Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Lethal words

    Last week at the US Republican CPAC conference, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said that “for the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” to loud applause. He now claims that he didn’t mean that trans people should be eradicated; just “transgenderism”.

    Let’s try that with some other isms, shall we? How about, “for the good of society… Judaism must be eradicated from public life entirely”? No? “Islamism must be eradicated from public life entirely?” No? “Catholicism must be eradicated from public life entirely?”

    “Transgenderism” is primarily used as a pejorative term as a synonym for trans people, but in its most neutral sense it means having the quality or characteristic of being transgender. It’s not something we do. It’s who we are. So eliminating transgenderism means eliminating us.

    This is not a fringe view or limited to the US Right. Most of the UK anti-trans groups have signed a declaration demanding the elimination of “transgenderism”, and the founding text of the so-called Gender Critical movement is Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, which says that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandated out of existence.” Author Helen Joyce, a leading UK anti-trans voice and part of the anti-trans Sex Matters lobby group, has said that trans people are a “huge problem for a sane world” and that the number of transitioned people should be “reduced”.

    This is genocidal rhetoric. It’s pretty clear that a lot of people don’t understand what genocide actually means, and they claim that as nobody’s currently putting trans people in camps then it isn’t genocide. But that’s not true. The Holocaust Museum notes that there are five ways to conduct genocide “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a group. Killing is the best known one, but there are others. The five ways are:

    1. Killing members of the group
    2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
    3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
    4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
    5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

    Withholding vital, life-saving healthcare or forcing trans people to detransition meets 2, 3 and 5; making it effectively impossible for trans people to exist in society is number 3; refusing to legally recognise trans people without them having surgery, effectively demanding sterilisation, is 4; conversion therapy and refusing to recognise trans people’s identities is a clear example of 5.

    All of these things are in the anti-trans bills in the US, which include forced detransition, bans on public participation (including wearing your own clothes in public) and even legislation that would enable children to be kidnapped if you believed they might be exposed to trans-affirming support.

    Quibbling over language is a distraction. You cannot separate “transgenderism” from trans people, and that means you cannot eliminate the former without the latter. All the language does is enable you to try and pretend you aren’t saying what you are very clearly saying.

  • Profits of doom

    This graph is astonishing, if unsurprising: the UK press is publishing an average of 38 articles about trans people per day, most of them negative.

    Graph showing relentless rise of transphobic articles

    Writing in advertising industry site Outvertising, Marty Davies makes it clear that brands, via advertising, are funding this – and that online advertising incentivises it.

    “We’re finding ourselves funding a forever intensifying, never-ending campaign of hate against the trans community. The World Association of News Publishers assessed that over 50% of news publisher revenue comes from advertising. The ‘gender critical’ journalists are pumping out execution after execution of this hate campaign and are paid generously from our hands. This campaign is setting the news agenda and leading our whole media and politics to become infected by its poison.

    It’s important for us also to consider the role of our social platforms and broadcasters in this ecosystem. They also have questions to answer. TV and Radio broadcasters are platforming ‘gender critical’ voices unchallenged – framing anti-trans narrative as ‘legitimate concerns’. Sensationalist stories act like kindling for conversation across social platforms, allowing hateful views to burn like wildfire and become reinforced in algorithmic bubbles. Hate speech is commonplace and sanctions from platforms on users are slow if forthcoming at all. This commentary then provides content to be platformed and amplified by the media vying for attention to then sell on to us advertisers.”

  • Say their names

    While the press continue to pretend that people who aren’t trans are being rushed into irreversible medical treatment, trans people continue to die from inadequate healthcare and disgracefully long waiting lists.

    The coroner’s report into the suicide of 21-year-old Northern Irish trans woman Sophie Williams, a report released this week, found that multiple failings by the NHS contributed to her death. This is from her family’s solicitor:

    “Two days before her death Sophie was informed by the Tavistock GIC that the four years that she had spent waiting for a first appointment at Belfast’s equivalent GIC service would not be recognised by the Tavistock, news that was devastating to Sophie. Sophie died on 20 May 2021 having taken an overdose of prescription medication.”

    This week would have been the 21st birthday of another young British trans woman, Alice Litman. She too took her own life after languishing for years on a waiting list. According to The Good Law Project:

    “Alice’s family believes her death was partly a result of not getting the care she needed, because she was transgender… at the time of her death, Alice had been on an NHS waitlist for nearly 3 years. Alice’s family feel that this long wait may have been too much for her to bear.”

    If Alice and Sophie weren’t trans, their deaths would be national scandals – as would the murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey just weeks ago. But it’s very clear that to much of our media and many politicians, trans lives simply don’t matter.

  • Street of shame

    Private Eye magazine would like you to believe that the magazine is a brave outsider, fearlessly speaking truth to power and exposing media hypocrisy. The reality, of course, is that it’s part of the same incestuous bubble as the media it reports on.

    Here’s an example. Normally, a high profile left-wing writer leaving a high profile job amid multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment (the writer is reportedly known by many as The Octopus because of his behaviour towards more junior women), suggestions of an attempted management cover-up and apparently spurious claims of ill-health is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect the Eye to cover. Creepy men! Sneaky bosses! Lefty hypocrisy!

    But they haven’t covered it.

    In unrelated news, The Octopus writes for Private Eye and has done for years.

  • Number crunching

    “Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Brianna Ghey: 0.5

    Average use of the word ‘trans’ in UK media stories about Isla Bryson: 16,427.1

    The first is a victim of a terrible crime, likely targeted for being trans; the latter a perpetrator of a terrible crime, in which her trans status has no bearing.”

