Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • It’s all connected

    Charles P Pierce is one of my favourite writers on politics, particularly US politics, and this piece on the links between US right-wingers and growing intolerance and violence in other countries is typically astute.

    As should be clear by now, this slouch toward authoritarian government is an interconnected, international phenomenon. It is a shadow government driven by conspiracy and empowered paranoia. It has power and reach. There is legitimate money behind it. If there is a central point, it’s probably in Russia, but liberal democracies have proven perfectly capable of ignoring the threat until it reaches full roar.

  • Be better

    Science writer Ed Yong’s coverage of COVID was superb, and his reporting of long COVID even more so. In a thoughtful piece for the NYT, he explains how journalists should and could do better: Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me To Be a Better Journalist.

    Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism.

    …How could so many people feel so thoroughly unrepresented by an industry that purports to give voice to the voiceless?

    As Yong explains, some of the defining characteristics of journalism can make it a powerful enemy of people who are suffering.

    many journalistic norms and biases work against us. Our love of iconoclasts privileges the voices of skeptics, who can profess to be canceled by patient groups, over the voices of patients who are actually suffering. Our fondness for novelty leaves us prone to ignoring chronic conditions that are, by definition, not new.

    …We are not neutral actors, reporting on the world at a remove; we also create that world through our choices, and we must do so with purpose, care and compassion.

  • Pain is privileged

    There’s a good piece in Nieman Labs about the biases, often unconscious, that mean journalists adopt the evangelical right’s framing when it comes to reporting on trans people.

    How else to explain the tens of thousands of words this year and last devoted to questioning whether trans people have too much access to health care, rather than to understanding the forces behind legislation to deny us that care? How else could a major news organization devote a major investigative report on the sliver of trans people who regret their transitions rather than on the many tens of thousands who don’t have the opportunity to transition to begin with? Or how else could an in-depth story about a clinic faced with an increase in trans minors question whether those minors really needed care rather than focus on how the healthcare system was failing them.

    One group’s pain is privileged; the other’s, invisible.

    The reporting over “detransitioners” is an excellent example of that. The number of people who detransition – that is, abandon their transition altogether and return to living in their assigned gender – is vanishingly small, and largely consists of people who found that prejudice, discrimination and bullying, and in the UK the decades-long waiting lists for even the most basic treatment, made their lives hell to the point they had to once again hide who they are in order to survive.

    Those stories should be told, but they’re not; instead, media focuses on the even tinier number of celebrity detransitioners, the three or four people touring the globe with the evangelical right who demand an end to all trans healthcare because they made bad calls as grown adults.

    Exceptions make the news. Of course they do: as the adage goes, dog bites man isn’t news; man bites dog is. But what the press is doing around trans people and detransition is to tell you that it isn’t safe to let your pets out of the house at all because the streets are full of rabid dog-biting hordes ready to chomp on your chihuahua, munch on your mastiff or chow down on your chow chow.

    The number of people who regret transition surgery are far fewer than the number who regret any other form of surgery; the number of people who regret transition are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction compared to the number of people who find that it improves or even saves their lives. But only the celebrity detransitioners get the column inches and the airtime, almost always unchallenged.

    The Nieman Labs piece uses an analogy:

    If you’re covering access to abortion care, do you sic your crack investigative team on the sub-1% of women who regret their abortions, or on the multiple attempts to deny them care?

    This is exactly what happens with trans people.

    I think there are two problems with the article, though. The first is that it doesn’t take into account how much journalism is actually churnalism, based not on reporting or research but on regurgitating press releases and talking points from pressure groups. Sometimes that regurgitation is down to pressure: in many newsrooms and production studios people are overworked, underpaid and don’t have the time to check whether a group is astroturfed, let alone whether the contents of its press release are factual. It’s why anybody with a logo, a Twitter account and an axe to grind can get on the BBC or in the pages of the press as a supposed authority.

