Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Himpathy for the devils

    I’ve just finished reading Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne.

    In nine chapters, Manne elaborates on the many spheres in which male entitlement hurts women and girls. The entitlement to admiration that some men demand, for example, has led to the phenomenon of “involuntary celibates” (or “incels”) targeting women in violent acts. The entitlement to bodily control has led to cis-gendered men legislating, often ignorant of basic facts, the bodily functions of pregnant and transgender people, Manne writes.

    The entitlement to sex has led to a rape culture rife with what Manne terms “himpathy” – the sympathy extended to a male perpetrator rather than to his female victims. “Misogyny takes down women,” she writes, “and himpathy protects the agents of that take-down operation, partly by painting them as ‘good guys.’”

    It’s a fierce and well argued book, and it doesn’t spare the women who participate in this: as Manne writes, women, especially privileged white women, can be complicit in perpetuating misogyny against other women.

    Manne takes particular aim at the women who campaign to restrict other women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive choices, who exclude particular groups of women from their feminism, who provide the “himpathy” for predatory and wicked men.

    There’s a lot here to be angry about, but despite this Entitled finishes on an optimistic note. The pages in which Manne describes the world she wants her child to grow up in made me want to cheer.

  • Happiness is not a cold scalpel

    Last night I read a post by a trans woman that made me sad. It was intended to be supportive – it was written as a kind of open letter to trans women who compare their appearance to other women and find themselves lacking – which is why I didn’t give it a kicking in the place where it was posted. But I think it’s worth talking about here.

    The poster wanted to tell trans women that happiness and self-acceptance are possible. All you need to do is “pass as cis” – that is, look like a particular kind of cisgender woman. And to do that, all you need to do is lose a ton of weight, take a ton of hormones, have facial feminisation surgery and undergo three rounds of vocal feminisation surgery.

    That might have been the route to happiness for the poster, but it might not be for anybody else.

    Take facial feminisation surgery, aka FFS. The poster had a well paid job and was able to pull together around £15K for their FFS (which suggests they didn’t have many treatments; you can easily spend many times more than that). Some people will never be able to afford that.

    And of the people that can afford it, some of them will not get spectacular results because the surgeons can only work with what they’ve got. If you look like me, a chin reshape or a brow reduction is not going to make you look like Audrey Hepburn.

    It’s the same with hormones. For some people HRT’s effects are minimal; their effectiveness depends on a whole host of factors, particularly genetics and age. Age is a big one, so telling late-transitioning trans people that HRT will definitely have magical effects is untrue. And even minimal effects may be many years in the future: not only do hormones work slowly but the wait to even start treatment can be very long. In some parts of the UK you can expect a wait of around five years between being referred to a gender clinic and getting a hormone prescription.

    Last but not least, there’s weight. The poster asserted that losing weight has a massive feminising effect, but again that depends on the face and body you have. Some people find that losing weight makes them look more masculine, not less.

    Of course if that’s the case they could always have facial feminisation surgery… and we’re back to the start again. There’s always one more thing you need to do before happiness is yours.

    Let’s pretend I have the desire and the resources for facial feminisation surgery (spoiler: I don’t). What if after a brow reduction, or chin recontouring, or a hair transplant, or a nose job, or a tracheal shave, or a lip lift, or cheek augmentation, I still don’t look or feel pretty?

    What if I’m still clocked because of the things surgery and hormones can’t change: the width of my shoulders, the breadth of my ribcage, the length of my torso, my centre of gravity?

    What if something goes wrong with the surgery – many FFS providers specifically advertise their ability to fix other surgeons’ mistakes – and I can’t afford to get it corrected?

    What then?

    I’m not suggesting that FFS, HRT and other things can’t have positive effects on how you feel about how you look. Of course they can. Some people have these things, look amazing and feel fantastic. I don’t endure two hours of painful facial electrolysis every week for a laugh: I do it because having a stubble-free face is important to me.

    But the idea that there is a particular standard of beauty (thin, pretty, usually white) and that if you just starve and carve yourself enough to meet it then happiness will surely be yours is a pernicious myth that has caused a great deal of harm to very many women.

