Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “It’s time to stop this silliness”

    When it comes to covering trans-related issues the difference between the UK and US versions of The Guardian is dramatic, with the latter demonstrating just how parochial, insular and reactionary the UK edition is. While the UK repeatedly commissions the same handful of writers to write the same column (variations on “someone told me / my friend / a celebrity to fuck off on Twitter and therefore trans people shouldn’t have human rights”), the US edition commissions writers like Rebecca Solnit.

    Rebecca Solnit: Dear transphobic feminists: it’s time to stop this silliness.

    …trans women do not pose a threat to cis-gender women, and feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights.

    Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You. Back then we thought gender really was kind of binary and defined by genitals; science has gotten smarter in the decades since and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff, some of which is in the brain, not the pants, and also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex, and some are misgendered at birth, and male and female never were airtight categories anyway. Cultures from Native America to India have long recognized that there are other ways to be gendered. This complexity and fluidity can be a blessing and it’s something feminism embraced when it demanded that “woman” not be a category be so tightly defined by roles, relationships, appearances and limits set upon our options.

    …When there is so much real violence against women, it’s a sad waste of time to focus on imaginary maybe presumably it-could-theoretically-happen violence. Trans women pose no threat to cis-women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts and pariahs (and insisting they use men’s bathrooms endangered them horribly). Trans women live dangerous lives, because gender nonconformity is punished in innumerable ways, speaking of patriarchy, and black trans women are murdered at a horrific rate, generally by cis-gender men.

    …there are about 4 billion women and girls on Earth, and we are not in danger of being erased.

  • “Ruthless, reckless, dishonest”

    This, in Slate, is devastating. The Trump Pandemic: a blow-by-blow account of how the president killed thousands of Americans.

    The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

    This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

    Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore. But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency. It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

  • Hearts

    Someone posted this to Reddit last night:

    There are boys without penises
    Girls without vaginas
    And transphobes without hearts.

  • “Perhaps we could give good faith a try”

    Writing in The National, Andrew Tickell notes that while there are valid criticisms of the Scottish government’s proposed hate crime legislation, “conspicuous by its absence in the first wave of criticism Holyrood’s Hate Crime Bill has received is any morally serious reflection on why hate crime might matter, and might merit being talked about in a careful, thoughtful way.”

    If you are racially abused on a routine basis at work, who could blame you for deciding to pack the gig in? If churches or synagogues are trashed or graffitied with hateful slogans, it is a message to every worshipper. If a same-sex couple is abused in public because they have the audacity to hold hands, they are never the only victims of the treatment meted out to them. To borrow a phrase from the late Lord Rodger, gay people who hope to share “the small tokens and gestures of affection which are taken for granted between men and women” are put on notice that it may not be tolerated.

    …We rightly worry about chilling effects on free expression, but routine intimidation and banal harassment create their own social deep-freeze, as people censor themselves, adopt avoidance strategies and live their lives constantly exposed to how they’re perceived, and the potential prejudices of those perceiving them..

    …You may not have experienced this in your life – but talk to people who are consistently on the receiving end of this kind of social treatment and you might not talk about “hate crime” in such a sneering and condescending way, or present the issue as a self-indulgent cartoonish enterprise in “woke” identity politics.

  • Raging and mourning

    I’ve just finished reading How To Survive A Plague by David French. It’s a book about the AIDS crisis and the activist groups, notably ACT UP!, who fought an incredible battle against prejudice, ignorance and inertia.

    Many of the cover quotes describe the book as uplifting, but that’s not a word I’d use: it’s a deeply harrowing read, and while it has a happy ending of sorts – it finishes at the point where retroviral therapies mean that infection was no longer a death sentence – it’s a book about deaths on a truly horrific scale.

    The US CDC reckons that 675,000 people in the US died during the epidemic, and that 13,000 more die from it every year. The World Health Organisation says that globally, AIDS has killed around 33 million people.

    The book is an ensemble piece, and it’s not a spoiler to say that many of the key characters in it don’t make it to the end.

    It’s instructive to read this book during another global health crisis, and inevitably there are strong parallels between AIDS and COVID-19 – not least the lack of action by particular governments, especially right-wing ones, and misinformation and ill-informed speculation in the press. But it wasn’t just incompetence in the case of AIDS. It was effectively manslaughter. One of the reasons the AIDS crisis was so devastating is that too many people in power simply didn’t care, even when the scale of the crisis was apparent.

    A key statistic in the book notes that at the beginning of the crisis, 80% of Americans claimed they’d never met a gay person. That unfamiliarity bred contempt.

    As far as many politicians, religious leaders and newspaper editors were concerned, gay men’s lives didn’t matter and weren’t worth saving. The book is about the US, but this was true of the UK too: our press, politicians and religious leaders were often just as hateful (and it’s jarring to see some of the most outspokenly anti-gay publications of the time, such as The Sunday Times, providing glowing quotes on the cover). That intolerance contributed to inaction, and even when sums were pledged to fight the disease they were far too little for far too long.

