Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Islands in the streams

    Most of my tech writing these days is news reporting, but from time to time I get to write something a little more reflective. Here’s a piece on how streaming services have persuaded me to get back into buying music I can touch.

    I think streaming is like a fast food drive-through, serving up cheeseburgers that are quick, cheap and convenient. And that’s great; it meets a need, satisfies a craving. It fills a hole. But food can be so much more than just fuel, and music can be so much more than Muzak. 

  • Let the light in

    Due to a calendar quirk, here in the UK the winter solstice is a day later than usual. But now it’s here, so today is the shortest, darkest day of the year and the beginning of the road back to summer sunshine. I’m writing this at 8am and it’s still pitch black outside; it’ll be like that for a while yet, and it’ll get dark early again today. But tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, it’ll get a little bit lighter. And the light will stay a little longer.

    This year’s second half has felt darker than most. There have been a lot of sadnesses in the last six months, sadnesses that have made it hard to do some of the things I’d planned to do this year. I’ve spent more time in hospitals and clinics than I’d have liked. And as someone who’s both trans and not a nazi, it’s been a frightening year politically. That’s likely to be the case in 2024 too.

    But there has been a lot of light too. I’ve been exceptionally fortunate this year because I’ve been given the opportunity to go to interesting things and talk to interesting people. Whether it’s launch events, festivals or just hanging around bookshops, I’ve had an absolute blast spending time with book people this year. I can’t go into details just yet but there will be more book things with more book people in 2024, many of which will be themed around joy.

    There will also be more music. I’m writing the best songs of my life, so much so that it’s become a problem: we’re supposed to be making an album but every time we agree on a track list I write more songs. So I’m going to force myself to focus and to actually release something in the next few months.

    It’s been a hard year for many of us, I know, but we’re still here. And that’s something worth celebrating.

    I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, if that’s a holiday you celebrate. And I hope that your 2024 is full of light, of love and of laughter.

  • Just the facts

    Since around 2017, it’s been very clear that if you hate trans people you can make up any old shite and have it printed or broadcast without anybody fact-checking it before, during or afterwards – and as a result, many anti-trans activists have taken full advantage of that to spread absolute bullshit with impunity. So it’s refreshing, albeit years overdue, to see some fact checking finally take place.

    Irish newspaper The Journal did some fact checking of a claim made by anti-trans obsessive Graham Linehan on Newstalk radio. According to Linehan, if you search the crowdfunding site JustGiving and look for people crowdfunding top surgery, there are “nearly 38,000 girls” raising money for surgery.

    The actual number of fundraisers is 38.

    What the Journal has done here is not difficult, but despite fact-checking being fundamental to good journalism it’s incredibly rare: there continues to be an assumption that contributors are coming in good faith, an assumption that is widely abused by endless bad actors. Their success should shame the journalists, editors, presenters and producers who’ve let them get away with it so publicly for so long.

  • Guilt

    Two teenagers were found guilty of the murder of teenage girl Brianna Ghey today, after what the Crown Prosecution Service described as “one of the most distressing cases the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with. The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.” I had to stop following the case because it was so upsetting, the manner of her death so horrific.

    Brianna was chosen in part because she was trans.

    Brianna didn’t go out much because she’d been the victim of anti-trans bullying (according to fellow pupils; her mother didn’t know about it); her anxiety and loneliness meant her killers saw her as “prey” that would be “easier” for them to kill. One of the murderers, Girl Y, told police that Brianna was “not a normal person”; messages between the two killers showed that the other murderer, Boy X, said that “I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl.”

    You can read more about the trial in the many newspapers or hear about it from the many broadcasters that, since 2017, have paid many thousands of pounds to transphobes stirring up hatred about girls just like her. Time it right today and you’ll see that the news of her killers’ conviction is just above equalities minister Kemi Badenoch continuing to claim that it’s “harmful” for schools to support trans kids.

    Update, 22 Dec

    Predictably enough, the newspaper coverage of this has been vile. The Daily Mail, which you’ll remember bullied trans teacher Lucy Meadows to her death and which has spent the last several years demonising trans people, did one of its “this beautiful angel has been taken too soon” front pages while prominently plugging its Brianna Ghey podcast; it still hates trans people, but it’ll pretend otherwise when there are papers to sell and podcasts to promote. It’s back on its bullshit today, giving vocally anti-trans columnist Sarah Vine the masthead to claim it was the internet wot dunnit. Vine has written many anti-trans articles for the paper, including ones demanding schools don’t support trans kids.

    Meanwhile The Guardian, many of whose writers are proudly anti-trans, was quick to say on its front page that the police had ruled out transphobia as a motive for the killing. That simply isn’t true, as the transphobic messages produced in evidence by the police demonstrated. The police ruled out transphobia as the *sole* motive, presumably because a straightforward murder charge would be more likely to result in conviction.

  • Dee eye ess see oh

    There’s a wonderful new documentary on BBC iPlayer (and on PBS in the US) called Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. It traces disco from its origins in the basement bars and warehouses of 1970s New York to its eventual world domination, and it’s a fantastic programme with a celestial soundtrack.

