Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “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.

  • Shots are fired

    We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump and the Republican Party intend to demonise trans people and trans allies in their election campaign to distract from that whole “killing 170,000 people and being corrupt on a scale never seen before” thing, and the first shots in that attack have now been fired.

    With the help of the Christmas-voting turkeys in the Log Cabin Republicans, Trump is being positioned as “the most pro-gay president” of all time, an “honour” he gladly accepted despite his administration attempting to roll back rights not just for trans people but for all LGBT+ people. The Log Cabin Republicans, not for the first time, are providing the cover for Trump’s assault on trans Americans while turning a blind eye to his administration’s discriminatory acts towards the entire LGBT+ community.

    And then there’s this, from this week’s Trump speech in Pennsylvania.

    They want to cancel you, totally cancel you. Take your job. Turn your family against you for speaking your mind, while they indoctrinate your children with twisted, twisted world views that nobody ever thought possible

    (Incidentally, if you rewrote that slightly I could convince you it was from a Times or Guardian op-ed or a JK Rowling blog post. That’s how far down the rabbit hole we are right now.)

    Hate crimes against trans people are rising globally because of language like this, and in the US the violent deaths of trans people is expected to reach a record high this year.

    It’s pretty clear who he’s going for here, and what the consequences will be.

  • “A devil’s bargain”

    Writing for Jezebel, Katelyn Burns tells an extraordinary story of medical malpractice, litigious surgeons and people whose lives are changed irrevocably by medical mistakes: When Surgeons Fail Their Trans Patients. Warning, it’s pretty graphic in places.

    It’s important to note that the vast majority of trans people’s surgeries have positive outcomes: gender reassignment surgery has an exceptionally low regret rate. But there is still regret, usually because of unsatisfactory surgical outcomes, and some surgeons do appear to have significantly higher rates of negative outcomes than others.

    This is something that needs to be talked about, but trans people rightly fear discussing such personal things in public.

    Burns:

    …speaking out after a traumatic experience, in a moment when so few are able to access care, can either be weaponized by anti-trans activists or interpreted by advocates as a step back.

    …When she posted about her experience with Dr. Rumer on message boards in an attempt to warn other potential patients, Carlie’s words were reprinted on anti-trans forums.

    I haven’t experienced anything like the women in the article have, but nevertheless I’ve chosen not to post some personal things about my own healthcare for that very reason. Discussion forums and Facebook groups for trans people have an ongoing problem with fake accounts mining them for anything they can use against trans people.

    …the environment can make it difficult for many trans people to find recourse, or warn others about bad surgical experiences. It’s a system that makes frank public discussion about surgical outcomes nearly impossible to have.

    Some anti-trans activists create opposition to access to trans-affirming care by claiming treatments are experimental or too risky to be ethical, another obstacle when patients consider speaking openly about their experiences with individual surgeons. Though regret rates remain low and, and as Dr. Schechter says, “the risks and the complications are commensurate with the risks and complications of other similar procedures,” anti-trans disinformation has become a serious problem in many corners of the media.

    Although the article is about the US system, much of it applies to the UK too.

  • Toys don’t mean you’re trans

    As ever the people who need to read this won’t, but Mermaids has attempted to address the myth that parents are rushing their kids to the gender clinic* at the first sign of their boy with a Barbie:

    Are kids being identified as trans because of the toys they play with or the clothes they like to wear? The answer, of course is, ‘no’.

    Part of the problem is that anti-trans activists are constantly looking for a “gotcha”. So parents who may well be struggling with accepting their child’s identity are accused of “transing” their kids because they happened to mention clothes or toys.

    If a parent were to say, ‘I first noticed my child was different to my daughters because he was playing with trucks rather than dolls’ it’s easy to see how that could be misconstrued as: ‘I think my child is trans because they played with trucks not dolls’.

    The piece gives space for parents of trans kids to talk about this in more detail.

