Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Pick-mes

    I’ve written many times that because trans people are normal people, they are just as varied as normal people – and that means some of us are idiots. Among the worst are people often described as “pick-mes”, which is a term used to describe members of a marginalised group who’ll happily throw their entire community under the bus to preserve their own status.

    I don’t know if it’s an age thing, but most of the trans pick-mes I’ve seen online are considerably older, transitioned a long time ago and tend to veer to the right politically. They don’t talk about trans rights much, but when they do it’s always victim-blaming: the war on trans people, in their view, is entirely trans people’s fault. It’s a profoundly ignorant and ahistorical perspective often expressed very vocally.

    Unfortunately this is nothing new. I’m reading Paul Baker’s superb Outrageous!, a history of the Section 28 era, and just like the trans pick-mes of today there were gay pick-mes in the late 1980s playing the same role: useful idiots against human rights.

    One strategy used by those in favour of [anti-gay legislation] was to try to separate off the ‘militant activists’ from ordinary ‘homosexuals’. Lord Annan said that the militants in the gay liberation movement wanted ‘a first-class row’ and ‘do not represent homosexuals any more than student union activists used to represent students. Homosexual men and women ask to be left to live their own lives.’ In a similar way, the Earl of Halsbury claimed he’d had a deluge of letters, many from homosexuals. He read out his ‘favourite letter’, which said, ‘I want to say how fed up I am with my fellow homosexuals. They have brought it upon themselves, their unpopularity. They are too promiscuous, too aggressive and exhibitionist. I cannot stand the sight of them. I wish they would keep themselves to themselves.’

    I try to have empathy for these people, who I know have suffered, but in all honesty it’s hard: they’d sacrifice the safety, dignity and human rights of the majority of trans and non-binary people to protect their own status as The One True Transsexual. And that means they’re enablers, human shields for some of the most hateful people on earth. Whether it’s stupidity, ego, trauma or a mix of some or all of these things I don’t know. But I do know that the people that hate the rest of us hate them too, and that those people won’t stop with us.

     

  • Carry on torturing

    In 2019, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland formally pledged to ban conversion therapy. In 2023, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland said that their bans would be introduced this year. This week, both the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland decided they were no longer going to ban conversion therapy. Officially that’s just for this year, but realistically it’s never.

    The reason, inevitably, is the unholy alliance of anti-trans bigots, religious lobbyists and the right-wing press, a Venn diagram that’s close to a single circle. The claim is that a ban is too complex, that it would criminalise legitimate psychological help, or that it would criminalise the wrong people. But the facts haven’t changed, and the facts are that such bans have been introduced all over the world without any problems. As we’ve discovered in countries such as Canada, Brazil, Spain, Germany, France, Malta and New Zealand, you can avoid being prosecuted for torturing children by simply not torturing children.

    And make no mistake, conversion therapy is torture: the UN described it as such in 2020, calling for a global end to the cruel and hideous practice. Amnesty International agrees. Conversion therapy is a breach of people’s basic human rights – specifically, article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The only psychologists and psychiatrists that support it are quacks: the practice has been condemned by both the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as medical bodies worldwide.

    There’s no debate here; you’re either in favour of torturing children or you aren’t. Seeing politicians cave to the pro-torture camp is as despicable as it is predictable.

  • eXodus

    I’m technically still a Twitter/X user, because I maintain an account there. But if you want to chat with me on social media, that’s no longer the place to do it. I’ve unfollowed absolutely everybody and deleted all my personalisation data so I’m not tempted to use it.

    It’s interesting to see what happens to the algorithmic For You feed when you do that: my feed is now made up largely of English football, Miley Cyrus fan sites, horrific anti-Black racism from known hate groups, plenty of transphobia and the occasional open-crotch porn photo. That, apparently, is what Twitter thinks you’re interested in if you’re an adult in the UK.

    I unfollowed everyone much later than I should have, based on something I just learned the name of today: an exodus shock. An exodus shock is an event that makes people leave a service for rivals, and in my case the latest one was Elon Musk’s blatantly antisemitic attacks on the ADL. Musk’s far-right views have been well known for a long time, but it’s his use of his Twitter account – an account that, unless you block him, will frequently appear in your feed – to actually publish antisemitism, racism and transphobia that was the final straw for me.