    While the music is of course the focus, it’s also very good at putting that music in its wider context: disco was music by and for marginalised people from the Black, Latin and queer communities, and the backlash against it was often because of precisely that: the Disco Sucks protests, which the show covers and which included a “disco demolition night” in a Chicago stadium, were toddler tantrums by largely straight, cis, white men railing against music embraced by Black, Latin and queer people of all genders. As Mark Anderson would later write:

    The chance to yell “disco sucks” meant more than simply a musical style choice. It was a chance to push back on a whole set of social dynamics that lay just beneath the surface of a minor battle between a DJ and a radio station that decided to change formats. More importantly, it was a chance for a whole lot of people to say they didn’t like the way the world was changing around them, or who they saw as the potential victors in a cultural and demographic war.

    As one of the interviewees puts it in the first episode, disco was political because the dancers’ lives were political.

  • A hateful echo

    In the same week that we heard closing arguments in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers, two teenagers who brutally murdered the young girl in part because she was transgender, the Tory government has finally published its draft guidelines regarding trans and non-binary kids in schools. As expected it’s a bigoted shitshow.

    The Department of Education’s own legal team says it’s unlikely to survive any legal challenge. And the fact that no LGBTQ+ organisations were consulted, but every bunch of passing bigots was, makes it clear what the agenda is here. If it weren’t clear enough, the introduction doesn’t even manage to make it into its third paragraph before using the Christian Right dogwhistle “gender identity ideology.”

    Smarter people than me will publish detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks, but the short version is that the guidance acts as if the Equality Act does not exist and often tells schools to act in ways that are against the law. As equality lawyer Robin Moira White put it, it is “a cruel attack on a vulnerable minority by a nasty government focused on running a culture war”.

    The guidance encourages teachers and other school officials to treat trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming children – who remain a tiny minority of pupils – illegally and unethically, which will make it harder for those children to live their lives. It’s a bullies’ charter, a bigots’ wish list, a hateful echo of Section 28.

  • The quiet part

    One of the not-too-hidden secrets of the anti-trans movement is that their goal is the total elimination of trans people. As with the forced birth movement, activists are very careful to disguise their goals, to self-censor and say only what they know they can get away with when they talk to the media. Hence “pro-life” instead of “forced birth”, “reasonable concerns” instead of saying the quiet bit out loud. But in their own events and their own social media, the masks come off.

    The strategy is gradualism, or a wedge strategy: you start small and use your win as a wedge for your real agenda. The US forced birth movement was a fringe movement for decades, but with cynical and significant help from the US GOP it began decades of gradualism to build the foundations for what we’re seeing now: the revocation of Roe vs Wade and moves towards the ultimate goal, which is to prohibit abortion without exception everywhere in the US (and elsewhere too). But even now they continue to pretend that their goal isn’t really their goal: again and again, forced-birther Republican politicians say the right thing about exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies before either removing those exceptions or, as ProPublica reports, making those exceptions almost completely inaccessible. The horrific case of Kate Cox, forced to flee Texas in order not to die after the Supreme Court said her life was worthless, shows how hollow those promises are.

    These extreme anti-women laws were always the goal, but the forced birthers pretend otherwise. And the anti-LGBTQ+ eliminationists are doing the same. Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law was initially pitched as for children from kindergarten to third grade, which means kids up to the age of nine; a year later it was extended to twelfth grade, which is 17 and 18-year-olds. Bans on LGBTQ+ books have pretended to be about pornography and protecting children, but explicitly targeted any books by or that mention LGBTQ+ people. Similarly the push for bans on trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic initially claimed only to be about protecting pre-pubescent children; the same activists are now pushing for a complete ban on healthcare for trans adults and the removal of all their legal protections too.

    It’s not that they don’t want us to be in sports. They don’t want us to be anywhere. One of the leading voices of the UK anti-trans movement says that trans people’s numbers should be reduced; our equalities minister, who has communicated and met extensively with anti-trans bigots but not LGBTQ+ organisations, claims that we are an “epidemic” and that “predators” are “choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people”, dogwhistling that “I’m not saying that transgender people are predators, but there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.”

    This is elimination by a thousand cuts as set out by the Christian right back in 2017: demonise trans people in every possible way. Go after trans people in sports, go after trans people’s use of public facilities, go after trans people’s healthcare, go after trans people’s protection from discrimination, go after trans people’s ability to live normal lives. Ban trans people who go through the wrong puberty; ban the healthcare that can ensure that they do not.

    You can see this in microcosm with Riley Gaines, the US swimmer who was beaten in a race by four other women and tied with a fifth. Gaines has since embarked on a highly lucrative campaign of revenge – not against the women who came first, second, third or fourth, but the trans woman who came equal fifth with her. It turns out that attacking trans people is much better for your profile and your bank balance than being a not-good-enough-to-win swimmer, a lesson other famous swimmers also appear to have absorbed.