    Cosmetic surgeries will not necessarily make you any happier or deliver the results you want, and nobody should be telling anyone that they will.

  • The fast track

    NHS England:

    The maximum waiting time for non-urgent, consultant-led treatments is 18 weeks

    PinkNews:

    Trans and non-binary patients in the UK’s south west are waiting more than 193 weeks to see an NHS specialist – more than 10 times the NHS legal guideline of 18 weeks.

    Waiting times vary across the UK but they’re years-long everywhere. For example the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow is currently making initial appointments for people who registered in January 2018. That’s 31 months; around 135 weeks. And that wait is for an initial assessment, not a consultation on any treatment.

    Update

    I think it’s worth pointing out that these times are for people who were in the system two to four years ago, not people who are joining the waiting list today. Their waiting times are going to be even longer.

    I joined the Sandyford waiting list in late 2016 and was seen 11 months later. People who joined in early 2018 are now being seen 31 months later. How long will the class of 2020 have to wait?

  • Spaghetti straps

    The inside of my head often looks like this.

    You’ve probably heard of gender dysphoria, which is when someone’s gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. But you may not be aware of the converse, gender euphoria. Where dysphoria is the feeling that something is terribly wrong, euphoria is the feeling that something is very right.

    There’s a lot of discussion about the dysphoria many trans people experience, but there’s a lot less about their euphoria: it often seems that we only hear about the sad stuff. I think that’s partly because so much of the discussion about us focuses on trauma and tragedy – something that’s inevitable if the narrative is centred on legal protections such as protection from hate crimes or the horrifically long waiting times trans people endure for basic healthcare. Of course we’re going to talk about the awful things many trans people experience.

    But I also think part of it is that what can seem really profound to you might seem really trivial to someone else – and when there are bad actors looking for anything to take out of context, screenshot and share with their fellow bigots, you become very wary of what you’ll post.

    So other people only get part of the picture: the sad part. But the reality is that there’s a great deal of happiness too, and sometimes that happiness comes from the tiniest of things.

    For example, the other day I wore a nice dress.

    It had spaghetti straps.

    That’s it.

    That’s the story.

    Exciting? No. Profound? Maybe not to you. But it’s not so much about the dress as what wearing it represented.

    Progress.

    Sitting with your shoulders visible isn’t going to be a big deal for a lot of women, but it is for me: since I came out clothes have been primarily about hiding my body, not making bits of it visible. I love dresses and wear lots, but if you’re looking for someone showing skin you’d have more luck with an Egyptian mummy.

    So something as simple as wearing something spaghetti-strapped or having legs that aren’t covered in 10,000-denier tights may not be a big deal for others, but it is quite a big deal for me – especially when it brings compliments from friends, not angry mobs with burning torches. It’s a sign of growing confidence and of self-acceptance.

    It’s also a sign of physical progress, because the dress fits in a way it wouldn’t have before I started transition. So there’s a euphoria there from having a tangible indication of your progress: when hormones work their magic ever so slowly, sometimes it’s nice to notice a milestone.

    I said earlier that the things I experience as gender euphoria may seem really trivial to other people. And that’s because they often are. They’re mundane things. Normal things. Things most people take for granted.

    But for me, they’re not mundane, not normal, not things I can take for granted. It sometimes feels like I’m an ingenue in the big city, constantly open-mouthed in surprise at the things the locals don’t even notice. “You mean you just, like, put on a dress, and go out, and nobody scowls at you? Ever?”

    They’re often little things. But they’re little victories too.

  • World-beating

    The UK now has two world-beating achievements to boast of: the highest excess death rate in Europe and the worst drop in GDP of any G7 nation. We’re in the deepest recession since records began.

    As journalist David Osland put it on Twitter:

    It’s lucky that asylum seekers, trans people and Dawn Butler are to blame for everything that’s wrong with Britain. Otherwise people might start thinking the government has got something to do with it.

