Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • 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.

  • 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.