Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Christmas wishes

    As someone wrote in a song:

    I hope you have a good one; I hope your Christmas is fun
    I hope you’re with your family and there’s something for you under the tree
    And I hope you thank your lucky stars

    I’m thanking my lucky stars this year: in the run-up to Christmas I’ve been able to spend time with people I care about very much, and after a couple of very difficult years I’m looking forward to spending Christmas Day with my children and close family.

    Others, I know, are not so fortunate. Some of us will be mourning loved ones they’ve lost, or that they’re estranged from; some will be gritting their teeth to spend time with people who won’t accept them for who they are.

    If you’re one of those people, I hope the coming year brings you joy, joy that’s bigger and more powerful than any of the sadness you’ve experienced. If you’ve been rejected, I hope you find the chosen family who can give you the love you so richly deserve. You might not know them yet, but they’re out there. And if you’re one of the people who’s caused or contributed to others’ sadness, I hope 2020 fills you with the love and empathy you lack.

    Merry Christmas.

    C x

  • Symbols mean whatever we want them to mean

    I’ve just been to pick up my Christmas food order. It was too early to bother with putting on my face or worrying about wigs so I did the lazy-tran thing of slapping on a beanie hat to hide my hairline before jumping in the car.

    At the checkout, the man on the till and I noticed each others’ Apple Watch straps simultaneously. His is the pride rainbow; mine is a combination of two straps to make the trans pride colours. And just like that, we went from fairly tired early-morning people to chatting like a couple of old pals.

    Symbols matter, whether it’s the strap on your watch or the pin badge on your messenger bag. In the case of my watch strap or the pins on my everyday bag, they’re a cheerful hello to others, a way to communicate without words that you’re on the same page, travelling in the same direction, part of the same family. It’s a way of communicating with people when it might be uncomfortable or unsafe to speak out loud.

    Words are symbols too, of course. When I talk about family in this post I don’t mean a biological or legal family; I mean something bigger and more inclusive than that, a family of people that may have very little in common with each other but who nevertheless have something that connects us.

    Words are symbols, shorthand for much bigger things. And we must be careful how we use them, because if we use them carelessly we can exclude people or marginalise them.

    On Twitter, the writer currently calling themself Merry Magdalene has posted a great thread about pronouns. As they say, “pronouns are not biological; they’re things we use to demarcate classes of people”.

    Magdalene’s thread is about the word “woman”, and how it’s shorthand for a collection of different characteristics that together we use to classify someone as female.

    There are women without vaginas. Women who do not have periods. Women who cannot give birth. Women who don’t have uteruses. Women whose uteruses do not work. Women with ambiguous genitalia. Phenotypical women with XY chromosomes.

    There is no *single* common characteristic.

    But if you bundle those experiences together you can build an understanding of what “woman” means in English, functionally: that you’re on one side of a two-sided social structure, within which certain traits predominate but are not universal.

    Anti-trans activists generally define “woman” in the tropes of biological essentialism: you can’t be a woman if you don’t menstruate, perhaps, or if you can’t bear children. But that isn’t the gotcha they think it is. It’s just a way of trying to use language to exclude people you personally don’t want in your club, and which can be used to exclude other people too. There are many cisgender women who don’t menstruate, or who can’t bear children.

    And it’s no coincidence that many of the people so hung up on dictionary definitions are so violently opposed to the use of the word “cisgender”, in much the same way anti-gay bigots were so opposed to being described as “heterosexual”. Both groups demanded to be called “normal” or “natural” so they could automatically classify everybody else as abnormal or unnatural. That argument isn’t biological. It’s ideological.

    “‘trans women’ are men, not women” isn’t a biological statement; it’s an ideological one about who we’re going to apply that word to, who we will admit to the class “woman,” and more to the point, whether these taxonomies can be transgressed.

    These taxononomies are highly subjective. Just yesterday Sharron Davies, the former athlete who’s found a new career as an anti-trans activist, argued that real women are “juggling kids, rushing out a wholesome dinner, doing the laundry & cleaning” like it’s 1953.

    It wasn’t so long ago we bundled women into asylums on grounds of insanity because they refused to make “wholesome meals” and do the laundry and cleaning for their husbands. And of course there are women still alive who were excluded and even attacked by so-called feminists because they were gay, because they were bisexual or because they were black.

    the things we universalize as traits of women are just *one historical bundle* of traits; in the past, there have been behavioral and temperamental tests as well, where nonconforming women were shunted off into side categories like “virago” that explicitly QUALIFY their womanhood in exactly the same way “trans” does.

    Like gender, language is fluid. Unlike bigots, it evolves.

