Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “No-one will ever love you”

    There’s been a lot of discussion about conversion therapy, the often-illegal and usually deeply damaging attempts to force people to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.

    That’s horrific, of course. But you don’t have to give people electro-shock therapy or send them off to prayer camp to try and talk them out of being who they are. From parents to healthcare providers, many trans and non-binary people encounter a great deal of resistance. In the case of GPs, that resistance can mean denying them access to the gender clinic system: as far as I’m aware Scotland is the only bit of the UK where you don’t need to persuade your GP to refer you to the gender clinic; I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about Northern Irish GPs in particular refusing to refer patients.

    The trans-friendly practice GenderGP asked some of its blog readers what experiences they’d had with medical professionals. The responses included being told the following:

    “Come back next year to see if you change your mind.”

    “You have to be attracted to men if you’re really trans.”

    “Pack it in, you’re too big for that sort of nonsense.”

    “If you continue on this path you’ll lose your job, your family, your friends, you’ll be neither male nor female & no-one will ever love you.”

    “Why can’t you just live as a tomboy for now?”

    “It’s just a perversion and you should be closer to God and your parents.”

  • Another phoney war

    Much of the media – and much of the government, including a Prime Minister who didn’t appear to give a shit about the exams catastrophe or anything else that’s actually important – is huffing and puffing about the Wokerati Thought Police Black Lives Matter Political Correctness Cancel Culture Gone Mad “ban” on singing Land of Hope And Glory at the Last Night of the Proms.

    There’s no ban. We can’t have entire venues full of people singing because there’s a bloody pandemic.

    Joel Golby:

    We’re somehow now on day three of #Promgate, and the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph – as well as about half of the government – are raging about what the Sunday Times in its headline gently refers to as the “BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’”.

    …I hate to be the one saying “you know we’re in a pandemic, right?”, but you know we’re in a pandemic, right? If I didn’t know better, I’d think the political right was deftly exploiting our national inability to ignore culture-war bait in order to obfuscate bigger stories, like, I don’t know, the fact that things are going badly for the government, literally all of the time. How many more times do we have to watch this happen? What do four more years of this government have in store for us? Five hundred children somehow catch the plague due to government negligence and the Express front page is “EU demands hungry Brits RENAME Cornish pasties”? After the 2022 banking crash, Boris Johnson stands behind a podium and vows that, despite the rumours, “the woke left will never make poppies illegal”?

  • “For far too many men, misogyny is not a deal-breaker”

    Jessica Valenti writes about the Aaron Coleman saga in the US.

    The short version: Coleman, a Democratic candidate, “committed serious harassment and sexual misconduct when he was a teenager: Between the ages of 12 and 14, he bullied one girl so badly that she attempted suicide; extorted another classmate with a nude photo which he later sent to her friends and family (which legally amounts to distributing child pornography, among other things); and harassed a third young woman for months.” Credible allegations of more recent abusive behaviour including physical violence are emerging.

    Coleman initially dropped out of the campaign but changed his mind after a lot of men offered their very vocal support: what you might call “himpathy”. Supposed defenders of women suddenly decided to throw women under the bus to defend the prospective politician.

    Valenti:

    The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, for example, tweeted last week that the 19-year-old was being “sabotaged” over “middle school misconduct” (which sounds nicer than revenge porn, I suppose), and questioned whether minors should be tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison — as if not being able to hold public office is somehow akin to incarceration.

    …Men might want to take a pause and examine why they are now repeating the same argument Republicans trotted out during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings: that not elevating a man to public power is a life-ruining consequence for something they did when they were a minor.

    Something very similar is happening here over the Alex Salmond trial. Supposedly progressive men have decided to ignore all the evidence that Salmond has a long track record of inappropriate behaviour; some have gone on to demonise the women who testified against him. 

    The concern is entirely for the perpetrator, not the victims.

    So as men who claim to be our allies go on a tear about how feminism ruined a young man’s life, some food for thought: The young women who Coleman harassed will likely never run for office. It’s not exactly something you can do when nude photos of you at 12 years old have been spread around the internet.

    …I wonder if the “progressive” men on a mission to convince the public that he deserved a second chance would spare a tweet or two for the girls who never got a first one.

