Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • More “reasonable concerns”

    This is what happens when a trans woman takes a mirror selfie.

     

  • Victim shaming

    This is disgusting.

    The Yorkshire Evening Post:

    Robber carried out ‘humiliating’ sex assault on victim after discovering he had targeted transgender victim

    Awful, right? It’s something most trans women live in fear of: the violence of straight men who discover we’re trans, the subject of so many “trans panic” defences in courts. But while the crime is despicable, my disgust is also about the way this has been reported in the linked article.

    Here’s the subheading.

    A violent street robber sexually assaulted a student after discovering his victim was a man who identifies as a woman.

    We’re not even into the article and it’s already called the victim a man.

    First paragraph:

    Luke Anderson was jailed for more than four years after a court heard he humiliated and taunted the victim when he realised he had targeted a male dressed in women’s clothing.

    So let’s humiliate the victim again by calling her “a male”.

    The barrister said: “It was never intended to be a sexual assault. It has caused him considerable embarrassment.”

    Embarrassment?

    This isn’t a social faux pas. He has a record of attacking lone women, he was off his face on crack cocaine and he grabbed a young woman, threatened her, punched her in the face hard enough to make her bleed and forced her to the ground. None of that, apparently, would be cause for embarrassment. That’s just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill violent attack on a young woman. Who’d be embarrassed about doing that?

    No, he was embarrassed because it then became a sexual assault. When he discovered she had male genitalia – not guessed, or deduced, but discovered – he sexually assaulted her and didn’t stop even when the terrified woman, in fear for her life, stuck her thumbs into his fucking eyes. 

    Anderson continued the attack, saying: “You are a feisty one.”

    He was caught because he left his DNA on her clothing.

    Is that what he’s embarrassed about?

    The judge told the defendant he believed the sexual assault was based on hostility towards the victim’s gender identity. He said “You realised it was a man dressed as a woman and you began to humiliate her.”

    Misgendering again, and then an extra bit of dehumanisation by referring to her as “it”.

    Maybe this report is just demonstrating how a barrister, a judge, a journalist and a sub-editor need to go on more diversity workshops. Maybe the judge didn’t mean to misgender the victim, let alone refer to her as “it”. Maybe the barrister meant that the attacker was remorseful, not embarrassed.

    But it doesn’t read like that. It reads as if the barrister was trying to frame this as a “trans panic” case where the victim’s trans status should be considered an excuse for the assault rather than the entire motivation for it. In other words, victim blaming – and by repeatedly misgendering her in its report, the paper has added some victim shaming too.

  • The anti-Goldilocks virus

    Ed Yong is one of the finest science journalists we have, and this in The Atlantic is an exceptional piece of journalism: How The Pandemic Defeated America.

    A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.

    …It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortages—their scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.

    Much of it is relevant to the UK too.

  • Power!

    This made me laugh, because I am easily amused.

    PinkNews:

    Who knew I had such power?

  • Vexatious complaints

    Anti-LGBT+ activists try very hard to censor anything they disapprove of. So of course, they’ve complained en masse about a same-sex kiss in a BBC programme.

    Gay Times:

    In their statement, the BBC dismissed accusations that the kiss was inappropriate, saying: “The decision to include this moment, as part of a longer storyline throughout series 7 which has been tracking the development of a romantic relationship between two of the characters, Jude and Cleo, was taken very carefully and with much consideration, and came about after CBBC and Boatrocker (the production company who make the show) acknowledged that the series could and should do more to reflect the lives of LGBTQ+ young people.

    “This is an important part of our mission to make sure that every child feels like they belong, that they are safe, and that they can be who they want to be.”

    Which is, of course, the correct response. So it’s all the more puzzling that when similar vexatious complaints were made about linking to charities that offer information to help trans people, the BBC pulled the links.

    PinkNews:

    The heads of Britain’s biggest LGBT+ groups have united to demand the BBC reinstate trans-support charities onto its Action Line website and explain why they were removed.

    All trans-specific charities for England, Scotland and Wales have been removed from the BBC’s Action Line page, which the leading LGBT+ groups slammed as “deeply troubling”.

    …This move, which members of the BBC’s internal LGBT+ Pride network were told this week was because of “audience complaints”, has already seen the public-service broadcaster condemned for “bowing down to deliberate and orchestrated hate campaigns” against trans people.