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Bigots

    Today’s story of JK Rowling and an anti-trans tweet is a good example of how lazy reporting reinforces bullshit.

    If you missed it (and you probably didn’t; it’s been all over the media today): last night, the author tweeted in support of the anti-trans activist Maya Forstater, claiming that her defeat in a tribunal was an attempt to “force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real”. #IStandWithMaya, she wrote.

    That’s been reported as Rowling supporting free speech, but it isn’t.

    It’s Rowling telling her 14 million followers to support a bully.

    Forstater wasn’t forced out of her job; her employer chose not to renew her fixed term contract. She wasn’t told she couldn’t state that “sex is real”; she was told that she didn’t have the legal right to create a hostile and humiliating environment for her co-workers.

    Forstater has said publicly that her case was intended to establish a legal precedent: the precedent she wanted would give anti-trans activists the legal right to be as abusive as they liked towards trans colleagues without consequences.

    That isn’t how this is being reported. It’s being reported as “cancel culture”, the sinister “woke mafia” picking on a national treasure.

    But Rowling has form for this. She was an unapologetic follower of anti-trans activist Magdalen Berns, who claimed that there was a Jewish-funded conspiracy to turn the world trans and that trans women are “fucking blackface actors” who “aren’t women” but “get sexual kicks from being treated like women. Fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions… you pathetic, sick fuck”. She’s publicly liked anti-trans tweets claiming trans people are “men in dresses” and when called out on it, she had her PR team claim that it was a “clumsy and middle-aged moment” because she doesn’t want to upset her significant LGBT+ fanbase.

    By misrepresenting what the Forstater case was actually about, Rowling is fuelling anti-trans sentiment. The reporting over this is perpetuating the myth that women are being silenced by the sinister trans lobby while giving those women global press coverage for their supposedly silenced views.

    Here’s journalist Laurie Penny.

    Trans people, and trans women in particular, have for years been under attack by dedicated cohort of the British press, egged on by a small group of transphobic extremists. Transphobic views have been normalised in Britain. That’s the context for JK’s comments today.

  • It’s not what you believe. It’s how you behave

    One of the many similarities between anti-trans activists and anti-LGBT evangelicals is their belief that they have an absolute right to be nasty to anybody they disapprove of.

    Inevitably, that means some of them lose their jobs for breaking the terms of employment or find their employers unwilling to renew their contracts when those contracts expire. Those people then go running to the papers and to lawyers. The right-wing press here and in the US hails them as free speech martyrs who will be vindicated in court, and when they lose – and they always lose – the same papers are spookily silent or claim conspiracy.

    Yesterday, Maya Forstater’s case for unfair dismissal was rejected by a tribunal. Forstater worked for an organisation that campaigns against inequality, and her contract was not renewed when it emerged that she’d been using offensive language about trans people and advocating against their rights.

    It’s important to understand what this judgement is about. The full document is here. It is not about freedom of belief.

    You can believe anything you like. It’s how you act on those beliefs that matters. So for example you might personally think Dave from accounts is going to hell because of his sexuality, and that’s perfectly legal. Standing up on your desk shouting “FUCK YOU DAVE YOU’RE GOING TO HELL”, not so much.

    The claimant alleged that the decision not to renew her contract – a contract, remember, with an organisation that promotes equality – was discriminatory because behaviour her co-workers found offensive was driven by anti-trans beliefs that were “philosophical beliefs” and therefore protected under the Equality Act.

    The tribunal found that they were not, and in particular they failed item (v) of the”Grainger criteria”, which define what counts in law as a philosophical belief:

    it must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not be incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

    It’s a long and considered judgement but here are some key takeaways:

    It is important to note that if a person is guilty unlawful harassment of others that conduct is likely to be the reason for any action taken against them, rather than the holding of a philosophical belief.

    Under the Equality Act, it is harassment to engage in “unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic” when that conduct violates the other person’s dignity or creates an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for them. Deliberately and aggressively misgendering a trans person or banging on all day about how you hate trans women would meet that definition.

    It would also fall foul of Article 17 of the EHCR, which says that your rights do not allow you to “engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms” of others. So for example if you refuse to accept the correct gender of someone with a gender recognition certificate, which gives the holder the right to be recognised as their correct gender, you are breaching Article 17.

    In this case, the tribunal noted that when the claimant was told her behaviour was offensive to her co-workers and asked to stop, she said “since these statements are true I will continue to say them.”

    Behaviour, not beliefs.

    …the Claimant’s view, in its absolutist nature, is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others.

    …if a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate that person is legally a woman. That is not something that the Claimant is entitled to ignore.

