Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • There is no “them”. There’s only us

    Like you I have many thoughts about the UK election results. But my main thought is this.

    Don’t fall into the trap of belittling and berating the people who didn’t vote the way you did. Don’t let yourself believe that “they” are racist, hateful or stupid. Don’t assume that because the politicians they voted for are bastards, they are too.

    If you do, you’ll feel the same rage and sadness when you lose the next election as you do today.

    There is no “them”. That’s what the worst politicians want you to believe. There’s just us.

  • Bad form

    I’ve been living full time as me for two years now. I’ve been undergoing hormonal transition throughout that period; I’ve changed my passport, my driving licence, my NHS gender marker (at my GP surgery’s request) and changed my name with every organisation imaginable. The world knows me as female.

    But there are still some exceptions. HMRC says I’m a bloke. If I want to remarry, I’d legally be the husband (and if I were straight and wanted to marry a man, religious celebrants could refuse to marry me or host my wedding in their church). If I die, I’ll be buried as a man. If I were seeking employment, employers demanding a birth certificate as proof of eligibility to work here (I know trans women this has happened to) could force me to out myself because my birth certificate still says I’m male.

    To be blunt, living as female while remaining legally male is getting on my tits.

    So I’m applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate to cross the remaining Ts and dot the remaining Is.

    Although I’ve been full time since October 2017, I have to provide documentary evidence of living as me – I can’t just show the emails of me coming out to employers, the Facebook messages from friends. Because most of my paperwork is digital, the first bit of printed evidence I have of social transition is my amended birth certificate from December 2017, which I’d applied for several months previously.

    You can’t apply until two years after the date on your earliest dated piece of evidence, so I have to wait until late December to send in my application.

    My birth certificate isn’t the only documentation I have to provide. I have to provide my passport or driving licence, utility bills, bank statements. I have to complete a statutory declaration, and I need to provide two medical reports: one from my GP and one from a specialist in gender dysphoria.

    Because the system is so underfunded and overstretched, getting anything takes time – so I wrote to my GP and to my doctor at the Sandyford Gender Clinic in early November with the appropriate documents in the hope of getting everything in order for a December application. My GP responded within a week but I didn’t hear anything back from my gender clinic doctor until I met him yesterday.

    He received my letter, he says, but he’s a bit busy. He should be able to fill out the form by the end of January.

    Even if he does it by then, which I doubt, I don’t have much hope of actually receiving the form in late January; the understaffed admin department is currently taking up to three months to type and send letters. But in the meantime I can’t apply for a gender recognition certificate because his report is non-negotiable. I cannot get a gender recognition certificate without it.

    I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve already put into this, and it’s costing money too. I’ve had to pay for the GP report, presumably I’ll have to pay for the gender clinic report and I’ll definitely have to pay £140 to the gender recognition panel. And when I finally do send off my application, the gender recognition panel may reject it without explanation, without the right to appeal and without refunding the £140 application fee.

    This is why of the estimated 130,000 trans folks living full time in the UK, fewer than 5,000 of us have gender recognition certificates.

    The proposed alternative, the one the anti-trans mob are telling you will cause the end of the world as we know it, would reduce the period of living full-time from two years to six months and remove the requirement for a report from an approved psychologist. You’d still need to provide documentary evidence that you’re living as you. And you’d complete a statutory declaration; doing so fraudulently is a criminal offence that could put you in prison for two years.

    That’s how gender recognition works in other countries, such as Ireland. It has never, ever been abused. But it’s made a paperwork exercise a little bit easier, a lot less humiliating and a lot less dependent on whether a specific doctor is “a bit busy”.

  • It gets better for misfit reindeer too

    This, by the ever wonderful Jennifer Finney Boylan, made me cry. It’s ostensibly about a kids’ Christmas movie, but it’s about so much more. I don’t want to spoil it for you so I won’t quote any of it here.

