Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • History revealed

    It’s well known – well, well known outside anti-trans circles – that trans people were targeted by the Nazis; the famous book-burning photograph that pretty much everybody in the world has seen was taken in 1933 when Nazi thugs looted the Institute of Sexology and burnt its research into trans and gender non-conforming people. However, like most people aware of this I thought that trans people were targeted not so much because they were trans, but because as far as the Nazis were concerned trans and gay were the same thing.

    That’s partly true, but not wholly true. It turns out that some trans people were indeed targeted, and murdered, simply because they were trans.

    This horrifying piece in The Conversation is about how scholars are uncovering more details about how trans people were treated by the Nazis. It isn’t a fun read.

    The author of a 1938 book on “the problem of transvestitism” wrote that before Hitler was in power, there was not much that could be done about transgender people, but that now, in Nazi Germany, they could be put in concentration camps or subjected to forced castration. That was good, he believed, because the “asocial mindset” of trans people and their supposedly frequent “criminal activity … justifies draconian measures by the state.”

    There are some very clear parallels with present-day anti-trans activism and politicians, and not just because Neo-Nazis keep turning up at anti-trans rallies. It’s because othering and oppressing marginalised groups is what fascism does: it tells you that group X is a conspiracy, that their very existence is a threat to your nation, your women and your children. It calls them a virus, a contagion, dehumanises them and demands their elimination.

    This is something the academic and writer Judith Butler tried to express in an interview with The Guardian in late 2021, only for the relevant sections to be deleted after publication.

    You can read the deleted sections in full here, but here’s an extract:

    It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender… The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism… we are living in anti-intellectual times, and neo-fascism is becoming more normalized.

  • Careless talk costs lives

    Casey Newton is one of the smartest people writing about technology, and this piece – the platforms give up on 2020 lies – is absolutely chilling. It’s about social networks’ reversal of their disinformation policies and their new unwillingness to censor dangerous content. As ever, Elon Musk is in the mix.

    One function Musk now serves in the tech ecosystem is to give cover to other companies seeking to make unpalatable decisions. Across a variety of dimensions, Musk has moved fast and loudest — and when others have followed, the response has been barely a whimper.

    Mass layoffs, stricter job performance requirements, a war on remote work, paid verification for social accounts — all of these served as a kind of aphrodisiac for other Silicon Valley CEOs, who proceeded to implement their own, slightly softer versions of Musk’s cultural reset.

    Most recently, Twitter’s decaying policy and enforcement systems have proven to be enticing for other social platforms.

    We’ve known for a very long time that unchecked, unregulated media can easily become a disinformation machine, a sewer full of the most poisonous propaganda. Here’s Jonathan Swift back in 1710.

    Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

    And of course, the Big Lie was at the heart of Nazi strategy too. We know how this works: not so long ago Facebook was a key vector of hatred that lead to the Myanmar genocide. Social media is a powerful thing, and all too easily becomes a powerful weapon.

    Newton:

    We are in for an ugly time. And should the worst happen, I hope we remember this: the moment when tech platforms, having briefly banded together to do the right thing, looked each other in the eye and one by one all gave up.

    It’s no coincidence that just yesterday we saw violent thugs attacking parents outside a Pride Month school board meeting in California while social media influencers incite violence against LGBT+ people, their families, their supporters and their healthcare providers; I really hope I’m wrong, but I think this year’s Pride Month is going to have a body count – and social media will have played a huge part in making that happen.

  • Satanic

    According to Media Matters, in the last seven days Fox News has given airtime to two stories about protecting children.

    The first story was the false allegation that Target was selling “satanist kids’ clothes” as part of its Pride merchandise. Fox News gave that two hours and twelve minutes.

    The second story was the horrific revelation that in Illinois, between 1950 and 2019 nearly 2,000 children were sexually abused by Catholic priests. Some 450 priests were revealed as abusers.

    Fox gave that story 22 seconds.

