Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Degenerates

    Artwork by Wassily Kandinsky, accused of degeneracy by the Nazis
    Artwork by Wassily Kandinsky, accused of degeneracy by the Nazis

    One of the tactics used to dehumanise minorities is to claim they have no culture, that they produce no art – because how can they when they’re not fully human? So it’s not a huge surprise to see disgraced former comedy writer Graham Linehan on his pity party tour claiming in the Daily Mail that trans people “produce no art”. There are “no great trans films”, “no great trans creators”… you get the idea.

    And it’s a very old idea.

    In far-right and religious extremism, the only art of value is the art produced by the in-group. Art and culture produced by members of the out-group is worthless, degenerate, corrupt, and the people who produce it and consume it are untermensch. Subhumans.

    Here’s an explanation from 1942:

    The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.

    Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.

    A subhuman and nothing more!

    That particular screed was edited by Himmler.

    The Nazis also railed against art specifically from the 1920s onwards, calling it Entartete Kunst – degenerate art. They claimed that such art was created by people corrupted and enfeebled, by people whose goal was to corrupt the minds of others and whose art was not in keeping with racial and sexual purity, that some works were “an insult to German womanhood”.

    They started by demonising it, then by confiscating it, then by disappearing the people who made and consumed it.

    Hatred that begins with art never ends there.

    As The LA Times puts it:

    The Nazi eradication of what was claimed to be degenerate in the symbolic realm of the visual, literary and performing arts was, quite logically, an early warning signal of a philosophy that would soon be applied to selective groups of human beings. Like the paintings that were rounded up and the books that Hitler burned, ostensibly degenerate people were soon dealt with in a final solution.

    In Britain, we used to battle this kind of thing rather than promote it.

    People on social media are dunking on Linehan with endless lists of great trans artists and works. But they’re falling into the trap, which is to distract. Linehan knows full well that there are great trans creators; before his decline into madness he used to praise some of them, and there’s no way that he’s unaware of, say, Wendy Carlos or The Matrix. But the issue is not that whether there are great trans artists. Of course there are. The issue is the ongoing mainstreaming of far-right views, in some cases actual Nazi views, in the mainstream press without criticism or challenge – and the cowardice of people who could and should be decrying those views rather than promoting them.

  • Achtung Vegas

    U2’s Achtung Baby is the greatest album ever made. Okay, maybe not to you, or to most of the Earth. But to 19-year-old me – the album was released the day before my 19th birthday – it was the most amazing and important record I’d ever heard, and it was followed the year after by the most amazing tour I’ve ever seen: Zoo TV. I know every note The Edge plays, and what guitar pedals he used to get each sound. I can hammer out every beat of Larry’s drums and know every word and every note of Adam’s basslines off by heart.

    I’m not such a fan any more; I fell out of love with U2 around the late 1990s and while I’ve seen them a few times since – they remain a superb live band who do interesting things in arenas – I don’t experience the same fierce joy they used to give me. Bono’s increasing Sinatra-isation of his vocals when he does the songs live is a particular irritant for me, and the band have long passed the point where the new music matches the highs of the old. But nevertheless, when U2 announced that they’d be playing Achtung Baby in full in The Sphere, a new and exciting venue in Vegas, part of me really, really, really wanted to go. I can’t possibly afford it – the affordable (and that’s a relative term) tickets went fast so the cost of show, hotel and flights would have been way past £2K, which is madness to go and see a show. But I still really want to go. I mean, look at it!

    Pictures don’t do it justice; you really need to see the video to appreciate the scale of it. And that’s where reality comes crashing in (assuming you can hear anything because of the constant whooping of audience members as the visuals change) because the videos demonstrate that, as my brother put it, it’d be great if it were soundtracked by the U2 of 1991. But it’s not. It’s soundtracked by the U2 of 2023.

