Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Hiding hatred in plain sight

    Have you ever wondered why bigots all seem to recite the same talking points and use the same words? It’s because they’re working to scripts, either literally – many Christian Right groups offer step-by-step guides for you to print out that teach you how to sign up for Twitter, how to post a message and what specific words and phrases to use; some even provide the full tweets, indicating which bit you should personalise – or because they’ve memorised them.

    Here are some examples of the anti-trans talking points set out by Heritage Action in the US as it fought against changes to the Title IX legislation. The goal is to demonise trans people in sports, almost all of them in non-elite, school-level sports, one of the key campaigning issues set out by the evangelical right in 2017. I’m going to use a screenshot so you can see how it’s set out.

    Isn’t it funny how closely so many newspaper columns follow that template, and how many supposedly objective news items recycle the talking points?

    The links are to bullshit, of course, and the one about suicide is particularly repellent: it’s a deliberate distortion of a 2011 Swedish study that found that before 1989, trans people in that country had shitty healthcare that fucked with their mental health (post-89, as healthcare and support improved, there was no increase in suicidality); the study’s author has explicitly condemned the many misrepresentations of their work.

    Bigots lie, here’s Dave with the weather. I know. But look at the language. The whole document is about transgender kids, but the word “transgender” is only used twice in the entire thing (the image is just an excerpt). Instead, trans kids are called “male athletes”, “men” and “males”. The intent is to stop you seeing trans kids as the girls and boys they are.

    There’s another linguistic trick beloved by bigots and frequently parroted uncritically in media, and that’s to replace “people” with “-ism” or “-ology”. So people will say with a straight face that of course, they support trans people; they’re just against gender ideology. Or of course they don’t want to eliminate trans people; they just want to eliminate “transgenderism”.

    Except the only way you can eliminate “transgenderism” is to eliminate trans people.

    There’s a more polite version doing the media rounds today, on the anniversary of Section 28’s introduction: a call to “remove pronouns” from schools. But pronouns here is a proxy for trans and non-conforming children; what “removing pronouns from schools” means is bullying trans and gender non-conforming children to try and stop them being trans. I’ve seen many people go for the easy dunk, pointing out the pronouns used by the person who wants to remove pronouns, but that’s falling into the trap: you’re accepting the framing, that the proposal is about stopping an abstract linguistic thing rather than harming actual children. Because harming actual children is the goal.

    Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The escalation from “trans debate” to “trans issue”, “trans problem” and most recently, “trans crisis”; LGBT+ equality being described as a “virus”; the repeated use of “misgendering” in headlines about people who lost their jobs for despicable bullying campaigns or for gross misconduct; Again and again weasel words are used to conceal blatant bigotry, a bigotry that knows it can hide in plain sight behind euphemisms that will be repeated again and again but never challenged.

    I’m very scared by this. When you call a marginalised group a “crisis” or a “virus”, when you openly call for the “elimination” of transgenderism, you are following a path we’ve seen countless times before all over the world. Defining marginalised groups as a “problem” inevitably invites a “solution”.

  • Reversal

    There’s an acronym, DARVO, used to describe the behaviour of abusers: it stands for Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. And the press does it all the time with bigots, as two of today’s news stories demonstrate.

    The first story is that the head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is being investigated by a KC over multiple very serious allegations of bullying and harassment of staff. Over 20 members of staff have been interviewed by Channel 4 News, which is going to screen a report about the allegations.

    The Daily Mail put it on its front page as “REVEALED: Plot to drive out equality chief who’s standing up for women”.

    The second story is about a teacher, Joshua Sutcliff, who was dismissed by two consecutive schools for very serious professional misconduct. He directed pupils to a video he’d made claiming Muhammad was a “false prophet” and to his website that railed against abortion, homosexuality and Islam. He also committed a clear breach of safeguarding rules by talking about a pupil on national television in a way that made the pupil clearly identifiable. That alone is enough reason to fire him and prevent him from working with children ever again.

    The Telegraph has reported this as “Teacher who ‘misgendered’ pupil banned from profession”. The details of what he was actually banned for – multiple cases of unacceptable professional conduct with no remorse or apology – are hidden behind a paywall, so most people won’t see them. As is so often the case with extremist bullies, he is represented by the Christian Legal Centre. [Update, 24 hours later: the teacher is now appearing on TV claiming that “all sin” – adultery, homosexuality etc – “deserves the death penalty.” Nice guy!]

