views for a more mainstream audience.

    The most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this country is, quite simply, liberals.

    Liberals are the ones “just asking questions” in the pages of newspapers, pretending to be objective when they’re just as biased against trans people as the most rabid right-wingers.

    The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be… If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more.

     

  • Politicians are preaching hate

    From ILGA-Europe, which consists of LGBTQ+ organisations across all of Europe and Central Asia:

    A NEW REPORT SHOWS A STARK RISE IN ANTI-LGBTI, AND IN PARTICULAR, TRANSPHOBIC STATEMENTS FROM POLITICIANS ACROSS EUROPE.

    Published today by ILGA-Europe, the 13th Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI People in Europe and Central Asia alarmingly reports hate speech from politicians in 32 European countries over the course of last year, 19 of them member states of the EU.

    There has been a clear accumulation of hate speech against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) community from officials across Europe, much of it targeting trans people, in countries including EU member states Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden. 

    The vast majority of anti-trans statements instrumentalise children, using scare tactics to create opposition to trans minors’ access to healthcare and restrictions on education. This is a broader trend we see in the use of children, with politicians across Europe claiming that limiting access to information about LGBTI people prevents harm to minors.

  • Reds in her head

    If you had any remaining doubts that trans people are the go-to bogeymen for the bigoted, the venal and the incompetent, look no further than disgraced former prime minister Liz Truss. Despite only being in office for 44 days before resigning, Truss managed to spook the markets, send borrowing rates into orbit and tanked the value of the pound: she was unable to stay in power long enough to outlast an iceberg lettuce in a blonde wig, a real thing that was created by the Daily Star to mock her intellect and political nous.

    Earlier this month Truss rolled out the age-old excuse for the damage done and the fact that she couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery: it wasn’t me. Instead, she was the victim of “a very powerful economic establishment, coupled by a lack of political support.” When that didn’t fly, she decided on a new claim: it was the trans what done it. Truss is now telling appreciative audiences of far-right US republicans that she was the victim of a UK deep state and a civil service packed full of “trans activists” and “environmental extremists”.

    It’s easy to mock her, and we should: sharing the story earlier I captioned it “and are those trans activists in the room with us right now?”. But it demonstrates something wider: this is the former equalities minister, whose job was to represent LGBTQ+ people, and she is an anti-trans ideologue and a fantasist for whom trans people are her very own reds under the bed.

    Those are qualities that apply just as much to her former equalities sidekick and current equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who is currently facing multiple questions over her own competence and in particular her uneasy relationship with telling the truth. The bulk of the scrutiny is over her lies about the Post Office scandal, but Freedom of Information requests have also demonstrated that she lied when she claimed to have consulted extensively with LGBTQ+ groups; the only groups she met were two anti-trans groups. Meeting requests by real LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were refused in letters whose tone was very different to the friendly and cheerful messages her office sent to anti-trans activists.

    When unhinged anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are repeatedly given responsibility for LGBTQ+ people’s legal protections, LGBTQ+ people’s safety and LGBTQ+ people’s human rights, Occam’s Razor surely applies: the simplest, most likely explanation is that this is being done deliberately and it is being done maliciously.

  • Deny and distract

    Grief is a horrendous thing, and it’s something we all process in different ways. And Brianna Ghey’s mum, Esther, is grieving something no parent should have to go through: the death of her child, a death whose brutality and ferocity are beyond most people’s understanding.

    With grief comes guilt, an endless parade of what-ifs and if-onlys that come to torture you in the hours where you can’t sleep. And I think Esther Ghey is feeling that acutely right now, because any parent would: of course you’d spend endless hours wondering what you missed, what you could have done differently, what single thing would have prevented this terrible thing from happening. Trying to make sense of the senseless is what we humans do.

    The latest reports suggest that Ghey thinks that social media may have played a part in the death of her daughter. And the way in which this is being reported is starting to look like victim blaming. If Brianna hadn’t been so active online maybe she wouldn’t have been so isolated in real life, and maybe that would mean she wouldn’t have been picked for her vulnerability, and maybe…

    I don’t agree with her, although I understand why Brianna’s mum is on a mission: for many years I’ve been delivering lectures about the regulation of the internet and social media, and sadly every year there are new calls for regulation from yet another grieving parent of yet another kid who should still be here and who is trying to make some sense of a senseless tragedy and ensure no other child experiences what their child experienced. But with this particular horror the press has a vested interest in the internet-did-it narrative, because it lets the real guilty parties off the hook.

    Newspapers blaming the internet for Brianna’s murder have spent six or seven years demanding the institutionalised bullying of trans kids in schools, have fought tooth and nail against hate crime legislation, have portrayed anti-trans hatred as acceptable “debate” and have continually platformed people and organisations who say that trans people are monsters to be hated and feared and eliminated from society.