    There will be many more such shocks, because Twitter is too big to disappear overnight: there are too many users with too much to lose for it to lose everybody in one go. But with each new exodus shock, more people will move to Bluesky, to Threads, to Mastodon, to Instagram. And while none of those services is likely to become as big and central as Twitter was, that doesn’t mean they can’t be incredibly vital and commercially successful.

    I’m on quite a lot of social media sites now and I’m trying to make sense of them all and work out what to post where; so far I think Bluesky has the most irreverent old-Twitter vibes, Instagram is the best place to talk music and books, Threads still feels a bit half-finished and Mastodon just doesn’t seem to gel for me. So there are different social networks for different groups of people, with no clear winner so far. And that’s okay; I’m used to it. My first online adventures were on places like CompuServe and USENET and bulletin boards; this is the same thing with better typography.

    One thing I have noticed since essentially quitting Twitter is the effect on my mental health. It turns out that tuning in all day and all evening to some of the most toxic content on the internet isn’t great for you. That’s a lesson I should probably try to remember when, inevitably, the new Twitters start to resemble the broken one.

  • All the right friends

    I’d like to introduce you to my friends Laura, Amy and Steven. I don’t understand why Laura loves incredibly derivative and often idiotic punk rock, and she thinks that my beloved REM are one of the worst bands in human history. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Amy’s veganism, and she obviously doesn’t share my love of barbecuing steaks. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Steven’s love of country music, and he believes that my book should be banned and that I am a predatory paedophile who should be tarred, feathered and hung from a lamppost. Other than that…

    Steven isn’t real, of course, although there are many people who believe exactly what I’ve described. But of course, I’m not friends with those people any more than I would be friends with animal torturers, wife beaters or any other horrific humans. And this apparently makes me a bad person.

    One of the most annoying topics in the current awfulness of everything is the trope that the woke censorious left won’t be friends with people who don’t share their political views. That trope is bollocks, and AR Moxon has written an excellent explanation of why.

    It’s a very common lament: that there is no civility left these days, as compared to earlier days, and the main reason appears to be that those on the “left” refuse to be friends with those on the “right,” shunning them simply because of their political views.

    This implies something rather startling: American conservatives want to be friends with the rest of us. Had you realized? You’d never know it to listen to them, but apparently it is so, and the notion that some of us don’t want to be friends with them is one of the most pressing matters to be found in the opinion sections of our nation’s great newspapers and magazines and newsfortainment television programs.

    Moxon argues that the supposed polarity of left/right isn’t accurate, and suggests humanist/supremacist instead. The supremacist political view is that “other types of humans do not matter, and shouldn’t have space to exist and thrive as themselves, and should are abused and punished for any refusal to be dominated.” And yet “they feel strongly that friendship is something they still deserve, though it feels like something they actually want, and more like something they believe they’re owed.”

    I think Moxon makes a very important point about the discourse around this.

    Something I’ve noticed about professional civility mourners is that when they mourn the divisions over political views, they rarely mention what those views are, or what effect they have.

    That’s very true of the reporting around this, which frames “views” as some kind of abstract thing without any actual consequences. So for example the “view” that there are too many trans people and that their numbers should be reduced, which is genocidal, is presented as if it were an opinion about wallpaper or a TV show. All too often, “views” are considered more important than the actual people those views are about and targeted towards.

    There is not a debate if one side believes that all Black people, all Jewish people or all LGBTQ+ people should be killed and the other side is the Black people, the Jewish people or the LGBTQ+ people that the other side want to kill. And yet all too often that’s exactly how these things are presented, and have been for a very long time. The BBC famously used the headline “Should homosexuals face execution?” in a piece about Uganda’s anti-gay persecution just over ten years ago. The “should” turns what should be absolute horror into a nice dinner party chat.

    Of course, not all views are so extreme. But many supremacist ones are, no matter how politely they’re expressed. And there is not an equally hateful and violent other side.

    Moxon:

    nobody is trying to strip supremacists of their vote, or ensure that they will go bankrupt over medical care, or force them to give birth to their rapist’s baby, or murder them at the border, or take away their children, or frame the continuance of their lives as a cost rather than a value, as something that must be earned, as something that is undeserved. In fact, these are things that the humanist spirit is trying to ensure even they will be safe from, which actually seems like the friendliest posture a person can take, toward somebody who has decided to be their enemy.