  • Diamonds in the mud

    The UK edition of The Guardian and its Sunday sister The Observer is openly transphobic and effectively the house magazine of the “gender critical” mob; as Trans Writes reports, during its recent diversity and inclusion events a group of senior writers and editors discussed their plans to push anti-trans narratives “fearlessly” in front of an audience of around 120 employees. But despite their best efforts, sometimes The Guardian still manages to publish good journalism about trans people.

    Most of that journalism happens in the US edition, whose writers once wrote an open letter condemning the UK Guardian’s transphobia. Here are some examples:

    Republican attacks on trans people smack of fascism – Robert Reich

    Conservative attacks on US abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place– Moira Donegan

    But sometimes a lone voice manages to get something sensible published in the UK edition, and that lone voice is usually Zoe Williams. I’ve long admired Williams’ writing, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be a lone voice of sanity in an increasingly deranged organisation.

    Her latest article, why are trans rights in prison so rarely defended?, is very good.

    I also thought the furore was in such obvious bad faith that it would fizzle out: anyone with a sincere interest in the welfare of women in prison would also be interested in a host of other things, from staffing levels to self-harm and suicide, from mental health to the fallout post-Covid. The same year that White committed some of her offences, 2016, saw the highest number of female deaths in custody on record. If your only documented interest in the female prison estate is in transgender prisoners, surely it would be obvious that your real beef was trans rights, and your campaign would gain no momentum? That turned out not to be true.

    One of the points that Williams makes in her piece is that the danger of trans prisoners has been massively and constantly exaggerated: of the 97 sexual assaults in women’s prisons between 2016 and 2020, just seven were perpetrated by trans prisoners. What her article also said, but didn’t make it into print, is that five of those assaults were perpetrated by the same person. So this entire panic, which is being used to suggest that all trans women are dangerous to all women, focuses on just three people and ignores the much wider problem of women’s safety in prisons. Not only that, but since those three attacks, the rules have been changed.

    Since the prison regulation on trans prisoners was reformed in 2019, (which made it more difficult for those convicted of any violent crime to switch between estates) there have been no assaults by trans prisoners on women in prison. It seems pretty obvious that if the majority of sexual assaults in the women’s estate are committed by prisoners who are not trans, then a relentless focus on trans prisoners is not going to keep women safe.

    But as with the rest of the anti-trans panic, none of this is about facts; it’s about scaremongering and othering trans people.

    it just didn’t occur to me that the behaviour of trans prisoners would be used to tarnish the characters of all trans people and call into question their legitimacy in any single-sex space. You simply can’t infer anything broader from the behaviour of inmates: they are an outlier population. That’s why they’re in prison.

  • Spoil the child

    The idea that parental love is unconditional is just that: an idea. The reality is often much more harsh, especially for LGBT+ kids: although by most estimates only around one in 10 people are LGBT+, nearly one-fifth of all young homeless people are LGBT+. 69% of those kids have experienced violence, abuse or rejection from the family home.

    Multiple studies report that attitudes to LGBT+ people are improving in the general population, but that’s not much consolation if your mum, dad, stepdad or stepmum is one of the dwindling number of homophobic parents. And it’s even less consolation if you’re trans or non-binary, because understanding and acceptance of trans and non-binary people still has much further to go. Rates of domestic abuse and violence from family members are significantly higher for trans and non-binary people.

    As trans researcher and author Julia Serano puts it:

    Almost without exception, parents never expect that their children are transgender. And that disbelief may persist for a very long time.

    I think that’s common. In a workshop with parents carried out by Healthtalk.org, parents described their feelings when their trans or non-binary kids came out to them; many parents say they were surprised and shocked, fearful for their kids’ futures; some didn’t believe it was even possible for a young person to be trans.

    There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on here. Fear’s the biggie, because to be trans, even now (and especially now in some parts of the US and UK) is to go through life on hard mode. There’s fear that they’re making a huge mistake, that they may be discriminated against or face violence, that they may undergo treatment they might later regret… all the obvious stuff. And for many parents this is both frightening and new, because the information most people have about trans people is sketchy at best and a pack of lies at worst.

