Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Dirty tricks, tested on trans

    England’s buffer zone laws, voted in by an overwhelming majority of MPs, will be deliberately undermined by new Home Office guidance. That’s according to the I Paper, which says that despite legislation banning religious groups from harassing women, the guidance says that forced birthers “would still be able to approach women attending clinics, conduct “silent prayer” and offer information to and engage in discussion with patients, all inside the 150m zones.”

    The guidance is currently open for consultation and if you care about women’s rights, you should contribute. Because you can be sure that the forced birthers will.

    This is a particularly twisted trick, because it effectively tells the police and other authorities not to enforce a law designed specifically to protect vulnerable people; it says that those people’s rights don’t matter, irrespective of what the letter and the spirit of the law says. And it’s a trick we’ve seen before, because it’s exactly what Liz Truss has done via the EHRC and its guidance regarding the Equality Act and its protections for trans people.

    Truss has close links with the US Heritage Foundation, a key driver of anti-trans and anti-abortion activity in the US; I wasn’t aware of Cleverly having similar links but whether by accident or design he too is serving up something from the evangelical right’s wish list.

    As I’ve written many times, I’ve long since given up on expecting most people to care about trans rights. But if you’re not a straight white Christian man, you should be paying attention to the tricks politicians, media groups and hate groups are using to target us and roll back our rights. Because as we’ve seen again and again, what they test on us is only ever the beginning.

  • A terrible echo

    In 2016, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included gender recognition reform. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2017 (and again in 2019), during which social and mainstream media – with significant input from genital-obsessed weirdos – repeatedly lied about the proposed legislation, demonised trans people and defamed them as dangerous to children. Gender recognition reform has still not happened.

    In 2021, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included banning conversion therapy. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2024, during which…

    If anything, the vitriol around this consultation is even worse. Although it’s largely coming from the same people as before there’s no pretence of “reasonable concerns” this time. Just constant abuse online and ridiculous evangelical claims of the “ordinary parents will be jailed for seven years” variety.

    Any time the rights of marginalised people are thrown open to the public, those consultations are flooded by bigots and misrepresented by the conservative press: whether the rights of trans and non-binary people in Scotland, women in Ireland or gay couples in Australia or Romania, consultations have repeatedly been used by the religious and far right to demand the that marginalised people receive worse treatment and have fewer human rights than they enjoy.

    If the majority wanted marginalised people to have equality, we wouldn’t need to legislate something so basic as protecting young people from treatment the UN defines as torture. We shouldn’t have to ask permission from the very people who deny us those basic rights.

  • Authors who don’t exist

    Meet Jason N. Martin N. Martin, the author of the exciting and dynamic Amazon bestseller “How to Talk to Anyone: Master Small Talks, Elevate Your Social Skills, Build Genuine Connections (Make Real Friends; Boost Confidence & Charisma)”

    Except you can’t meet him, because he doesn’t exist. He’s an AI-generated character with an AI-generated face credited with writing an AI-generated ebook with an AI-generated cover. Both the cover and the content are likely based on content that’s been plagiarised: most of the large language and content models used for AI generation have been fed with real humans’ work in order for them to emulate it without credit or, of course, payment.

    Once you’ve found Jason, Amazon will recommend another 11 just like him.

    Between the synthetic faces, the use of repetitive and potentially AI-generated text, and art copied from other sources, the 57 books that these authors have published over the last two years may well contain almost no original human-generated content, and Amazon’s algorithms in their current state have the unfortunate effect of worsening the problem by recommending additional inauthentic books or authors once a customer stumbles upon one of them.

    Amazon isn’t the only place this is happening, and books aren’t the only sector it’s happening in: there’s a flood of computer-generated content in everything from music to furniture listings. Just the other day Amazon’s listings were full of products called “I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy”. X/Twitter is already full of ChatGPT bots posting, and your search engine results are starting to fill up with AI-generated content too. I’ve been trying to research some products recently and it’s been like swimming through treacle: so much content returned by search engines is completely useless now.

    The odd listings are most likely the result of dropship sellers using ChatGPT to write everything from product descriptions to product names in huge volumes, but they’re a good example of the pernicious creep of AI into almost everything online – partly due to tech platforms’ lack of interest in removing useless content. Sometimes it’s funny – ChatGPT confidently informed me that I died a few years ago – but it’s increasingly replacing actual information in your search results. And then that bad information becomes the source data for the next generation of AI articles.