    And yet we’re expected to be friends with people who want those things for us. Moxon uses the analogy of schoolyard bullies who want us to sit at their lunch table as sycophants: “If you want to be friends, why don’t you ever come sit with us? Why is the demand that we come sit with you instead? Why do you want so badly for only some of us to sit over with you, and why aren’t the rest of our friends ever welcome at your table?”

    If you want friends, why aren’t you willing to be friendly?

    Do you want to be friends? Is friends what is desired here?

    I don’t think so, actually.

    I think what’s being sought is accomplices.

    And I think that’s true. It’s freedom of speech as a demand for freedom of consequences all over again: some of the world’s worst people demanding that the world conforms to what they want, and never the other way around. It’s portrayed as a basic human right when it’s nothing of the sort. Friendship is a contract, and the terms of that contract is that if you turn out to be an arsehole, the deal is off.

    In a previous piece, Moxon talked about the abuse of freedom of speech in more detail.

    It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.

    Moxon believes, as I do, that it’s perfectly appropriate for awful people to be shunned because of the things they say and do.

    There are worse things than shunning. There are shelves empty of books. There are people dying from deliberately manufactured medical policy. There are actual attacks upon freedom and speech. There is supremacy. There is genocide.

    …At a certain point, it seems to me that we have to conclude that what such people are actually advocating for is not to use sunlight to expose and disinfect our society of bigotry, but simply to have a society in which bigotry is free to dance in the sun.

  • Erasure

    It’s very hard to write about the grifters, bigots and assorted arseholes waging war on trans people and make it entertaining, let alone funny, but Liz Crash manages it with great aplomb in her piece about the supposed “erasure” of lesbian women by trans women, a claim beloved of far-right goons and their useful idiots. It’s as wise and well-informed as it is funny.

    Now, I’m something of a lesbian myself, and from my perspective—putting aside for a minute the housing crisis, COVID-19, the cost of living, psychiatrist fees, Sarina Russo, fentanyl in the pingers, climate change, and global fascism—there’s never been a better time to be a lesbian.

  • Where’s the rush?

    The London Gender Identity Clinic has just updated its waiting list information: as of July 2023 it was making first appointments for people first referred in July/August 2018, five years ago. With 324 new referrals each month and 55 first appointments offered per month, it’s clear that that five year figure is only going to increase.

    Maths isn’t my strong point. But a service that’s only seeing 20% of new referrals each month is a service that’s adding 80% of new referrals to a waiting list that’s already five years long. So if you’re referred today, your waiting time won’t be measured in months, weeks or even years; it’ll be decades.

    In Scotland, where the population is smaller and we have a different NHS, things are marginally better: the Edinburgh gender service is currently making first appointments for people referred two years ago. However in Glasgow, which covers a much bigger area (and oversees all surgery-related care for Lothian, Tayside and Grampian NHS areas too) and is the largest such clinic in Scotland, the waiting list for adults is around five years, up from four years in late 2022.

    Gender services are not bound by the same Referral To Treatment (RTT) and Treatment Time Guarantees (TTG), which mandate that patients should not have to wait more than 18 weeks between referral and the beginning of treatment. Rather, the care for trans people is best illustrated by a small but telling detail: if you believe that the wait for an appointment is affecting your mental health, NHS Scotland will direct you to a page of mental health resources on the Sandyford website. When you visit the page you’ll see a short, simple message: “The page you requested was removed.”

    One of the reasons that waiting lists are growing (other than the fact that trans healthcare is centralised when most of it could easily be handled by GPs) is because where there are vacancies, as there are in Sandyford, the current viciously anti-trans climate makes vacancies hard to fill: in the case of the Sandyford you don’t just have to brave online abuse but run a gauntlet of bodycam-wearing Christian extremists to get in the front door on some days. And while the wider faults in trans healthcare have been glaringly apparent for many years now, no politician is going to demand the improvements that are so desperately needed when you know exactly how the press and pressure groups would spin it.

    I’d love to live in the fantasy world the bigots describe, where you simply refer yourself to a clinic and have hormones and surgery the same day. It’s much nicer than the reality, in which our healthcare is little more than a link to a web page that doesn’t even exist.

  • Temporarily inaudible

    If you’re looking for Carrie Kills A Man on Audible right now, you won’t find it. I’m tempted to pretend that it’s because I’ve been silenced and get myself a few weeks of national newspaper and broadcasting publicity, but I’m too honest to do that. It’s an admin thing and it’ll be back on the service in a couple of weeks.