    I think this is very much part of it:

    There are some — like the men who blamed the [#metoo] movement for ruining men’s careers — who don’t want a future that doesn’t tolerate harassment or assault. Too many men they know, or like (or see in the mirror every day) would be impacted.

  • Lessons learnt

    I volunteer with SWIM, a charity dedicated to equality in music, and their latest wheeze is called Swimspire: members are asked to share any key lessons they’ve learnt, and I’m one of the members they asked.

    My four aren’t specifically for music, as I think they apply to work generally:

    • The smartest, most talented people I know have terrible impostor syndrome. Don’t let it limit you.
    • Say yes to the things that scare you. They often turn out to be the best things.
    • Know your worth. Don’t accept toxic behaviour and don’t be the only person in the room who isn’t getting paid.
    • Be the person others want to work with, not the one they whisper about.

  • “God. Damn. YouTube.”

    If you don’t want to make yourself thoroughly miserable about the state of the world, don’t read the Reddit group r/QAnonCasualties. It’s a forum for people who’ve lost or are losing friends and family to conspiracy theories.

    Mum, stepdad and brother have been well down the rabbit hole since about 2013-2014.

    Started with flat earth, now I’ve heard almost all conspiracies you could imagine. Doctors are bad and all drugs are bad, vaccines cause all health problems, billionaires eating babies, flouride, 5g. It all started because YouTube. God. Damn. YouTube.

    Another:

    Since we’ve been in lockdown [my two best friends have] become consumed by Plandemic misinformation, anti-mask and COVID denial stuff, and my friend admitted to me the other day that she supports Trump because “he’s the only one doing anything about the child trafficking.” She’s gotten a medical exemption from wearing a mask because she thinks the virus is a lie.

    I haven’t mentioned this, but I won’t trust her around my newborn since she’s not being safe with the virus, and I also have a condition that puts me in the highly risk category.

    In many cases the slide into conspiracy theories began with trauma.

    [My boyfriend’s mother] really started to subscribe to conspiracy theories over 20 years ago, when her other son (BF’s little brother) was diagnosed with severe autism. That son died last year, just before his 25th birthday, after suffering from seizures his whole life. She blames vaccines for all of it.

    Unsurprisingly, she is very suspicious of COVID-19 and masks, has already stated she will never take a COVID vaccine, doesn’t understand BLM or the protests, etc… and yesterday at dinner, she asked us if we knew about “pizzagate”. I braced myself. She claimed that some of BF’s cousins opened her eyes to this theory and she’s starting to believe it.

    This one’s from the UK, a woman writing about her boyfriend:

    His Grandad has just passed away and I think he was in a vulnerable place making him more susceptible to all this. He was researching more and more, joining more and more groups on Reddit/Facebook, watching countless videos and basically just spending hours and hours getting deeper ‘down the rabbit hole’

    …I feel like I’ve lost my boyfriend. He’s normally so level headed and sound minded and normally so smart and switched on but now he’s been brainwashed by these people

    It’s a terrible litany of destroyed friendships, families and relationships, made all the sadder by the knowledge that the people who’ve been sucked in by this bullshit believe that they’re the rational ones.

    This is absolutely breaking my head, because at this point any sort of rational discussion hits an immense brick wall. How can you argue with someone who always says that all your souces are “fake news”, and all her sources are correct?

    It’s also very clear that these conspiracies are spreading far beyond their usual audience.

  • False framing

    Gemma Stone, writing on Medium:

    Recently, an anti-trans activist was spoken to by police over a suspected hate crime. Suzy Ireson has been quite prolific in posting anti-trans propaganda around public places, with a direct intention of drumming up hate for trans people and making trans people feel intimidated. She even gleefully admits to doing this on social media profiles, all egged on by other known hateful anti-trans campaigners.

    This is how the media should have reported on this story, it should have just been a very simple “bad person doing bad thing” kind of affair. Except that’s not what we got when The Mirror got their hands on it.

    The Mirror piece was written by a vocal supporter of anti-trans activists who has written multiple anti-trans pieces for the right-wing press.

    The Mirror ran with the title “Mum in hate crime probe after pro-JK Rowling stickers amid trans rights row” which is very clearly slanted in making her seem like a sympathetic character in this narrative.