     

  • They’re not bigots. They just want gay people dead

    As expected, the launch of the SNP’s LGBT+ manifesto has upset the worst kind of people.

    Among them is the anti-trans pressure group Women Make Glasgow, which is followed by a who’s who of anti-trans people in Scotland including many prominent names from the pro-independence movement and mainstream journalism. The group copied in SNP politicians Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine into their response to the manifesto announcement because they believe they are kindred spirits.

    The group is predictably outraged about proposed gender recognition reform. But it’s interesting to see what else it’s upset about: improving the treatment of LGBT immigrants, and providing PrEP medication for gay men.

    This is homophobia straight out of the 1980s. It’s saying that HIV is your own fault and the NHS shouldn’t give you medicine.

    So far, none of the account’s 3000+ followers appear to have a problem with that.

    PrEP can prevent HIV infection and can be life-saving for men and women who have HIV. It’s a very safe and very effective public health measure – and prescribing it has absolutely nothing to do with the manufactured panic over gender recognition. It is purely about saving people’s lives.

    Anti-trans activists generally try very hard to hide homophobia. The party line is that they are not homophobic (“I support equal marriage!”) and are purely concerned with women’s safety. That way you can reuse every bigoted argument once used against gay and lesbian people and link arms with the US anti-abortion, anti-LGBT religious right while claiming that you disagree with everything they stand for but support their stance on “gender ideology”.

    But many anti-trans activists are in full agreement with the religious right on much more than anti-trans issues. The columnists who rail against trans people frequently expose themselves as racist, islamophobic, anti-semitic or islamphobic, or use “reasonable concerns” about trans people as cover for fundamentalist beliefs that are anti-LGBT and against women’s reproductive rights. The bloggers who are absolutely, definitely not homophobic rail against inclusive education in primary schools and abuse lesbian women who disagree with their bile. And groups claiming only to campaign about women’s rights argue that the lives of people with HIV aren’t worth saving.

    It was never just about trans people.

  • A bold statement by the SNP on LGBT+ equality

    To mark Human Rights Day, the SNP has published a manifesto for LGBT+ equality. It’s not so much what it says as the fact that it says it at all, especially now: it’s going to make some high-profile bigots extremely angry, which is a bold move in the days before an election.

    The details are here. Here’s a short summary:

    • Demanding full devolution of employment, equality and immigration law
    • Urging the UK government to better protect LGBT+ people from discrimination
    • Gender recognition reform, and supporting the same in England
    • Pressing the UK government to recognise non-binary people in official documents
    • Retrospective pardons for gay and bi people criminalised for their sexuality
    • Pressing for effective protections for intersex people
    • Urging the rest of the UK to better provide life-saving PrEP medication
    • Opposing any attempt to roll back human rights, including the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act
    • Pressing the UK government to outlaw dangerous and discredited conversion therapy
    • Pushing for reforms so that LGBT+ asylum seekers are treated with dignity and respect
    • Championing LGBT+ equality and human rights worldwide

    I don’t think any other party has been this explicit in their support for human rights. It’s an interesting one: the obvious and often vicious transphobia in the independence movement and in some sectors of the SNP has made it very difficult for me to vote for them, but to see this as manifesto commitments rather than just vague promises paints the party in a very different light. It’s going to be interesting to see how that translates in terms of party discipline given the behaviour of some of its members, including senior ones.

    If you’re thinking about LGBT+ issues when you vote in Scotland, you might find it interesting to compare your candidates with the list of signatories to the Equality Network’s LGBTI Equality Pledge. In my constituency the Lib Dem, the Green and the Labour candidates have signed it. The right-wing candidates haven’t, but neither has the SNP candidate. I hope it’s an oversight: he’s been a signatory in previous years.

  • How to break the news (and a country)

    If you haven’t already seen it, this photograph is a PR nightmare for the Conservatives. It shows a 4-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia forced to sleep on a Leeds hospital floor because of a bed shortage. It’s an image that’ll resonate with any parent, but it’s particularly heart-breaking for anyone who’s taken their child to A&E in a similar situation: it was just a few months ago that my own son was being investigated for and later treated for pneumonia, so I’m particularly aware of how awful and frightening the wait can be.