  • An evil plan

    In bad movies, villains like to explain in advance what they’re going to do. And in the bad movie we currently appear to be living in, the Christian Right does that too. Often, the most hateful plans and strategies are discussed openly at their conferences or published in their strategy documents.

    A good example of that was the 2017 Values Voter Summit in Washington DC, where the strategy to attack trans people was set out in full: by using a divide and conquer strategy to try and separate the T from the LGB, the Christian Right believed they could use trans people as a wedge against human rights more widely. They would do that in two ways: first of all, by portraying their attempts to remove trans people’s rights as trans people demanding more rights; and secondly, by pushing the message that those rights would remove the rights of others, such as lesbian women and female athletes. As you know, it’s a strategy that so far has been highly successful both in the US and the UK, partly through the Hands Across The Aisle initiative to team up Christian evangelicals with supposedly left-wing feminists and feminist journalists.

    If you thought that one was bad, you should see what they’re working on now.

    As Brynn Tannehill reports, Project 2025 – a coalition of despicable organisations including our old friends the Heritage Foundation (a key influence on the UK government and the main driver of this project), the Alliance Defending Freedom (a key player in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic) and many others – has published a 900-page strategy document that’s truly terrifying and that it hopes will inform the next US presidential term. I’m looking at it here from a trans perspective but it’s also horrifying for Black people, for women, for disabled people and civilisation generally.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of government… The business wish list calls for eliminating federal agencies, stripping those that remain of regulatory power, and deregulating industries. The president would directly manage and influence Department of Justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted, and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws.

    As Tannehill says, it’s effectively a wish-list for the evangelical right. And their wishes regarding LGBTQ+ people are frightening.

    “The Mandate for Leadership” makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority.

    It’s important to consider the document in its wider context, because at the moment in the US many states are passing laws to restrict people’s access to pornographic content. But the Right’s definition of pornography probably isn’t your definition, because it includes the simple existence of LGBTQ+ people.

    So when you read this:

    Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

    You need to understand that “it” includes my book, this blog, The Advocate, Autostraddle, the Trevor Project’s suicide hotline and anything else that provides any information whatsoever about LGBTQ+ people. We know this because they’re already trial-running it in the form of laws such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

    And that’s just the beginning. Tannehill:

    It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to “eradicate transgenderism from public life.”

    That eradication is real.

    The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule 

    The document decries “the toxic normalisation of transgenderism” that it claims is “invading” school libraries and says that its very top priority is to:

    Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

    That’s not a dog whistle. That’s a five-alarm wake-up call in a document that sets out very clearly how the Christian Right intends to turn the US into a theocracy.

    Tannehill:

    The question remains: Will they be able to get all of this past the Supreme Court? Perhaps not in the short run. But over time, if given the power, they will replace current justices with those they hand-pick to give them the decisions they want, just as they did to end Roe v. Wade. Conservatives at the Claremont Institute have stated that they intend to seize power for generations and remake the U.S. entirely in their image. The “Mandate for Leadership” is an announcement of their goals, and the roadmap to achieving them.

  • Taliban fans

    Last year, trans people wryly joked that it was just a matter of time before some anti-trans dolt praised the Taliban because “at least they know what a woman is”. That dolt turned out to be Julia Hartley-Brewer, who tweeted on 29 August: “At least the Taliban know what a woman is” in response to a tweet noting that the Taliban “beheads and murders women and gay people”. Hartley-Brewer’s tweet appears to have been liked by JK Rowling, whose people told the press earlier this year that she’d helped people trying to escape the same regime.

    Praising the profoundly, viciously misogynist, homophobic and transphobic Taliban is very much on brand for so-called gender criticals, and many of them display a level of ignorance and idiocy that’s truly impressive. Such as today’s post by “Joanna”, who told a trans woman that “you, as a man, would not be subjected to what women in Afghanistan are. Why? Because you are a MAN.”

    As the woman in question, Katy Montgomerie, pointed out, there are only two possible fates for trans women under the Taliban. If they pass – ie they’re perceived to be cisgender women – then they will be oppressed just like any other woman. And if they don’t, they will be treated like other LGBTQ+ people, many of whom are attacked or sexually assaulted because of their orientation or gender identity: abused, attacked, sometimes even tortured or executed.

    Human Rights Watch has an excellent and horrifying article about life for queer people under the Taliban.