    I think this is a key point:

    It is important to remember that most parents of trans young people are simply not trained in the often aggressive attack and counter-attack of recreational debate, whether it’s on television, online or at the school gates. Most are simply mums, dads and carers going about their daily lives, doing their jobs, worrying about bills and trying to get the kids to brush their teeth at bedtime. They don’t get a kick out of debating trans identities. They’re simply listening to and supporting a child who’s surprised them with news they never expected to hear and, rather than forcing them to pretend to be someone else, they’ve resolved to show them love, understanding and support.

    * In some alternative universe where gender clinics don’t have three-year waiting lists for teens.

  • Surprisingly pretty

    Something I’ve seen a few times now is people (including staunch trans allies) expressing their surprise when someone in a TV programme is revealed to be trans.

    It’s interesting to analyse that, because it says a great deal about how trans people, particularly trans women, are usually portrayed. I think for many people, the words “trans woman” doesn’t make you think of someone like this:

    Teddy Quinlivan

    Or someone like this:

    Janet Mock

    Or someone like this.

    Nicole Maines

    Of course, you don’t need to be conventionally pretty to be valid. But I think one of the reasons that people are surprised when someone conventionally pretty is trans is because many people’s idea of what trans people look like is based on what they’ve seen on TV before. So depending on your age, I suspect it’s likely to be something like this:

    Les Dawson

    Or this:

    Matt Lucas and David Walliams

    Or this.

    Brendan O’Carroll

    You’ve probably picked up on the fact that Dawson, O’Carroll, Lucas and Walliams aren’t playing trans characters (the Little Britain characters are apparently supposed to be cisgender crossdressers; Dawson and O’Carroll were playing women); they’re just in drag. But that’s kinda the point: until very recently, that was the closest thing to representation trans people could expect.

    As the excellent documentary Disclosure demonstrated, trans representation in media, when we were represented at all, was largely limited to psychotic murderer, dead sex worker or man in drag. So if your mental image of trans people is 20-stone truck drivers in tights then of course you’re going to be surprised by someone who looks like a supermodel.

    Most of us don’t look like supermodels, of course, but neither do most cis people. The difference is that nobody’s ever surprised to discover that someone beautiful is cis.

  • Why some people can’t sing

    I’m a great believer that almost anybody can sing: it’s more of a craft than an art and the more you do it, the better you get. I stumbled across this 2011 piece, which suggests I’m wrong about 5% of people.

    NBC News: Why some of us are terrible singers

    [A] study found that anywhere from 40 to 62 percent of non-musicians were poor singers, a rate much higher than shown in previous research.

    It also found that roughly 20 percent of people can’t sing accurately because they don’t have good control of their vocal muscles. Another 35 percent of poor singers have trouble matching the pitch of their own voice to the same sound heard in other timbres, such as when it’s coming from a trumpet, piano, or a person of the opposite sex. And 5 percent of lousy singers lack the ability to hear differences in pitch or discriminate between two different sounds.

  • An American icon

    Dolly Parton (image: Billboard)

    Billboard has published an interesting profile of Dolly Parton, who Wikipedia describes as “an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, actress, author, businesswoman, and humanitarian”. That’s selling her short. She’s an incredible talent, incredibly generous and quite clearly the smartest person in any room.

    NME profiled her in 2017:

    A ferocious talent who grew up in dire poverty alongside her 11 siblings in a tiny two-room shack, she became – and remains – a powerful entertainment force, as well as a quietly but subversively political one.

    Sure, there are the 43 albums, seven Grammys, global record sales of over 100 million, stints as an actress and author and even her own theme park, but she’s also an LGBTQ icon and renowned philanthropist, putting money back into her beloved community and endorsing a whole host of charitable causes. Her theme park, Dollywood, isn’t just a hillbilly Alton Towers; it was built to bring industry to the area she grew up in and create jobs in one of the poorest parts of the United States. Her Imagination Library project has helped to promote child literacy since 1995 by giving over a million free books to kids across the world.

    The Billboard piece is primarily about her business empire (Billboard is of course a magazine for and about the music industry) but it’s yet more evidence of what an extraordinary person she is.