    It’s happening again today. A woman in the US, Sasha White, has been fired by her literary agent employer for posting a mountain of abusive tweets about and to trans women, including tweets advocating violence against them. Inevitably it’s being framed as a brave feminist silenced by the sinister trans lobby rather than a tiresome bigot getting the sack for bringing her employer into disrepute. It’s important to note that her employer is very and vocally LGBT+ friendly and represents a number of LGBT+ authors.

    Suzanne Moore has tweeted her support, Toby Young has already been in touch with her. It’s surely just a matter of hours before The Spectator offers her a column and JK Rowling calls her a hero.

    Stone:

    Transphobes and bullies are framed as innocent little victims who didn’t do anything wrong, while trans people are framed as monstrous, authoritarian and dangerous. 

  • “These days, right, if you sexually harass someone…”

    Sometimes columnists accidentally reveal more about themselves than they perhaps intended. Iain MacWhirter in The Herald:

    Doing any of those things without consent is sexual harassment, and the Herald’s self-appointed Defender of Women should know that.

    Emma Rich of Engender Scotland:

    Sexual harassment is sex discrimination & a human rights violation. For decades, unwanted hair stroking, touching, and kissing have been understood to be sexual harassment.

    As one commenter put it:

    Who the fuck is going round stroking people’s hair and thinking that’s normal?

    Rich posted some statistics from a recent TUC survey:

    • Nearly 1/4 of women have experienced unwanted touching (such as a hand on the knee or lower back)
    • More than one in ten women reported experienced unwanted sexual touching or attempts to kiss them.

    Author and Scotsman columnist Laura Waddell:

    What does it say about the security of women’s rights when leading Scottish political columnists like Macwhirter feel completely comfortable and unashamed repeatedly diminishing the idea of consent? Women-hating garbage.

  • “She wanted to be queen”

    The rather dull headline undersells this sensitive, fascinating and terribly sad piece about the death of Angela Martinez last month in LA: Death of an Indigenous essential worker sparks debate over gender identity.

    Martinez died of COVID-19, but the manager at the Burger King where she worked claimed she died from a “hormone overdose”. It was an appalling and idiotic claim, and there were storms of protest. But amid the storm it seems that Martinez herself was forgotten about: while her death sparked protests under the hashtag #TransLivesMatter, Martinez didn’t consider herself trans.

    Martinez’s friends said she had been meticulous about not referring to herself as transgender. Though Martinez went by “she,” she was neither man, nor woman. She was “muxe.”

    The muxe identity, which Martinez held dear, has existed as a respected third gender in Zapotec cultures in Oaxaca for centuries, especially in the southeastern area of Istmo de Tehuantepéc.

    Gender binaries aren’t carved in stone: the idea that there are just two genders is primarily a white European Christian thing that our ancestors spent many years and spilled a lot of blood exporting to other countries.

    The notion of a third gender has existed for centuries in different cultures worldwide. In some Native American cultures, the term “two-spirit” is an umbrella term describing those who fulfill a third gender. In South Asia, there are more than half a million officially recognized hijras. In Thailand, there are the kathoeys. In Ethiopia, the ashtime. And in Polynesia, the fa’afafine.

    The protesters using the #TransLivesMatter hashtag were well-intentioned, but ultimately they were projecting a primarily white perspective onto somebody who didn’t share it: while Martinez was clearly a strong trans ally, she didn’t see herself as trans.

    …friends complained that trans activists were, as Midnight Blue wrote on Facebook, “exploiting her image without permission. She was not trans, my sister was muxe and indigenous people are tired of the erasure of our identities.”

    Although I’ve quoted bits about Martinez’s gender identity here, that’s not really what the piece focuses on: it’s a warm, sad and beautifully written portrait of the human behind the headlines.

    “One time she asked me, ‘Do you think angels exist?’” Midnight Blue said. “Her greatest wish was to see an angel. I think she forgot that she was one of them.”

  • Your neighbours are going mad

    One of my friends has been watching with horror as a former school friend has plummeted down the rabbit hole of online radicalisation. The former friend is a university educated middle class woman; think stereotypical Waitrose shopper.