    Despite making repeated pledges to respect human rights, the Taliban have engaged in widespread rights abuses since retaking control of the country, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and land grabbing. The danger now facing LGBT people in Afghanistan—in an environment devoid of legal protections, under authorities that have explicitly pledged not to tolerate LGBT people—is grave.

    As Foreign Policy reports:

    Since the Taliban takeover last August, members of the Afghan LGBTQ community have faced electrocution, torture, killings, and fear.

    Here’s DW talking about Danish, a trans person.

    Danish has been living in semidarkness for weeks. Since the Taliban’s takeover in mid-August, he has been hiding in the windowless back room of a friend’s now-closed shop in Kabul. He no longer dares go outside. Under the Islamist Taliban, he and many like him face the death penalty… Everyday discrimination against LGBTQ individuals is ubiquitous, as is violence against them.

    But at least the Taliban know what a woman is, right?

  • Flickring out

    I joined the photo sharing site Flickr in the early 2000s and closed my account this week, nearly two decades later. I’d have closed it a couple of years ago but I’d forgotten all about it: the only reason I still had an account was to share photos with my mum, who at the time could still use a tablet computer, and to easily share byline photos with publishers and publicists. What used to be a social network had become little more than file storage and I’ve long since moved to better options.

    If you’re as old as I am you’ll remember the days when Flickr was talked about in the same sentences as MySpace and Blogger: it was part of the Web 2.0 boom when what became known as user generated content began to populate the online world. We’d been sharing stuff before, of course: my first experiences online were on USENET and CompuServe, which relied on content provided by service users. But Web 2.0 felt different, because the sites that enabled sharing (and hoped to profit from it by selling ads around it) made it incredibly easy and friction-free. Posting a photo to Twitter or a blog to Blogger was the beginning of a conversation. These were the days when Friends Reunited was a UK phenomenon and nobody had heard of Facebook.

    What went wrong at Flickr is pretty much what went wrong with many social media hits: owner Yahoo!, which acquired the service in 2007, neglected it and took its users for granted. It either didn’t see Facebook and Instagram coming or just suffered from Not Invented Here Syndrome, which is when a firm refuses to see the iceberg that’s about to sink it. Blackberry famously had Not Invented Here Syndrome when Apple showed off the very first iPhone.

    Where the original Flickr led the pack, the Yahoo-owned version lagged behind. It didn’t even have an app until 2009, by which point Facebook wasn’t so much eating its lunch as sneaking into its kitchen and clearing out the fridge. The app was terrible, and remained so through 2010 when Instagram turned photo sharing into an extremely big hit. Yahoo took another two years to make a similarly decent app but updates to the service were few and far between; it increasingly felt abandoned by its owners, its forums full of complaints from unhappy early adopters.

    Eventually Yahoo, which itself had been bought by Verizon, sold Flickr to SmugMug, who clearly didn’t have a clue what made the site work in the first place and didn’t have much money to throw at it either. Without Yahoo’s deep pockets the new Flickr removed the unlimited storage for free users and hiked the price of Pro accounts. Users fled in their millions.

    Of course the whole story is a bit bigger than that, and includes Meta (formerly Facebook) being very aggressive in its “if it’s a competitor, buy it or bury it” strategy; it bought Instagram and chucked serious money at it, and it’s doing the same with its Instagram spin-off Threads now. But many – most – of Flickr’s wounds were self-inflicted.

    Today, like Blogger, Flickr is still going – but it’s limping rather than sprinting. It still has its loyal users, mostly the keen photographers who loved it from the start. But most of us share on Google Photos, or iCloud Photos, or Instagram, or Facebook. At its peak Flickr had around 90 million monthly users; it’s believed to have around 7.6 million now, of which roughly 30% are in the US – so just over 2 million, with a further 87,000 in Europe according to Flickr’s own EU reporting. By comparison, Instagram has 2.35 billion.

    It’s interesting to compare Flickr to Twitter, or X as only Elon Musk and his sycophants call it. Because what we’re seeing with Flickr, and what I think we’re seeing with Twitter, is very much like Mike The Chicken of Fruita, Colorado. Mike became famous in the late 1940s because he managed to run around quite happily despite having been decapitated. The killer blow happened in late 1945, but Mike didn’t actually keel over until early 1947 – and he might have lived even longer if he hadn’t suffered the accident that finally killed him. I think the fatal blow for Flickr was the Yahoo takeover, and the Twitter one was the Musk purchase. Both networks are dying, but they’ve still got a little bit of running around to do.