Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Kitty litter

    The UK cat panic continues, with journalists who absolutely know better now offering cash for people to tell lies. This was posted, widely mocked and deleted earlier today.

    Offering money for stories is considered a bad thing in journalism, because as columnists’ drivel endlessly demonstrates, people will say any old shit for money. As a result cash for personal stories is usually the preserve of supermarket trash such as Love It! with their endless and invented tales of ghosts, murders and serial killers. But this request is for a supposedly reputable national newspaper.

    I almost feel sorry for Helen here, because she became today’s main character on Twitter. But I don’t, because what she’s doing is hoping to get paid for stirring up hatred against trans kids and their healthcare providers. The made-up story about kids identifying as cats is the right-wing’s infamous only joke, “I identify as…”, weaponised, and Carroll is offering cash for people willing to lie about it in print.

    The story is a hoax, and everybody reporting it knows it’s a hoax. Shame on them, and on the people who lap it up.

  • From despair to where?

    Earlier today I wrote a post about the newspapers claiming that trans kids are identifying as cats, horses and the moon, a classic piece of demonisation straight out of the classic text Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

    This morning, Elon Musk – whose trans daughter has cut all ties with him, and whose wife apparently left him for a trans woman – claimed that the word cis or cisgender, which is to transgender what heterosexual is to homosexual, is a slur that will get people who use it banned from Twitter. Twitter has no such concerns about actual slurs or threats of violence against trans people or their allies. While Musk was preening to his blue-tick sycophants, I received some Twitter report updates letting me know that actual death threats I’d reported on the service were not in breach of the Twitter rules.

    This afternoon, it leaked that the long-delayed UK ban on conversion therapy – aka torture – will have a consent clause, so if you’re coerced or bullied into being tortured then that will remain perfectly legal.

    The US evangelical right’s colonisation of our politicians and press is more evident than ever, and their strategies couldn’t be any more obvious.

    One of the bigot brigade’s favourite strategies is what far-right goon and Trump strategist Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with shit”: you put out so much misinformation that your enemy simply can’t fight back against it. It takes much more effort to clean up bullshit than to spread it.

    Elon Musk knows “cis” isn’t a slur; he doesn’t care, either. He’s doing exactly what Sartre described 1940s anti-semites as doing.

    Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

    Toni Morrison famously wrote that the purpose of white racism was to wear Black people out.

    The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

    It’s the same with the demonisation of other minorities. Trans people (and the wider communities we’re being used as a wedge to attack) are under constant assault on multiple fronts: in the courts, in the infiltration of school and health boards, in the pages of the press, over the airwaves and on social media. Endless airtime is given to people asking “what is a woman?” and discussing the fever dreams of bigots, a constant discussion about us by people who know nothing about us – and who care even less.

    When the moral panic against folk devils like you is stripping trans kids and adults of their healthcare, when people feel emboldened to call you predators and paedophiles simply for existing, when hate crimes are rocketing and you’re more scared of the outside world than ever before, how do you feel anything other than despair?

    Writing in Slate, Evan Urquhart says what many of us think: “Just a few years ago, it felt as though the lives of queer Americans were steadily improving… it’s different now.”

    It’s a provocative piece, and deliberately so. And it’s very much where my head is too, because while I’m not directly affected by what’s happening in places such as Florida I can see the tide crossing the Atlantic, as it has been doing for the whole time since I came out as me. Interviewee Ryan Campbell puts it very well:

    “I try to hold on to the idea that hate burns hot, but it burns out,” Campbell said. “I think things will probably continue to get worse for a bit. This is a thing that will rise and fall, but in the meantime, people are getting hurt now.”

    There’s a lot here that resonates strongly with me.

    When I was a child, in the late ’80s, I remember first learning that being gay was something bad, and understanding what gay meant well afterward. “Transgender” didn’t exist in my world growing up as that type of human being, but I saw the crude stereotype of a man in a dress as something to laugh at and as something frightening, a predator. As a trans person, my understanding of myself was crippled, distorted by confusion, doubt, shame, and self-hatred. As I came to accept myself, first as a queer woman and then later as transgender, I came to hope that children wouldn’t need to grow up like I had.

    …The loss of that promise comes hard. 

    The shock for me wasn’t that some people hate us, or that some of the most hateful will incite violence against us and campaign against our rights. No. What shocked me was that nobody cares. We told our peers what was happening. We showed them the bad actors – the religious extremists, the fascists, the grifters – telegraphing their plans like movie villains. We predicted every step of the process, from the reasonable concerns to the refocusing on the wider LGBT+ community and women’s reproductive freedom. And the response was… nothing.

    We raised the alarm and nobody came.

