Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Lying by omission

    Journalism pretends to be fair and independent, but much of it isn’t: you can easily shape a story by choosing to include some things and exclude others. And there’s an excellent example of that in today’s newspapers, or rather there isn’t an excellent example of that in today’s newspapers.

    The ongoing employment tribunal of the deeply unpleasant Fife nurse Sandie Peggie has been the subject of intense daily coverage in all of the UK and Scottish press. Peggie was abusive to a trans doctor, Beth Upton, and was disciplined for that. But most of the newspapers’ coverage attempts to paint Upton as an aggressor and Peggie as her victim. Peggie is being represented by a director of the papers’ favourite anti-trans hate group Sex Matters and the case is widely believed to be funded by a very famous millionaire.

    The judge has effectively allowed the tribunal to become a show trial of Peggie’s victim; in addition to allowing misgendering and deadnaming by Sex Matters’ lawyer, the tribunal refused to grant the doctor anonymity to protect her from exactly the co-ordinated media and social media abuse she’s been subjected to.

    The papers clearly believe that this story is so important that it justifies blanket coverage including live blogs from the tribunal. And yet there are no headlines in the major newspapers today of the most explosive testimony yet, which came from Peggie herself yesterday. During an absolutely astonishing session she revealed herself to be bigoted against all kinds of people. She used multiple racist slurs, admitted to Islamaphobia, and generally revealed herself to be bigoted against multiple marginalised groups. This follows on from other witnesses producing evidence of her posting sick, racist jokes about dead Pakistanis and saying that she wanted to post bacon through the doors of a mosque.

    This is very inconvenient for the newspapers that have lionised Peggie as a feminist Jesus; The Scotsman and The Herald have repeatedly hailed her as a pure, innocent victim of the evil trans mafia. And as a result, they have looked at the most newsworthy testimony from the entire tribunal and simply ignored it.

    It’s not just the Scots press. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph have been equally obsessed, and yet there’s nothing about the racist comments in either print edition today.

    This is what newspapers do when the truth gets in the way. They bury it. And if that means burying people too, so be it.

  • #OneMoreTune: a celebration

    I’m proud and honoured to be part of One More Tune, a celebration of and fundraiser for the legendary JD Twitch, aka Keith McIvor, of Optimo/Espacio. It’s a 41-track compilation album spanning all kinds of genres and featuring artists big and small, and all proceeds are going to JD’s healthcare and to his favourite good causes. JD has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and musicians and music fans have already rallied round to help. The crowdfunder to help with his immediate care smashed its target in hours.

    We’ve contributed an unreleased song, Don’t Know How To Human, and I wrote a little bit for the accompanying booklet about interviewing Keith for Small Town Joy, in which he played a really important part. Here’s a taster:

    I thought I loved music, but compared to JD I just have a bit of a crush. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody so knowledgeable about music – all music, not just a particular genre of it – and so insightful and enthusiastic about such a huge variety of sounds. JD doesn’t just talk about music. He evangelises.

  • “40 years on, are we really doing this again?”

    Jessica Harriet writes about Labour’s new Section 28, which is designed to dehumanise and harm trans kids. 

    Clause 72 is an ambiguous mess, purposefully leaving headroom for the removal of LGBTQIA+ books should they include a representation of transgender people, family members, friends, or history. Granting schools and parents enough plausible justification to censor inclusive materials, whilst claiming it is for protection. And in doing so, they declare the acknowledgement of gender diversity as an inherent danger, restricting a minorities representation to age requirements and trigger warnings.

    …In stark parallel to Section 28, trans education is framed as a form of “indoctrination” or, as they politely put it, “encouragement.” Just as Thatcher’s government deemed queer identities a threat to ‘functioning’ society, the RSHE guidance implies trans visibility as a suggestive wrong, a political contagion.

  • The best laws money can buy

    We’ve been told repeatedly by the Labour government that the Supreme Court judgement that reversed decades of equality law, threatening trans people’s rights and safety, is final and must be respected: any Supreme Court judgement is carved in stone, permanent, impossible to change.

    Today, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves “is considering overruling the Supreme Court over a £44bn car loan commission scandal after lobbying by some of the UK’s biggest lenders,” The Guardian reports.

  • Safety first

    There’s a good piece on the higher education site Wonkhe by Anna Bull: Safety must shape policy on single-sex spaces. And pushing trans and non-binary people into the wrong toilets and changing rooms is not the way to do that. The focus here is on educational institutions but the point is true more widely: we’re much more likely to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators of it.

    Trans and non-binary people are much more likely than cis people, including cis women, to be subjected to sexual harassment and violence. This is a well-established fact, evidenced by national studies of 180,000 students in the US; 8000 students in Ireland; and 43,000 students in Australia, as well as studies focusing on staff-student sexual misconduct (p.277) or on specific disciplines; and studies across campuses and that compare different sexual and gender minority groups.

    …Taken as a whole, the Supreme Court judgement, and the EHRC’s interpretation of it, risks making trans and non-binary people even more unsafe by revealing their identities when it may not be safe to do so, and by creating a climate where targeting them for abuse on the basis of their identities is more acceptable. As a result, the figures given above on the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment against trans and non-binary people are likely to grow even larger.

  • A tsunami of scaremongering

    There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.

    It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:

    “the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.

    This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”

  • Home is where the hate is

    One of the anti-trans groups favoured by health minister Wes Streeting is the Bayswater Support Group, some of whose members advocate child abuse in order to make children “accept biological reality”. And in a new, heartbreaking report by Trans Safety Network, some of those kids describe how the group radicalised their parents into increasingly cruel behavior and opened the door for far-right extremism.

    A very familiar pattern emerges: increasing alienation, paranoia, cruelty and conspiracism as people get drawn deeper into radicalisation and further from reality.

  • Somewhere: for me

    I’m in the new issue (issue 19) of Somewhere: For Us, Scotland’s LGBTQ+ magazine, talking about music and joy and the power of Pride. It’s a great magazine and I’d really recommend the print version: the ink it uses smells amazing.

  • A kick up the arts

    One of the very best things about writing books about music is that you then get to talk about music with people who are just as mad about it as you are. So it was an absolute joy to hang out with Nicola Meighan and Laura Jane Wilkie for Nicola’s excellently named podcast, A Kick Up The Arts. 

    Nicola and I will also be at the Edinburgh Book Festival next month along with Chitra Ramaswamy, Emma Pollock and Cora Bissett to talk about mid-90s music in an event that I think is going to be a lot of fun.

  • Ten years today

    Imagine an alternate timeline where the media and political anti-trans panic didn’t happen, Scotland passed its proposed gender recognition reforms, and the sky didn’t fall in: none of the problems predicted by genital-obsessed weirdos arose, and ten years after the legislation introduced gender recognition by self-ID it was crystal clear that the weirdos’ scaremongering about trans people’s documentation was entirely groundless and based on bigotry.

    That’s the timeline in Ireland, which today marks the tenth anniversary of self-ID.