    I have a lot of thoughts about the book and the story it told, but at the moment they’re too emotional for a blog post: How To Survive A Plague was a deeply upsetting read that’s left me angry as well as sad.

    I was a teenager during the AIDS crisis, and I remember the public safety campaign: “AIDS. Don’t die of ignorance.” And people did die of ignorance; the ignorance and intolerance of the powerful. So many people have so much blood on their hands.

  • “You’re a superhero but some days are Kryptonite”

    The final track on our new Messengers EP is called Time Will Put Your Enemies In The Ground. I swithered about releasing a song with that title in the current climate, where body counts are so awful we don’t talk about them any more, but I think people are intelligent enough to understand that the song has nothing to do with what’s going on in the wider world.

    Time… is a song of solace for someone going through a hard time.

    The title was inspired by the famous misquote: “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure”. It’s a good line and often credited to Mark Twain, but the actual words are  slightly different. They’re by the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow. In 1932 he wrote:

    All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

    If you’ve ever been bullied or suffered other kinds of cruelty you’ll know the feeling of wishing another human dead. I wanted to take that dark thought and make it into a promise: you will survive this and you will leave your tormentors far behind.

    Like a lot of our songs it’s partly autobiographical, and it’s connected to the opening track, Animal. Both songs are about being dehumanised and demonised, but where Animal is about defying hatred Time… is about surviving it.

    Lyrically Time… has a lot in common with A Moment of Clarity from our first EP: it’s acknowledging the pain someone feels – “Some days feel like you’re drowning on dry land / the weight so heavy on your shoulders you can barely stand” – and promising them that they will not always feel so sad. “Time will turn everything around / time will put your enemies in the ground.”

  • “A zodiac only I know”

    The third track from our new EP is called Zodiak. Our bassist Kenny already had the title and most of the tune when I first met him. I don’t think he had the Zodiac Killer in mind at the time, but with that title the song couldn’t have been about anything else.

    The Zodiac Killer is part of popular culture now, the subject of films and books and podcasts and rock songs. That’s primarily because he was never caught, so we never got to discover the banality of his evil. In today’s era of true-crime podcasts there’s plenty of speculation over who he was and how he got away with it (the police work wasn’t exemplary and may have ruled out the most likely suspect), but it’s likely to remain an open case.

    It’s hard to write about this stuff without falling into cliché or tired “edginess”: for example one of my favourite bands, Therapy?, once sang “I know how Jeffrey Dahmer feels / lonely / lonely”, which is pretty teenage. I tried not to do that.

    What I ended up with was more of a colour piece. I read a lot of the killer’s letters and was struck by the language in them (eg: “Wouldn’t none of them be missed”) as well as their tone. The killer, most likely a deeply inadequate man, clearly believed he was smarter than the newspapers, smarter than the police, smarter than the public – but at the same time I think he wanted them to decode his code, to give him an out, to stop him because he couldn’t stop himself.

    They didn’t stop him, but something did. Whether he killed five people (the official count) or 37 (his claim), there were no reported Zodiac killings after 1969. Jail? Death? Recovery from multiple personality disorder? There are lots of theories, but nobody knows the answer.

    Did I get it right, or have I fallen into the heavy metal cliché? That’s for you to decide. But I really love this song, not least because Kenny’s bassline is phenomenal and I get to pretend I’m in Led Zeppelin for much of it. It’s one of our favourite songs to play live. I am not usually the sort of person who says something rocks, but Zodiak rocks.

  • “If you’re not angry you have not been tuning in”

    (Today is fee-free Friday on Bandcamp. If you buy our new EP there, or if you buy anyone else’s music, 100% of the sale price goes to the artist today. If you’re short of cash, all our music is pay-as-you-want – so you can have all of it for free. We want your ears, not your cash!)

    Here’s today’s track from the new EP. It’s the title track, Messengers.

    Messengers is about grievance artists and bullshit merchants: when we play it live it features some samples of right-wing clown Alex Jones claiming the Pentagon has been testing gay bombs. Grievance artists are the people who spread bullshit and fear in order to sell something: actual products in the case of grifters such as Jones; personal brands in the case of the more genteel grifters who pollute the pages of the newspapers; political ideologies in the case of the most dangerous ones.

  • “I am pills, injection sites”

    Time for some new music. This is the first song from our brand new Messengers EP, and it’s called Animal.

    I hope you love it as much as we do.

  • This is not OK. This is never OK

    Emma Thomas is an award-winning creative producer and director who’s currently sending out CVs in her hunt for work. So at first she was delighted when a potential employer got in touch.

    You can be sure this isn’t the first time he’s tried this. And there are many men just like him. To them, women aren’t people. They’re targets.

    It’s 2020. And yet a woman has to write this on her profile on a business-focused networking site.