Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “We are weaker, more exhausted and more divided than ever”

    Nesrine Malik in The Guardian writes about manufacturing dissent for ratings and clicks:

    The forums in which we find ourselves debating issues – Brexit, immigration or “identity politics” – are structurally designed to exacerbate, rather than resolve or even explore, differences. Conflict is favoured over conversation, animosity over inquiry. Usually, disagreements that happen on social media are picked out and repackaged by traditional media outlets. We see it all the time: a public figure tweets a controversial statement, social media users come out for or against, print and online media amalgamates the content into 600 words, and perhaps “the debate” makes the six o’clock news. There may be a relatively small number of people actually online, and an even smaller number actively arguing, but their activity is magnified, consumed and, ultimately, monetised and pressed into the service of political agendas.

    … In these conditions, engaging in a back-and-forth with someone holding an opposing viewpoint is not a constructive act with the aim of reaching common ground, or at least an understanding of the other: it is to feed an insatiable appetite for public spectacle.

    … If the ultimate purpose of debate is to encourage pluralism and tolerance, we need to realise that these ends cannot be achieved when the means has been infected by bad faith.

  • Facebook is spreading hate

    Last year, Ofcom found that 49% of the UK population used social media to access news reporting; the Pew Research Center reported a similar figure, 55%, in the US.

    Much of the news people see and share on social media is highly partisan, and it’s often highly inaccurate too. Right-wing bullshit factories have come to dominate the online news sphere.

    A new study by Media Matters shows how that affects people’s knowledge and understanding of trans people.

    NBC News:

    Anti-transgender Facebook content shared by right-wing news sources generated more engagement than content from pro-transgender or neutral sources combined…

    “Facebook users are getting a totally biased and factually inaccurate understanding of the multitude of issues that impact trans people”.

    Sigh.

    Of the top ten sources of trans-related news, seven were avowedly anti-trans; of the 66 million shares, 43 million were of content from anti-trans websites such as the Daily Caller.

    This is an American study but the phenomenon is global: the vast majority of trans-related articles and opinion pieces I see shared by British people on social media, particularly Facebook, are from right-wing publications based either in the US or the UK.

    Gizmodo:

    we know from a 2019 Pew Research poll that Facebook has a nearly even split—35% and 34% respectively—between users that consider themselves some sort of liberal or some sort of conservative. But we know from other research that those with a conservative bent are more far likely to share (and fall for) news articles that reinforce their preexisting point-of-view, even if they’re sensationalistic or downright debunkable. 

    …because a good half of Americans get at least some of their news on Facebook, that means that the bulk of people are reading stories about the transgender community that, again, paints them as icky leches on society, instead of just normal people living their normal lives.

  • Human rights are never popular

    Many people have rightly celebrated the life and mourned the death of John Lewis, the US civil rights leader and staunch LGBT ally. Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who refused to accept racial segregation and who engaged in very public protest.

    The Freedom Riders were very brave and very important. And they were also very unpopular. As the Washington Post shows:

    This shouldn’t be surprising: before his death, nearly two-thirds of Americans disapproved of Martin Luther King too. The civil rights leaders we later lionise are demonised, victimised and sometimes even brutalised for telling the majority what they don’t want to hear.

    When it comes to human rights, what is right is rarely what is popular.

  • “There is no safe or survivor-centred way to police anatomy”

    Over the last couple of weeks, anti-trans activists have been targeting and bullying the women who work in various rape crisis centres. The Survivors’ Network, the rape crisis centre for Sussex, is having none of it.

    predatory men are already able to enact their abuse with few repercussions, including entering changing rooms and public toilets – they do not need to pretend to be part of a marginalised community to break the law and to violate women, and suggesting that they would do so is entirely unsubstantiated.

    There is no safe or survivor-centred way to police the anatomy of someone accessing a service or using a bathroom/changing room. This will impact on gender non-conforming cisgender people, particularly cisgender women, as well as transgender people. Policing gender expression and defining someone’s womanhood by her conformity to state-sponsored specifications is an archaic practice that should not be considered in 2020 and is certainly not a feminist principle or one that will protect vulnerable women.

  • Blasts from the past

    I’m currently reading Transgender History by Susan Stryker, and one of the saddening things about it is how little the arguments of anti-trans people have changed – not least the tendency to accuse us of believing things we don’t believe.

    This is doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment.

    If a vagina doesn’t make you a woman, how come lipstick, high heels and a handbag do?