  • You’re not a bigot

    Or at least, it’s highly likely that you aren’t. That’s according to the latest survey of UK people’s attitudes to trans people. While there’s clear evidence that three years of anti-trans scaremongering have had an effect, there’s also clear evidence that the scaremongers do not reflect wider public opinion.

    Stonewall:

    When the public is asked to choose words that describe their feelings towards trans people, we see a really striking picture.

    Overall, positive feelings dominate, particularly for women – half of us feel ‘respect’ and more than a quarter ‘admiration’ for trans people. We can also see that women are much more likely to feel respect and admiration for trans people, while also being less likely to feel disgust, pity, fear or resentment. This is important to bear in mind, as it undermines the common narrative which seeks to turns cis women and trans women against each other.

    But alongside these positive feelings, quite a lot of us aren’t sure and that’s OK. Some of these people may not be comfortable expressing negative feelings, many of these people are likely to be those who genuinely don’t know how they feel, or simply see trans people as … people.

    However, the people who hate us really hate us.

    Very few people indeed selected negative feelings such as disgust, fear or resentment. But when we look at the views of the minority who describe themselves as prejudiced (16% of us), this transphobic minority feels very strongly: a third said they felt disgust (33%) and one-quarter said that they felt resentment (25%). This means that while the group of people who are transphobic, and would describe themselves as such isn’t large – 16% is in line with other forms of discriminatory attitudes to oppressed groups – the views of that minority are much stronger.

    Those are the views most often platformed by UK newspapers, current affairs magazines and broadcasters, and they are the views most commonly expressed on social media.

    The British public in general, and British women in particular, feel pretty positive about trans people. If our media coverage and social media discussions simply reflected this reality, the lives of trans people would be immeasurably improved overnight. Instead of this, the drip, drip of negative and distorted media coverage may be manufacturing a creeping sense of discomfort around shared spaces.

    …[the survey] shows that we have a small, but vocal group of people with extreme anti-trans views in Britain, and that should worry us all.

    …

    If the majority of us simply sit by while the transphobic minority shout their harmful views from the rooftops, our warm feelings mean nothing, and we are part of a problem that is ruining trans folks lives.

    Please, don’t be part of the problem.

  • False flags

    Here’s a great example of how anti-trans activism works.

    On social media, some anti-trans activists are posting about stickers that prove how evil trans people are. The stickers, which were first spotted in Torquay, have the phrase “genital preferences are transphobic” over a rainbow flag.

    The stickers were made and posted by an anti-trans activist trying to discredit trans people.

    The phrase on them is an anti-trans trope: in much the same way homophobes want you to think that gay men want to have sex with your children, transphobes want you to think that trans women want to force you to have sex with them even, or especially, if you aren’t into trans people. It’s a vicious libel, and I’ve written more about where it comes from here.

    Some of the better known anti-trans groups have condemned the stunt, so for example the LGB Alliance has said “if it is true that agents provocateurs are posting these stickers in an attempt to exacerbate our divisions, we certainly condemn it.”

    But really, the arsehole making the stickers is just doing a crude version of what the anti-trans groups and activists do every day. They make false allegations about what trans people think, who trans people are or what healthcare trans people get, and they then call on everybody to condemn trans people (and often, to demand the removal of their rights) based on those false allegations.

    How many articles have you read about the supposed prescription of cross-sex hormones to children, which doesn’t happen? About children being given gender reassignment surgery, which doesn’t happen? About trans women being predators, which the religious right made up? That’s much more deserving of your condemnation than a couple of stickers at the seaside.

  • Deliberately making safe spaces dangerous

    If you’d like to understand the “debate” over trans people’s use of toilets, the academic paper “The toilet debate: Stalling trans possibilities and defending ‘women’s protected spaces’” by Charlotte Jones and Jen Slater is worth your time.

    whether naive, ignorant or explicitly transphobic, trans-exclusionary positions do little to improve toilet access for the majority, instead putting trans people, and others with visible markers of gender difference, at a greater risk of violence, and participating in the dangerous homogenisation of womanhood.

    …‘Gender-critical’ feminists prioritise the demonisation and exclusion of trans people, even when this comes at the expense of improving toilets for all.