    Remember the official line here: trans women must be banned from women’s sports because going through male puberty gives them a biological advantage. That claim is not necessarily true – while there are some sports where it may be a factor in some circumstances, it’s been used to demand bans on trans participation in snooker, darts, croquet and Irish dancing too – but that’s not the point: it’s the stated reason for anti-trans sporting bans. The post-pubertal body, they claim, is simply too powerful for fair competition.

    Except Gaines and the far right doesn’t want trans women to compete in anything at all, which is why she’s just turned the right-wing media machine against a teenage trans girl. The girl, who is 17, began transitioning before puberty and therefore doesn’t possess any of the claimed biological advantages. But the news that she had apparently been offered one of a dozen volleyball scholarships by the University of Washington was enough to set the anti-trans hate machine in motion. It now appears that the university has withdrawn the offer, depriving the girl not just of a sporting opportunity but an educational one too.

    This particular story appears to be another case of something we’re seeing a lot of in the US at the moment: bad losers (or their parents) invoking the spectre of trans people to harm their rivals. Sometimes it’s levelled at girls who are not trans but who aren’t pretty blonde white girls – something trans people and LGBTQ+ allies more widely have been warning about for years. Those warnings, like many others, were ignored – because the collateral damage is welcome too. Bigotry and intolerance run in packs, and they will not stop running when they’re done with us.

  • As seen on TV

    The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has produced a new report detailing the 60-plus organisations set up by the Christian Right to spread mis- and disinformation about LGBTQ+ people, and about trans people in particular. It’s a damning report, as you’d expect, and it also features a lot of organisations that will be very familiar if you read the newspapers, listen to the radio or watch TV in the UK: many of them were set up specifically to launder hateful bullshit through the mainstream media, a goal that mainstream media has been happy to help with.

    According to the SPLC, these organisations are:

    …dedicated to changing who LGBTQ+ people are and limiting LGBTQ+ rights by promoting conversion therapy, de-transitioning, bans on gender-affirming health care, bans on transgender people playing sports, censorship of LGBTQ+ topics in public schools, bans on public expression of LGBTQ+ culture like drag performances, and other politically motivated attempts to erase LGBTQ+ identities.

    …Anti-LGBTQ+ organizations use pseudoscience to attack not only affirming medical practices, but almost any social, religious, commercial or governmental affirmation of LGBTQ+ identity and LGBTQ+ representation in popular culture. With the help of right-wing and extremist social media personalities, anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience is sold as “proof” that a conspiracy of “leftists” is infiltrating schools with “Marxist gender ideology,” indoctrinating kids and even turning them transgender and that transgender identity is spread through “social contagion” when schools accept and affirm LGBTQ+ children.

  • “Who needs this?”

    There’s a lovely piece by the equally lovely Robin Ince about creating things and asking yourself a simple question: who needs this?

    It’s something I think about a lot, and like Robin says “my favourite thing about the arts is the potential of connection.” When I write a book or a song, what I want to do more than anything else is to connect with somebody.

    I’m very lucky in that I sometimes get to see those connections: sometimes I’ll play a song and see people react to it, or I’l do a book thing and get to talk to people afterwards. I’ve joked that the latter is very dangerous, because it can make you think you’re Bono. But to have someone tell you that your book (or any other thing you’ve created) has been meaningful to them is an astonishing, beautiful thing.

    Ince:

    What I love to see is arts and artists that are full of love, that enhance, that make people feel happier to be alive, that offer people new ways of thinking and being.

    The older I get the more I feel the same too. I’ve done the hack work, the low hanging fruit, the lazy gag and the easy laugh. But while there may be money in it there’s no skill in it, no fun in it and no love in it. As Robin puts it:

    I think there is more bravery in showing love than shouting hate.

  • When left turns right

    One of the interesting and frightening things we’ve seen in recent years is people who would consider themselves left-wing not only turning right, but turning far right. Some of the most extreme examples do so after public humiliation destroys their credibility – Naomi Wolf is a good example of that – or after online criticism hurts their ego. Some do it after losing faith in specific institutions, or to seek the Murdoch dollar or MAGA votes. And often, they take many people with them.

    This excellent piece by In These Times looks at what happens when the left turns hard right.

    It’s easy to dismiss many of these high-profile defectors as crackpots or spotlight-seekers, as never truly serious in their political principles or as plain grifters. Because of course there is money to be made by saying, “Once I was blind, but now I see.” It permits the Steve Bannons of the world to affirm their political faith not as an argument, but just the truth. But, in some ways, the peculiarities of the celebrity drifters are beside the point.

    The point is who they bring along.

    One of the key points in the piece is that there’s a pipeline between being a controversialist and becoming a fascist, and it’s a pipeline we’ve known about for a very long time. “Strategic irony” is a well-worn tactic of the far right: what begins with “edgy”, taboo-busting humour or saying the supposedly unsayable soon becomes a lot less funny. As one of the people quoted in the piece puts it, you can only be ironic for so long; you can only post so many George Wallace memes before you start thinking that two sets of water fountains aren’t a bad idea.