    Urquhart:

    For many in the queer community, we’ve moved well past the point of fearing something might happen, and on to figuring out how we’re going live through this. Our despair is grounded in grim acceptance and practicality. We are learning that life goes on after you accept the fact that no help is coming, and you’ve been left alone to defy or defend or escape, or just bear witness.

  • Don’t have kittens

    We’ve been in the “making shit up” stage of the anti-trans culture war for a while now, but this story takes the biscuit: the completely invented tale of a school pupil identifying as a cat has moved from the Telegraph and the Independent into Radio 4, because our media is hopelessly broken.

    Imagine calling yourself a journalist or editor and writing or publishing this as a news story.

    The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.

    She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.

    It took three Telegraph writers to write that, presumably with crayons.

    What’s particularly bad about this is that there’s audio of the supposed event, and that audio demonstrates that all the reports about it are lying: it’s a recording of a child being bullied. And nobody seems to care, apart from Mic Wright. He writes:

    Now the Mail, along with The Times, and The Telegraph — the three central pillars of anti-trans coverage in the UK — are pretending the story is about a child identifying as a cat rather than two students picking on another student by comparing their gender identity to “[identifying] as a cat or something…”

    [writers and editors know] that there was no child “identifying as a cat” and the claim that the teacher reprimanded students for not accepting the other student’s feline identity is totally in bad faith.

    The cat-child is an urban legend beloved of anti-trans campaigners, and it’s made the press in various guises in the US, Australia and the UK. Every single time, it’s been complete bollocks. The origin is simple and sad: a few years ago it was revealed that in the aftermath of a school shooting, one US school started keeping cat litter as part of its terrorist kit: in the event of another shooting, the litter would be helpful because kids trapped in an ongoing attack would be able to go to the toilet.

    But that’s not all. Our schools are also packed with children identifying as horses, dinosaurs and the moon. Except, of course, they aren’t.

    The Daily Telegraph does not have extraordinary evidence, it has anonymous sources, obvious horseshit, and an ideological motivation to push this story.

    What we’re seeing here is a particularly clear example of how the bullshit pipeline works. I actually posted about it on Twitter, only to be proved right about ten minutes later:

    The danger of that Telegraph article, as ever, isn’t that its few readers will believe the made-up story. It’s that it launders hate group propaganda into the mainstream. It’s sitting on a BBC researcher’s desk right now as a possible phone-in discussion or news item.

    Ten minutes later, I discovered that they were talking about it as if it were a real news story on the Today programme.

    Here’s the pipeline in action.  First of all an anti-trans pressure group invents a story and passes it to a tame journalist in the right-wing press, who is perfectly happy to print absolute shite if it enrages the readers.

    That newspaper then makes its way to the BBC, where it becomes an item on the Today programme and gets the attention of politicians and other media outlets.

    That in turn circulates the made-up story more widely, encouraging the right-wing press to push the story more with a little bit of help from rent-a-gob MPs. And before you know it, the Prime Minister is promising to take action against something that didn’t happen, doesn’t happen and won’t ever happen – action that will likely cause very real harm to the very real people the anti-trans pressure group concocted the whole story to attack.

  • Gender recognition works

    There’s an important new report by TGEU in which it asked for official data around gender recognition self-determination – aka Self-ID – in Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. The focus was very much on finding evidence of gender self-determination not working, with requests including:

    • Have there been cases of “regret”? have people made repeat applications?
    • Have people used the law for fraud or with a criminal intent?
    • Are there negative effects from the law? Are single sex services for women affected?
    • Are there positive effects from the self-determination law?

    As you’re probably aware, these are the so-called “reasonable concerns” of anti-trans groups. And what did the data show?

    Our research finds that none of [the] previously expressed fears materialised.

    Which makes sense, because the fears were never based on reality; they’re based on an invented bogeyman, the cisgender man who will fake transition in order to assault women.

    The report found that:

    • Applications are not made for fraudulent reasons or to conceal abuse.

    • Applications are made after careful consideration.

    • In very few cases people filed a second application to return to a name or gender marker held before. Transphobic family and social environment are key factors.

    • Gender self-determination does not undermine gender equality quota measures for women’s equality.

    • The provision of single sex services, such as shelters, women support centres, changing facilities, hospitals, prison facilities, as well as equality data collection, are not affected.

    • Positive effects of the law clearly prevail.

    I don’t expect this to get any coverage; in the eyes of the UK press, there is something uniquely dangerous about British trans women (trans men, as ever, are not given any thought). Despite the fact that almost identical systems have been in place worldwide for years – nearly a decade in some cases – without any detrimental effect on women’s rights or safety, the anti-trans grift will grind on for as long as there are newspaper readers to terrify and bigots’ books to publicise.