    …The Claimant’s position is that even if a trans woman has a Gender Recognition Certificate, she cannot honestly describe herself as a woman. That belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society. It is incompatible with the human rights of others.

    The case is significant because anti-trans activists expected it to set a legal precedent that would allow bigots to bully trans people in their place of work. That’s backfired.

    It’s also significant because it was a waste of an estimated £80,000 in crowdfunded donations – donations that would have made a huge difference to charities that work to help vulnerable women and girls.

  • I think this means I’m a toddler

    It’s time for my annual joke: every queen should have two birthdays. Today is my second one of the year, because I legally became Carrie two years ago.

    It feels much longer than two years, and sometimes I feel like this.

    (click for full size image)

    But more often, I feel blessed. This isn’t an easy road to walk but life is good. I’m happy. And that’s largely because of the people I spend my time with.

    I feel blessed to know so many wonderful, beautiful, kind and hilarious humans, many of whom I didn’t know before I became me. They have made me feel happy, made me feel safe, and made me shoot expensive gin out of my nose.

    I hope they, and you, have a very happy and joyful 2020 when it comes.

    As for me, I’m going to the pub soon. After all, it is my birthday.

  • Gender recognition reform: here we go again

    The Scottish Government has published its draft gender recognition reform bill. It’s here. The consultation closes in March 2020.

    The Scottish Government does not wish trans people to go through procedures which are demeaning, intrusive, distressing and stressful. That is, quite simply, not right for our citizens.

    The draft bill goes into great detail about the possible effects of reform on the rights of women and girls.

    The Scottish Government is clear that reforming the GRA does not diminish the rights of women. The Government remains committed to the protection of women as well as achieving equality and challenging discrimination.

    …The 2010 [Equality] Act exception for single sex services will not change

    …there are a range of exceptions in the 2010 Act which can be used when appropriate to protect women, which might in some specific cases require the exclusion of trans women, if the conditions within the exception are met. These exclusions will not change following GRA reform.

    …The key question in this context is very much about whether a change in the system for obtaining legal gender recognition would adversely affect women’s rights. The Scottish Government has concluded that it would not.

    In reaching this view, the Scottish Government has considered international experience. As outlined in Annex E, there are a variety of systems for obtaining legal gender recognition in other countries. There is no evidence from overseas which the Scottish Government is aware of which would suggest that moving to a statutory declaration-based system for obtaining legal gender recognition would impact adversely on the rights of women. Under the system which the Scottish Government is proposing for Scotland obtaining legal gender recognition will remain a serious step which could not be undertaken lightly.

    You’re going to hear and read a lot of lies about this during the consultation period.

    I’m dreading the next three months of media scaremongering and social media abuse.

  • Here comes the flood

    The Scottish Government will announce its proposals for and open its second consultation on gender recognition reform this week.

    This is the second consultation because the first one did not get the result that bigots wanted: of the 15,532 individuals and 165 organisations who responded to the months-long, widely publicised consultation, 60% respondents were in favour of reform. Rather than “silencing women”, the consultation received submissions favouring reform from women’s organisations including Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Women 50:50, Zero Tolerance, Close The Gap, Engender and Equate Scotland.

    When women’s groups said they were in favour of gender recognition reform, the “stop silencing women” groups told the government to ignore them and re-run the consultation. To its great shame, the government did.

    The first Scottish consultation ended shortly before the English anti-trans panic really kicked in, so the evangelical groups, right-wing nutcases and anti-LGBT+ bigots that have poisoned the issue down south didn’t really get to make as much noise up here as they did in the rest of the UK (although all the leading anti-trans organisations and anti-LGBT groups did make submissions to the initial consultation, despite many of them claiming the consultation was somehow kept secret from them).

    They’ve made up for lost time ever since, and the second consultation will see them given a much bigger microphone to try and incite fear and hatred of trans people, especially trans women. They will be supported by their friends down south and across the Atlantic and by the majority of the local and national press.

    The proposed reforms have been implemented successfully in many other countries and have never been abused; lurid tales of predatory men using gender recognition certificates remain firmly in the imaginations of newspaper columnists, religious fundamentalists and idiots on Twitter. The predator myth was created by the US religious right after losing its war on equal marriage; at least one group has admitted fabricating the “predators in bathrooms” issue to try and make people scared of trans women.

    GRA reform has no impact on who gets to use toilets, who gets to access women’s refuges, who goes where in prison.

    It will not redefine the meaning of “woman”, force children to see penises or any of the other nonsense claims made by the same people who a generation ago would have been the ones claiming that lesbians shouldn’t be allowed to be PE teachers and that gay primary school teachers would molest their pupils.

