Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Super Size Media

    Morgan Spurlock in a promotional image for Super Size Me (2004)

    Have you ever wondered why so much news output is junk?

    It’s because of the big board.

    As journalist Mic Wright explains, the big board was popularised by Nick Denton of Gawker media. It’s a big screen that everybody in the newsroom can see, and it shows you in real time which stories are getting the most attention.

    What Gawker did a decade ago is commonplace in newsrooms now, because most media outlets have become dependent on traffic-based advertising revenue. As a result every significant media outlet pays close attention to its traffic: “which reporters/writers/columnists are killing it and whose stuff is absolutely eating dirt,” as Wright puts it.

    And sadly, it’s usually the lowest-quality content that’s killing it.  You can see that for yourself: while media outlets don’t let you see their big board, many of them do show you what content is the most read (and often, most shared and/or most commented on).

    In 2011, Nick Denton explained that this system worked really well for everything but “the worthy topics”: “Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables. Nor [do advertisers] want to pay to encourage people to eat their vegetables.”

    He was right, and the food comparison is a good one: many of us would much rather eat Big Macs than broccoli, and the stats show that we are similarly drawn to unhealthy news output: the dogwhistling columnists, the manufactured outrage, the reinforcement of prejudice, idiocy rather than analysis.

    But the downside is the same too. As Morgan Spurlock demonstrated in Super Size Me just before the big board became a newsroom staple, there are terrible consequences to consuming a diet made mainly of junk.

  • Good news, bad news

    The UK government’s plans to roll back trans rights suffered a setback this week when tens of thousands of cisgender women emailed the Prime Minister to say “not in my name”. I don’t believe for a moment that the plans have been dropped – as today’s Guardian notes, Dominic Cummings was focus-grouping trans rights in the Autumn as a topic the conservatives can use to attack Labour – but it was a welcome reminder that anti-trans voices do not speak for most women.

    As was this, in the LA Times: it’s very typical of the US response to JK Rowling’s blog post.

    Poke a prejudice, almost any prejudice, and pretty quickly the conversation goes straight down the toilet. Those opposed to civil rights, LGBTQ rights and the Equal Rights Amendment all have historically boiled their bigotry down to some wild-eyed fear about what equality in any form will mean to the state of our public restrooms. Black people peeing with white people, men with women, straight people with gays people, trans with cis — oh, the horror, the horror.

    As I’ve written before, the difference between the mainstream US media and the mainstream UK media is dramatic. Last night BBC’s Newsnight – which previously gave extensive coverage to an anti-trans piece in the BMJ without revealing that the article it was covering was written by the journalists who were covering it – once again decided to scaremonger about trans teens’ healthcare by getting the same journalists to essentially tell the same story again.

    There was lots of scary music and lurid claims from conveniently anonymous sources, but no time to explain how the system currently works. Coincidentally, knowing how the system actually works is at odds with scary tales of children being railroaded at high speed into irreversible treatment.

    The parent of a trans kid detailed the process in the I Paper last year, when waiting lists were shorter – they were 20 months for a first appointment then; it’s now 27 months and climbing.

    Once you are seen for the first time, there follows a lengthy assessment process, involving a minimum of six appointments with two psychologists who assess and challenge the child over a period of at least six months, often stretching to years in limbo. Each appointment is a lost day of education and work, with long journeys to London, a second Gids centre in Leeds, or a handful of satellite clinics.

    If this long assessment period is ever concluded, “hormone blockers” may be prescribed. These are designed to pause puberty, which allows the young person time to reflect on their gender. The medication is well understood, considered reversible, and has been used safely for nearly 30 years for transgender young people and considerably longer for treating early onset puberty.

    Given the timing, it seems rather suspicious that Newsnight chose this of all weeks to reheat the same innuendo from what looks very much like a mendacious campaign. But it appears to have had the desired effect, with endless commenters on Newsnight’s social media comparing trans healthcare providers to Dr Mengele, claiming that this is a scandal akin to Thalidomide and describing an NHS facility as a “child abuse clinic”.

