Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Twenty-eight

    I’m one of the contributors to a new book, Twenty-Eight, which looks at the impact of the hateful anti-LGBT legislation that lasted from the late 1980s until the early 2000s.

    It’s generally agreed that Section 28 was a terrible stain on our history, but what people tend to forget is that the majority supported it. As Scott Cuthbertson of LGBTI Scotland recalls:

    Not a single poll supported the repeal of Section 28. That’s because a millionaire and the media collaborated to create a moral panic. Now the vast majority of the public are horrified that they ever treated LGBT people that way.

    He notes that in 2000, the year Scotland repealed the law (England was a few years later), a poll for the Daily Mail found that 54% of respondents wanted to keep the legislation in place.

    Many of the pundits and publications that contributed to the moral panic over LGBT+ people then are doing the same now.

  • No rush

    Countering the constant flood of anti-trans bullshit is a Sisyphean task that many of us simply haven’t the time or energy to deal with, but a particularly egregious example is doing the rounds right now and it’s important to debunk it.

    The lie: the Scottish gender recognition reform bill was rushed through by the Scottish Government.

    The reality: as Nancy Kelley from Stonewall demonstrates, this is one of the most consulted on bills in Scottish Parliamentary history.

    • 5 years and 2 months of discussion and debate
    • 3 large scale consultations, amassing over 43,000 responses with a large majority in favour of reform
    • 67 hours of parliamentary debate and evidence gathering (during which anti-trans groups did not provide any evidence to substantiate their lurid claims)
    • 25 hours of parliamentary debate on proposed amendments at stage 3
    • A clear parliamentary majority in favour of reform at every stage of the bill

    As Kelley writes:

    This is one of the most consulted on bills in Scottish Government history. This is democracy and devolution in action. This is implementing a fundamental human right for trans people in Scotland. To consider triggering a constitutional crisis to block it is shocking.

  • It was never about sports

    This, by Erin Reed, is a good analysis of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s war on trans people and its use of a gullible/complicit media.

    A ban on gender affirming care is not the endgame here. With attacks on gay people rising through book bans and Don’t Say Gay or Trans bills, all LGBTQ+ rights are in the crosshairs. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project makes that clear when he claims that the debate over gay marriage was a sham and that “essentially we went from Obergefell and gay marriage to now sex changes for gay minors, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers.”

    The ADF is a key driver of the anti-trans movement in the UK and in Scotland too, with its representatives given columns in the Scottish and national press without any explanation of who they are and what they represent; they typically provide witnesses in anti-trans legal cases too, such as the (now reversed) ban on puberty blockers in the UK.

    The anti-trans movement in the US is a Christian Right assault on LGBT+ people. And so is the UK one, although it tries to convince itself otherwise. Whether it’s Scottish Nationalists standing with the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, bored millionaires publicly supporting avowed anti-feminist Christian theocrats or self-proclaimed left-wing writers throwing themselves into the warm embrace of the Daily Mail, The Times and The Telegraph, anti-trans bigots in the UK are doing the work of the religious right.

    A key part of the Christian Right’s strategy is to frame trans people’s basic human rights as a “debate”, in much the same way creationists pushed the idea of “teaching the debate” as a way to get fundamentalist religious beliefs into classrooms. As Katelyn Burns writes in Xtra, that “debate” is no such thing: it’s a constant barrage of anti-trans propaganda. Whether due to malevolence or incompetence, supposedly liberal journalists are doing the devil’s work.

     

  • “How come you never thought it before?”

    There’s an article in today’s (Glasgow) Herald claiming that a ban on conversion therapy will “criminalise parents”, throw psychotherapists in prison and have you arrested if you question your child’s gender or sexuality.

    It’s nonsense, and it’s based almost entirely on baseless claims by the Christian Institute – the same Christian Institute that the same newspaper described as anti-LGBT “Christian Fundamentalists” in 2017 when it had yet to join the anti-trans culture war.