    One of the problems with this kind of thing isn’t just that it’s a complete reversal of reality. It’s that so much of the broadcast news agenda is dictated by the press, and in particular by articles like these. So there will be phone-ins about the woke mob coming after the equalities chair, and about a teacher getting the boot for a mere one-off misgendering, when neither of those things are true. But they won’t be corrected, and the broadcasters will spread the DARVO more widely. And so the moral panic continues.

  • “They’re afraid of us”

    This, by Soleil Ho, is absolutely horrifying: I attended a secretive anti-trans dinner in San Francisco. And then I puked.

    During a Q&A session at the end of the event, the speakers gave the audience the moment they were waiting for. An attendee asked them, “Who are the powers of interest behind transgender indoctrination, and what is their end goal?”

    “The end goal is really dark,” said Garfield-Jaeger, and the crowd hissed and whooped in anticipation of the revelation. “Trans humanism, pedophilia … destroying the family, our culture and our society. Marxism.” The crowd went wild.

  • LGBT+? Join a union

    Luna Spain, a trans woman, was fired from her job at Starbucks after a video of her losing her temper with a customer went viral; the right-wing press went out of its way to demonise her and send bigots to her door in coverage horribly reminiscent of the press campaign that ultimately made trans teacher Lucy Meadows kill herself, a death that the coroner laid squarely at the feet of Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn.

    Inevitably, the video turns out to have been a deliberately engineered confrontation by bigots.

    Ben Hunte, writing in Vice:

    Police have told us they are investigating the incident, which took place in April, as a potential transphobic hate crime, and Spain said she was considering legal action against the customers as well as her former employer. 

    …VICE News has spoken to current staff and customers who were all there when the incident occurred, and the details are very different to what has been reported and shared so far.

    …VICE News has seen Thomas’s and Andrews’s social media profiles, where they and their friends repeatedly use transphobic slurs. In the comments of the original post where Andrews uploaded the video of the incident, they refer to Spain as “he”, “it” and “that”. They also claim they were never scared of Spain, using laughing emojis throughout, with Thomas writing: “I would have knocked it out if there weren’t cameras,” adding another cry-laughing emoji. 

    Deliberately causing confrontation and using it to falsely play the victim is a well-established tactic of conspiracists and bigots alike (two categories that often overlap very significantly). I’ve just finished reading Off The Edge by Kelly Weill, a book that begins with flat earth conspiracies and goes into the conspiracy/bigotry world more widely. In one section she profiles a belligerent extremist who likes to go into coffee shops, abuse the customers until they snap at him and film it on his iPhone. The video is then uploaded as evidence of the unreasonableness of flat-earth deniers.

    It’s a live action equivalent of the bear baiting that bigots do online, deliberately pushing people in the hope that eventually they’ll snap so you can use their anger as evidence of their unreasonableness. That tactic’s a big favourite of anti-trans bigots who want to get screenshots and quote tweets they can use to claim trans women are just angry men. It’s a less polite version of the “provoke trans allies to ban you, threaten them with legal action they can’t afford to fight, and go on every news outlet whingeing about how silenced you are” tactic so beloved of more affluent bigots who use their power to pick on marginalised people.

    If you’re reading this and you’re trans, gender non-conforming or potentially likely to be considered trans/GNC by the ‘we can always tell’ brigade, I’d strongly advise you to join a union and to be aware, and to make your employer aware, of the possibility that you might be targeted by these assholes. This is not the first time anti-trans bigots have done this and it won’t be the last.

  • Everyone’s a winner

    Carrie Kills A Man was nominated for the British Book Awards this year, and while I didn’t win an award or expect to at the ceremony on Monday night (every other book in my category was a heavyweight, critically acclaimed book by an excellent author), I’m still really delighted to have been shortlisted: with an estimated 200,000 new books published in the UK every year, being shortlisted for such a prestigious award is a testament to how hard my publisher works. And how brilliant I am, heh.

    I did feel like a fish out of water, but I expected that too: these awards are like The Brits music awards in that they’re primarily about the business, not the art; it was telling that every author was limited to an acceptance speech of 30 seconds but there were no such limits on speeches by the sales teams, PR departments or rights managers. I did have St Vincent in my head a little bit: “I’m so glad I came but I can’t wait to leave”: it was an honour to be invited but it’s not a world I’m part of, or ever likely to be.