    So there’s fear. But there’s also guilt; one of the big questions my mum asked when she’d got used to me being trans was whether she’d been the cause of it. I was able to reassure her that being trans doesn’t work like that, but I recognise the feeling: whenever my kids are unwell, I agonise over what I might have done to cause it or what I should have done to prevent it. And that’s just when they have a tummy bug, not gender incongruence.

    And there’s another horrible emotion: shame. Here’s Jonathan L. Tobkes, M.D, writing in Psychology Today.

    I remember that when I discovered that my son was gay, I felt shame. I was not ashamed of him, but I thought his orientation might cause outsiders or friends to criticize our family. I did not want our family to be seen as “different.” If we were regarded as having a child, who is a member of a minority group now, I thought that this new definition could be a source of shame.

    While the stigma around having a gay kid is lessening, once again understanding and acceptance of trans kids is far behind.

    So let’s imagine you’re a parent of a young boy or girl. One day, out of the blue, they tell you that they’re non-binary, or maybe trans. What do you do?

    Let’s assume that you’re not the kind of parent who’ll respond with violence, with abuse, or by throwing your kid out on the street. I think for a lot of parents, your initial reaction is going to be disbelief. This is a bombshell; there were no signs. And maybe all you know about trans kids is the shite that’s in your newspaper: trans people were invented on social media in 2017. It’s a phase, a fad, attention-seeking.

    So you go online, and you look for people to confirm what you believe: that your child is not non-binary; that your child is not trans; that no child of yours could be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual. And if you go online, you’ll find it.

    Welcome to the anti-trans parent movement.

    A huge amount of anti-trans stories are based on the testimony of or activism by parents who frequent a handful of websites, and who are absolutely convinced that their children are not non-binary or trans. Many of those parents swap tips on how to completely isolate your child from their friends and how to bully them into recanting. A handful will tell you it’s a conspiracy by paedophiles, Big Pharma and the Jews. Some, whose children are now adults, talk about how their child, and sometimes their friends and family too, no longer talks to them.

    The Julia Serano quote towards the top of this article is from her piece about those websites, and it’s typically well researched, interesting and frightening.

    Some parents come into these groups with strong pre-existing views on trans people (e.g., social conservative or GC/TERF), while many others are initially trans-unaware and simply seeking answers in the wake of their children coming out to them. Either way, because these online communities tell parents exactly what they want to hear (“your child isn’t really trans, they’ve just been influenced by an insidious outside force and we can help you dispel it”), many find these spaces and the misinformation they propagate to be quite compelling.

    The (made-up) theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria was invented on one of those sites, and the paper that attempted to legitimise it drew solely from users of the same website. The websites, as Serano puts it, are “steeped in science denialism and distrusting the medical establishment.” The most infamous were created as a backlash to older websites that helped parents learn how to understand and support their children; the anti-trans ones were created for the much smaller number of parents who don’t want to understand and don’t want to offer support.

    The menu available to you, a concerned parent, starts with misinformation and disinformation and ultimately leads to torture: some of the better known sites guide parents to practitioners of dangerous and discredited conversion therapies (described as “torture” by the UN) or offer advice on how to bully your kids without outside help.

    Serano’s article is an excellent guide to how the sites operate, how they recruit and radicalise parents and how those parents then spread their message through mainstream media. And I think a lot of what Julia writes about is pretty universal.

    I have never met a trans person whose parents weren’t surprised when they first came out. Trans people who were overtly gender nonconforming as children are told “we just thought you were gay.” I know trans people who insisted that they were really a boy or really a girl from a young age (only to be disaffirmed by their parents at the time) and who, upon coming out as trans as adults, their parents still acted shocked. I know trans parents who were surprised when their own children came out to them as trans.

    Given that surprise and disbelief, it’s not a shock that many parents are easy marks for the anti-trans obsessives and their associated crowdfunding grifts.