    – Andrew Carter

  • Poisoned pens

    Jude Doyle knocks it out of the park yet again with an incisive analysis of the increasingly poisonous New York Times:

    “Transphobia has been an unacknowledged norm of “objective” journalism for a very long time. It’s been an unacknowledged cultural norm for much longer. Yet it is still transphobia—still bigotry, still lethal—no matter how unconscious it may be. In 2023, when trans people are at the red-hot centre of a culture war and trans healthcare is being attacked in dozens of state legislatures across the nation, it is not a form of ignorance that any journalist can afford.”

    The superb If Books Could Kill podcast has just published an episode about the same thing, and comes to very similar conclusions about the polite bigotry of the paper of record.

    You could write a very similar article or episode about the UK.

    As Doyle also writes – and this is something that’s widely known among trans people who pay attention to the media, but still utterly shocking to see when it’s stated so baldly – “It’s a tough topic, media transphobia. It’s complex. It’s nuanced. You can almost forget that top editor Ian Katz — formerly the deputy editor of the Guardian, then the editor of BBC’s Newsnight, now head of programming for Channel 4 — was, until quite recently, married to Justine Roberts, co-founder of TERF forum Mumsnet, and that they were together for twenty-five years.”

    The links between Mumsnet, the so-called Gender Critical movement and their cheerleaders in the press and broadcast media would make a great Private Eye piece. Or at least it would if Private Eye weren’t part of the same incestuous bubble of bigotry.

  • A terrible thing that didn’t happen

    On Saturday, the Daily Mail published a made-up story about something that didn’t happen. I know that is hardly news, but neither was the story. It’s just yet another made-up piece trying to spread fear of trans people, the kind of thing that ends up being quoted by politicians who want to remove our healthcare and human rights.

    The article isn’t so much a red flag as a flag shop that only sells red flags and that just got a big stock delivery from the red flag distributor. According to Tory councillor Ruth Sampson, she was in the ladies toilet of a pub when she had a conversation with a trans woman (who “towered” over her) about the absence of paper towels to dry their hands.

    The key assertion in the story is that in the absence of towels, the woman told the councillor that “I’m going to wipe my hands on my penis.” This, according to the councillor, is definitely a thing that actually happened, and it therefore proves that trans women should be excluded from the ladies and all other facilities they are legally entitled to use. To undermine this, said councillor immediately wrote to anti-trans Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, rather than speak to the police, because that’s what you do, isn’t it?

    Unfortunately for the councillor, the trans woman concerned read the article too. And her side of the story is somewhat different. She had been attending a vigil in memory of a murdered trans girl, went to a pub afterwards, and in the bathroom conversation in question she said “oh, well I’ll just wipe my hands on my jeans then”, left, and thought nothing more of it.

    Which one do you think is most likely? That a trans woman, sad from a vigil and going about her everyday business, would decide to try and intimidate a random woman for no reason? Or that a young, grasping Tory councillor thought she’d try and raise her profile among her fellow Tories with a bit of the old transphobia that seems so popular among her elders?

    The article is a case study in subtle demonisation and defamation. She won’t face any consequences for adding to the anti-trans panic, and because the trans woman isn’t named the press regulations mean the Daily Mail won’t either. It’s all grist for the mill that wants to grind trans people into dust.

     

     

  • “What they want is not a dialogue.”

    This, by AR Moxon, is superb. It’s an evisceration of people who say terrible things and demand freedom from criticism or consequences.

    “they pre-suppose that some are allowed to speak, and others should not be allowed to respond.

    What they want is not more voices. They want fewer voices.

    What they want is not a dialogue. What they want is a monologue.”

  • The Onion nails it again

    When The Onion strikes, it strikes hard.

    It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

    We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

  • RIP, Brianna

    This is a photo of Brianna Ghey, the 16-year-0ld girl who was stabbed to death at the weekend. She was trans, but the newspapers didn’t know that at first – and when they found out, the Times went back through its news story about her and removed every reference to her being a girl.

    As journalist Mic Wright points out, it’s notable that the reporting of this particular murder – of a young, pretty, photogenic, white teenage girl – has not been reported in the same way the murders of other pretty young white girls have been.

    It’s possible to believe — and I do — that there are two terrible and cruel things at work here: Newspapers are both obscuring the relevance of Brianna’s identity and discussing her being trans in the worst possible way by deadnaming her and making other insinuations.

    We don’t yet know why Brianna was killed; the police are currently investigating whether it was, as seems likely, a hate crime. Whatever the explanation, the response within the LGBT+ community is one of absolute heartbreak. We have been trying to warn about the rising tide of anti-trans hatred in the media and online, and how that hatred is manifesting itself in the streets: hate crimes have skyrocketed, particularly against trans people, and against trans women and girls in particular.

    We’re heartbroken not just because of the senseless loss of life. We’re heartbroken because for years, we have been telling you that this is the inevitable outcome of demonising, defaming and scaremongering about trans people. The so-called gender critical people pretending to be sad about her death are only sad because it’s bad optics for their movement. They’re crying crocodile tears, because this is exactly what they want: fewer trans people. Trans people are very familiar with people urging them to kill themselves, with people trying to prevent them from getting the healthcare that’s proven to reduce mental distress, with people urging others to take action to prevent them from existing safely in society.

    As Helen Joyce, writer of the utterly disgraceful Trans and one of the UK’s most prominent anti-trans activists has said, trans people – all trans people – are “a huge problem for a sane world” and we must reduce their numbers. It looks like she’s getting her wish.