    And the second problem is that the article talks about a particular type of journalist, the one who wants to do their job well, and I’m not so sure there are so many of those journalists left. Unfortunately with trans people, many of the people writing and speaking about us know exactly what they’re doing; the misrepresentation and disinformation is not accidental but intentional.

    How do you persuade journalists to report the truth when their social media followers, their book deals and their TV appearances depend on them doing otherwise?

  • “Do we have them castrated?”

    Byline Times:

    Just days after Rishi Sunak reportedly dropped plans to introduce a conversion therapy ban, Byline Times can reveal that a project of a charity registered in Northern Ireland held a conference in Poland where delegates heard about conversion therapy techniques, how fundamentalist Christian leaders met with British MPs and lords to convince them to fight against conversion therapy bans, and asked whether castration would get rid of “LGBT freaks”.

    One of the things this article demonstrates is how these hateful bigots pretend to be transparent but censor their own videos before publishing them and sharing them online; they’re very aware that without such self-censorship, reasonable people would be repelled.

  • “Irish dancing has fallen”

    Is there any sport that trans women won’t dominate with their superhuman strength, laser vision and ability to fly without wings? Apparently not: the latest news out of Bigot Central is that, and this is a direct quote, “Irish dancing has fallen”. Which is astonishing language considering the news item the post is sharing: in next year’s Irish Dancing World Championships in Glasgow, one of approximately 5,000 contestants will be a 13-year-old trans girl.

    “Fallen” is being used deliberately: it’s language usually used in war reporting to describe when a place is captured by the enemy, and it’s a favourite of the far- and religious right in their attempts to portray oppression as victimisation.

    This, like the attempts to remove trans women from snooker, darts and chess, is saying the quiet part out loud: the bans on trans people have never been about protecting women or protecting women’s sports from some supposed biological advantage. The motivation is identical to the moves to ban any books by or about trans people from schools and libraries: these people do not want trans people to exist in society in any way, shape or form.

  • Throw a block party

    As we once again move to new social networks, an old and very boring trope raises its head once again: is it okay to block people? And the answer, of course, is: no. It’s more than okay. It’s essential. Block early, block often, block the bigots and the blowhards and their fans and their followers, block for any reason you choose or for no reason whatsoever.

    Your social media feed is yours to control, and that includes deciding whose voices you want to hear.

    The “it’s bad to block” trope has been around at least since the 1990s when I first ventured online, and it’s the same bad faith argument it’s always been: usually deliberately, people pretend that the US first amendment applies worldwide and protects their right to be an absolute arsehole on the internet. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t. Your right to free speech doesn’t trump my right to completely ignore you.

    Here’s Joan Westenberg:

    There’s a crucial difference between silencing someone and choosing not to engage with them. Blocking someone isn’t about denying them their right to speak. It’s about asserting your right not to listen.

    Some of the very worst people online believe that they have the right to your attention whenever they demand it, and that alone is an excellent reason to block them. Because as Westenberg says, they are the weeds of your online garden. Time spent reading their unsolicited shit is time better spent on more beautiful things.

  • Ignorance is strength

    The Tory government have confirmed that they intend to ban conversion therapy but not for trans people: according to equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, providing a safe space for kids to explore their feelings about gender rather than mentally torturing them is the real conversion therapy.

    It’s egregious bullshit, of course, but it’s entirely in keeping with Badenoch’s war on trans people, a war she and Liz Truss have been waging for several years now.

    The idea that gender-affirming care is really conversation therapy is a fiction concocted by the evangelicals and parroted widely by their useful idiots. Once again, our politicians are happily dancing to the evangelical right’s tune.

  • “Walk a mile in her shoes”

    Bigots like to pretend that being trans is easy, that it’s something people do on a whim to make themselves more interesting and popular. The reality, of course, is very different, as this piece in Byline Times points out: “Call me Chloe”: the reality of life for my transgender daughter.