    The day before the awards, I travelled down to the Boswell Book Festival where I got to read to and chat with a really nice group of people. I know that’s part of the business side of books too, but it doesn’t feel like it: it’s an opportunity for a conversation with like-minded souls, and it’s become my very favourite thing about being an author. As nice as it is to be nominated for an award, it’s nothing compared to the feeling you get when you’re making a connection with people.

  • Not breaking news

    You’d think that the UN publishing a damning criticism of the UK government might make the news, but as expected yesterday’s statement about LGBT+ rights in the UK and the associated fall of the UK in the Rainbow Rankings has barely been covered at all: one short piece in the Metro and one (anti-trans, of course) piece in moonhowler pamphlet The Critic.

    Today’s Daily Express did, however, find plenty of space to complain that a trans woman had been allowed to row a boat.

    In 2015.

  • A damning verdict

    The UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has released a damning statement about the increasingly abusive treatment of LGBT+ people by the UK press and government. So you can expect him to be demonised in our fair and balanced press, assuming this is reported at all; if a trans person gets a parking ticket or accidentally treads on a ladybird that will of course be considered more newsworthy.

    The key summary:

    Abusive rhetoric by politicians, the media and social commentators has trickled down to produce increasingly abusive and hateful speech against LGBT persons in the United Kingdom (UK).

    It’s particularly damning in its assessment of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has been stuffed with anti-trans stooges by the Tory government.

    …the objective of the EHRC was to offer the Government a formula through which it could carry out discriminatory distinctions currently unlawful under UK law, and that will remain so under international human rights law. The Independent Expert is of the opinion that this action of the EHRC is wholly unbecoming of an institution created to “stand up for those in need of protection and hold governments to account for their human rights obligations”.

    The initial statement is here.

  • Toxic workplaces

    I’ve said many times that I live an unusually charmed life compared to many trans people, the majority of whom are not middle-aged, middle-class media freelancers. A new workplace survey of trans people by YouGov demonstrates that for those people, things aren’t great.

    The study found:

    • 65% of trans employees hide their trans status at work, up from 52% in 2016;
    • 56% of trans employees aren’t out to their colleagues;
    • 32% have experienced workplace bullying or insults from colleagues;
    • 50% say they’ve concealed their trans status when looking for jobs;
    • 25% have been socially excluded by colleagues;
    • 27% have experienced discrimination or abuse from colleagues outside work;
    • 6% have been physically abused or threatened in the workplace.

    There are some small indications of positive progress, though. Of those people who are out at work:

    • 51% said colleagues responded positively, up from 50% in 2016.
    • 5% experienced a negative reaction from colleagues, down from 10% in 2016.

  • A fall from great

    In 2015, the UK was number one in the ILGA Europe Rainbow Europe rankings. It’s an annual study of the LGBTQ-friendliness of European countries, and for a long time the UK was proud to lead the way.

    The latest rankings have just been published. The UK has fallen to 17th. And it’s doing its best to fall further.

    Stonewall’s Robbie de Santos, on Twitter:

    This is a story about stagnation in the UK and progress across Europe. Our score has stayed steady, while other countries modernise their legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. The UK now sits at the bottom of the middle & countries like Slovenia and Croatia will soon overtake us.

    The index covers issues such as gender recognition legislation, hate crime protections and so on – things that, since 2022, have become demonstrably worse as the UK government chips away at LGBT+ people’s legal protections and the media fuels ever rising anti-LGBT+ sentiment; what started as an anti-trans moral panic, sadly and predictably, is now targeting the LGBT+ community more widely as the UK seems hell-bent on becoming a rainy version of Florida.

    Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley sums it up:

    Shameful.

    The UK used to be, could be and should be better than this.

  • The wedge

    It’s been obvious for many years that if you vote for an anti-trans politician you get an anti-abortion politician; the whole trans panic has been manufactured by an unholy alliance of political and religious conservatives who believe that they, not you, should decide what you can do with your body. But even by their low standards they’re not usually as blatant as the Republicans in Nebraska.

    As the Washington Post reports, Ben Hansen filed amendments to the anti-trans bill 574, already a dangerous and hateful piece of legislation designed to remove trans people’s healthcare, that would ban abortions after 12 weeks – effectively a ban on all abortions. Senator Merv Riepe blocked the amendments, for now at least. But the amendments, and the furious reaction to Rip’s blocking of them, should remove any doubt that the war on trans people’s bodily autonomy is part of a wider war against everybody’s bodily autonomy, or that the “gender critical” movement is at best a useful tool for the evangelical right.