    Nobody’s claiming having heels or a handbag makes you a woman. Nobody. It’s a straw man, a made-up claim designed to reinforce the idea that trans women are unserious people who are merely playing dress-up, and anti-trans activists have been using it for over 40 years now.

    “Man” and “woman” are genders, not sexes, and while they generally correspond to people’s observable birth sex that is not always the case. We’re much more complex than that.

    Many cultures understand this and have long classified people into not just two genders, but many; they understand that the genitals you are born with do not necessarily dictate the gender you are or the way you will live your life.

    One of the reasons we conflate sex and gender is because for many people they match. But they don’t always, and it’s often gender – how closely you conform to stereotypical ideas of what men and women should look like and behave like – that is used to classify you.

    I’ve written about this before, because I find it bleakly funny: when I began presenting as me full-time the change was dramatic. Literally overnight I went from being a valued member of one project team to a person whose opinions were only worthwhile when repeated by one of the men; from being someone who could read a book in a bar without interruptions to someone who couldn’t; from being respected as an expert to being dismissed as a “silly little girl”. My genitals didn’t change, but people’s perception of my gender did.

    And part of that perception is based on the presence or absence of lipstick, heels and handbags. It’s not that those things make me a woman; of course they don’t, any more than sitting without makeup in a t-shirt covered in bits of fried egg makes me any less of one. It’s that they make other people less likely to be difficult.

    The closer I conform to stereotypical gender presentation, the less shit I have to deal with – so while my presentation doesn’t change my gender identity, it does change how some other people treat me.

    Here’s an example. The other morning I went to my own bank to pay my own money into my own bank account. I was dressed like I normally am: skinny jeans, animal print tunic, a bit of makeup and a bit of jewellery. And normally I’m greeted without incident or misgendering. But this time out I was wearing a mask that hid most of my immaculately made-up face, and when the teller heard my voice and compared it to what was on her screen – a female pronoun, a female name – she asked me: “are you sure this is your account, sir?”

    Most of the time I present stereotypically female because it makes life easier: I’d rather not be treated with suspicion when I’m paying money into my own bank account.

    Biological sex is what you begin with, but gender is the space in the culture that you inhabit – and the former does not necessarily dictate the latter. You can be born with a vagina and be a man; you can be born without one and be a woman; and you can be born with any configuration and be non-binary. Other cultures have known this for millennia. It’s just taken us a bit longer to catch up.

  • Return to sender

    When you move home, you probably arrange to have your postal mail forwarded. It’s worth doing the same if you change your name and your email address. For a while, you’ll arrange for messages sent to your old address to be redirected to your correct one.

    How long is a while? For me, three years: I think that’s a long enough grace period for people to process my name change.

    Since I’ve stopped getting messages sent to my dead email address, there’s been a massive decrease in the amount of spam I get. I don’t mean unsolicited ads trying to sell snake oil or sex vitamins (although that’s reduced too). I mean badly targeted – or rather, completely untargeted – emails from PR companies.

    Most PR companies I deal with are lovely. But many of the ones I don’t deal with are hopeless, and they are the ones who keep sending things to my old email address. They don’t know who I am, what I cover, what sectors I write about or what country I’m in. But that’s not going to stop them from emailing me multiple times.

    They start their messages with “Dear Paul,” even though I am not and have never been called Paul, and then invite me to an exclusive telephone briefing about a new vending machine somewhere in Idaho that will vend magic underpants for fish. They will often send the same message from several different people who work for the same PR firm, and all of those people will then send follow-up emails to check I got the first lot of messages.

    I try to be nice. I really do. So if I have time, I’ll reply and say “hey, I’m sorry but I think your contact details are out of date and this isn’t a subject or product category I cover. Your best bet is to find the title(s) you want to get coverage in and email the section editors directly”.

    To which they always reply: “Can you let me know the email addresses of those editors, please?”

    Sure! I keep a Rolodex of Editors Likely To Give A Fuck About Underpants For Fish right here on my desk!

    So it’s nice to see that abate a bit. Right now the only PR messages I’m getting are from firms who know my name, who know what I cover and whose products are relevant to the titles I write for. It won’t stay like that for long, but for now I’m enjoying the peace.

  • “Let me take it from here”

    This is lovely, and hit me hard. Mae Dean, a webcomic author, comes out as trans and has a conversation with herself.