    Imagine the outcry if the BBC removed links to charities offering advice on abortion or contraception because of audience complaints from forced birthers.

    The BBC in this context means the BBC in England. But of course many of its programmes, and services such as Action Line, are provided to the whole of the UK, so if there’s something rotten in the English operation it has an effect nationally.

    Here’s journalist Jane Fae:

    A couple of years back, anti-trans campaigners tried to set up a group within the BBC. Their aim was to roll back what they perceived as “too much trans rights”.

    Since then there have been numerous instances of what looks like an active network of staff members intervening to skew reporting of stories relating to trans people.

    I’m not privy to the inner workings of the BBC in England; I just talk about technology once a week as a guest of BBC Radio Scotland. But the picture emerging from the English operation is deeply worrying.

  • Compromise

    Famous Moments in History, Reimagined By Centrists

  • Snap. Happy

    There’s a comic strip I really love in which a trans woman travels back in time to talk to her younger self. It makes me cry every time. Here’s a page:

    I occasionally daydream about doing the same for the younger, sadder, pre-transition me, but I know it’s a waste of time. Not just because time travel isn’t a thing, but because even if I could, young-me wouldn’t believe a word I told her.

    But I wish I could tell her about days like today. That one sunny day she’d be bouncing around her favourite part of her favourite city with a photographer in tow, laughing as he did the professional-photographer thing of constantly throwing out compliments and telling her she was beautiful, not feeling self-conscious or scared of others’ attention, feeling like a famous musician or a model or a movie star before going home to the beautiful, hilarious humans who make her feel like the most loved woman in the world.

    But as I’ve said, young-me wouldn’t believe me. And that makes me sad. Sad that she won’t know about such joy for such a long time, and sad that her shame and her fear won’t even let her imagine the possibility.

    I’m thankful she stuck around long enough to finally get us here. I’m sorry it took me so long.

  • Here come the thought police

    A new report says that right-wing academics are being silenced by the thought police. Inevitably they’re talking about that silencing on the front pages of right-wing newspapers.

    Here’s Newsweek.

    There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges. Or, more accurately, hundreds of experiments at different campuses, directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just of the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to “affirm” their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the ’60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence. If they no longer talk of taking to the streets, it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and — when they have the administration on their side — outright coercion.

    Surprise! The Newsweek article is 30 years old. It’s from December 1990.

    As media researcher Becca Lewis notes on Twitter, “it’s really incredible how identical the talking points are, thirty years later.”

  • Na-na-na-na Facts Man!

    This, by Annie Lowrey, is fantastic.

    You have met Facts Man before if you have spent any time online in the past half decade or so. He’s inescapable. He podcasts. He makes YouTube videos. He traffics in Medium posts. He burns up Facebook. And he loves—loves!—Twitter.

    What does he serve up there? Truth. Facts. The overlooked and the undercovered. The unvarnished and obvious conclusions that the media do not want you to believe. The conclusions that the social-justice warriors and sheeple professors will not let you reach. The conclusions that mere mortals, including lauded subject-matter experts and the people who have actual lived experience of the topic at hand, have not yet grasped.

  • Celebrities’ fears are not news

    Here’s the New York Times last year: Who Cares What Celebrities Think?

    Last week, just ahead of back-to-school season, New York State health officials issued emergency regulations limiting medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for kids attending schools or day care centers.

    What do celebrities think about this development? Hopefully, the public won’t find out — because it doesn’t matter. But unfortunately, when it comes to opinions about vaccination, we in the media typically make two big mistakes. We treat celebrities’ opposition to or fears about vaccines as news. And in the rare cases in which their beliefs do deserve coverage because they could potentially affect public health, we too often amplify unfounded or misleading talking points without sufficiently correcting the misinformation.

    Ill-informed, scaremongering celebrities have been a key part of the anti-vaccination movement as this paper notes:

    Persuasion from entertainment and pop culture figures can influence health behavior and decision-making about vaccinations (eg, Tiedje et al). Celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy, Alicia Silverstone, Rob Schneider, and Robert De Niro used fear-based messaging to influence parents to avoid vaccination, particularly in claiming a false link between vaccinations and autism. Political leaders also play a role in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump shared anti-vaxx messages on social media, although in recent months he encouraged vaccinations. More recently, vocal representative Jonathan Strickland in Texas described vaccinations as “sorcery.”

