Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Sparkling transphobia

    Another good piece by Vice: “Gender Critical” feminism isn’t feminist. It’s just transphobic

    If you read the news, it’s easy to think that gender-critical thinking is the dominant mode of British feminism. That can be terrifying for trans and non-binary people, especially when we are increasingly bombarded with transphobic headlines; an IPSO report in 2020 found there had been a 400 percent increase in coverage of trans issues in the previous five years.

    …Gender-critical feminists may have the powers that be and the far-right, but they haven’t persuaded other feminists. 

    I don’t like the term gender critical feminist, because like intelligent design or race realism it’s an attempt to rebrand the unpalatable to make it acceptable (and like those framings, it’s repeated by journalists who aren’t doing their jobs properly). There’s nothing critical or feminist about reinforcing patriarchal gender roles and trying to roll back to the clock on equality.

  • If you believe nothing, you’ll believe anything

    This, from Vice, is very good: America’s Most Influential Conspiracy Theorists Are Going All-In On Transphobia. It’s about how people with various agendas, from Qanon conspiracists to self-promoters, are finding transphobia the perfect vehicle for making the world demonstrably worse. And this is not a US-only phenomenon.

    The fact that these once-fringe subcultures and the so-called mainstream have merged to such an extent means that when they all focus their attention on something, the effect is especially devastating. And right now, that shared focus is an all-pervading panic and hostility about drag queens, “groomers,” transgender identity as being somehow “contagious,” the supposed sexualization of children by LGBT people, and the false claim that gender-affirming care is a form of abuse or mutilation. 

    …The relationship between the anti-vaccine and anti-trans movements makes logical sense, in that they both farm a specific suspicion of science and mainstream medicine. More subtly, both the anti-vaccine and anti-trans worlds also try to weaponize regret, sowing fear that a medical choice might go irreparably wrong.

    …This sort of explicit instrumentalization of conspiratorial ideas is the direction, it would seem, in which things are heading. Demonizing trans people is proving popular because it has political and social utility for so many different people, from Substack to the hall of Congress, from increasingly popular podcasts and the guests they can’t seem to give enough time to to parents confused, as parents always are, by the way the world has changed since they were young.

  • The E stands for enemy

    The Conservative government has been stuffing the EHRC – the Equalities and Human Rights Commission – with anti-equality bigots for some time, which is why it recently and very publicly u-turned on its guidance regarding trans people and the Equality Act. But even knowing that, the latest minutes from the EHRC’s Scotland Committee are absolutely devastating. The EHRC’s own staff said that its politically motivated attacks on trans people were wrong in law, would remove trans people’s human rights and posed an existential threat to the EHRC’s continuing existence. The EHRC is supposed to protect human rights, but in its current incarnation it is clearly the enemy of marginalised groups.

    Trans Safety Network has more:

    The Committee notes that the proposed amendments would ‘[undermine] the Commission’s long held position on trans rights’, which would pose ‘reputational risk’. The Committee also recommends that ‘the Board should consider the risk to our perceived political independence if we are perceived to be aligning with Government in the absence of robust evidence. This is a potential existential risk that such a perception could risk the Commission’s existence going forward’.

  • All the news that’s shit to print

    There’s been a very significant uptick in the amount of anti-trans bullshit in the newspapers this month, with papers such as The Express doing exactly what Express editor Gary Jones said in 2018 was “offensive… I wouldn’t want to be party to any newspaper that will publish such material”: running endless fabricated stories about a minority group to stir up hatred against them. But the best example of the bad faith and malicious intent of the anti-trans press comes via The Telegraph, which breathlessly reports the story of an evil transgender woman robbing London Marathon runners of their rightful place: her participation was “wrong and unfair”, the paper says.

    The woman placed 6,160th.

    She also raised £37,000 for charity, but that detail might make Telegraph readers think slightly positively about her so of course it wasn’t mentioned in the piece.

    This story, like the US right losing its mind over a free can of beer being given to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney last week, makes it very clear what the beliefs of the anti-trans mob and their friends in the press are: trans people should not be allowed to participate in anything. To claim that a marathon runner placing 6,160th is depriving anyone of anything is simply malicious, malevolent bullshit.

  • Inhumanity

    Two days ago, Police Scotland Greater Glasgow posted an appeal for information about a missing woman, Amy Campbell. She hasn’t been seen since the middle of March and was reported missing on 4 April.

    As you’d expect from a missing-woman appeal, there are hundreds of comments. But those comments, by and large, aren’t expressing concern for her welfare. They’re misgendering her and posting anti-trans slurs because they believe she’s transgender.

