Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Don’t give up

    It’s been a terrible week for trans people.

    In England, the High Court effectively banned puberty blockers in England and Wales. The court essentially judged that the life of one cisgender teen was more important than those of all trans teens: in order to ensure that no cisgender teenager delays puberty and then decides it was a mistake, all trans teens should be forced through the wrong puberty unless they can persuade the courts otherwise. That applies even if their GP and their parents are supportive.

    We’ve seen this before in places like Australia, where it has since been repealed on the grounds that it’s backwards and cruel. But the message from the High Court this week told us that as far as the establishment is concerned, trans lives don’t matter.

    Here in Scotland we were told a similar message. The SNP’s newly elected equalities convener is a proud supporter of anti-trans lobby groups and dismissed her critics as “a small minority”. Representing small minorities is, of course, the equality convener’s job.

    And in Ireland, feminists are battling a wave of anti-trans bullshit being exported from England and being picked up by right-wing pundits, out-of-touch authors and the usual culture war suspects.

    In the background, the constant drumbeat of anti-trans articles in the press and anti-trans trolls on the internet continues.

    It’s hard, I know. But despite everything, the reality is that all of this will pass. The reason we’re under attack is partly because we’re more visible; the reason we’re more visible is that we have information, representation and support that previous generations were denied. Trans people have always been here, and will always be here. And in years to come, everyone will look back on this era with the same horror we have for the era of Section 28 and AIDS denial.

  • “The most political identity of all”

    Jessica Valenti is on typically scathing form in this piece about cis, straight white men in US politics:

    Because to them, white men are a politically neutral group: the default choice. Any deviation from that standard must be about ‘identity politics’. It has never occurred to them that white men are the most political identity of all.

    For centuries, straight white men have been at the world’s helm because they were straight white men. Still, despite eons of patriarchy and the systemic disenfranchisement of marginalized communities, we are supposed to believe that the glut of white men in power is based on competence alone. How many times have we heard that an all-white male panel, board of directors, or leadership team was chosen solely on ability? They were race and gender blind in their process, they swear! It was all about who was best for the job!

  • Adam Banks RIP

    Sad news today: Adam Banks has died. Adam was the guiding light of MacUser magazine, one of the UK’s very best magazines, and while I never worked for him I was a great admirer not just of his magazine but of the love his contributors clearly had for him. He and I were friends on social media where I often shared his incisive and insightful takes on technology, on publishing and on trying to be a good human. He was one of the good guys and he’ll be missed.

    My friend, former MacUser contributor Craig Grannell, has written more about Adam here.

  • Loud silence

    Former Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore is doing the “I’ve been silenced!” thing on the front pages of right-wing newspapers after rage-quitting The Guardian. A key reason for her departure, it seems, was a letter from staff to management expressing concerns about the (UK) Guardian’s relentless platforming of anti-trans views, something that has been criticised by its US operation too.

    Here’s the letter.

    As employees across the Guardian, we are deeply distressed by the resignation of another trans colleague in the UK, the third in less than a year.

    We feel it is critical that the Guardian do more to become a safe and welcoming workplace for trans and non-binary people.

    We are also disappointed in the Guardian’s repeated decision to publish anti-trans views. We are proud to work at a newspaper which supports human rights and gives voice to people underrepresented in the media.

    But the pattern of publishing transphobic content has interfered with our work and cemented our reputation as a publication hostile to trans rights and trans employees.

    We strongly support trans equality and want to see the Guardian live up to its values and do the same.

    We look forward to working with Guardian leadership to address these pressing concerns, and request a response by 11 March.

    Below is a list of 338 of Guardian employees globally who signed this letter at the time of writing.

    This “please stop hurting us” letter by people who don’t have a column to express their views has been characterised as a vicious personal attack, which seems something of a stretch.

    Meanwhile, a number of prominent women including many current Guardian contributors have written an open letter denouncing “violent hostility” against trans women. The Guardian has yet to mention it.

  • Facebook: fighting fascism is bad for business

    There’s a damning section in this NYT piece about Facebook’s ongoing refusal to deal with misinformation and hate speech.

    The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them.

    So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely.

    “The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.

    Facebook chose to use a weaker algorithm.

    While that left more objectionable posts in users’ feeds, it did not reduce their sessions or time spent.

    The problem has never been that Facebook can’t police hate speech and dangerous misinformation. It’s that it won’t. Big tech is increasingly looking like Big Tobacco, profiting from a product it knows is doing great damage.

  • An overdue apology

    The history of computing has its shameful parts. For example, you’ve probably read about how Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, was persecuted, lost his job and was ultimately driven to suicide for being gay. But you might not know about Lynn Conway, a hugely significant figure in modern computing who’s life was destroyed by IBM purely because she was trans.

    IBM has now apologised some 52 years later.

    Jeremy Alicandri, writing for Forbes:

    when IBM’s Corporate Medical Director learned of her plans in 1968, he alerted CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr., who fired Conway to avoid the public embarrassment of employing a transwoman.

    The termination turned Conway’s life upside down. The loss of income and looming inability to support her family shattered their plans for a quiet divorce with visitation rights. To worsen matters, California’s Social Services threatened her with a restraining order if she ever attempted to see her children.

    Imagine having your life destroyed because the CEO was embarrassed to have you working for him. Sadly those attitudes, while rarer, still exist today.

    It’s a sad irony that Conway’s work helped lead to the development of the very devices that bigots use to abuse other trans people today. Whatever you’re reading this on, Conway was part of the path that led to its creation.

    “. . . Among [Conway’s] many foundational contributions to computer architecture are the scalable digital design rules she invented for srilicon chip design and the ARPANET e-commerce infrastructure she developed for rapid chip prototyping – thereby launching a paradigmatic revolution in microchip design and manufacturing . . .,” explains John L. Anderson, President of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

    The article is well worth a read. Conway’s story is both horrific and inspiring.