    U2 2023 isn’t U2 1991. It’s a different band not just because drummer Larry Mullen Jr is absent, recovering from back surgery. It’s a different band because the fire and energy of 1991’s U2 isn’t there any more, and because Bono’s voice isn’t what it used to be, and because a band that was once hungry and vital has mansions around the world and hangs around with presidents. Despite the big screen and the equally big revenues, playing a Vegas residency means exactly what it’s meant from the residencies of Elvis to those of Britney Spears: the creative well has run dry. Sure, there’s new music. But it’s not great music.

    This happens with every band, or at least the ones who keep going; REM avoided the same fate by splitting up. I suspect U2 never will; as long as there’s breath in Bono’s body and a crowd to play to, he’ll perform. But they’re not the band they used to be, and can’t be – any more than I can be the person who fell in love with Achtung Baby more than 30 years ago. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but perhaps some things are best left as memories.

  • Evil with smiles and suits

    One of the major drivers in anti-trans media and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic is the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF for short. When there’s a Christian bully taking legal action claiming oppression, the ADF is there. When there’s an anti-trans test case trying to remove healthcare, the ADF provides “expert” witnesses. And for at least six years, trans and other LGBTQ+ people in the UK have been trying to raise the alarm that their ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    This week, The New Yorker reports on how the ADF’s ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    There’s more to it than that, of course. As the article points out, the ADF is effectively trying to remove any and all restrictions on what religious extremists can do and say, even if that means opening the door to even more vile people such as violent racists. That may even be a feature rather than a bug, as bigotries tend to apply to multiple groups, even if the bigots are usually careful not to admit it.

    As ever with reporting like this, it’s both valuable and worthless: valuable because it’s well researched, accurate and clearly sets out the danger; worthless because the people who need to read it won’t read it. And here in the UK, both print and broadcast media will continue to platform the ADF without explaining to readers and listeners what it is and what its goals are. I’m long past the point of caring whether that’s incompetence or malevolence because the result is the same.

  • Pain

    I really love Cat Valente’s writing, and her latest essay – Pain Is Not Penance – is a thoughtful piece about pain and our understanding of it. Some of it feels like an exorcism.

    Pain, Valente writes, is something many of us have learnt to believe is a punishment:

    For something you’ve done, something you’ve been, something you failed to do, something you wanted, chose, strove for, resisted, something you couldn’t stop, something you turned away from or turned toward or turned into, something you gave in to, something you saw or didn’t see, something you lost or took or abandoned or wouldn’t let go.

    And that can lead to one of the most dangerous beliefs in our society:

    Pain is payback. You earned this hurt. It didn’t happen to you, you collided with it. It isn’t random, it is your pain, for you, because of you, and if you’d only been better, if only you’d been stronger, if only you’d held on a little longer or let go a little sooner, if only you’d been more, if only you’d been less, if only you’d managed to be Goldilocks’ Own Brand Pristinely Precisely Perfect Fucking Porridge, you wouldn’t be doubled over in the dark right now, burning alive from the inside out.

    I don’t want to spoil the rest of the article. It’s well worth your time.

  • These things speak to me

    There’s an arresting quote in Jude Doyle’s superb profile of the late author Rachel Pollack that to me, sums up the experience of being trans when you haven’t come out:

    all of these things speak to me, but I am not welcome in the places where they are being spoken.

    The piece also links to an important slice of trans history, the manifesto Don’t Call Me Mister You Fucking Beast. The language around transness has changed a lot since it was written in 1972, the same year I was born, but it remains timely.

    When we’re alone we tend to accept the stereotypes. By getting together we’ve discovered how ridiculous they really are. No one in the group has ever said, ‘What horrible trick of nature has made me a woman trapped in a man’s body?’ We just don’t think that way.

    …The important thing is, no one should tell you, as a man or a woman, this is the role you have to play, and you have to play it all the time. 

  • A loaded question

    Someone made the rookie mistake of asking writer and academic Julia Serano to come on air and discuss the bigot dog-whistle “what is a woman?” Serano declined, and explained why.

    “What is a woman?” is not intended to be a question. It’s a slogan created and championed by UK “gender critical” activists who strongly oppose the social and legal recognition of trans people, with some even calling for eliminationist measures that would morally mandate us out of existence. Whenever gender-critical activists pose the “what is a woman?” question to politicians, organizations, celebrities, etc. (as they are wont to do), they are not looking to start a nuanced discussion or debate. Rather, they want a yes-or-no answer to their real question, the only question that counts in their minds: Will you support our anti-trans beliefs, policies, and legislation?