    As The Herald reported back then:

    The charity has previously campaigned against gambling, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, opposing same sex marriages and seeking to raise the age of consent. The charity once produced an organ-donor style plastic card that read: “In the event of my death, I do not want my children to be adopted by homosexuals”.

    None of that context is in today’s piece, despite being extremely relevant. It’s almost as if that’s a calculated editorial decision.

    This column, from the Belfast Media Group, is doing the rounds today although it was published last summer.

    if you are indeed one of those suddenly convinced that the trans issue is desperately worrying, ask yourself this question: How come you never thought it  before?

    Is it a coincidence that you suddenly started thinking and fretting about it at exactly the same time as the Tory press started to fixate upon it at a time when the Conservative Party is in dire trouble?

    You never cared about trans women in toilets, even though they’ve been there for decades and never did you any harm. You never cared about trans women athletes because they’ve been competing in the Olympics for 20 years. You’re only worried about them now because the right-leaning media is telling you to. Last time it was migrants. Time before that teachers. Time before that junior doctors. Time before that judges. Time before that people on benefits. Time before that gay people and HIV. Time before that… 

    When we do ban conversion therapy, like so many other countries have done and will do, it’ll become very clear that the fundamentalists lied. But don’t forget who passed them the mic to spread those lies.

  • Bring it on

    Happy New Year when it comes. I hope your 2023 is full of love, laughter and joy.

  • There were no signs

    (Content warning: slurs)

    Many LGBT+ people who’ve come out have been told by friends or family, with some bafflement, that there “weren’t any signs” that they were gay or trans. And I think that’s really interesting, because I think there are two main reasons for that. The first is that the signs people expect are often based on stereotypes. And the second is because many people – not all LGBT+ people, but many of us – make damn sure we don’t reveal who we are if we haven’t come out.

    Let’s start with the stereotypes. When the only LGBT+ people portrayed in the media are from a particular mould – trans women but not trans men; straight trans women who fancy men but not gay trans women who love women; gay men who are hyper-camp but never gay men who are hyper-masculine, and so on – then many LGBT+ people simply don’t match the stereotypes people expect us to be. And in the case of trans women there’s the added confusion of drag. How could I have been trans when I didn’t spend my teens strutting down the high street dressed like RuPaul and destroying the locals with my savage drag queen wit?

    If those are the signs you’re looking for, then no. There were no signs.

    But there’s more to it than that, I think. It’s something Zoe Violet writes about in this poem for Tacoma West, “When you come out as trans and your mom says ‘there were no signs’”. Here’s an extract:

    But of course, there were no signs
    There were no signs because
    She was the city planner
    She was the civil engineer
    …She plastered you with circles and arrows
    Posted warnings and named all the places

    This isn’t exclusively a trans or LGBT+ thing, of course. As a parent I’m acutely aware that I’m the town planner and enforcer of my kids’ environment, and there are all kinds of ways in which I can make it clear what is and is not acceptable. And words are only a small part of it. What we do can undermine what we say: for example, a friend of mine was told through her early teens that no matter what she was going through, she could talk to her mum about it free from judgement or censure. And when she told her mum she’d started birth control before turning 16, her mum went ballistic. She didn’t confide in her mum ever again.

    It’s not usually that blatant, though. It’s something we tend to absorb by osmosis. It’s in how the people around us react to things, such as a boy wanting to wear nail polish or a girl who doesn’t want to do stereotypically girlish things. It’s in the jokes others tell and the sitcoms they laugh at, the churches the kids are taken to, the clothes allowed and the behaviours discouraged, the newspapers bought and the books left lying around, in the conversations kids overhear and in the phrases they learn (man up, be brave, boys don’t cry, good girls don’t, if you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry about), in the friends on the approved list and the ones excluded from it.

    As the cartoonist Sophie Labelle put it, every time you laugh at the idea of a man dressed as a woman, a trans girl gets more scared to come out.