    Despite what you read online, most people who come out as trans or non-binary do so because they’re trans or non-binary. Kids who are experimenting with their gender expression are not necessarily trans (and are unlikely to do more than dress differently, change their haircut and try on a different name, all of which are of course easily undone), but kids who are insistent, consistent and persistent about being trans very rarely backtrack. Adults who undergo gender reassignment surgery – surgery that in the UK, only adults can access and which typically requires years spent languishing on ever-growing waiting lists – have a regret rate that’s incredibly low. The number of trans people who regret surgery/transition is vanishingly small – less than 2% – and of that number, most of the people who go back to their gender assigned at birth do so not because they aren’t trans or non-binary but because their world is incredibly shitty to trans and non-binary people. Most detransitioners will ultimately retransition and stay transitioned.

    That’s not to say that some kids don’t get it wrong. Of course some do. But very, very, very few. And if you start paying attention to media reports about detransitioners, you’ll soon notice that despite claims that there is an epidemic of detransition, that thousands upon thousands of people regret transition and have retraced their steps and will be suing their healthcare providers in huge numbers any day soon just you wait, you only ever hear about the same two or three people – people who, like the ex-gays of previous decades, just so happen to have strong links to social and religious conservative groups; Potemkin villages of gender.

    But the truth is not something that crusading journalists “just asking questions” about trans people want you to read. Serano:

    But when journalists only tell the parent’s side of the story, or when they pit a parent’s trans-skeptical account against that of their trans child — implying that the former likely “knows better” than the latter — that should be a giant red flag for audiences.

    And when articles and news stories mention trans-skeptical parents “seeking support” and finding “like-minded voices” online, that’s almost always a sign that said parents are involved in or interacting with the anti-trans parent movement.

  • A cabal

    Reality continues to make satire redundant.

    In mid-April, a group of senior writers and editors at The Guardian met as part of the company’s ‘Diversity and Inclusion Week’ to discuss pushing gender-critical narratives ‘fearlessly’… The meeting of four senior members of The Guardian’s staff (leader writer Susanna Rustin, financial editor Nils Pratley, chief sports writer Sean Ingle, and chief leader writer Sonia Sodha [was] watched by approximately 120 others from the company, including Guardian US, Guardian Australia, and The Observer.

    Taking place on the same day as their Pride event, I was told that ‘Untangling sex and gender’ was the most well-attended event of the week.

    What’s particularly galling about this is that The Guardian is still believed by many people to be a left-wing newspaper, so when its openly transphobic staff conspire to publish terrible articles demonising trans people those articles have an air of false legitimacy: leftish people are more likely to believe a Guardian story than a Daily Mail one, even if it’s written by the same kind of bigot.

  • “me best + them bad”

    This, by Catherynne M Valente, is a glorious howl into the void: There’s No Such Thing As a Smart Fascist.

    there’s been such an astonishingly effective PR campaign, ongoing through multiple generations, striving to convince you that there was and can be true human genius and vast ability behind the industrialized evil perpetrated by Nazis, their historical forefathers, and their infinitely damned present-day children… We call it fascism because me and my friends get to be murderkings kind of gives the game away.

  • The hate factory

    In news that’ll surprise nobody, Elon Musk’s Twitter has become a hate factory. Hate speech on Twitter has existed for a long time, but it was previously considered a problem; now, it’s a feature. A new report shows that if you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription, you get a free pass for hate speech.

    The Daily Beast:

    Researchers at the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) flagged hate speech to the company in tweets from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers. Four days later, they say, 99 percent of the tweets were still up and none of the accounts had been removed…

    “What gives blue tick hate actors confidence to spew their bile is the knowledge that Elon Musk simply doesn’t care about the civil and human rights of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, as long as he can make his 8 bucks a month,” Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the CCDH, said in a statement to The Daily Beast, “Our society has benefited from decades of progress on tolerance, but Elon Musk is undoing those norms at an ever-accelerating rate, by allowing hate to prosper on the spaces he administers, all with the tacit approval of the advertisers who remain on his platform.”