    As one of the people I follow on social media put it: if you think social media’s bad, you should see what they put in the papers.

    LGBTQ+ people and advocates have been trying to raise the alarm for years, and again and again their warnings have been ignored or even ridiculed. And now that the very thing they feared and tried to prevent is happening, the press, politicians and public figures are doing their very best to deny or distract.

    I’m writing this the day after it emerged that a non-binary kid in the US died after a savage beating by multiple teenagers in the school toilets, a beating that appears to be because of their gender identity; they lived in Oklahoma, whose schools are run by one of the most viciously anti-trans bigots around. Earlier this month, it emerged that a trans teen was stabbed multiple times in North London, an attempted murder apparently because others took exception to seeing a trans person. And despite the best efforts of the press to play it down, the murder of Brianna was in part because one of her killers was repulsed by the fact she was trans.

    I have enormous sympathy for Brianna’s mum. But I think that in her grief and in her pain, in her attempts to make sense of something so senseless, she’s unaware that others are seeking to exploit her, to turn the focus away from the press, the politicians and the public figures who’ve spent six-plus years trying to make the world more lethal for trans and non-binary people.

    I got a call from the BBC last week asking me to come on air regarding Brianna; not to talk about her murder, or the climate of hatred that makes so many of us genuinely afraid, but whether we should ban kids from having phones. I declined, of course. But the framing is telling. There’s no interest in investigating what’s really contributing to the hatred that led to the murder of a young woman, the attempted murder of another and the attack that appears to have killed a third teen. Because that would mean asking questions whose answers are far too uncomfortable, and far too close to home.

     

  • When even The Guardian sees the bigotry

    It’s very hard to see any light at the end of the anti-trans tunnel; just yesterday, it emerged that a teenager has been charged for the attempted murder of a trans teen in North London. The 18-year-old trans girl was stabbed 14 times in a confrontation that began with strangers shouting transphobic slurs at her; thankfully she survived. But to add insult to injury, the Evening Standard report spent the bulk of its column inches telling us how sad her (alleged) attempted murderer was.

    As an example of how the UK press treats hate crimes against trans people, that’s not unusual: in recent days we’ve also had reports that one of the murderers of trans teen Brianna Ghey has been boasting in prison about how famous the newspapers, which used glamour shots rather than mugshots of her on their front pages, have made her.

    I’ve written before that I really thought the murder of Brianna would finally bring some sanity to the anti-trans moral panic, but it didn’t – although Rishi Sunak may have helped with his attempt to score political points by mocking trans people while Brianna’s mum was in attendance, a move that had even some of the bigot brigade appalled. But maybe we’re finally coming to the end of this vicious panic. Because even The Guardian is now running several pieces highlighting the cruelty and the bigotry of the anti-trans movement.

    The UK edition of The Guardian has arguably done more to legitimise anti-trans pressure groups and narratives than the right-wing press, and some of its key writers have set up their own “gender critical” group to push anti-trans content in the pages of The Guardian and sister paper The Observer. But in the last few days it’s printed several articles critical of anti-trans culture warriors. That’s significant because these are in the UK edition: for some time now there’s been a marked difference in editorial policy between the US edition (pro-LGBTQ+) and the UK one (obsessively anti-trans).

    Today’s piece is about the manufactured controversy over Parkrun fun runs, which began on Mumsnet before jumping to the Daily Mail and being amplified by the right-wing pressure group Policy Exchange.

    so once you erase trans women from physical sport, you move to sports such as chess and darts. From there it’s a short leap to scoffing at people’s pronouns, talking about “men in dresses”, perhaps even a cheap gag during prime minister’s questions while the parents of a murdered trans teenager are watching from the public gallery. Next you start denying the concept of gender fluidity entirely. You demonise the trans woman as a potential abuser or rapist. You describe transition surgery as “mutilation” or “child abuse”. All in the service of pushing the window, inching towards some sunlit horizon in which – as is already beginning to occur in parts of the US – trans people can be legislated out of existence entirely.

    And really the telling part of the parkrun row is the way the anti-trans movement in sport has begun to broaden its focus beyond the Olympic 800m, or national swimming trials, or suppressed testosterone levels, into areas of identity and belonging. The proposed parkrun ban is – short of genital inspectors in the token queues – basically unenforceable. The cruelty is the point here: the desire to forcibly out trans women, even when it might threaten their safety. The message to trans women, trans men – or even anyone who looks like they might be trans – that this is not your space, and you will identify not according to your values but to ours.

    If the bigots have become so bad that even The Guardian is admitting it, maybe sanity will finally prevail after all.