  • Saying yes to hate

    The first rule of being in a hate group is that you must never, ever admit that you hate the people you hate. A lot of effort goes into choosing the right euphemisms, coining phrases such as “reasonable concerns”, “family values” and so on.

    So the anti-trans groups affiliated with Fair Cop must be pretty pissed off right now. In response to posts marking Trans Day of Remembrance, they proudly proclaimed their desire to #sayyestohate.

    This is known on the internet as “saying the quiet bit out loud”. They did it repeatedly to organisations that chose to mark Trans Awareness Week:

    David Paisley tracks the followers of various groups and how they intersect. The intersections between supporters of Fair Cop and the LGB Alliance, Woman’s Place, Transgender Trend, Fair Play for Women, the Safe Schools Alliance and For Women Scot are significant. As Paisley puts it:

    They all share a huge proportion of the same followers. They are all anti trans hate groups.

    They’re also all regularly platformed by mainstream media to lobby against protections for trans and non-binary people.

    When people tell you who they are, believe them.

    PS. There’s also this.

  • #TDOR

    It’s Trans Day of Remembrance today, a day when trans people and allies mourn the trans and non-binary people lost to acts of violence. So far this year 350 trans people, mostly trans women of colour, have been murdered worldwide, often in really horrific circumstances; those are only the reported murders, and the true number is likely to be considerably higher. And it doesn’t include the terrible number of people lost to suicide, which disproportionately affects LGBT+ people and trans people in particular.

    There are still places in the world where it is illegal to be transgender, and places where “I realised she was trans and I was so horrified I killed her” is an acceptable defence for murder. In supposedly enlightened societies transphobia is the acceptable face of bigotry. The dehumanising and demonising of trans people by politicians and pundits has terrible consequences.

     

  • The f*ggot debate

    It’s that time of year again: straight people demanding the right to sing and play the uncensored version of Fairytale of New York, which contains a homophobic slur.

    Huw Lemmey did an excellent piece about it last year:

    Well, this is it, from now on. Like the War on Christmas, the faggot debate is set to become a perennial staple of the culture war. Every year column inches will be devoted to it, thinkpieces like this one will be written, people will become more polarised on the issue, and more and more straight people will gleefully sing about faggots, not because they hate queer people but because they’ll be damned if they’ll be told what to do by the ‘woke’ left. Meanwhile more and more queer people will be reminded of those people who do hate them, and everyone will trust each other a little less and the world will get a little bit shittier for everyone. We need, as a culture, to break out of this loop. The problem is, we won’t, until it’s too late.

    …As for me, I don’t care if you, as a straight person, do or don’t sing the lyric about the faggot, but I would like to live in a society where you’re not desperate to. 

  • Water

    I’ve written before about misgendering and other microaggressions, things that individually don’t amount to anything but that collectively work rather like water torture. Here’s a good example of that.

    On Sunday, I was out for a meal that for various reasons I was anxious about. After weeks of being alone and quite frankly, letting myself go, I decided it was time to make a bit of an effort. I put on some cute clothes and nice jewellery, did some proper makeup prep, used the good perfume and put on my favourite lipstick. And in every single interaction I had with the waiter, he called me sir.

    Did I shout “did you assume my gender?” in a big booming voice and storm out? No, because that shit only happens in right-wingers’ social media posts. I did what I almost always do: nothing. I didn’t think he was doing it deliberately and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

    So instead I let him embarrass me, repeatedly.

    Do you remember the feeling of embarrassment you used to get as a school kid, the skin-crawling, nauseous feeling, the cold in the pit of your stomach? It’s that. It’s not just embarrassment about what happened; it’s also the extra embarrassment that comes from having people who know you see it. Their looks of awkwardness or pity amplify it.

    I couldn’t finish my food, and afterwards I went home and cried.

    I’m supposed to be going to one more restaurant this week, a birthday lunch with one of my dearest friends. It’s only my second restaurant visit in many months, and it’s probably the last social contact I’m going to have until we come out of the imminent Tier 4 COVID restrictions.

    Last night the restaurant called me to switch my booking to its sister restaurant due to unforeseen circumstances. The caller had my name and pronouns in front of them, asked for me by name and heard me say “that’s me!” in response, and when they heard my voice they immediately started calling me sir.

    So that’s two different establishments in the space of a couple of days deciding that my appearance and my voice don’t entitle me to the correct pronouns. And my brain, which is on a rather shoogly peg right now, is convinced that as trouble comes in threes I’ll be misgendered throughout my birthday lunch.

    So now I don’t want to go.

    It sounds irrational, I know. It is irrational. But so far this week the misgendering hospitality hit rate is 100%, and it’s against the backdrop of the usual anti-trans stuff online – which washed-up indie rocker is going to drink the anti-trans kool-aid and dominate my Twitter feed THIS week? – and some trans-related unpleasantness from closer to home, so why shouldn’t I expect it to continue?

    So what’s supposed to be a happy occasion, something to look forward to, is something to dread. If it’s a repeat of Sunday I’ll be upset and embarrassed; if it isn’t, the prospect will still have cast a cloud over the whole thing because I’m so worried about it.

    These misgenderings aren’t transphobia. I’m well aware of what that looks and sounds like, and God knows there’s enough of it around right now that I’m not going to forget its sound and its shape. This is different. Transphobia is thunder, all noise and fury. These little insults are raindrops.

    Who’s afraid of water?

    I am.

    Raindrops don’t fall in isolation. Other drops fall, and they merge, and they can become a trickle, a rivulet, a stream, a river. And rivers are powerful, dangerous things.

    I fear that one day, a river will wash me away.