    Cartoon by Sophie Labelle: every time you laugh at the idea of a man dressed as a woman a trans girl becomes more scared to come out

    And then there’s school. As Michael Franti of rap group The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy wrote in The Language of Violence:

    The first day of school was always the hardest
    The first day of school, the hallways the darkest
    Like a gauntlet the voices haunted
    Walking in with his thin skin, lowered chin
    He knew the names that they would taunt him with
    Faggot, sissy, punk, queen, queer
    Although he’d never had sex in his 15 years

    Collectively these are the circles, arrows and posted warnings of Violet’s poem: they set out the territory we inhabit and tell us where the boundaries are. Some people become enforcers of those boundaries, and others become their victims. At school, LGBT+ people are much more likely to experience bullying; outside of it, they are much more likely to experience hate crimes, sexual assault and discrimination of all kinds. In our cities, LGBT+ people account for a disproportionate number of homeless people; they’re more likely than straight, cisgender teens to be made homeless by their parents or to be fleeing parental violence.

    You don’t need to have experienced these things directly to understand them. When every road and every junction is plastered with warnings, you know very well what might await you should you fail to follow the permitted path – or if you show any signs that you might be considering a different route.

  • “Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.”

    This, by Cat Valente, is a superb piece about the inevitable ruin of social media – a pattern that repeats again and again.

    I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference.

    As someone who’s been in online spaces since the early 90s I’ve seen the pattern Valente describes so many times.

    I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.

    Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I’m back blogging it’s because of what Valente writes about in that piece. In recent years Twitter was a much more convenient way to connect with people, but now that Musk is running around like a comic book villain opening all the doors of Arkham Asylum it’s very clear that what we’ve always called a hellsite is going to become considerably more hellish.

    I know people who are effectively trapped on Twitter at the moment: they hate what it’s becoming but it’s where they live online; it’s where they’ve spent years building connections, and networks, and in many cases careers. They can’t just move to Mastodon and replicate all of that. So because Twitter can be and has been sold to someone who doesn’t give a fuck about them, everything they’ve made is now under threat. Twitter has become a Titanic and they’re clinging on for dear life.

    As Valente writes in the linked article, this is not new. It’s more extreme because of Twitter’s place in the culture, but it’s not new. People build communities online on platforms they don’t own or control, and sooner or later the people who do own and control those platforms destroy everything that was good about them. It’s more profitable to have people buying things and hurting each other.

     

  • Flip your wig

    Here’s a photo from the GRR Bill debate in the Scottish Parliament yesterday.

    The response on Mumsnet, aka Prosecco Stormfront, was swift. “They can’t help themselves,” one poster wrote. “…it’s typical male pattern aggressive sexualised behaviour”.

    Others agreed, until they realised that the protester isn’t a trans woman; she’s an anti-trans woman, Elaine Miller of For Women Scotland. Miller decided that she’d flash her (fake) pubic hair in front of an audience including schoolchildren. If it weren’t for the fake pubes, that would have been an arrestable sexual offence.

    You’d think that effectively committing a sex crime in the Scottish Parliament – it wasn’t initially obvious that Miller was wearing a wig over tights and initial reports claimed she was flashing her genitals – would be newsworthy, and I have no doubt that had Miller been a trans or non-binary person she would be all over the front pages and leading the broadcasts today. The fact that she isn’t speaks volumes.

     

  • Read it in books

    I read a lot of books this year. Here are some of my favourites.

    Orpheus Builds A Girl, by Heather Parry

    This tale of a man who believes he can cheat death is gloriously gothic, beautifully written and by the final act had me reading from behind my fingers.

    I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy 

    This is as good as everybody says it is, and some bits had me jumping out of my seat in surprised horror. It’s a story of terrible things but it’s also very funny.

    Fix The System Not The Women, by Laura Bates

    Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates’ latest is another must-read, a rallying cry for reform and likely to make you very angry.

    Surrender, by Bono

    Like the man himself this is insightful, annoying, funny, pompous and utterly charming. I’d strongly advise the audiobook version of this one, where you can hear the laugh in his voice.