    I bristle when I hear people talk of the ‘trans debate’ as if my daughter’s right to exist peacefully and safely in the world is somehow up for discussion. But I do wish that all those who think this is a process any young person would ‘choose’ would walk one day in her shoes. It’s not a walk they’d want to repeat.

    Being trans is hard. Being young and trans is harder still, and requires a bravery far beyond anything the bigots possess. Culture-war cowards run in packs; trans people often walk the world alone.

  • Moles whacked

    Bath Moles, one of the UK’s endangered grassroots music venues, is no more. And Mark Davyd knows why.

    Bath Moles is closing because right now, in 2023, it simply isn’t possible to present original live music in a 220-capacity venue without losing money.

    He’s right, and he’s also right that by ignoring what’s going on at the grassroots level the music industry is letting those roots rot. Without venues like Moles (and similar venues, such as Glasgow’s King Tuts and recently closed 13th Note) the British arena-fillers of recent years would never have become famous. No Moles no Radiohead, no Oasis, no Massive Attack, no Ed Sheeran, no Blur.

    While arena shows and stadium shows break financial record after financial record, smaller venues are dying.

    The Music Venue Trust has been trying to change this for years. As Davyd explains:

    The truth is that the solution to stopping any more iconic venues closing is simple. It’s achievable, it’s easy, it can be done, and it will have to be done… For five years now Music Venue Trust has been trying to get the live music industry itself to act on these challenges. We have proposed a simple £1 charge on every arena and stadium ticket sold should be put into a fund to financially support venues like Moles so they can afford to programme and develop the artists of the future. We’ve laid out exactly how such a fund would work and demonstrated that it can be done. 

    This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s exactly what happens in France.

    Every British promoter operating in France, every British artist performing in France, every British agency booking acts into France, accommodates this levy within their costing of every show.

    The loss of key venues is part of a wider issue we have with the arts in the UK, where participation – as an artist or as an enjoyer of art – is becoming increasingly reserved for the rich and those willing to get into huge debt to see stadium shows with three-figure ticket prices. With successive governments uninterested in changing that – the Tories have previously described large-scale ticket touting as entrepreneurship – it’s up to the music industry to fix what’s left of the roof while the sun shines. The best time to introduce a ticket fund was five years ago. The next best time is now.

  • An admission

    It’s yet another week in the ongoing demonisation of trans women; former prime minister Liz Truss wants to introduce a member’s bill that would ban healthcare for trans teens and make it illegal for trans women to use women’s spaces, and a bunch of bigoted right-wing shits have made a film mocking trans women in sports. The coverage of both has been dreadful – for example most reports of Truss’s bill use the sense-free dog-whistle “biological males” instead of trans women, while the bigots’ film has been described as a comedy – and in the case of the movie, the coverage has missed a crucial point.

    According to risible bigot Ben Shapiro, the film was not originally intended as a scripted movie. It was supposed to be a documentary. His intention was to get men to join women’s sports teams by claiming they were women, but when the men tried to do that they were told (politely, I assume) to fuck off – because you can’t just join women’s sports teams by claiming to be a woman. As Shapiro has admitted, the men “weren’t willing to go the full distance in terms of, you know, the actual hormone treatments and everything to play in some of the ladies’ leagues.”

    Right-wing bigots in “making shit up to demonise minorities” shocker? This is my surprised face.

    As is so often the case, writer and academic Julia Serano has been talking about this for years: as she wrote in her book Whipping Girl, if changing gender were that simple, that easy, far more people would do it. Actors would do it for roles, criminals would do it to go undercover, reality show contestants would do it for fame, women would do it to escape the glass ceiling and other discrimination, struggling gay or lesbian people would do it for an easier life. And right-wing assholes would do it to get on women’s sports teams.

    The reason they don’t is because deep down, they understand that gender transition is not something anybody does lightly, that hormones have a profound effect on your brain and on your body. To be blunt, they weren’t willing to risk feeling for even a few weeks what many trans people have to feel for years or even decades.