    You may recall similar rhetoric being used before people started bombing abortion clinics or taking assault rifles to pizza parlours in the belief that Hilary Clinton was skinning babies in the basement.

  • A tale of two cities

    Something happened in Glasgow’s George Square last night.

    Tale #1: two rival groups of protesters clashed. One group was there to “protect statues” from vandalism.

    Tale #2: more than 200 far-right loyalist goons set out to attack a peaceful pro-immigration protest, assaulting protesters, passers-by and the police.

    Both tales are true, but they’re framed very differently and effectively describe two different cities.

    The first one has appeared in multiple media outlets.

    The second description is the real one.

    The far-right thugs shouting racist and sectarian slurs – “Fenian bastards” was a favourite, judging by the videos I’ve seen – and sieg-heiling in our streets, the people who just days ago assaulted non-white people and young women in similar scenes, were not counter-protesters and were not there to protect statues. They were coordinated by the National Defence League, the successor to the SDL, a group of fascist clowns who go out intending to inflict violence. Their social media is plastered with the Red Hand of Ulster and the Union Flag, acronyms such as FTP and all the usual far-right tropes.

    To suggest, as some media outlets have done, that they were in any way equivalent to the gentle, joyful, anti-eviction protesters whose event they deliberately targeted isn’t balance. It’s false equivalence.

    I joked on Twitter last night that the bigots “need to work on their messaging: if they claimed to have ‘reasonable concerns’ about ‘statue erasure’, The Herald would give them a column”. But there’s some truth in it. Whether it’s sectarian hooligans or more genteel bigotry, false equivalence is very dangerous.

    False equivalence doesn’t just mislead people about the story. It prevents progress. How can you take action against vicious, violent bigots if you won’t admit that there are vicious, violent bigots in the first place?

  • “That is phenomenal engagement. What’s not to like?”

    Alex Hern explores the tragic and frightening tale of one man’s descent into psychosis, a descent that was speeded up by online radicalisation.

    There is no doubt that people have been radicalised by the internet, and by this particularly horrible corner of it. There are just too many cases like Slyman’s, where we can see, in the pattern of YouTube likes, Facebook groups and Twitter follows, someone entering the funnel at one end – watching Jordan Peterson videos, or listening to the Joe Rogan Experience – and then, six months or a year later, fully “red-pilled”, accusing Hilary Clinton of child murder or calling for a second civil-war in the US.

    (One particularly curious thing about this as a Brit is that that’s even the journey of radicalisation of much of the UK far right. God knows we have our own pathways too – with Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins playing major parts – but the number of Trump t-shirts and MAGA hats at British fascist gatherings is wild.)

    But in this case, six days just feels too quick for the normal radicalisation narrative to fit.

    Hern asks a frightening question: what if the algorithms that push content to us can push us over the edge?

    if YouTube’s recommendation algorithm had learned to recognise the signs of someone on the edge of a psychotic break, and had learned that if you show them a lot of QAnon videos at that stage in their life engagement goes through the roof, what would be different from the tale we’ve just heard?

    We’re still not taking the problem of online radicalisation seriously enough. Part of it is human, where extremists use cult tactics to recruit people to their cause and create echo chambers of increasingly extreme ideology. But a great deal of it is automated, and that automation not only rewards extremism but promotes it to the people least able to sort fact from lurid fiction.

    Five days after he watches his first Q video, he is live-streaming his belief that the local radio station is sending him coded messages from Q. Later that day, the song You Spin Me Round by Dead Or Alive convinces him the Deep State is coming to kill him, and he gets in the car with his wife and kids and begins his drive.

  • “Every day in public is risky”

    It’s been interesting to compare the US and UK press reaction to JK Rowling’s blog post about trans people: in the US it’s been met with widespread revulsion, with many opinion pieces by cisgender women outraged by her claims to speak on their behalf. It’s also led many publishers to commission trans women to talk about their experiences. This, by former Human Rights Campaign press secretary Charlotte Clymer, is particularly good.