  • More of a comment

    Kate Watson’s blog post on the scourge of events, the “more of a comment than a question” guy, is worth your time. It does a great job of explaining why he’s a menace, and what you can do to stop him derailing the Q&A.

    If and when the mic goes to someone and the dreaded “It’s not really a question, more of a comment…” is uttered – this is what you do: kill the roving mic (if there is one), or really prepare to speak up and over, and say with all the authority you can muster “Thank you, we’re taking questions at the moment, but if we have time left after the questions, I’ll open the floor for comments. Now, who has the next question?”

  • The job

    It’s been said so often that it’s a cliché, but the job of journalism is to report the truth. Its job is to investigate, to find facts, and to follow those facts to see where they lead. It is a process of discovering, of uncovering, of seeing and telling what’s really going on.

    In order to do that, you need to be objective. We all have biases, assumptions and other weaknesses. But in journalism the job is to put them aside, to accept that if the facts contradict your pre-existing beliefs then those beliefs need to change. Because your job is not to shore up your own biases, but to find the truth.

    With some irony, the publisher of The New York Times has written extensively about that here.

    Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.

    Sulzberger’s words here are absolutely true, but it’s worth considering why he’s writing the piece: it’s in response to growing criticism that the New York Times often breaks those rules. That’s certainly the case in its reporting of trans issues where, often by using the opinion section to avoid fact-checking, journalists act as anti-trans propagandists.

    One of the worst of many such propagandists is Pamela Paul, whose ongoing campaign against trans people continued this week with a really shoddy piece about teen detransition. When some trans journalists identified howling errors in her reporting, she dismissed them as activists; when they wrote to the NYT about the flaws in her piece, the paper refused to publish it because it was a criticism in part of their output. Their letter is here.

    The issue with Paul’s work is simple enough: she apparently adopts a policy of knowing, rather than searching. She appears to reflect the world as she may wish it to be, not the world as it is. She does not plainly state the facts. And she does not carefully convey ambiguity or debate.

    At its very simplest, journalism’s job is all about the Ws: who, what, when, why. For every assertion you make, you need to provide solid evidence. So if you say there is an epidemic of X, you need to demonstrate that there is indeed an epic of X. But Paul doesn’t do that. Quite the opposite.

    Writing in Slate, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who is neither trans nor a trans activist, investigates the numbers behind Paul’s claimed epidemic of detransition. And – surprise! – they don’t back up her claims.

    That’s not to say that there aren’t detransitioners, or that there isn’t regret. Of course there are. Of course there is. But the question that journalism should be answering isn’t “does this happen?” but “how significant is it?” For example, there are cis women who regret having breast reduction or breast enhancement surgeries, and as far as I can tell the regret rates there are similar, and possibly slightly higher, than the regret rates for top surgery for trans men. Where are the endless editorials about that?

    What’s clear from this evidence is that the vast majority of people do not experience regret, howsoever defined, after transitioning genders. Regret rates are actually much higher for a lot of medical procedures. 

    The whole premise for these articles is a house built on sand. And competent reporters will know that, which means the people who choose not to let the facts colour their articles are incompetent, malevolent or compromised.

    By any metric, the rate of trans detransitioners is tiny; the rate of trans people who regret transition similarly so. Which invites a key question: why the panic? What motive does Paul have to consistently misrepresent what’s actually happening, to abandon the basic tenets of journalism to scaremonger instead? Why is the potential regret of a handful of cisgender people a crisis when the actual removal of healthcare for thousands of trans people is not?

    That’s a rhetorical question.

    Meyerowitz-Katz:

    Ultimately, the question of what proportion of kids or adults regret their transition is only important to a select group: the people who want to transition, and their clinicians. At worst, the rate of regret is still better than other treatments which don’t require national debates over their use, which really begs the question of why anyone who isn’t directly involved with the treatment of transgender people is even weighing in on the topic at all.

  • Study: transition works

    The biggest ever survey of trans people in the US has found, unsurprisingly, that transition makes our lives better. Which of course is why we do it, often at great personal cost. And why so few of us detransition, despite what the anti-trans mob would have you believe. Depending on the category, between 94% and 98% of us say that our lives are somewhat or significantly better as a result of social and/or medical transition.

    The study, of over 84,000 adults, also confirmed yet again that it’s also pretty crap being trans. The unemployment rate among respondents was six times higher than the general population; 5% have been forced to move home because of anti-trans legislation in their state; and nearly half of respondents who’d had healthcare reported negative experiences ranging from refusal of care to actual verbal or even physical abuse. For so many of us the negatives of being trans are almost entirely due to how other people treat us.

  • Sunak

    Just three days after PM Rishi Sunak cried crocodile tears over the death of trans teen Brianna Ghey, he was back to making jokes about trans girls and women in parliament. While Ghey’s mother was in the gallery, and he knew she was there.