Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • “Fanning the flames of populist hate”

    Labour MP Nadia Whittome has a way with words. Today she said the government’s endless prevarication over gender recognition (GRA) reform was “fanning the flames of populist hate”.

    She’s right.

    We’re now going into the third “silly season” where it’s open season on trans people in the media and on social media. GRA reform is the tenuous justification for it.

    What was only ever a minor administrative change (and a manifesto commitment of all the major political parties) has been blown out of all proportion and used to excuse a multi-year campaign of vicious demonisation of trans people, particularly trans women. And that’s having a demonstrable effect on real-world hate crimes. The government could and should have prevented this.

    Liz Truss responded:

    Let me be absolutely clear. We will not be rolling back the rights of transgender people. It is important that transgender people are able to live their lives as they wish, without fear, and we will be making sure that is the case.

    I don’t believe her, and I certainly don’t trust her.

    I believe she had every intention of announcing a rollback of trans rights today – her government briefed the political editor of The Sunday Times to that effect a few weeks ago – but was prevented from doing so because the government didn’t anticipate tens of thousands of cisgender women contacting them to say “not in my name”.

    And I think she is still trying to find a way to reduce trans people’s rights without changing the underlying legislation, such as changing the current guidance around the Equality Act to make it trans-exclusive rather than trans-inclusive as it currently is. That would enable her to say that she hadn’t changed the letter of the law while undermining both its spirit and its practical application.

    Whatever she decides to do, if she actually decides to do anything, her government is complicit in “fanning the flames of populist hate”.

    Its ill-judged consultation became a referendum on an extremely marginalised group’s basic human rights, and even though the majority of responses were in favour of reform it has repeatedly refused to publish its response, let alone take any action.

    Not only that, but it has refused to correct any of the misinformation and outright falsehoods that now circulate about what GRA reform means and what a GRC entitles the holder to do. It’s not as if accurate information is hard to find. It was in the government’s own consultation documents.

    The longer the government refuses to say what it will do, let alone actually do anything, the longer it leaves a vacuum that bad actors are only too happy to fill.

    Three years ago, the Tories painted targets on trans women’s backs and ran away. Whether by malevolence or incompetence, I don’t know. But I do know that their inaction now looks very much like cowardice.

  • Death by numbers

    On Twitter, Dan Barker has posted an interesting thread showing how terrible reporting becomes conspiracy theory nonsense.

    It begins with The Telegraph. Its science editor reported that lockdown could cause as many as 200,000 preventable deaths, and the headline was clear:

    The same claim was then posted by other news outlets citing the Telegraph. For example, Metro’s headline was “Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’”.

    Remember, most people who share news stories on social media don’t read beyond the headline.

    This is important, because as Baker demonstrates, people are taking the headline and using it in anti-lockdown posts such as this one.

    First of all, that’s not what the article says. It is not a report about actual deaths. It’s a report about predictions of possible deaths in a very specific scenario.

    And secondly, the Telegraph has framed the story in what appears to be a deliberately misleading way.

    As Barker points out, the report this story is based on isn’t just about lockdown. The figures it quotes are from predictions based on “protecting the NHS” – that is, cancelling other healthcare to prioritise COVID-19 cases.

    The report asked the question: what would happen if prioritising COVID cases meant cancelling 75% of elective treatments, such as cancer treatments and other life-saving surgeries?

    That’s where the 200,000 figure comes from. It’s a worst-case scenario that says up to 25,000 people might die because their treatments were delayed; in the medium to long term, such delays could kill up to 185,000 more.

    So in this scenario, if we protect the NHS from being overwhelmed and have to do so for a long time it might – might – cost over 200,000 lives.

    And if we don’t?

    We’ll kill a million and a half.

    It’s there in the report, and in the Telegraph article, which notes that:

    …nearly 500,000 people would have died from coronavirus if the virus had been allowed to run through the population unchecked. And there would have been more than a million non-COVID deaths resulting from missed treatment if the health service had been overwhelmed in dealing with the pandemic.

    So protecting the NHS would kill 1.3 million fewer people than doing nothing.

    And yet this report is being used to fuel anti-lockdown sentiment when a second coronavirus spike in England, and the need for at least local lockdowns, is highly likely.

    Barker:

    In other words: The report implies lockdown could save hundreds of thousands of lives – the opposite of the headline.

    Newspapers are very keen to blame social media for spreading conspiracy theories, but many of those theories originate from newspapers and their online offshoots. Some of the most enthusiastic conspiracists are well known media figures: for example, one of the people currently pushing the “lockdown will kill 200,000 people” narrative is Toby Young.

    Many of the worst conspiracy theories circulating online originated in print.

    Here’s Marianna Spring from the BBC, who got chatting to two young men outside Topshop this week.

    Also an anecdote – while I was recording this on Oxford Street, two guys in their twenties started talking to me.

    Without me even explaining what the report was about they told me they wouldn’t be getting a coronavirus vaccine because it was a plot to microchip everyone.

    The roots of that conspiracy theory are in the anti-MMR vaccine scare, which predated Facebook and Twitter: it spread not on social media, but in the pages of the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. The anti-vaxx movement it spawned is already responsible for thousands of preventable deaths; as it evolves into COVID vaccine denial it could kill thousands more.