    If you’re a Twitter user this won’t surprise you: posts by or about marginalised groups attract swarms of blue tick bigots, and because their replies are now prioritised you’ll see their hateful replies ahead of any other comments. And that hatred is profitable: as the article says, “five high-profile Twitter accounts responsible for consistently linking LGBT to ‘grooming’ were set to generate $6.4 million a year in advertising revenue for Twitter.”

  • Predators

    The New York Times has done what the UK press has refused to do: it’s exposed disgraced Observer and Private Eye columnist Nick Cohen as an alleged predator.

    Cohen has written multiple articles and posts accusing trans women of being a danger to women while, according to the NYT, sexually harassing multiple women. When the NYT put the allegations to him, he claimed it was a stitch-up by the Russians and trans people.

    Cohen’s behaviour was apparently an open secret in media circles: he had the nickname “The Octopus” and many women journalists have said other women warned them about him. The publications that knew about the allegations but chose not to expose him included those notable “we must protect women” publications The Guardian and The Observer – who let him go amid much secrecy – and Private Eye.

    It’s interesting, and predictable, to see who’s rushing to defend him. In a now-deleted tweet, former Guardian/Observer anti-trans columnist (now Times anti-trans columnist) and long-time Woody Allen defender Hadley Freeman was quick to excuse his serial harassment on the grounds that he was probably drunk when he did it, which makes it all okay, and anyway he said sorry. It’s a good example of Freeman’s tendency to write what she’d like to be true rather than what’s actually true: some of the allegations refer to harassment that he did long after he stopped drinking, and he hasn’t said he’s sorry.

    And also on Twitter, @euanyours is providing a list with citations of the “protect women” crowd who rushed to Cohen’s defence when Good Law Project head Jolyon Maugham attempted to get people to believe women. That list includes a who’s who of very high profile anti-trans voices of the I’m So Silenced variety. If they regularly appear in the right-wing press, they’re in the list.

    Mark Berry on Twitter:

    Hi, I’m a cishet Times/Observer journalist, privately educated, and am here to tell you why everything my friend Nick Cohen did both does not matter and was entirely the fault of Jeremy Corbyn and trans people, who must answer for it.

    The glee with which trans people – including me – are sharing the story is for a simple reason: it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-trans journalism, which may pretend to be about protecting women but which has no interest in protecting women from actual sexual predators. People who have written multiple columns about the need to remove human rights from entire marginalised groups to “protect women and girls” are on the side of the abusers, not the abused. And that’s because the so-called gender critical movement has never been about protecting anybody from anything; it’s about eliminating trans people from society.

    Also on Twitter, @scriblit puts it beautifully:

    Please support my campaign to get all opinion columnists banned from using public toilets and changing cubicles in case they’re ALL well known predators getting enabled by the industry (this might get some non columnists beaten up but collateral damage is acceptable)

  • Lying by implication

    Look at the photo, then the headline, then back at the photo. What kind of person do you think the police are cuffing?

    That’s right! A far-right, anti-trans, “gender critical” thug!

    But of course, that’s not what you’re supposed to see here. The Telegraph, very deliberately, is encouraging you to think that this is a trans person or ally. It isn’t. He’s a former member of the neo-nazi EDL, a thug who turned up in support of Kellie-Jay Keen’s anti-trans rally. Maybe he was there to offer a nuanced critique of the works of Judith Butler, as far-right thugs so love to do. Or maybe he just wanted to crack some trans kids’ heads. It’s a mystery!

    The Telegraph knows what it’s doing and what he is, but it wants some of those sweet, sweet anti-trans clicks that it seems so dependent on lately. And now the far-right media ecosystem has burst into life and will forever circulate the photo as supposed proof of how violent trans people are.

    This isn’t journalism. It’s hatemongering. And if you write to the press regulator to complain, you’ll be told that it isn’t breaking any rules. And that’s true, because the rules don’t exist to protect the public; they exist to protect newspaper proprietors.