    Six months ago, the friend started posting on Facebook about her doubts over the official COVID death tolls.

    Three months later:

    She has gone from questioning official death tolls to hollering about 5G to spreading QAnon conspiracies on Facebook: “I’ve done my research!”

    And now we’re at the six months mark:

    This weekend she was out at the QAnon protests with her husband and kids. Maskless, no social distancing. Wearing a T-shirt that said “NO TO: pedophiles, Bill Gates, Covid Lies, Plandemic, MSM”…. out on the street giving speeches about Pizzagate and how it’s linked to the ‘fake virus’ through a megaphone.

    As my friend pointed out, note the American spelling of “paedophile”. QAnon is a US conspiracy movement that’s being imported wholesale, American spellings and all.

    If you’re not familiar with QAnon, it’s a far-right conspiracy theory endorsed by clueless celebrities, Donald Trump and other Republican politicians and, increasingly, the people next door. It’s grown significantly during lockdown and social networks have been too slow to crack down on it.

    The BBC puts it very well.

    At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

    Let’s just read that again.

    President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

    It’s a kind of meta-conspiracy theory that happily pulls in other conspiracy theories – 5G phone masts spreading coronavirus, Bill Gates supposedly putting microchips in Coronavirus vaccines, Hilary Clinton carrying out child sacrifices – and makes them its own. Remember the recent claims that the online furniture shop Wayfair was trafficking stolen children? QAnon.

    The FBI considers “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” a growing threat:

    The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.

    The Guardian featured a piece about US women who are falling for and amplifying these conspiracy theories.

    This is not solely a fringe group of uninformed people blindly forwarding cat videos. These are college-educated women who (correctly or incorrectly) believe they have done their research. They look out for their families, the health of their children, and they share information on their Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Adherent literature abounds, providing a rabbit hole of media links to seemingly real evidence from experts.

    There are obvious parallels with UK anti-trans activism, which I’ve seen described as “QAnon for British women”: it too rejects science and facts because “I’ve done my research.”

    “From Rockefeller to Gates, it’s all related,” Alice told me. “This has been in the works for a long time, and it’s all part of a new world order of control and surveillance.” She attends Zoom meetings with doctors who explain the “misuse of ventilators in NYC hospitals” and how “wearing a mask will kill you”. She felt privy to a labyrinth of interconnected world-altering plots. My questioning the credibility of these sources was taken as a sure sign that I had been brainwashed by the mainstream media.

    My friend:

    The speed of these conversions is frightening.

    We are living in terrifying times.

  • Songs from lockdown

    One of the things that helped keep me sane during lockdown was writing and performing music, and the Songs From Lockdown project was a big part of that: each week, songwriters would give the group a challenge and we’d go and write songs based on that challenge.

    You can listen to all the tracks here, and the first section is a handy selection of highlights. One of my songs, St Luke’s Steps, is included in it.

    I like this song a lot: it’s about the transformative power of friendship, and fittingly for a song from a lockdown group it’s about meeting my best friend when lockdown finally allowed that to happen. It’s more of a colour piece than a story: I’m trying to paint a picture of a moment in time. The fact that it’s reminiscent of Glasgow’s famously atmospheric The Blue Nile is entirely deliberate.

    What I liked about the group was the way in which it encouraged everyone to think differently. For example, St Luke’s Steps was from a challenge to write about a colour, hence the line “red wine the colour of the dye in our hair”. That was enough to give me the shape of the song I wanted to write.

    Here’s another one, No Ties That Bind. The challenge here was to write from somebody else’s perspective, so I chose to inhabit the head of a father disowning his LGBT+ child. It’s not exactly full of laughs but I’m really pleased with the lyrics – “I walk away from my mistakes / I consider you the worst one I ever made… I can’t love what you became / you turned your back on me when you changed the name I gave” – and the vocal.

    I did a playlist of all my various contributions, which you can find here. They’re all over the shop musically (deliberately): glam rock, goth, jaunty acoustic and even rap. Because of the time constraints, some of them aren’t quite there but some are close to being finished releases; I’m planning to rerecord and release one of them, Got You In My Bones, on our next EP: it’s possibly the most joyful, most pop thing I’ve ever written and it makes me smile and dance around the flat.