    Serano’s right, of course. “What is a woman?” is a loaded, rhetorical question asked by the kind of people who praise the Taliban or Russell Brand for “knowing what a woman is”, and it’s asked in much the same way as “when did you stop beating your wife?”

    It is a question with an agenda, and it is based on an underlying assumption, a belief, that there is a single, immutable definition of what a woman is. And of course, that isn’t true.

    The term “woman” is a classification and as Serano says, it has different criteria and meanings in different contexts. So for example in genetics, the criteria might be chromosomes; in reproductive health, reproductive anatomy; and in everyday conversation, social class: “people who move through the world as women and are interpreted and treated (and sometimes mistreated) as such.”

    …if I mentioned having a conversation with a woman that I know from work or ran into at the store, you wouldn’t think at all about her chromosomes or reproductive organs (unless, of course, you were some kind of creep). 

    Serano writes:

    …we all understand that “woman” is a broad category that comprises roughly half the human population. By necessity, it includes all sorts of diversity and seeming exceptions to the rule.

    This is why, in everyday life, nobody ever asks the question “what is a woman?” In fact, the only people who bother to raise the issue these days are anti-trans activists.

    And the reason they raise it, and the reason so many cisgender men parrot it, is because it’s a distraction from the very real issues all women experience, cis and trans. Because if we were to focus on any significant danger to women, we wouldn’t be looking at trans women. We’d be looking at cisgender men and some cisgender women too.

  • Now they’re closing clinics

    A US health clinic for trans people has closed its doors permanently after the introduction of a state-wide ban on healthcare for trans teens. As Xtra magazine reports, the ban was largely based on wild allegations by a single person, allegations that appear to be largely or completely baseless. But the national press, and the New York Times in particular, doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good scare story – and those scare stories often end up being used as evidence by the bigots in support of their bans.

    From the article:

    While the bulk of the blame for the clinic’s shuttering lies with the state’s conservative legislature, its closure was also accelerated by a group of anti-trans journalists who presented Reed’s unsubstantiated allegations to a wide audience.

    …[despite the claims being debunked] Reed got a rosy portrayal from New York Times journalist Azeen Ghorayshi. Ghorayshi reported that she couldn’t substantiate most of Reed’s claims, and yet still went on to paint Reed as a brave truth teller in the pages of the paper of record.

    Evan Urquhart in Assigned Media has more, including interviews with the parents of trans teens.

    “We care about the clinic we take our children to. We care that it is providing ethical care. We care that it is following the standards of care. But using the words of this person [Reed] who has been shown to be unethical, to deny healthcare to all these people, just isn’t right. In Missouri, politicians are making health care decisions right now, none of whom are qualified to do so.”

    For too many journalists, this is a game. But for the people losing their healthcare – and the right-wingers have adults in their sights as well as teens – it’s a matter of life and death.

     

  • Double danger

    The Guardian reports today that the latest social attitudes survey shows that the UK is becoming more liberal in almost every way – with the notable exception of attitudes towards trans people. Since 2016, the first time such attitudes were recorded, people have become much more hostile to trans people:

    The proportion of the British public describing themselves as “not prejudiced” towards transgender people fell from 82% to 64% between 2021 and 2022, when the latest survey took place.

    So the number of people who say they’re prejudiced against trans people has doubled in a year. That’s astonishing, and horrifying.

    What could possibly have happened since the apparent golden age of 2016? If you go through The Guardian and The Observer’s coverage of trans issues in 2016, you’ll see that it’s very different from what they published in 2018, and things are even worse now: it turns out that “occasionally publishes hateful shit”, which was those papers’ position pre-2017, was as good as it was going to get.

    The big change in this period, of course, was the arrival of faux-feminist anti-trans groups and their immediate embrace by journalists in the left-wing press as well as the right. That happened in mid-2017 and grew very quickly, and you can see the change in the coverage and the language used.