    Clymer says she finds it hard to believe Rowling’s claim that she “knows trans people”. As she writes:

    Folks who have trans people in their lives — and actually care about them — know how much trans people generally go out of their way to accommodate cisgender people.

    As Clymer is quick to admit, trans people are no more of a monolith than any other group. But very many of those of us who are out will relate to her experiences of the “fairly common actions we take just to be in the public square and avoid risking violence and discrimination from cisgender people.”

    I haven’t been to the gym since I came out.

    Nor me, even though there’s a really good and really cheap council-run facility just around the corner from my flat. I haven’t been swimming either, bar on one foreign holiday with my kids (during which I was yelled at by a woman at the beach).

    I’m terrified of changing rooms because of the possibility of confrontation.

    When I travel out of state, I look up nondiscrimination protections for where I’m going, including airport layovers.

    I don’t travel much, but I did a lot of research before the aforementioned foreign holiday and had to rule out multiple destinations because they aren’t LGBT-friendly. If it means going solo I don’t typically consider gigs or events that aren’t in my own town any more, because I’m increasingly worried about my safety if I venture far from home. And at home I’m careful not to travel by public transport if there are big events such as football matches or concerts by particularly laddish musicians taking place. I’ve left many events early to ensure I’m not getting the late bus or train home.

    [if] there’s a long line to use a public restroom, I usually walk away if I can help it

    I do this too. There have been nights out where my fear of confrontation has outweighed significant physical discomfort. Before lockdown I’d be very careful not to drink too much at gigs so I could avoid having to use the toilets at all.

    Even in places where we have legal protections, I worry about being a burden. I don’t want to cause headaches. I have faced discrimination in places where it was illegal and let it go because I wasn’t sure whether it was worth it. And I feel terrible about that. I feel guilty.

    Transgender and nonbinary people are constantly adjusting and revolving our lives around the preferences and feelings of cisgender people, not because we want to do that but because there aren’t enough hours in the day to fight every battle and not enough rights to guarantee our safety.

    I’d describe it as walking on eggshells but perhaps tiptoeing through a minefield is a better analogy: stepping on an eggshell isn’t going to harm you.

  • “Britain is the epicenter of a strange, savage, and specific cultural backlash”

    I know I’ve posted a lot of long pieces about trans-related issues lately, but if you only read one of them then perhaps it should be this one by Laurie Penny: TERF Wars: Why Transphobia Has no Place in Feminism. It’s an attempt to explain why the UK is unusually intolerant of trans people right now, and how perfectly nice people can be, and continue to be, radicalised against trans women.

    Britain is the epicenter of a strange, savage, and specific cultural backlash against trans rights. That backlash is doing real harm to people whose lives should not be up for debate. Its proponents have recruited a great many decent, well-intentioned people to their cause through subterfuge and scaremongering — including mainstream media figures and celebrities like Rowling.

    In the past half-decade, British transphobes have done everything in their power to convince the public that trans women are a sexual threat to women and girls… After years of relentless campaigning and strategically seeding stories into the press, they have managed to convince a significant chunk of the population that trans people are an active threat to women and children.

    How did they do that? As Penny describes it, some progressive people were uncomfortable with the sudden visibility of trans people.

    This was new territory, and not everyone who made comments like this was being rude and cruel on purpose, but the internet reacted as the internet is wont to do, particularly the parts of the internet full of angry left-wing queers in their teens and early twenties. In turn, establishment liberals reacted to that as establishment liberals are wont to do when called out by angry young lefties. Instead of listening, they got defensive and doubled down and…. well, you can guess what happened next. What happened is that the whole cycle repeated itself with increasing frenzy for about a decade.

    And that was weaponised by people Penny calls “swivel-eyed zealots”.