  • Chanks

    I went to the optician yesterday. It’s a new branch so I’m not known to the staff, and as I had a mask hiding most of my face I wasn’t too surprised to be misgendered on the basis of my voice.

    I was going to trick you by saying “You’ll never guess what happened next! They sure chose the wrong day to mess with ME!” but if you know me, you’re not going to be fooled.

    What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect from me. I had a quick, friendly, quiet word with the person I’d heard misgendering me. I told her that it was no big deal, but with the whole being-a-woman thing I’d prefer it if she could use female pronouns.

    You’ll never guess what happened next!

    What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect too. She said oops, she said of course, I said really it isn’t a big deal, I said it’s just a bit embarrassing, I said I get it a lot because of my voice, and we chatted about other things that were much more interesting. Half an hour later she and a colleague were providing extremely opinionated and often very funny commentary on the various pairs of glasses I was trying on. It was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of laughter.

    Unless it’s intentional, misgendering is no big deal. It happens all the time, often many times a day. Sometimes it gets me down – it’s particularly horrible when it happens on air – but I know that it’s almost always unintentional. People are busy and thinking about other things and tend to work on autopilot. As I’ve written before a lot of the cues we rely on aren’t so clear if you’re not presenting as stereotypically feminine, if you are but half your face is behind a mask, or if you’re just a voice on a telephone.

    And we all have moments when our brain just goes blehhhhhhh and something flops out of our mouths. Last week I tried to thank a helpful guy in a hi-vis vest who gave me directions; torn between saying “cheers” and “thanks” I said “chanks”. I immediately went bright red, hit the window button and drove away in a state of extreme embarrassment, my kids giggling gleefully because they had a new in-joke to torment me with.

    So when misgendering happens it’s no different from someone who hears my name as “Karen” or “Kerry” instead of “Carrie” because of the Irish in my accent, or if they get it wrong because like me they’re absolutely hopeless at remembering people’s names. It’s a tiny, honest mistake that’s the product of, y’know, growing up in a culture with a binary system of gender classification based on observing a handful of biological markers and stereotypes that doesn’t take into account the beautiful variety of human brains and bodies and identity and expression.

    Yeah, that old thing.

    I’m going for comic effect here but there’s still a sensible point in there. If you’ve ever worked in customer service or any kind of customer-facing role (and I have, so this applies to me too) you’ll have had it drummed into you that you call your male customers sir and your female customers madam (and the more difficult the customer, the more important that becomes: for example, the returns desk at M&S is one of the politest places on earth, at least on the till side of the desk). It becomes an ingrained habit: if you hear a male voice, you call him sir as a mark of respect. And that works really well unless the voice’s owner isn’t a him and she really would prefer it if you didn’t call her sir.

    It’s going to take a long time before that’ll change, and in the meantime misgendering is a kind of ambient noise: it’s always there for me, like traffic noise in a city, so most of the time I don’t notice it let alone comment or complain about it.

    Sometimes it’s self-correcting, such as when someone I’ve known for a very long time exclaims “what a guy!” – a term used to indicate grateful thanks for doing something awesome – before immediately adding “Oh! Fuck! Sorry! I didn’t….” I find that kind of thing quite funny, and I just wish my friend didn’t feel bad for saying something that doesn’t bother me.

    Whether or not misgendering bothers me isn’t really the decider for whether I’ll say something or not. It’s more practical than that. If it’s a company or service – a bank teller asking me if my account is really my account, an insurance agent questioning whether I’m really the policyholder, a receptionist asking if Carrie is going to join me in a moment – then I’ll correct the mistake because if I don’t, it’ll happen again.

    It’s the same with people. If I’ve never seen the person before and won’t be spending another moment in their presence, it’s a waste of energy – theirs and mine.

    It’s only if I think I’m going to be misgendered repeatedly by someone that I’ll usually say anything, and I don’t make a big deal of it. I’ll gently correct the error in exactly the same way I would if they kept calling me Kerry – and in the same way I’d expect them to correct me if it was me getting their name wrong.

    I try to treat other people with kindness and consideration, and I would like them to do the same for me.

  • Forever delayed

    Trans Health UK has posted an update on the few services gender clinics are currently providing. It’s summarised in this image:

    Look at that bottom row: that’s the current waiting time for a first appointment. Not a prescription or a referral to anything; just a first assessment. The trend was obvious long before COVID-19 came along: trans healthcare is in crisis.

    In Exeter the wait is currently four years; in Belfast the waiting list has grown so long it isn’t accepting any new patients.

    This is the reality of supposed “fast-tracking”, of people being “rushed” through the system. It’s years of waiting for a first appointment, then waiting list after waiting list for any kind of treatment.

    Here’s an example from my own experience. This was when the waiting times for my local gender clinic were 1/3 what they are now.

    Waiting time for initial assessment: 11 months
    Waiting time for second assessment: 4 months
    Waiting time for assessment for counselling: 2 months
    Waiting time for first counselling session: 10 months

    That’s three years for a first counselling appointment – and that first waiting period of 11 months is now 31 months, so God knows how long trans people have to wait for counselling now. I’ve been told that the waiting times for surgery are currently measured not in months but in millennia.

    In a better world this would be a scandal. But in this one, people actively campaign to make trans people’s healthcare even harder to access.

  • “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.