Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • “Rowling’s essay is an ugly thing: bitter, accusatory, cruel.”

    There’s a very good (and very detailed) piece by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs about everybody’s favourite litigious author.

    How did we get from the one place to the other? How did we go from the “beautiful fantasy world” to this exhibition of fear and dehumanization? Was she always like this? Why is she doing this? People who always detested the books can give fans a satisfied “I told you she sucked,” but this is far too simple. Rowling’s fiction is complex, thoughtful, deeply beloved. That has to be reconciled with any explanation of her ignorance on gender.

    …Before all the online transphobia, Rowling herself was adored, in part because she seemed an example of a “meritocracy” actually functioning: a talented woman producing something actually good and then getting rightly acclaimed for it. Fans wanted to love J.K. Rowling. They did love J.K. Rowling.

    This is a critical part of why so many of her readers feel so betrayed to see Rowling devolve into a Twitter personality who regularly says offensive things about transgender people. To have invented all of this… and then to become that? How disappointing. How sad. How typical. How distinctly non-magical.

    One of the key points made in this piece is that Rowling is acting from a position of ignorance: she doesn’t engage with the arguments, but simply dismisses them.

    Rowling’s essay is maddening, in part because, a lot like “intellectual dark web” criticism of feminist and anti-racist politics (see, e.g, Steven Pinker), it pretends to be Reasonable and Empathetic but is nothing of the kind, distorting the opposing arguments and failing to actually engage with the other side’s writing or thinking. It is, as Dominique Sisley writes for Huck, “dogmatism dressed up as rationalism,” misrepresenting facts, making unsubstantiated claims, presenting unrepresentative anecdotes as data, and spreading pernicious myths

    …Rowling does something here that people often do when telling a story about the Social Justice Mob shutting down dissenting opinion, which is that she assumes that the critics must have been wrong without actually investigating what their criticisms were.

    …Rowling, then, is ignorant. She couldn’t be bothered to read an introductory blog post, let alone actually research the subject. Here she is explaining that while she has been begged repeatedly to actually talk to (and listen to) the people she’s talking about, she has made no serious effort to do so.

    …Trans writers have carefully explained why what Rowling said is objectionable. In addition to Montgomerie’s piece, Zinnia Jones published a three-part series citing tons of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Do I think Rowling will read Jones’ careful explanation of how Rowling is misrepresenting statistics in order to present a picture of some giant national trend of children becoming transgender? Do I think she will bother to investigate the abuse that trans writers receive (here’s journalist Siobhan O’Leary on what she gets in just 24 hours) so that Rowling can fix her misperception that the online trans community is uniquely hostile? No, I think she is going to conclude that the existence of disagreement with her essay means that she must be telling Unspeakable Truths that No One Dares To Say.

    The thing about transphobia is that in the same way many people who think or do racist things do not believe they are racist, many people who think or do transphobic things do not believe they are transphobic. Transphobic people are hateful, like the Westboro Baptist Church. They’re not people like you or like me.

    Except, of course, they are.

    People often do not notice their transphobia. They do not notice that they are applying different standards to trans people than they do to cis people.

    …A big part of racism, like transphobia, is the refusal to see certain people as human to the same degree you see yourself as human. They are talked about, but not listened to. I’ve written over and over and over for the last few years about the staggering fact that when critics of “social justice” and “identity politics” write about these things, they don’t seem to take the time to read a single book by the people about whom they have such strong opinions.

    It’s a really good article. You should probably read it before Rowling’s lawyers move in.

  • The people who love to hate

    Yesterday, the Scottish Daily Mail ran a front page story damning Scotland’s proposed new anti-hate crime legislation.

    The source of the story is Lois McLatchie, who the Daily Mail says “works with the UN Human Rights Council”.

    That’s a very clever way of implying she’s part of the Council. She isn’t; in fact, she is part of an organisation that represents pretty much everything the UN HRC stands against. McLatchie lobbies the UN Human Rights Council, because she’s the legal analyst for ADF International.

    ADF International is an anti-abortion, anti-LGBT hate group.

    Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

    ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion. Since the election of President Trump, ADF has become one of the most influential groups informing the administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights.

    It’s hardly surprising that the ADF is against any legislation that might suppress its ability to spread hate. And it’s also unsurprising that the Daily Mail would happily jump into bed with the Christian Right yet again: its anti-trans campaigning frequently platforms evangelical groups from the lunatic fringe, and might well fall foul of any anti-hate speech legislation. But giving the front page to the ADF is a new, chilling low.

    The US Christian Right operates globally, pouring its considerable resources into overt and covert campaigning against women’s rights and LGBT people’s rights. It’s connected to the violent anti-LGBT movements in Eastern Europe. It tried to influence the Irish referendum on women’s reproductive freedom. It’s trying to influence, and appears to be funding moves against, a whole swathe of legislation in the UK and in Scotland. And it’s increasingly indistinguishable from the far right.

    The Daily Mail, once again, is dining with the Devil.