    Nevertheless these claims and many more will be churned out by the Scottish and national press and on social media for many months to come. Many of the people making those claims will be ill-informed but many more will be malicious.

    Look for newspaper columnists with a track record of Islamophobia, social media posters who can barely hide their homophobia, “family values” campaigners who’ve previously lobbied against women’s reproductive health and for the right of parents to beat their children. Look for the Mumsnet crowd who’ve tried to defund children’s charities, for the antisemites claiming conspiracy, for the “protect women” groups who don’t care about any of the issues currently harming women, for the public figures who once said exactly the same about gay and lesbian people that they’re saying about trans people today.

    Listen for the dog whistles behind the “reasonable concerns” and false claims to care about “real” trans people.

    The flood of abuse that’s coming won’t stop reform from happening; it’s in line with international best practice and reflects the medical, scientific and legal consensus. GRA reform is a niche issue that only affects a tiny number of people, and the current concerns will one day be seen for the bullshit they are.

    But in the meantime it means yet more daily abuse of people like me.

    What the endless, cowardly delays in Scotland and England have done is enabled the far right, the religious right and their useful idiots to demonise part of the LGBT+ community in an attempt to weaken the wider family. Trans people are just the start.

    We are a wedge strategy for anti-LGBT+ and anti-feminist activism, the softest targets in a war on gay men and lesbian women, on bisexual people and on women’s reproductive rights. We’ve seen the LGB Alliance’s social media run by Trump supporters and question the validity of bisexual people, seen Women Make Glasgow claim gay men shouldn’t get life-saving medicine, seen the leading lights of the UK anti-trans movement break bread with right-wing Christian fundamentalists and declare their support for Tommy Robinson, watched our MPs laud activists who claimed that trans people are a global conspiracy funded by the Jews. We’ve even seen people elected who believe that there’s a secret Muslim strategy to turn everybody transgender.

    We have endured more than two years of this, and yet the immediate future looks even worse. I’m scared not just for us, but for everybody else who’ll be targeted after us.

  • Won’t get fooled again

    Last night, the Hallmark Channel decided not to drop wedding adverts that featured two women getting married. It’s just the latest example of a business discovering that while evangelical and/or intolerant pressure groups can be very vocal, so can the people they hate.

    Being intolerant is rarely a good look, PR wise, and LGBT+ people, their friends and their families have purchasing power. How many businesses can afford to alienate a huge proportion of the population to mollify a small number of idiots?

    That’s something The Salvation Army is realising too. As CNN reports, it’s trying to detoxify its brand after years of anti-LGBT+ activity.

    Salvation Army bell ringers, the folks you see jingling bells by red kettles at Christmastime, will be carrying a new prop this year: A card explaining the Christian church and charity’s approach to LGBTQ people.

    Designed to help bell ringers answer questions from passersby, the cards include a link to online testimonials from LGBTQ people helped by the Salvation Army’s array of social services, from homeless shelters to rehab clinics and food pantries.

    “For years, Facebook posts, forwarded emails and rumors have been leading some people to believe the Salvation Army does not serve members of the LGBTQ community,” the cards read. “These accusations are simply not true.”

    As tends to be the case with these kinds of statements, the Salvation Army is responding to a straw man: people aren’t saying that the SA doesn’t serve members of the LGBT+ community. They’re saying that it has a record of discriminating against LGBT+ people and lobbying against their human rights.

    As CNN notes:

    Criticism of the army among LGBTQ supporters peaked in 2012 when a church leader told an Australia radio program that gay people should be put to death.

    …Salvation Army leaders say the group no longer lobbies or signs public letters pushing for specific policies, with the exception of tax laws. Some are frustrated their anti-gay reputation still sticks.

    Which reminds me of a joke.

    Two men are in the countryside, talking. One of them points to the fences that surround the fields and says, “See those fences? I made every single one of them. But do people call me Sammy the Fence Maker?”

    He shifts his aim. “See those dry stone walls? I made them with my own hands. But do people call me Sammy the Dry Stone Wall Maker?”

    He sighs.

    “You fuck ONE sheep…”

    The Salvation Army is very much in that situation. We’re not saying that all their refuges discriminate against LGBT+ people or that any of them are doing it now; we’re saying that there’s evidence of some of them doing it as recently as 2017. We’re not saying that their officials are going on the radio to say gay people should be put to death today; we’re saying that one of their officials did it a couple of years ago.

    Trust takes time to rebuild, and in the meantime there are plenty of charities who don’t have a record of anti-LGBT+ discrimination and activism that we can support.