    The worst aren’t the obvious bigots. The worst are the people trying to pretend their bigotry is just – you’ve guessed it – reasonable concerns: if the police were serious about finding Amy, they argue, they’d make it clear what genitals she had at birth. Many of the people posting this have the “gender critical” signifiers in their usernames or bios.

    Imagine seeing a police post about a missing woman and thinking the right thing to do is post “that’s a man” or an anti-trans slur. Imagine doing that and thinking the world is better with you in it.

  • Be joyfully you

    This Wired piece by Katherine Alejandra Cross is excellent.

    IT’S DIFFICULT TO overcome the momentum of algorithmic suppression, but our hearts and minds remain our own. We can defend them against colonization by hate-campaigners, who feed on our despair like some demon in a German fairy tale.

    What is needed instead of ceaseless portents of doom is a constant reminder of what we’re fighting for—especially for those trans people that rely on social media to have any sense of community at all, a point Branstetter returned to frequently. It’s especially important that they be able to see what trans thriving looks like. Especially our youth. As sociologist Tey Meadow put it over a decade ago, we need “inspiration for the kids who are still here … They need stories of teenagers just like them who are safe and happy now.”

  • Revelations

    The New York Times has a revelation: the US Christian Right deliberately targeted trans people as part of its strategy to rally its base in the aftermath of its equal marriage defeat.

    Or as I put it in my book, published six months ago and written quite a long time before that:

    …That tipping point occurred just as the Christian Right lost its decades-long battle against marriage equality. The UK was implementing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples Act) and the US Supreme Court heard Obergefell v Hodges, striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage.

    Faced with the absolute rejection of its scaremongering and demonisation of gay and lesbian people, the Christian Right found a new target.

    Me.

    Instead of going after the entire LGBT+ community, the Christian Right decided to focus on trans people. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Multiple Christian Right groups talked openly of their strategy; several, including The Family Research Council, put it in writing on their websites.

    This is not something that anybody kept secret: the US Christian Right in particular has talked openly about this strategy – separate the T from the LGB in order to weaken the movement and battle equality, and do so by forging alliances with anti-trans “feminist” groups – since at least 2017. Trans journalists such as Katelyn Burns and the Trans Safety Network have written about it multiple times for multiple outlets. The award-winning podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, among many others, covered it in detail in 2021.

    Here’s Rolling Stone in 2018.

    Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

    This is what I mean when I say that media is largely incompetent or malevolent when it comes to reporting on trans people. The US evangelical right, the European Catholic Church and right-wing horrors of various kinds have all deliberately and cynically targeted trans people as part of a wider war on LGBT+ people and women’s reproductive rights, they have done so in plain sight and they have provided endless evidence proving that that’s what they’re doing. And mainstream media has largely ignored all of that, or actively supported it. Not least the New York Times, which has spent much of the last six years amplifying every anti-trans dogwhistle it can.

    There is something very wrong with today’s journalism, and some of the worst people on Earth are exploiting it.

  • Breaking the law

    The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, EHRC for short, is technically the UK’s equalities watchdog. I say technically because in the last few years the Tories have been stuffing it with stooges who are actively and vocally hostile to minority groups. So it’s not a huge surprise to see it rubber-stamping the Tories’ war on trans people, even though its rubber-stamping is legally illiterate. So illiterate, in fact, that three (possibly four; it’s unclear today) of its legal directors have resigned.

    There’s a good explainer here on OpenDemocracy:

    Multiple former employees have alleged that opposing trans rights has become an institutional priority for the EHRC.

    As well as alleged resignations by staffers in response, two former legal directors have publicly decried the organisation’s apparent abandonment of the human rights values it is supposed to uphold.

    …Regardless of whether the letter becomes law, it signals a growing confidence to abandon human rights principles in order to further attack the trans community.

    I’m not going to lie. I’m scared by this. And I’m even more scared after reading this transcript of a meeting between the EHRC and Trans Media Watch’s Helen Belcher. 

    90:01 HB: Can you understand why trans people might be incredibly angry with you at the moment?

    90:04 silence

    90:06 MB: Yes

    silence

    90:09 HB: Do you think that means that you are trusted as the human rights body to defend our rights?

    90:16 silence

    What’s frightening about this is that it shows the EHRC’s utter contempt for trans people. They U-turned on trans rights over a year ago and still haven’t made the tiniest attempt to pretend there’s any justification for it, or to suggest there’s any evidence on which they based their U-turn or this more recent letter. The tories simply said FUCK TRANS PEOPLE and the EHRC jumped to attention, saluted and asked: how hard?