    That could mean AI is an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail: the more AI-generated content there is, the more AI will use that content as its source – and that means the very many errors AI systems are currently making will cascade. AI researchers have a name for the potential outcome: model collapse. It means that the language models used by AI are so full of bad data that their results are useless at best and absolute gibberish at worst.

    There’s a famous saying in tech: garbage in, garbage out. Thanks to AI, we’re currently seeing that happen on an epic scale.

  • Overreacting

    From the very beginnings of the war on trans people, we’ve been accused of overreacting whenever we report what anti-trans groups and politicians say they want to do to us – which in many cases is the complete elimination of trans people by any means necessary.

    Most UK anti-trans groups and key anti-trans figures have signed a declaration calling for the “elimination of transgenderism”; many talk openly about removing all our human rights, healthcare and legal protections. Some openly wish to see us dead.

    This is something that campaigners for all women’s rights have long experienced: when they tried to raise the alarm about the US Republicans’ openly stated goal of rescinding Roe vs Wade, they were told not to be so silly. Roe vs Wade, of course, is gone with abortion and contraception now under sustained attack in multiple states – and Obergefell v Hodges, which enabled equal marriage, and Loving v Virginia, which struck down bans on interracial marriage, are next in the firing line. We know this because the religious right told us, as they usually do.

    One of the tactics that’s been openly discussed for a few years now is to classify the very existence of trans people as a sexual act, and to then use that classification to ban trans people from everyday life. And here’s legislators in West Virginia trying to do just that. In two separate bills, Republican lawmakers propose to ban “obscene matter”; in their definition of such, they include “any transvestite and/or transgender exposure, performances or display to any minor.” In other words, the mere presence of a trans person near a child would be a sexual offence.

    It’s easy to dismiss this as the latest whacky nonsense from crazed US fundamentalists. But the exact same arguments are being advanced over here by anti-trans groups, many of which work closely with US evangelical groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the key drivers and drafters of US anti-trans legislation. And the arguments are in the 2025 Project manifesto by groups including the Heritage Foundation, which is very close to the current UK government. Many of these documents and strategies make it clear that it’s not just trans people being targeted here but queer people more widely, along with women’s reproductive rights.

    The West Virginian bills aren’t expected to become law. But they are a tiny part of a wave of anti-trans bills in the US, bills that UK anti-trans activists and politicians would like to see in the UK too.

    We’re not overreacting; if anything, we’re underselling the threat to trans people’s lives, to the wider LGBTQ+ community and to reproductive freedom.

  • Who pays

    The newsletter publishing platform Substack has a Nazi problem: specifically, it publishes, promotes and makes money from actual Nazi newsletters as well as the more media-trained faces of far right propaganda. As ever, trans people have been trying raise the alarm about the platform for years: it’s where some of the most vicious, abusive and hateful anti-trans bigotry is published, with Substack taking a hefty cut of all of it. In some cases, bigots’ Substacks are the primary source of their income, generating large sums from which Substack takes a 10% cut.

    As a high profile critic of the platform’s support for the world’s worst people, Jude Doyle’s writing attracted a response from the firm’s CEO – and the offer of a lucrative publishing deal if he were to stop pointing out the genuine harm Substack helps pay for. Doyle said no, telling the CEO:

    If you have money to invest in me, then you have money to create and enforce a content moderation policy, stating that you do not host or fund content that promotes hate speech and/or targets marginalized groups.

    But Substack has no interest in doing that. It’s making too much money from hatred.

    Substack’s response to accurate and measured criticism – effectively, “we don’t like Nazis but we like their money so fuck you” – has led a lot of people to demand creators stop using the service. And while I understand why – I won’t pay for a Substack for the same reasons – I also understand why many creators are loath to leave.

    The problem for many people who publish on Substack is a problem we’ve previously seen on other platforms, including Twitter. It’s enabled people to establish an audience and in some cases a career, and that means leaving could cause financial harm to people who abandon the platform. Even if other platforms were morally pure, and very few of them are, the people demanding moral purity from their newsletter creators are rarely the people who will be financially harmed by it.

