Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • AI won’t save publishing

    A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI. And that access is cheap.

    You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.

    As tech writers of some vintage, Ian and I have both seen many technological waves disrupt publishing: the move to digital, the pivot to video, the rise of search engine optimisation, the rise of reviews that aren’t reviews and many more. Each time, some publishers – including very big and successful ones – have sacrificed long-term credibility and ultimately viability for short-term returns, only to see those returns disappear as a new disruptor comes to town. There are countless formerly great publications that have lost significant readerships, or disappeared completely, because of that short-termism.

    And AI isn’t the only disruption that’s here right now: the current obsession with Google traffic and affiliate revenues that means everybody covers the same product stories and deals is running out of time too.

    As Betteridge rightly points out, publishers have assets that AI and cheapskate rivals don’t: “decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams.” Wise publishers will be thinking of how to empower and amplify them, not replace them.

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.

  • Acceptable damage

    My friend was humiliated on the Glasgow subway last night.

    My friend is a conventionally attractive thirtysomething cisgender woman with great fashion sense and brightly coloured hair. This, apparently, was enough to convince a carriage full of men that she was transgender. In between breaks to snort cocaine from a shared bag, the men loudly abused her, shouting the t-slur and other transphobic and homophobic abuse.

    She’s as okay as you can be in such circumstances, but it was a horrific experience – and it’s an experience that’s becoming increasingly common in public for anybody who doesn’t fit a very narrow view of acceptable femininity, because transphobia has become the bigotry it’s okay – and often even encouraged – to express. To the anti-trans mob, the abuse of cisgender women is simply acceptable, collateral damage mixed with victim blaming: if cis women don’t want to be abused by howling arseholes on public transport, they should present themselves more demurely.

  • Unethical. Unscientific. Unsafe

    The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is largely banned (so for example it’s been stopped in my bit of Scotland). And now the NHS in England is turning its attention to teenagers. Its new policies are unethical, unscientific and unsafe, and have effectively banned best practice healthcare for trans teens.

    Healthcare will be withheld – a clear human rights violation – if patients don’t agree to be part of research studies – another human rights violation; patients have the right not to be forced into such studies – and private clinicians who provide the care the NHS denies may be investigated by regulators with the threat of withdrawing their licence to practice medicine. The proposed protocols enshrine dangerous and discredited conversion therapy as a preferred course of action instead of providing evidenced and effective treatment we know to be life-enhancing and in some cases life-saving.

    This article by Susie Green goes into the detail.

    What we’re seeing here is healthcare decisions made not by clinicians but by columnists; not by medical experts but by propagandists.

    Green:

    So where did these protocols come from? Who created them? We don’t know and they aren’t telling us. It seems ridiculous that they would ignore WPATH Standards of Care V8, especially when you consider the rigorous work done to ensure that it is based on extensive literature review and contributions, and scrutiny from over 4,000 clinicians worldwide who specialise in transgender healthcare. But with a government hellbent on damaging trans people as a way to distract from their failings, I don’t think it is difficult to work out that NHSE has become a politically manipulated service. And trans people are the ones who are suffering because of it… [the NHS] doesn’t want to improve trans healthcare for children. They want to stop it.

    These new protocols aren’t medical. They’re political.

  • Training wheels of hate

    I don’t generally comment on modern horrors such as the deaths in Gaza or in US classrooms because I don’t have anything to say beyond heartfelt but trite platitudes. But there’s a detail about the ongoing situation in Maine, where a man recently discharged from a mental hospital has killed nearly 20 people, that’s worth highlighting.

    At the time of writing the mass murderer Robert Card is still on the run, but there’s a growing body of evidence showing what motivated him. And surprise surprise, Twitter is in there – so much so that Elon Musk apparently had Card’s account pulled from the service, presumably because it shows how much time Card spent on Musk’s timelines and on those of other right-wingers. The logs are widely available online and it’s very much a case of Musk Musk Musk Carlson Musk Donald Trump Musk… you get the idea.

    Not only that but one of the paths to his radicalisation appears to be that favourite of the far right, the supposed danger of trans people: among his recent likes on Twitter, Card liked posts from Donald Trump Jr and by Tucker Carlson railing against the supposed dangers of “trans/non-binary mass shooters” and how the trans movement is the “natural enemy” of Christians and “pushing their gender affirming bullshit on our kids”. As Wired puts it, his Twitter profile “was filled with conspiracy theories about trans mass shooters and pro-MAGA content.”

    I’ve written about this before: it’s called stochastic terrorism, a way of inciting violence while keeping your own hands clean. The Donald Trump Jrs, Tucker Carlsons and other sulphurous bastards of the world don’t commit acts of terrorism. But their words are read by and fuel the hatred of people who do. And in a country where severe mental illness and domestic violence convictions are no barrier to assault rifle ownership, that hatred can lead to unspeakable horrors.

    It’s too early to say definitively what caused Card to become a killer, and of course these things are multi-factorial: this particular toxic cocktail appears to include severe mental illness, among other things. But again and again we’re seeing the internet radicalising people to kill, and increasingly that radicalisation includes anti-trans propaganda – because the far right use that as a gateway to further radicalisation, the training wheels of hate.