    Initially at least, the anti-trans charge was led not by the right wing press, but by the left – notably the Guardian and The New Statesman. By 2018, the editorial policy of most of the UK press was clearly and often ridiculously anti-trans as the moral panic got into high gear.

    This is exactly what we saw in the period leading up to the introduction of Section 28.

    As I wrote in my book:

    [by 2018] newspapers’ star columnists were regularly railing against the invented evils of “trans activists” who were “silencing women”, and evangelical groups were being given a platform to describe support for trans and non-binary teens as “child abuse”, deliberately and cynically conflating changing gender markers with having “mutilating surgery”. The level of coverage was ridiculously one-sided, completely disproportionate for a minor change affecting such a small minority of people, and was an attempt to direct public opinion rather than reflect it.

    And direct it they have: in a very short time the press-driven hate campaign has seen a massive change in people’s attitudes towards legal gender recognition – something that doesn’t affect you at all if you aren’t transgender. From the Guardian report:

    while 58% of the British public agreed in 2016 that transgender people should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate changed if they wanted, that figure had dropped to 30% by 2022, suggesting an overall gradual erosion in support towards transgender rights” since 2018.

    The law today is the same as it was in 2016. What’s changed is the obsessive coverage of it, and of us.

    There’s a long list of villains here: not just the pressure groups and the journalists but the US right, the BBC, Channel 4, social media, the cowardice of the Theresa May government, the skeptics movement, the “mummy bloggers” and Mumsnet, the Hands Across The Aisle coalition and many more. One day somebody who isn’t risking financial ruin under UK libel laws will write the damning exposé the whole sorry saga deserves, hopefully making some of its key actors unemployable in the process. But for now, here’s the issue in a nutshell: since 2016, The UK’s leading left-wing paper has been a crucial part of a highly successful right-wing campaign to promote intolerance of and prejudice against some of the most marginalised people in the country. Well done, everybody.

  • Seven kinds of rubbish

    The UK Prime Minister, as I’m sure you’ve seen, has promised to ban “heavy-handed measures” that don’t exist: “taxes on eating meat”, “sorting your rubbish into seven different bins”, and so on. He has previously spoken against other things that don’t exist, such as children identifying as cats, once again with the full-throated support of the right-wing press.

    It’s easy to mock this stuff, and I’m happy to, but it’s also very frightening: when politicians invent and rail against imaginary enemies, they’re not so much flirting with fascism as sticking their tongue down its throat. What we’ve seen in the war on trans people – the weaponisation of absolute bullshit – is now being used more widely. We’re in a very dark place.

  • Fake science, real cash

    The Huffington Post has an interesting exposé of the people making good money from bad takes and pseudoscience: you can make tens of thousands of dollars presenting pseudoscience in the employ of anti-trans religious extremists. And while the article is mainly about the US, the UK gets a look-in too. You may recognise the names here from their very frequent appearances in the UK press.

    The spike in anti-trans legislation means states need even more experts to defend it. And in order to deepen the bench, states have started enlisting academics who aren’t in health care or don’t even primarily research humans. One is a Manchester University professor named Emma Hilton, who mainly studies a particular species of frog and how it offers an understanding of inherited human genetic disorders. Hilton is a founder of a British group, Sex Matters, that advocates for legally segregating spaces by sex. She earned $300 an hour last year defending bans on trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams in Utah and Indiana.

    By way of explaining why she was qualified to weigh in on school sports, she told one court, “I participate keenly in sports at an amateur level, playing netball recreationally.”

    “Our understanding of human biology is in part a result of the study of animal models,” Hilton said in an email. She declined to address the relevance of netball, which is like basketball without dribbling.

    Another is Michael Biggs, an Oxford sociology professor who admitted in court to writing transphobic tweets under the pseudonymous handle @MrHenryWimbush and described himself as a “teenage shitlord [turned] Oxford professor.” “Transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons,” reads one representative post.

    Florida paid Biggs $400 an hour to defend its Medicaid ban.