    One of the reasons trust takes time is because organisations lie. Take Chick-Fil-A, the US fast food chain. After high-profile protests in 2012, it promised to stop donating to anti-LGBT+ organisations; its tax records for 2018 show that it didn’t keep its promise. After yet another PR storm this year, the organisation has promised once again to change things – but it hasn’t explicitly promised to stop funding anti-LGBT+ organisations, just to review its funding approach.

    You can understand why we’re cynical. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.

  • We are family

    In the US, the Hallmark channel has pulled a series of bridal adverts because they featured a lesbian couple. Of the six adverts submitted, only two – the only two featuring heterosexual couples – will be aired.

    The ads were pulled because of pressure from One Million Moms, a far right, anti-LGBT+ evangelical hate group. A post on the group’s website said that their call to the CEO of Hallmark’s parent company “gave us the opportunity to confirm the Hallmark Channel will continue to be a safe and family-friendly network.”

    This is the same pressure group that demanded a boycott of Toy Story 4 because in the background of one scene there was a same-sex couple dropping their child off at nursery and giving them a hug.

    The entire purpose of One Million Moms is to get offended about things and campaign against them. Not important things such as child poverty, structural inequality or women’s reproductive rights and healthcare. Things such as the names of ice creams and the gender of dolls and Drag Queen Story Hour and the presence of lesbian women in bridal adverts. They’re basically the US equivalent of the Mumsnet nutcases who spend every waking hour trying to hurt trans people and who have the right-wing press on speed dial.

    They exploit the public perception of mothers as kind, caring, nurturing people rather than rabid, reactionary right-wingers and have a media profile that’s much bigger than any group of intolerant evangelical assclowns deserves. And some firms are too craven and cowardly to tell them to go to Hell, which is where they’re all headed.

    The membership of One Million Moms is considerably smaller than one million mums. As Advocate.com points out, their history of petitions and boycotts demonstrates that these terrible arseholes have very little support, and they have close links with hate preachers who demonise not just LGBT+ people but Jews, Muslims and Mormons too. But that didn’t stop the Hallmark Channel from caving to their bigoted demands.

    The idea that the very existence of LGBT+ people is not family friendly fills me with rage. We are family. We are your family, even if your so-called family values mean we have to hide from you. We are your sisters and brothers, your fathers and mothers, your sons and daughters, your aunts and uncles and cousins and every other kind of family member there can be.

    The idea that our existence is not family-friendly, that simply by being alive we are threats to all that is decent and true, is what fuelled the hateful Section 28 legislation. It’s what leads supposedly intelligent adults to scream at primary school teachers because they teach inclusive education. It’s what prevented equal rights  for so long. And it’s what fuels the discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people that fills my news feed with new horrors each and every day.

    “We’re not bigots,” say the bigots. “We’re just defending family values.” But the family they mean is their religious family, and the values they speak of are hatred and intolerance.

    My family is a rainbow family, and I teach my children family values too. But in my house, family values doesn’t mean hatred and intolerance. The family values we preach are kindness, compassion, and not being hateful, bigoted bastards.

    Update, 16 December

    This story has really blown up, and Hallmark has reversed its decision. In a statement, GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis said:

    The Hallmark Channel’s decision to correct its mistake sends an important message to LGBTQ people and represents a major loss for fringe organizations, like One Million Moms, whose sole purpose is to hurt families like mine.

  • Behold the awesome power of the sinister trans lobby!

    Despite the valiant efforts of many trans candidates in the General Election, the number of transgender and non-binary UK politicians remains zero. As PinkNews notes, there are now more UK MPs who believe that there is a Muslim conspiracy to make people transgender than there actually are transgender MPs.

    The zero MPs elected by the much-publicised transgender lobby amounts to – you guessed it – zero percent of the 650 MPs who sit in the chamber.

    The result means that there are now more MPs who believe that transgender people are part of an extremist Muslim conspiracy to destroy the West than MPs who are transgender.

    It marks the 57th consecutive general election with no openly transgender people elected.

    Being viciously anti-trans and in some cases anti-LGBT and anti-feminist didn’t stop a number of other clowns from being elected either.

    So much for an all-powerful, well funded sinister trans lobby. Yet again we have zero trans or non-binary MPs, zero trans or non-binary judges, zero trans or non-binary newspaper editors, and zero trans or non-binary political columnists. Despite our awesome power we haven’t even been able to secure reliable supplies of HRT.

    It’s been interesting to see the mental gymnastics the anti-trans crowd have been putting themselves through over the election results. They claim that Jo Swinson lost her Scottish seat because she was in favour of gender recognition reform. They don’t seem so keen to point out that the candidate who beat her was from the SNP – a party whose manifesto was explicitly in favour of, er, gender recognition reform.