    It’s the kind of image that can change the path of elections, so the Conservatives have reacted very strongly. What’s interesting about that is the way they’re doing it. They appear to have activated a very powerful misinformation machine to spread outright lies.

    Let’s make something clear first. There’s no doubt that the image is genuine. The Chief Medical Officer at the hospital has already apologised. The Chief Executive has made a personal apology to the child’s mother.

    That’s not what people are seeing on social media. On Twitter and on Facebook they’re seeing the same message from multiple unconnected accounts, many of which have lain dormant for some time:

    A good friend of mine is a senior nursing sister at Leeds Hospital – the boy shown on the floor by the media was in fact put there by his mother who then took photos on her mobile phone and uploaded it to media outlets before he climbed back on his trolley.

    Here’s how it looks on Twitter.

    The same cut-and-pasted text has since been retweeted manually by minor public figures such as former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen. But the initial rush of publication has come from what appears to be a centrally co-ordinated network of social media accounts.

    The same message is being posted to carefully selected Facebook groups, as Marc Owen Jones explains (with screenshots as proof). Facebook groups are a very effective way of targeting voters of particular demographics, not least because nobody outside the group usually sees what you’re posting there.

    In one example, Jason Crosby pastes the tweet on the FB group for “Seaham Have Your Say”. Seaham have your say is a page with 24k followers serving the North Eastern coastal town of Seaham. His post gets 91 comments and 26 shares.

    And it’s making its way to the right-wing press. Here’s Allison Pearson of the Telegraph.

    Pearson also claims that the mother of the child is upset that “Corbyn politicised it”, which is at odds with the claim that the mother staged the photos for political reasons. [Update, later that day: Pearson has now deleted the tweets without explanation or apology, presumably after a word with a libel lawyer.]

    To reiterate: the hospital has already apologised. From the BBC:

    Dr Yvette Oade, chief medical officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Our hospitals are extremely busy at the moment and we are very sorry that Jack’s family had a long wait in our Emergency Department.”

    She added: “We are extremely sorry that there were only chairs available in the treatment room, and no bed. This falls below our usual high standards, and for this we would like to sincerely apologise to Jack and his family.”

    What we’re seeing here is deeply disturbing. In response to a story it doesn’t like, the Conservative Party – or more likely, a separate organisation with plausible deniability of its connections to the Conservative Party – is trying to bury it not with spin, but with outright lies and defamation. Those lies are coming from a range of sock puppet accounts on multiple social networks and their message is then amplified by tame journalists.

    This is no different from the fake-news chants of Donald Trump: the goal is to delegitimise the media, to push the narrative that everything you read critical of The Party is a lie. And it’s a key tactic of fascist politics, which is why it’s so frightening.

    Fascism does not begin with jackboots. It begins with creating a “them” and an “us” and then delegitimising the institutions that limit state power such as the judiciary and the press. They ridicule the judges, claiming they represent special interests and are “enemies of the people”, as The Daily Mail put it. They accuse the press of bias and of lying, accusing them of speaking on behalf of the “them” against the “us”. If the press is not compliant, it is threatened into silence (this week alone the Conservatives have threatened the licence of Channel 4 and the funding of the BBC) or dismissed as fraudulent.

    Our current Prime Minister is connected to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, a proud supporter of far-right extremists who wants to “destroy the state”: “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment,” he says. Delegitimising the press is a key part of that strategy.

    The US Holocaust Museum famously lists 14 early warning signs of fascism. They are:

    • Powerful and continuing nationalism
    • Disdain for human rights
    • Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
    • Supremacy of the military
    • Rampant sexism
    • Controlled mass media
    • Obsession with national security
    • Religion and government intertwined
    • Corporate power protected
    • Labour power suppressed
    • Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
    • Obsession with crime and punishment
    • Rampant cronyism and corruption
    • Fraudulent elections

    How many can you tick?