    The paper also talks about the problem of ill-informed sharing on social media.

    Skeptics also use online platforms to advocate vaccine refusal; as many as 50% of tweets about vaccination contain anti-vaccine beliefs. Research suggests that it only takes 5 to 10 minutes on an anti-vaccine site to increase perceptions of vaccination risks and decrease perceptions of the risks of vaccine omission.

    Among these social media influencers are parents who attribute the deaths of their children or illnesses they contract to “vaccine injury,” and they often take to the Internet to discuss their experiences and warn other parents. Indeed, a substantial part of the vaccine discussion takes place on anti-vaccine website discussion boards such as Age of Autism, Say No to Vaccines, and Naturalnews.com. Even on mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, anti-vaccine discussions are flourishing as these groups have closed their forums to anyone who describes themselves as “pro-vaccine.” According to Shelby and Ernst, these parents and other anti-vaccine activists “have relied on the profound power of storytelling to infect an entire generation of parents with fear and doubt”.

    Perhaps the most common trope told by this group is the “overnight autism” narrative, in which a parent takes their child in to get the MMR vaccine only to watch them digress cognitively almost immediately after.

    The parallels with the celebrity- and social media-driven scaremongering about trans kids are considerable.

    Here’s Jack Turban writing in Psychology Today about the supposedly scientific paper shared by everybody’s favourite author.

    For “overnight autism”, here’s “rapid onset gender dysphoria”:

    This term comes from a paper published in the journal PLoS One, in which the author anonymously surveyed parents recruited from websites that focus on the theory that trans youth identify as transgender due to “social contagion” and online influences. Unfortunately, the paper did not survey any of the youth themselves or their clinicians. The only thing the paper established is that some people online believe that youth rapidly become transgender as a result of watching trans-related content on Youtube and Reddit… [it claims] that “a substantial proportion” of referrals to gender clinics are for youth with this “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” It provides no citation for this claim. There are no data showing that this is true.

    Then there’s simply ignoring evidence that says your theory is wrong:

    The paper contains a section entitled “research” in which the author quotes a number of people regarding their thoughts on medical interventions for transgender youth. However, it fails to cite any of the many papers that show medical interventions for transgender youth result in favorable mental health outcomes.

    There’s ignorance about what current procedures actually are:

    The watchful waiting approach is irrelevant to the discussion of medical interventions for transgender youth. Under existing guidelines, these interventions are never offered before the onset of puberty.

    And there are false assertions presented as fact.

    The paper claims that gender affirmative models do not allow providers to explore with patients their “underlying belief systems and motivations,” or else they will be accused of conversion therapy. This is not true. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry’s policy statement on conversion therapy clearly states providers should engage in open exploration of identity with youth. An approach is only conversion therapy if it has the pre-defined goal of a specific gender identity.

    Back to the anti-vaccination paper.

    In addition, it was determined that “93% of tweets about vaccines are generated by accounts whose provenance can be verified as neither bots nor human users yet who exhibit malicious behaviors.” This amplifies the misinformation that parents are exposed to, and it fuels the belief that the science behind vaccine efficacy and safety is still debatable.

    Exactly the same thing is happening with discussion about trans people and trans kids in particular. The conversation is dominated by multiple “sock puppet” accounts, trolls and bots.

    ideas about neoliberalism and skewed perceptions of feminist concepts of bodily autonomy and parental decision-making trumps medical expertise. Reich’s data and findings suggest that upper-class women may adopt anti-vaxx sentiments as a means for expressing independence—while tragically undermining the value and science behind herd immunity.

    As with anti-vaccination, people are trying to undermine health provision that is proven to be safe, proven to have positive health outcomes and that follows internationally agreed standards – provision that is already desperately underfunded and overstretched.

    In England, there is only one clinic for trans youth; the waiting list for a first appointment there is currently 27 months and there are serious concerns about the quality of care and support being offered. And adult services are in crisis. I was talking to a trans woman yesterday who wanted to know the procedure and time frame for hormone therapy on the NHS; in England you can realistically expect to wait around four years, possibly longer. In Northern Ireland you can’t even join a waiting list.

    While people, trolls and bots rail against things that are not happening, the current system is failing people in need.