  • Two pairs of slippers

    I wrote the other day about how if you’re in a customer-facing role, you’re expected to call male customers “sir” and female customers “madam”. This, from a travel industry talk last year by Billy Kolber, discusses the gendering and inclusivity of the hospitality industry.

    When travel destinations and brands say they’re LGBTQ+ friendly, what they really mean is they’re very comfortable serving the rich, white gay men who have been visiting them for the past decade. Most have no idea who the T, Q or all the people represented by the + are, let alone how to welcome us respectfully and personally.

    …Our industry is one of the most heavily gendered, with ideas about hospitality and respect that date back to the Victorian era. Virtually everything we know about travel is built on a paradigm of the heterosexual couple, mostly white, mostly American, British or German, traveling around the world.

    We hold doors and pull out chairs for women, and hand wine lists to men. We market spas to women and adventure to men. For years, hotels have given couples two pairs of slippers – one big and one small.

    This unnecessary gendering happens in all kinds of industries, and it’s not just relevant to LGBT+ people.

    Here’s an example from this week: a new study found that during lockdown, more than one-third of women using the Zoom videoconferencing app for work have been told to wear more makeup and have their hair done for video calls; 27% had been asked to dress “in a more sexy or provocative way” because it’s important “to look nicer for the team” or to be more “pleasing to a client”.

    How many men do you think were asked to dress more provocatively to be more pleasing to the client?

    Kolber:

    To be champions of equity and inclusion, we must make our own professional spaces and engagements equitable and inclusive. They must be desexualized. A gender-less future isn’t one where we don’t have gender, it’s one where gender doesn’t impact access or respect.

  • “I do not understand you. Still, I do not hate you”

    Journalist Jane Fae has written a heartfelt article to the people who seem to hate trans people so much.

    It is a letter to friends I once had “that side of the wall”. Women, mostly, with whom I broke bread, and shared my house. Women with whom I campaigned, long and hard, against male violence. Against rape. Against social exclusion.

    You knew me once. You knew who I am, how I am: in truth you still do. You know, should know, I am not the monster depicted by the gender police. How are you not ashamed to be where you are now?

    …I do not understand why you are working with some of the most regressive elements in society, who hate not just trans people, but women and LGB folks too. I do not, in the name of all that is commonsense, understand why you would support court actions whose endgame will be the reduction in rights for all minorities, yourselves included.

    I do not understand how you can support monsters, masquerading as global statesmen, in furtherance of your anti-trans agenda. I saw you when you praised Trump for owning the trans: saw you, too, when you got into bed with anti-abortion groups and violent neo-fascists in Ireland to own the trans.

    And I saw you this very week, when your writings gave succour to Russia, the same day their police were beating up LGBT folks and feminists. To own the trans.

  • Hypocrites

    Over the past few weeks, some very wealthy writers have been very vocal about the importance of free speech. People should be free to voice their honestly held opinions, they say, no matter how offensive or hurtful those opinions may be.

    This week, the same writers have sent their lawyers after multiple people and publications whose honestly held opinions are that the wealthy writers are transphobic.

    Those opinions are honestly held. But they are not held by people who are wealthy. And that means the people they criticise can, and do, use the threat of financial ruin to silence them.

     

  • Cancel culture

    CTV News:

    An Ontario pastor who came out to her congregation as a transgender woman last month has been fired after the congregation voted to remove her.

    Metalsucks:

    Ex-Absu Guitarist Details Being Fired From Band After Coming Out as Transgender

    NBC News:

    Transgender man files discrimination suit after Maryland hospital cancels hysterectomy… the center canceled the procedure because it “conflicted with the hospital’s Catholic religious beliefs”.

    Metro Weekly:

    The Trump Administration is planning to tell homeless shelters how to identify and subsequently deny access to transgender women, including warning shelter workers to look for “facial hair” and “the presence of an Adam’s apple.”

  • Sexism is a warning sign

    Jessica Valenti is very tired of writing the same column over and over again.

    I hate that I’m writing this column. Over the years, I’ve published versionafter version of it: how the majority of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence; how misogyny is a clear and obvious indicator of future violence; and how politicians, mainly on the right, refuse to treat it as the epidemic it really is.

    And here I am once again. Just this week, Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and well-known misogynist, allegedly killed the son of a federal judge and wounded her husband in an attack at their New Jersey home.

    …Women knew he was dangerous, but as happens time and time again, what should have been obvious warning signs were ignored.

  • “You want to make America great again? Turn and face the strange”

    Another week, another wise and witty column from Jenny Boylan. I won’t spoil the opener because it really made me laugh and I think it will really make you laugh too.

    But the column isn’t just about a funny misunderstanding. It’s about having a disability, about consideration for others, about being different.

    I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about looking funny, about not fitting in, both as a partially deaf person living in a world dominated by the hearing and as an L.G.B.T.Q. woman living in a world dominated by straight and cis people. I’m tired of living in a world in which hearing people never think about the rest of us. I’m tired of living in a world in which transgender people constantly have to explain and justify the facts of our existence. I’m tired of living in a world in which, for some white people, the simple statement that Black lives matter is somehow considered radical.

  • “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.