    We don’t have all 14 yet, but many of the items in the list should give us pause. More than any other party, The Conservatives seem to be taking us down a road that we’ve seen many other countries travel. We know all too well where that road can lead.

  • When the media promotes conspiracy theories

    Conspiracy theories aren’t just the preserve of cranks. The Sunday Times ran a long campaign claiming that AIDS was the invention of a “gay lobby”; as recently as 2009 The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson claimed that the link between HIV and AIDS was contentious and that “debate” on the subject was being silenced by a “strong and vociferous lobby”.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s, much of the UK press chastised those who sought to “silence” Andrew Wakefield’s discredited and dangerous claims about the safety of the MMR vaccine, coverage that brought a fatal, preventable disease back into our classrooms.

    Just this weekend, The Sun published a far-right conspiracy theory claiming Jeremy Corbyn was part of a shadowy network of hard-left extremists – an article it quickly and quietly unpublished.

    So we’re hardly in uncharted territory if sections of the media promote conspiracy theories today. They do, particularly around trans people. This week, they’re claiming that Big Pharma is paying the Liberal Democrats to force gender recognition reform into law, thereby turning all our children trans, because reasons.

    This isn’t just cranks on social media. It’s Radio 4’s Today Programme and the Murdoch Press.

    Here’s the Sunday Times’ explanation.

    Ferring Pharmaceuticals donates to the Lib Dems.

    True. It’s done so for years, to the tune of about £1.5m.

    It markets the drug Triptorelin

    Also true.

    “which is used to block puberty among adolescents”.

    That’s a deliberate distortion. Triptorelin is not primarily prescribed as a puberty blocker. It is a cancer drug, and it’s used overwhelmingly for cancer patients – thousands of them, compared to the few dozen for whom it’s used to treat precocious puberty or as a puberty blocker.

    Now, Ferring doesn’t appear to be a very nice company. Pharmaceutical firms rarely are. But it’s not mainly in the puberty blocking business. It’s in the cancer business, which is much more profitable. The entire market for puberty blockers in the NHS is worth around £90,000 a year, but it spends more than £2 billion on cancer treatments.

    Let’s think for a moment. Which is more likely: a corporation that makes cancer drugs spending £1.5m as an insurance policy for a market sector worth £2,000,000,000 per year, or a corporation that makes cancer drugs spending £1.5m to make all the children transgender so it can bring in £90,000 a year?

    Aha, the anti-trans lot say. But the market will grow. There are so many people trying to access gender clinics that the market for puberty blockers will soon be worth, like, lots and lots and lots. Maybe eleventy billion pounds a week.

    More referrals does not mean more prescriptions. In 2014-2015, the number of under-15s referred to the UK’s only gender clinic for adolescents rose from 46 to 52 – but the number of people prescribed hormone blockers dropped from 41 to 32. Puberty blocking remains exceptionally rare. These drugs aren’t and won’t be handed out like sweets.

    And remember, the alleged plot here is that the money from Big Pharma is going on lobbying for reform of the Gender Recognition Act, which has no connection with trans healthcare of any kind, let alone adolescent healthcare.

    The argument, then, goes something like this.

    • Cancer drugs firm donates not to the political parties that will win the election, but to one that won’t
    • Political party that won’t win the election will somehow force the other parties to make paperwork slightly easier for trans adults, which they’d promised to do anyway
    • Something something something think of the children

    Not mad enough? On social media, high profile figures with tens of thousands of followers decided to add yet more skulduggery to the equation.

    • Vladimir Putin wants all UK children turned trans, because reasons
    • Putin gives a gong to the boss of a cancer drugs firm, possibly with mind control technology inside it
    • Cancer firm donates not to the political parties that will win the election, but to one that won’t
    • Political party that won’t win the election will somehow force the other parties to make paperwork slightly easier for trans adults, which they’d promised to do anyway
    • Something something something think of the children

    How did we end up with Vladimir Putin? Well, the boss of Ferring, Frederick Paulsen, has been awarded the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation. What more proof do you need?