    One of my friends, the writer and trans health and policy expert Dr Ruth Pearce, is not mincing her words.

    I am done with being polite, and reasonable, and rational. These proposals represent a blatant attack not just on our civil rights but also on our rights to exist as human beings in public.

    …None of this is about details. It’s about terrorising trans people, and we are terrified.

    It’s about making our lives impossible. Ideally, we will disappear; our oppressors don’t really care if we suffer or we die. And we know, trans people know, that people around us are suffering and dying because we are actually a part of that community. I’ve spent the past 13 years producing research that formally documents the oppression we face, because when we simply say what we know is true because we are living that truth every day, nobody in power gives a shit.

    In the meantime, people in suits believe there are votes and clicks and money to be won through fighting culture wars, through distracting people from rising poverty and slow-burning climate collapse.

    Ruth is right; this is part of a bigger picture. I think in much the same way that attacks on gender recognition reform were a step on the way to the real goal, which was to change the Equality Act, I think the current EHRC move is part of a wider move towards EA repeal – something the likes of The Spectator and key anti-trans figures have been campaigning for for some time now alongside removing the Human Rights Act (something that’s in progress already) and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we’re still a signatory.

    I’ve long since stopped expecting people to care about trans people’s rights. But the EA protects many other groups: pregnant people, people of colour, religious people, gay people, lesbian people, disabled people and so on. Removing that protection, which applies to everything from education and employment to housing, would be a significant step towards a low wage, no-rights economy where only the very rich and those considered ideologically pure are protected by the state.

    This is conservatism reduced to its most brutal. As Wilhoit’s Law puts it, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Trans people are one of the out-groups, but we won’t be the only one.

    Dr Pearce:

    …If you’ve ever wondered “what would I have done in the face of rising fascism?” then wonder no longer.

    Your moment is here. The question is how you act.

  • Why they come for books

    I had the great honour of delivering the closing remarks at this year’s Scottish Youth Publishers conference in Edinburgh, stepping into shoes previously worn by Denise Mina, Douglas Stuart and Nicola Sturgeon. My talk was about what I dubbed the four Ps of publishing: possibility, personality, power and people, and I’d like to share a short extract where I talk about the people removing books from libraries in the US and the people – including elected politicians and the right-wing press – wanting to do the same in the UK and in Ireland.

    [in the era of Section 28] Books about people like me, the LGBT+, were banned in school libraries and nowhere to be found in my local library. People in power genuinely believed that if they could just starve us of information, if they could remove our representation, they could stop us being ourselves. It didn’t work, of course, and it did untold damage to a generation of us. And there are moves to try and make that particularly horrible history repeat.

    Of the top 10 most banned books in the US last year, four were by and/or about LGBT+ people; the most banned, Gender Queer, was a trans memoir just like mine. 

    This is not just an American problem. Last summer, a senior girls’ school in London censored sections of Understanding The Modern World, a GCSE history resource, to remove all references to gay people in a section about the Nazis’ genocidal policies; another school, also in London, cancelled a planned visit by gay author Simon James Green on World Book Day because the event promoted a “lifestyle choice” that had “no place” in a Catholic school.

    We have US-style pressure groups here in Scotland campaigning against what they call “sickening sex lessons” in schools, lessons that dare to tell kids what the parts of their body are called; in England, the same lurid claims of “extreme” sex education are being made by elected MPs in parliament as well as in the pages of the right-wing press.

    …The Times, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail are currently campaigning against books in school libraries that mention LGBT+ people. Just two weeks ago, the Daily Mail ran a double-page spread – “Do YOU know what’s in your child’s school library?” – claiming that “violent and pornographic sex education books are available to 10-year-olds”. The accompanying photo strongly suggested that those books were two trans memoirs, Gender Queer and Beyond Magenta. 

    …There’s a reason the bad guys want to ban or burn books. They don’t want us to know who we are, to know that we are not alone, to have others empathise with us.

  • To know me is to love me

    New research proves something many of us already knew: people who actually know trans people are much more likely to be trans allies. Bigotry thrives in ignorance: as I point out in my book, a survey of Fox News viewers found that they were much more likely to say they have seen a ghost than ever met a trans person, which makes it easy for people to tell lies about us.

    The findings are here.

    In a survey of 3,695 adults aged 18 to 25, 74% of those who described themselves as “not supportive” of trans people said they do not know anyone who is transgender. 

    Of those who do not know any transgender people, just 33% described themselves as “very supportive” of trans people. However, this is compared to 64% of people who do know a trans person, whether they are close to them or not. 

    Just 3% of people who know a trans person said they are “not supportive”.