  • HRT+DNA

    Over at Stained Glass Woman, Doc Impossible has written a fun piece about HRT and what it does regarding DNA.  As ever, the “basic biology” crowd are ignorant about actual biology: the super-short version is that DNA is an instruction book but hormones decide which specific instructions your body will actually follow. Change those hormones and the body changes too, and not just superficially.

    I love this stuff: as in other areas of science, the more we know the more we discover about the sheer complexity, variety and, if faith is your thing, miraculousness of it all. To paraphrase Hamlet: there are more things in heaven and Earth than are understood by social media science deniers.

  • Going the distance

    There’s a fascinating piece in Scientific American that brings together many years of debunking: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong.

    Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it’s wrong.

    This appears to be one of those things that “everybody knows” but which turns out to be based on a bunch of guys making shit up, in this case in a collection called Man The Hunter published in the mid-1960s. The authors of the collection arrived at their conclusion – essentially, Men Are The Best Because Science – by ignoring all the evidence that disproved it.

    The religious and social conservatives on the internet, inevitably, are losing their shit over this because the article makes it very clear yet again that many of the tenets of gender essentialism – that male and female roles are hard-wired in biology, so women should be kept barefoot and pregnant while men go out and do man stuff – are absolute bollocks. Man is not a hunter and woman is not a gatherer; that view is based on an interpretation of history that is increasingly proven to be false. Biologically speaking, women are much more suited to hunting – of the prehistoric kind – than men and there is no evidence that they were left to look after the kids while the men went chasing prey. And that’s an inconvenient truth for the faith over facts crowd.

    Where the article gets really interesting is in its focus on a key hormone: not testosterone, but estrogen.

    Given the fitness world’s persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance.

    It’s well worth a read.

     

  • Now that’s funny

    From Popbitch:

    The intensity of internet discourse can sometimes create an overinflated sense of just how interested the general public is in certain stories.

    For instance, Graham Linehan’s new memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy sold 390 copies in its first week – including pre-sales. A figure that fails to place it in the Top 1000.

    To put that into context, titles that did crack the Top Thou include: a large print wordsearch book in at No.551, which sold more than twice that; and a colouring book called Dinosaurs Around The World, which sold over 2,000.

    He’s currently claiming to have sold tens of thousands of copies, apparently unaware that “ordered by bookshops who thought serialisation in two national newspapers would mean a lot of sales” and “actually bought by people” are not the same thing. Books not sold are returned to the publisher after a set period.

    Hilarious hubris aside, the opening paragraph of the Popbitch piece is key here: that story, and the trouncing of the Tories in last night’s by-election, are yet more evidence that the anti-trans culture war is an obsession of a very small group of people: newspaper proprietors, right-wing politicians and obsessive internet trolls.

    Update: in fairness, it’s worth pointing out that the figures won’t include pre-sales sold directly via the publisher, which is where the author’s biggest fans will have been getting their copies from. But that just further proves the point that the general public just isn’t interested.

  • Pop perfection

    I went to see the Taylor Swift tour film last night. It’s one of the greatest live music things I’ve ever seen, and if you’re even vaguely interested in pop music it’s definitely worth a trip to the IMAX. Swift is a fantastic songwriter, an incredible performer and the sound and staging of the show are as good as it gets.

    I’m well aware that I’m going to sound like an old woman saying this, but I am one so that’s how it’s going to come out. I think I enjoyed the tour movie more than I would have enjoyed the gig. It’s not just the ridiculous cost of tickets (the cheapest ones I saw were £300) and the travelling to Edinburgh, which is the nearest stop on the tour to me. It’s that an awful lot of people who go to gigs are awful, and have become more so since the COVID lockdowns. It’s not an original observation I know but it does feel like a lot of people forgot how to behave in public, and as a result gigs – particularly big gigs by famous people – are often ruined by shitfaced people loudly talking to their friends or worse, FaceTiming them and loudly yelling at the same time.

    The other factor is the venues themselves. Football and rugby stadiums were built for football and rugby, not music, and they are places where sound goes to die. Unless you’re down by the front the wind carries a lot of the top end away, and your view will be of faraway screens. While the staging of Swift’s show (and of other big-gig masters such as U2) is built for big spaces and does a good job of spectacle, the view and sound and experience you get from the not-cheap seats isn’t close to what you get from the cosy seats of the IMAX. And yet while Swift tickets sold out in seconds for Edinburgh, the IMAX in Glasgow last night was only half full.

  • Scared, tired and alone

    Huffington Post:

    The Conservative government has upped its anti-transgender rhetoric recently, leaving people “scared, tired and alone”, charities have told HuffPost UK.

    …It’s not just the prime minister, either. The health secretary Steve Barclay used the Tory conference to announce that he wants to introduce a policy where trans women would be banned from female-only wards. Five other cabinet ministers took aim at the community too.

    We’ve seen this happen in other countries and we are sadly very aware of where it leads. Scared, tired and alone doesn’t begin to describe how I feel right now.