    Of course, Paulsen has been given some other honours. Maybe if we looked into that we could see just how big this international conspiracy really is.

    Paulsen’s honours include:

    • The French legion of honour.
    • The Order of the Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan.
    • The Order of Merit Class I by Germany.
    • The Cross of the Order of Chivalry by Denmark.
    • The OBE, the Order of St John Service Medal and Freeman of the City of London.
    • The Scottish Geographical Medal.
    • The Companion of the Royal Aero Club of the UK.
    • An honorary professorship of the University of Dundee.

    Now, I don’t want to alarm you, but clearly it isn’t just Putin. The international transgender conspiracy goes much deeper and includes President Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, Queen Margarethe II of Denmark, King Wangchuck of Bhutan, The Queen of England, the Scottish Geographical Society, The Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom and the entire University of Dundee. Together they are united with a single goal: to get the Lib Dems into power to turn all your children trans.

    Either that, or sections of the mainstream media will happily promote unhinged conspiracy theories that help create fear and distrust of trans people.

    One of these possibilities is much more likely, and much more frightening, than the other.

     

  • The great HRT shortage: a very British disaster

    Hundreds of thousands of women in the UK have been affected by the ongoing shortage of many HRT products. The products aren’t made in the UK but the shortage is very much a UK thing. Emma Hartley discovers why.

    The short version: the UK government messed up.

    The slightly longer version: supply problems have been massively magnified by a change to the way the UK prices HRT medication, changes which have also been affected by the Brexit-related fall in the value of the pound.

    Hence a supposedly global problem having disproportionate effects on women in the UK.

    At the heart of a problem so ferociously complex that many in the pharmaceutical industry even have trouble understanding it, could this be a simple case of incompetence?

    It certainly seems to be.

  • Living in a burning world

    When I was a kid, I used to devour apocalyptic fiction: give me a shattered society trying to survive in a nuclear winter and I’d be all over it.

    One of the most frightening ones I read was Nevile Shute’s On The Beach, which truly terrified me.  It’s set in Australia in the aftermath of a nuclear war, with the characters awaiting the inevitable arrival of the radioactive fallout. It gave me nightmares.

    It’s not as frightening as this article.

    The article is also about Australia, and about people stoic in the face of a man-made disaster. This one isn’t nuclear war, though. It’s fire.

    Our weather apps now carry dotted lines across the shining sun: smoke haze. We learn the meaning of “temperature inversion”, in which warm air traps cool – and smoke – beneath it; our weather reports now carry air quality ratings. For the past month they’ve ranged from “poor” to well beyond “hazardous”. In news updates about the fires, it’s now commonplace to hear two horrific phrases: “seek shelter” and “too late to leave”.

    …The fire danger warnings have a new category. Colours at the low-danger end are green, moving through yellow and orange. The new one is a deep, malevolent red with black stripes, and it’s called “catastrophic”.

    On the first catastrophic warning day there’s a palpable fear, because even expert firefighters have never seen anything like this. The winds are completely unpredictable. Nobody knows what will happen.

    The writer, Charlotte Wood, is well aware that her article centres the relatively affluent city-dwellers, not the poorer people who’ve been affected by these fires in much more devastating ways.

    …as the days and weeks pass, here in Sydney the mood changes from disbelief to hypervigilant fear to a kind of WTF petulance. It’s still happening? We’re used to turning our attention briefly, intensely, to “those poor people” affected by climate change, then returning to normal life. Now those poor people include us.

    Internet fights break out over whether it’s obscene to complain about the smoke. Of course it is; we’re lucky, we of the middle-class inner city. I can afford to buy a new Ventolin once a week, for example. I have time to do each load of laundry thrice before it smells clean. My work doesn’t force me to remain outside, breathing in this shit all day long. And of course, no fires have visited inner Sydney. None of ours are among the 600-plus homes burnt to the ground. None of us are among the dead.