  • A flower in concrete

    On a morning where the Prime Minister of Great Britain is caught on video making shit jokes about trans women to chortling MPs, and the government publishes guidance for schools urging teachers to out trans kids to their parents, something that can’t possibly have any negative results, it’s important to take your wins where you can. So this piece in The Observer is a welcome corrective to that paper’s near-constant transphobia, not least because it’s been promoted online by some senior Guardian/Observer writers who haven’t drank the bigoted kool-aid.

    The piece itself, by Kathryn Bromwich, is perfectly sensible and reasonable. So naturally her name was soon trending on UK Twitter as the usual avalanche of abusive arseholes descended on her, as they do to any woman who dares to say publicly that trans women are not the enemy of cisgender women.

    Here’s a quick extract from the piece.

    Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy; worse, it reduces women to their reproductive systems, which is surely something we should be trying to move on from.

    If women are united by anything – and there are 3.8 billion of us, so there is going to be little common ground – it is the risk of sexual violence, from which no woman is safe, especially not trans women. No rapist is going to stop to check whether you have fallopian tubes. The fact that we are all targets of this particular kind of violence should only increase cis women’s solidarity towards our trans sisters.

  • Parent power

    I’ve been keeping this secret for ages until it felt like I’d burst, but now I can go public: I’m appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year in stellar company. Kirsty Logan, Szilvia Monar and I will be talking about our memoirs and the minefield of modern parenting.

    The event is on at the Spark Theatre on Monday 28 August and tickets go on sale on 29 June.

  • Women should beware of period apps

    Yesterday, a UK court jailed a woman for taking abortion pills shortly after the UK limit during lockdown, when normal medical care was unavailable. There’s a great deal to be angry about here, not least the complete absence of the “protect women” crowd when it comes to protecting women’s reproductive rights. But there’s also a warning: if there’s any possibility that you might need an abortion at some point in your life, be very wary of what data you share with apps and websites.

    One of the details of this particular case is that the English police, as the US police have also been known to do, used the woman’s digital footprint as evidence against her; in this case it was her search history and message history. In the US, social media and smartphone location histories have been used to target women travelling out of state for abortions. Women and non-binary people have been flagging up the potential dangers of cycle tracking apps for some time too.

    We like to think that we’re more enlightened than the US, but we’re not: abortion in the UK is not decriminalised. And people seeking abortions can be betrayed by their digital footprint just as easily here as across the Atlantic.

  • And now we wait

    My GP thinks it’s highly likely that I have ADHD, which I contracted by watching TikTok videos, having friends with blue hair and reading about Critical Race Theory. *sideways look*

    I’ll no doubt write more about it some other time, but the tl;dr version is that my winning personality may actually be a neurological condition. Fun times!

    I received confirmation of my referral today, along with a bunch of questionnaires and a letter explaining that the current waiting time for any assessment is “approximately 80+ weeks”.

    I know what you’re thinking. 80+ weeks? For an initial assessment?

    Me, I’m probably not thinking what you’re thinking, because I have experience of trans healthcare. I’m thinking:

    Woah! Slow down there, Speedy Gonzales! Round here we measure wait times in years!

  • Panic! At the newspaper

    I wrote about moral panics in my book:

    When I was younger, there were moral panics over heavy metal records and the board game Dungeons & Dragons; the former allegedly contained backwards messages to worship Satan and/or kill yourself, and the latter was accused of pretty much everything. Similar panics occurred around video games, the Harry Potter books, the urban legend of Killer Clowns and so on.

    I’ve lived through other moral panics too, including the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s and the attempts by the Keep The Clause campaign and campaigners against equal marriage to persuade people that gay, lesbian and bi people were dangerous predators.

    The problem with moral panics is that while the subject is fictional, the damage the panic does is not. And it can spread far beyond the original subject of the panic too. Scientific American on the current anti-trans panic:

    The anti-trans laws send a message that nonreproductive sexuality, reproductive health and bodily autonomy are not acceptable. Ultimately this tells a story about who has power: if we can erase trans people then we can erase anyone; if we can remove gay books we can remove any book; if we can silence drag queens, we can silence you.

  • I’m in great company

    I’m very surprised and absolutely delighted to be included in Audible’s Pride List of Queer Storytelling, which has been created in association with LGBT+ writers’ organisation Out On The Page. Featuring recommendations from 42 LGBT+ writers and poets, it’s an excellent collection of must-read and must-listen books. I can’t believe I’m in the same list as so many writers I love.

    Thanks so much to Scott Aaron Tait for the kind words:

    Some books grip you from the first sentence and hold you in entranced until the end. Carrie Kills a Man is one such book… this is a must-read for everyone.