    The Cruelty Is The Point, by Adam Serwer; Troll Nation, by Amanda Marcotte; American Fascism, by Brynn Tannehill

    Sadly the culture wars and far-right troll politics of the US haven’t stayed within its borders, and we’re seeing very similar anti-democratic activity here.

    Flip The Script by Arusa Qureshi, The End by Katie Goh and The Appendix by Liam Konemann

    The main reason I wanted to be published by 404 Ink is because I love their eclecticism, and I’m very proud to be in such distinguished company. These Inklings – shorter than a book, longer than a longread – are fascinating, fun and thought-provoking.

    Exit Stage Left, by Nick Duerden

    A fascinating look at the lives of ex-pop and rock stars that’s much more interesting than you might expect. How do you find meaning when the most exciting thing you’ll ever do, the one thing you always dreamed of doing, is in the past?

    Good Boy, by Jennifer Finney Boylan

    Jenny Boylan is a hero of mine, and the author of several memoirs about her life as a trans woman. This warm, wise and often very sad book tells the tale through the dogs she’s loved and lost.

    Get Rich or Lie Trying, by Symeon Brown

    A genuinely disturbing insight into the reality of influencer culture, the sharks swimming in it and the people destroyed by it.

    Sandy Hook, by Elizabeth Williamson

    An astonishing piece of journalism about some of the most despicable people in America: not the school shooters, but the conspiracy theorists, hatemongers and grifters who swarmed around this terrible event to push their own demonic agendas.

    The End of Innocence, by Simon Garfield

    A clear-eyed and devastating account of the AIDS crisis in the UK. It’ll make you rage and weep.

    Themes For Great Cities by Graeme Thomson and A Perfect Silence by Ben Wardle

    Sublime writing about sublime music: Thomson on Simple Minds in their imperial phase and Wardle on one of my great musical heroes, the late Mark Hollis of Talk Talk.

    Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan and This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan

    Beautifully written and observed books that start off about music-obsessed teens and become something much greater. Memorial Device has been out for ages so I know I’m coming very late to it, but I now understand why it has such a cult following. It’s glorious and sometimes uncomfortable reading if like me you were a quite pretentious member of various unsuccessful bands.

    These are just a small selection, because 2022 turned out to be a great year for books. Apologies to anybody I’ve raved about online and haven’t mentioned here.

  • Hate Mail

    After writing a very honest and often horrific account of her teenage experiences online, a trans woman I know was approached by a sympathetic journalist who wanted to share her story: amid the “debate” over banning conversion therapy, the journalist wanted to make her readers aware of its horrors and lasting damage.

    My friend was wary, especially given the publication, but the journalist was very persuasive. Promises were made about photos, context and framing; the journalist offered to share the final piece for approval and to make any last-minute changes.

    You can probably guess what happened next.

    What was supposed to be an informative, sympathetic story became a hit piece. The photos that the writer promised not to use were used. The framing was changed, the context too. Online, the sole link to her social media wasn’t to the main account page or any of her conversion therapy posts; instead, the site linked to an old retweet of a joke post about the late Queen’s handbag colours that details the handkerchief code for various sex acts.

    In this case the paper was the Daily Mail, but these tactics are used across the media. In this case I think there are multiple breaches of the IPSO code, but even if the regulator found in her favour months from now the damage is already done. She’s been discussed by hundreds of people online in the most awful ways, and the paper could still twist the knife further if one of its rabid columnists decides to use her as a subject for yet another anti-trans screed.

    My friend was aware that this might happen but took a calculated risk, hoping that the article would help raise awareness of what conversion therapy and associated horrors entails. But the paper, and many like it, are waging a culture war in which marginalised people are only ever the enemy.

    Trans Media Watch has spent a very long time monitoring mainstream media’s coverage of trans people, and its guidance is very helpful. It’s important to have trans and non-binary people telling their stories, but all too often publications and broadcasters have already decided which stories they want to tell – and if your story doesn’t fit, they’ll change it until it does.