    But even as this is happening, right-wing politicians pretend it’s business as usual.

    The prime minister’s family lives here in Sydney; surely by now the man must be saying something? I checked his social media pages. Prime minister Morrison’s Instagram account carried grinning images of him – baseball cap in place – atop a ladder, draping his family home in twinkly Christmas lights. No matter what’s going on each year, says the PM of a burning nation, getting in the Christmas spirit has always been such an important part of our family life.

    But it’s not business as usual. The 2010s were the decade when our planet burned. From Wired:

    This year, for example, wildfires in the Arboreal forest ringing the Arctic were unprecedented in both intensity and latitude, according to The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The organisation says that the Earth’s boreal forests are now “burning at a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years.”

    And fires pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, creating a terrible feedback loop.

    In Brazil, wildfires – which have been at the most intense since 2010 – released the equivalent of 228 megatonnes of carbon dioxide. In an atmosphere already chock full of pollution, this is, of course, bad news.

    There is much more bad news where that came from. And our response is to decorate our Christmas trees and pretend everything is okay.

    We’re going into an election here where the PM can’t be arsed taking part in a climate debate; no wonder. Under the Conservatives we’re going to miss our extremely tame 2020 climate targets. We’re failing to meet our modest commitments to tackling carbon emissions, pollution, waste and overfishing. We’re also going to miss our 2050 emissions target.

    We worry about Bags for Life and paper straws, tinkering with things that don’t matter while the world burns and the rich and powerful tell us not to believe the science and to keep on consuming and polluting and trashing the only home we’ve got.

    From On The Beach:

    You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.

    The apocalyptic novels of my youth were supposed to be fiction of the most pessimistic kind. They’re starting to feel horribly real.

  • Library closures are a horror story

    The Guardian:

    Almost 800 libraries have closed since the Conservative government implemented austerity in 2010, new figures reveal.

    That’s nearly a fifth of the UK’s libraries gone in a decade.

    One of the awful things about this, and there are many awful things about this, is that savage cuts to library services reduce the number of library visits. That reduction is then used to justify further cuts on the grounds that fewer people are using libraries.

    Libraries aren’t just places to get books, although of course that’s important: my mum taking me to the local library kick-started my imagination and ignited a love of stories and language that’s been with me my whole life. I wouldn’t have the job I have if it weren’t for those visits, and I wouldn’t be the person I am without those books.

    I’m with Manic Street Preachers – “Libraries gave us power” – and Walter Cronkite here: “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”

    Libraries are crucial for social services – librarians spend more time helping people fill out essential forms for benefits than they do stamping books; with many crucial services only available online, libraries are a godsend for those who can’t afford or who are not confident in using computers – and for people who need somewhere to go that doesn’t require them to spend money. In the absence of help for some of society’s most vulnerable people, they can be a valuable safety net.

    And they make people’s lives better.

    Here’s a study from the UK Arts Council from a couple of years ago.

    library use is positively associated with subjective wellbeing after controlling for a wide range of other factors. Library usage is associated with higher life satisfaction, higher happiness and a higher sense of purpose in life

    …We also find that library engagement has a positive association with general health. After controlling for other confounding factors, being a regular library user is associated with a 1.4 per cent increase in the likelihood of reporting good general health. We valued this improvement in health in terms of cost savings to the NHS. Based on reductions in GP visits caused by this improvement in health, we predict the medical cost savings associated with library engagement at £1.32 per person per year. It is possible to aggregate NHS cost savings across the library-using English population to estimate an average cost saving of £27.5 million per year.

    …We note that this is likely to represent just a subset of the secondary health benefits of libraries, which may impact upon other medical services and costs aside from GP visits.

    This vandalism is a terrible thing with terrible consequences, and it’s completely unnecessary: it’s the results of cuts forced upon us by cultural vandals who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.