    In addition, many of the people being urged to quit are marginalised people – the very people who can least afford the financial hit.

    I’ve experienced this myself. I quit writing for a particular publisher over its support for bigots, a decision that cost me about £1,000 in lost commissions a year. I left another media organisation for similar reasons, passing up something close to £4,000 a year. I’ve turned down work from other outlets because I don’t share their values. And I don’t have an active presence on Twitter any more, which has damaged my networking and no doubt cost me work too. And while I’m okay with those choices, it hasn’t made a damn difference to any of those platforms because I’m completely insignificant to them.

    Writing on her Substack, Cathrynne Valente explains it very well.

    It is exhausting just trying to exist with any level of moral consistency online nowadays. And the people who keep being handed the keys to several kingdoms don’t ever bother to worry about it. They just let us tear ourselves apart trying to do the right thing while they feast. It’s all a game to them. It’s not remotely a game to us. So there’s no equivalence.

    Take social media for example. If you leave Twitter for a smaller social network, abandoning the network you may have spent more than a decade building, where do you go? Threads? Its current moderation is just as bad as Twitter’s, enabling nazis and transphobes to abuse people without consequence. Bluesky? It doesn’t have a Nazi problem purely because it’s too small so far, and it’s very clear that the platform creators aren’t very interested in protecting their users from bad actors. And so on.

    So for many creators, it’s far more complicated than “this place is bad and you should quit”: if almost everything is a bad choice, then by removing your voice from a particular platform you’re letting the bigots win. The bigots thrive, the platform continues. The only person who suffers anything negative is you.

    Valente:

    I don’t want to support the Badness by being here. And yet, if I go, does that not just abandon another space because bad people are also here, handing them control of yet another hugely-recognized platform, control they could never achieve on their own just on numbers and popularity, while the people who have any moral compass whatsoever have to continually start over from scratch?

    Which one helps the goblin horde more, staying or going?

    There’s a famous cartoon in which a man says “we should improve society somewhat” and another man pops up to say “Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent.” And that’s a pretty good description of the discourse around some of this stuff.

    There are lots of things that are very wrong with tech platforms. Facebook has been complicit in genocide; Instagram (owned by the same company) in the rise of the anti-vax movement. Twitter, pre-Musk, was instrumental in the rise of the far right and in stirring up racial and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. And that’s just off the top of my head. It’s not impossible to work only on ethically pure platforms. But it’s close to impossible if you want to be where most people – your friends, your colleagues, your readers, your listeners – are and communicate with those people.

    Like Valente, I don’t know what the answer is on an individual level: in the absence of group action, we’re powerless. For now I’m comfortable with the choices I’ve made, because I’m in the fortunate position of not having to choose between having a conscience and having a roof over my head. But I also realise that that’s a luxury that others don’t necessarily have. Many of us think we should improve social media somewhat, yet have to participate in social media.

    Update, 9 January: Substack now says it will remove some, but not all, Nazi newsletters. Reports on social media suggests the total number of removed newsletters is… five.

  • Handsome devils

    I bought myself a coffee table book as a present. Marr’s Guitars by Johnny Marr is a lavishly photographed guide to some of Marr’s 132 guitars, including some very iconic instruments that played a key role in the sound of The Smiths.

    If you love guitars like I do, it’s absolute filth.

    Some of my favourite bits are the many close-ups of cracked paint, worn metal and chipped edges, the signs of a guitar well used rather than kept behind glass somewhere. And I love the way many of these guitars move: bought or gifted from the guitarists who influenced Marr or the musicians he played with in his long and varied career, or passed on to other musicians by Marr – a list that includes the likes of Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Bernard Butler.

    If you’re looking for a guide to Marr’s sounds you won’t find much here, although a photo of his Smiths-era pedals does give some pretty big hints. It’s a book to sit back and luxuriate with, not one to crib from, and it does that job very well. If like me you’re the kind of person who ooohs at a sparkly stratocaster or a resplendent Rickenbacker, it’s a very beautiful book.

  • Calling Scots writers

    Are you an early-career queer writer based in Scotland? Then you really need to know about the Queer Words Project Scotland, which is now open for applications. It’s a programme designed to help you with your writing, and with your writing career.