  • Tories prepare to harm trans kids

    The UK Government has produced a very long briefing document on the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act, official guidance and the debates around gender recognition. The document was published two days ago, on the 15th of July. It seemed to give undue prominence to the views of anti-trans groups but it did accurately report the current legal protection for trans people, including children.

    24 hours later, significant sections were removed.

    The document was quietly replaced with an updated version with significant sections removed. Almost all of the content about trans kids, the law and their rights has been taken out. At the time of writing you can see for yourself here.

    Here’s an example, from page 4 of the first version. This entire section has been removed.

    Six pages have simply gone, including almost all of the content relating to schoolchildren: the explanation of how the Equality Act applies to children and to schools, the details of trans kids’ experiences of bullying and discrimination at schools, the explanation of official guidance for schools, the details about access to sports, the details of policies of devolved governments… all disappeared.

    This is gone:

    And so is this:

    It’s hard to see any other explanation other than this: Liz Truss knows she can’t change the Equality Act to allow overt discrimination against trans children. So instead, she’s going to change the official government guidance to achieve the same result.

    I don’t have words to describe my disgust.

    Update: The House of Commons Library says the missing sections are being updated and that yet another version of the document will be published “early next week”. It is not clear why entire sections on sports and on bullying had to be removed in order to clarify one item and add a reference to an ongoing legal case, which are the only changes the HOCL says will be made; in the meantime MPs are not being given very relevant information in a document they do not know is incomplete.

    Liz Truss’s statement on gender recognition reform, which this document is supposed to brief MPs on the background to, is scheduled for Wednesday. 

  • Paper money

    The Guardian is laying off 180 staff. Inevitably and horribly, some people on the internet are being dicks about it and celebrating the imminent unemployment of sales staff, junior editorial staff and so on.

    These people aren’t losing their jobs because of the paper’s content. They’re losing their jobs partly because of the paper’s business model. Like all similar media, the money tap has dried up because of coronavirus. But unlike many similar media operations, The Guardian is particularly exposed because of a serious of decisions it’s made in the past and because of its current business model: to give all of its content away for free and make money from selling ads and running events, the two things you cannot make money from during a pandemic.

    But the majority of discussion about this on social media is not on why The Guardian would rather lay off hundreds of people than introduce a paywall. It’s gone all culture war. I’ve lost count of the journalists who’ve essentially said that if you don’t want to take out a subscription to save the paper, you are an easily offended snowflake who hates journalism and is an enemy of democracy.

    Which is exactly the kind of attitude that makes some people unwilling to subscribe to The Guardian.

    Here’s publisher and commentator Laura Waddell, on Twitter.

    Readers are increasingly asked not to buy a product but to support a principle – that the paper should exist, why it should exist. An organisation – of any kind – cannot ask the public to donate to support their principles without having those principles scrutinised.

    The message being put across here is not “buy this product because it is good”. It’s “donate to the cause”. I don’t hate journalism and I’m not an enemy of democracy, but as I’ve written a few times in recent years I don’t feel that The Guardian is a cause I feel comfortable supporting.

    It’s not because it occasionally exposes me to a point of view that I disagree with. It’s that for nearly three years now it has taken a very clear editorial stance on trans people, a stance that has been publicly criticised by its US newsroom and 1/5th of its UK staff, a stance that I don’t believe is any different from or any less harmful than that of The Daily Mail.

    I don’t buy that paper either, and yet I don’t see any left-wing people claiming that people who don’t buy the Mail are easily offended snowflakes who are enemies of democracy.

    The Guardian’s preferred solution to its financial issues encapsulates the problem: it would rather destroy its superb arts and books coverage than cull the extremely well-paid columnists who write endless pieces about people being mean to their friends on Twitter.

    Waddell:

    You cannot say to the public – buy a paper to support these principles – its very existence, a free press, quality reporting – but criticise them for holding their own views as to what principles they will pay money to support or not support.

     

  • Discomfort

    A new study by Ipsos MORI reports that 7 in 10 Britons believe trans people face discrimination, that only 1 in 10 believe trans rights “have gone too far”, and that 6 in 10 women agree that gender and biological sex are not always linked. Given the tone and volume of anti-trans coverage in recent years that’s somewhat encouraging.

    I wrote the other day about the “yuk factor”. The poll provides some evidence that it exists.

    And as with all of these surveys, there’s a demographic gap. The older you are and the more right-wing you are, the more anti-trans you’re likely to be. That demographic, of course, is also the demographic that buys the papers and reads the websites that churn out constant anti-trans scaremongering. Funny, that.