    In the discomfort of media liberals and the fervor of young trans activists, these essentialist feminists saw an opening. They reached out to cis women in the media who were sick of getting called transphobes by trans people online, offering sanctuary. They made in-roads with a number of prominent men who, while they had little interest in women’s rights, were only too happy to leap into the free-speech wars and kick down at some trans women with the smug, sadistic sophistry that is the birthright of a certain sort of centrist intellectual. They also made connections with other “‘gender critical” groups that were growing in number online — women who had no stake in the relentlessly incestuous liberal media drama, but who were panicked by the number of young people they saw coming out as trans and wanted what so many of us seem to want in these febrile times: a safe place to be prejudiced. Transphobic conspiracy theories were seeded among communities deemed most receptive- including mothers of young children, which is how parenting website mumsnet.com briefly became the nation’s most torrid hotbed of anti-trans recruitment.

    I’ve spoken to cis women involved in that side of the debate who have lost everything that mattered to them over years of austerity, cuts to services and welfare, who have been ground down by male violence and are now being told by people with an agenda that men in dresses are coming to take the last safe spaces they had. They are hearing, again and again, that trans people are coming to corrupt their children and convert their daughters to deviance — but if they sign up to an ideology that portrays trans women as “poison” (as transphobic feminist Shelia Jeffreys recently declared in the House of Commons), they can fight back.

    Please do read the whole thing.

  • “Harry Potter and the scales of justice”

    I was looking forward to Jenny Boylan’s take on the US Supreme Court ruling, and here it is.

    “I used to think people like you should be, you know, exterminated,” the nice young man said to me. “But after listening to you speak, I’ve really changed my mind!”

    This was after a lecture I’d given a few years ago at a college in Ohio. He looked at me proudly, clearly hoping that I’d be cheered that my words had opened his heart.

    But that word, “exterminated,” tempered my happiness somewhat.

    Sometimes I forget that there are people who want to wipe me off the face of the earth.

    I forget, even though the Trump administration does its best to remind me, every day.

  • Trans people are planning to escape the UK

    Jane Fae in the Independent:

    I spoke to a few trans folk: ordinary people trying to go about their daily routines as well as community leaders advocating on their behalf. The result was unanimous and shocking, and not just for the general level of abuse reported back. For this, in the end, is not so much about abuse or danger, but a growing fear that government, in yet another desperate populist lurch, will roll back the still limited place trans folk have been granted, making the UK a more hostile place for all.

    …if rhetoric does turn to action – if the Tory party reverts to its longer-term status as “nasty party” in respect of LGBT+ people – who can blame trans people for seeking safety elsewhere. We have seen what is happening in Trump’s America. Seen, too, how quickly rights can be stripped away in places like Hungary or Brazil. And we know that without state protection, the violence that some would like to direct our way will swiftly escalate.

    I do not wish to leave the UK. I am not going any time soon.

    But if the UK lurches further right, descending further into desperate populism, the time may yet come when, like my father before me, I can no longer live safely in the country where I was born.

    Some of us want to leave but can’t. I know because I’m one of them.

  • How the UK press came to target trans people

    There’s a lengthy, well-informed and balanced piece in Vice about how anti-trans attitudes came to dominate the UK press.

    Often writers centre experiences such as abuse or rape and then set these up as distinct and separate from the experiences of trans people. As Alison Phipps writes in her book Me, Not You: The Problem With Mainstream Feminism: “Sexual violence is terror; so is the way it is tackled and policed. And (white) ‘women’s safety’ is used to justify violence against marginalised communities.” She later adds: “The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones.”

  • Anti-LGBT+ discrimination is sex discrimination

    A surprising, very welcome and very important decision by the US Supreme Court says that anti-LGBT+ discrimination is sex discrimination and therefore LGBT+ people are protected in employment law. Some states already include LGBT+ people in their anti-discrimination protections, but this brings such protection to the states that do not.

    As justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, explained with admirable clarity:

    An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.

    It’s a terrible shame that one of the people responsible for the court case, trans woman Aimee Stephens, didn’t live to see it: she died a few weeks ago.

    There is a lot of bad news for LGBT+ people in the world right now, not least in the UK where the Westminster government is expected to try and roll back trans people’s rights this week, and LGBT+ people’s rights in the US remain under threat (and in the US, fire-at-will employment law means they can still be discriminated against, but less overtly). Nevertheless this is something worth celebrating.