    …the fight is not so much ‘about toilets’ but about the contested boundaries of womanhood, tightening the reins on gender, and making trans lives impossible.

    This, I think, is the key takeaway:

    Toilets become dangerous to make trans identities impossible.

    By pushing the false narrative of trans women being dangerous predators, activists – whether faux-feminist or religious right – encourage the policing of women’s appearance. And as we’ve seen again and again, that policing affects Black women, big women, tall women, women with short hair, lesbian women, gender non-conforming women and any other women whose femininity is considered lacking by strangers.

    There was an example of this yesterday when on Twitter, a self-appointed toilet cop boasted proudly of hanging around outside toilets to catch and humiliate anyone they suspected of being trans. Given that the people who claim they can “always tell” have variously claimed that Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, Holly Willoughby, Jodie Whittaker, David and Victoria Beckham, Keira Knightley, and all of Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriends are clearly transgender, such self-appointed bathroom police are a threat to all women.

    Some of them know this, and don’t care: when asked about the lesbian women abused in toilets for the crime of looking like they might be trans, they responded that such cases, while regrettable, were collateral damage. If making toilets dangerous for all women is the price of making them dangerous for trans women, so be it.

    The cruelty is the point.

  • The end of the American dream?

    Another blistering piece about Trump’s America, this time in Rolling Stone.

    Anthropologist Wade Davis describes “the unravelling of America” and argues that COVID-19 “signals the end of the American era.”

    Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

    The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

    …In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

    Empires end because they become failed states, unable to cope with external factors – factors such as global pandemics.

    Patrick Wyman in Mother Jones:

    When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was.

    Davis:

    Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

    …As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

    Wyman:

    We don’t have to wait decades for all this to sink in. The nature of the problem and its scale are clear now, right now, on the cusp of the disaster. Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point has truly been reached. We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their varied depth and location. Perhaps it’s not yet too late to stanch the bleeding.

  • Understanding the “TERF wars”

    There’s a new and important academic work about the current anti-trans moral panic: TERF Wars, The Fight For Transgender Futures.  TERF is an acronym used to describe people who identify as feminists but whose feminism explicitly excludes trans women and non-binary people.

    The book exists because:

    Analyses of trans-exclusionary rhetoric provide an important contribution to sociology. This is not only because they offer an insight into the production of ideologically ossified, anti-evidential politics (including within academic environments), but also because of what can be learned about power relations. Questions of whose voices are heard, who is found to be convincing, what is considered a ‘reasonable concern’ and by who, and how these discourses impact marginalised groups are key elements of sociological enquiry.

    If you have institutional access to SAGE you can read it online for free; if not, the paperback is £10 (and at the time of writing, using the code UK20AUTHOR gets you another £2.50 off).

    The introduction is online and free to read here. It provides a good overview of the very significant rise in anti-trans activism in the UK, identifies the key attack lines of those activists and makes their connections to religious evangelism and the far right very clear.

    The language of ‘gender ideology’ originates in anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses among right-wing Christians, with the Catholic Church acting as a major nucleating agent (Careaga-Pérez, 2016; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). In the last decade the concept has been increasingly adopted by far-right organisations and politicians in numerous American, European and African states. They position gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’, as represented by multinational corporations and international bodies such as the United Nations (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018).

    …Ultimately, the growing social acceptance of trans and non-binary people has challenged immutable, biologically derived conceptualisations of both ‘femaleness’ and ‘womanhood’. ‘Gender critical’ opposition to this can be understood as an emotionally loaded, reactionary response to reassert essentialism, resulting in interventions such as the ‘Declaration of Women’s Sex-Based Rights’ (see Hines, this collection) which effectively echo the demands of far-right, anti-feminist actors.

    …a growing number of anti-trans campaigners associated with radical feminist movements have openly aligned themselves with anti-feminist organisations. For instance, from 2017 US group the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) have partnered with conservative organisations The Heritage Foundation and Family Policy Alliance, both known for supporting traditional gender roles and opposing abortion rights, comprehensive sex education and same-sex marriage.