    Funded by Creative Scotland, it matches five emerging queer writers with five established authors who’ll provide help and advice – and this year those authors are Colin Herd, Heather Parry, Mae Diansangu, Shola Von Reinhold and me.

    It’s a great opportunity, it’s going to be tons of fun and successful applicants’ work will be featured in an anthology by the wonderful 404 Ink. You’ve got until Valentine’s day to apply and full details are available right here.

  • How we got here

    Jude Doyle is always worth reading, and his latest piece for Xtra Magazine is a good analysis of how a handful of powerful people have effectively destroyed US media’s ability or inclination to battle the far right. It’s written from the perspective of a trans person because, as is so often the case, trans people are the canaries in the coal mine.

    The impact of these platforms has not just been to spread bigotry, but to flood the field with junk, to make social media gossip and un-fact-checked blog posts the main vector for information—to make it harder to know what is real. In an emergency, you need to know where the exits are, but at least half of the signs you’ll read in 2024 are lying to you. 

    It is always in the best interests of the powerful not to have a robust press that can hold them accountable.

  • Papers please

    The right-wing press wasted no time in starting 2024’s Tory-fuelled attacks on trans people: on New Year’s Day both the Mail and the Telegraph ran scaremongering articles supporting Kemi Badenoch’s desire to roll back trans people’s rights by several decades.

    This time the target is our passports, which the Telegraph claims have a “loophole” that enables us to change our gender markers that is “self-ID by the back door”. Except it isn’t a loophole and it isn’t self-ID. We’ve been able to change our passports with a note from our GP since the late 1940s (anecdotally) and definitely since the 1960s: April Ashley changed her passport in this way in 1961. It’s standard procedure.

    What Badenoch and her acolytes are doing here is presenting something utterly ordinary and uncontroversial as a sudden sinister threat; in the 70-odd years that trans people have been changing their passports this has never been abused by either a trans person or a cisgender man pretending to be trans. But as ever, the intention here isn’t to protect anybody. It’s to stir up hatred and chip away at our legal protections and rights.

     

  • Rectal research

    A new report by Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank whose job is to give the Telegraph and Daily Mail some scary headlines and rubber-stamp whatever hateful policies the Tories want to bring in, is a great demonstration of what I’ve seen described as “rectal research”: the report’s supposed facts have clearly been pulled out of the author’s arse.

    The report pretends to be an analysis of trans participation in sport, but it’s nothing of the sort: the figures it presents are complete fiction. For example, it claims that there are 527 trans women and 61 trans men participating in professional rugby; the correct figure is zero, as trans people are banned from the sport; before the ban there were fewer than 10 trans people taking part. It claims that there are nearly 9,000 trans people competing in professional swimming; again, the real number is zero. It claims nearly 500 trans competitors in athletics; the correct number is, again, zero.

    The best example of this rectal research is in cycling, where it claims that there are over 4 million men and over 2 million women taking part in the sport: not riding for fun, but competing professionally. That’s ludicrous, as is the claim that there are over 16,000 trans athletes competing in the sport.

    Update, 31/12: A number of people, including Vivian Wulf on Twitter, have investigated the source of the cycling numbers because they’re so clearly nonsense. The figures are taken from the Active Lives survey by Sport England, which wasn’t about elite sport: its cycling numbers tell you how many people used a bike at least twice in one month for more than ten minutes for the purpose of leisure, travel or sport. Policy Exchange took the number of positive respondents, multiplied it by the estimated proportion of trans people in the UK, and published it as supposed proof of a trans takeover in competitive cycling. 

    In total, the Policy Exchange report claims that tens of thousands of trans women are competing professionally in sport. Given that the UK census – which anti-trans groups say overestimates the number of trans people in the UK – reports that there are 166,000 trans women in the UK, that would mean somewhere between one-seventh and one-fifth of all trans women are professional athletes.

    It’s complete fiction, but it’s doing its job: it’s being reported in all the press as if it’s a credible document rather than the fever dream of anti-trans bigots, and those reports will be cited in future as proof of the entirely invented trans takeover of professional sports.

    Once again, the brave and fearless British press proves Humbert Wolfe correct:

    You cannot hope to bribe or twist
    thank God! The British journalist
    But seeing what the man will do
    unbribed, there’s no occasion to