Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • To know me is to love me

    One of the things I write about in my book is that transphobia largely relies on people not knowing, or not thinking they know, any trans people. I make a very good joke about it that you’ll need to buy the book to read. And the same point is made in this report from LGBT Nation, which talks about polling that demonstrates intergroup contact theory. The short version is that if you know trans people, you’re much more likely to oppose hateful anti-trans legislation.

    This is why they want to ban books about or by us, and why they want to erase us from public life. Because as the cliché goes, to know us is to love us.

    Transphobia is classic fascism: we are the out-group against whom the in-group is mobilised, the outsiders the insiders are told to hate and fear. And to maintain that, you need to maintain the fiction that we are a dangerous, sinister “other”. Knowing us, hearing our stories, seeing us do ordinary things… that’s something to be prevented at all costs.

    This week’s right-wing shitefest (or at least, the loudest one so far; I’m writing this on Tuesday) is over the inclusion of Hari Nef (above), a very beautiful trans actress, in the Barbie movie. Her transness isn’t referenced in the movie at all, and there’s no indication as to whether her character – which, it’s important to note, is a plastic doll – is cis or trans. These giant babies are throwing tantrums purely because a trans woman has a job.

    It’s very telling that in the photos many of these ludicrous attention-seeking bigots are sharing in their outrage, they frequently point to a completely different, cisgender, actress as they cry “we can always tell!” So far I’ve seen almost all of the film’s cast identified as trans women or trans men, including the very famous and very cisgender actors Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

  • Kitty litter

    The UK cat panic continues, with journalists who absolutely know better now offering cash for people to tell lies. This was posted, widely mocked and deleted earlier today.

    Offering money for stories is considered a bad thing in journalism, because as columnists’ drivel endlessly demonstrates, people will say any old shit for money. As a result cash for personal stories is usually the preserve of supermarket trash such as Love It! with their endless and invented tales of ghosts, murders and serial killers. But this request is for a supposedly reputable national newspaper.

    I almost feel sorry for Helen here, because she became today’s main character on Twitter. But I don’t, because what she’s doing is hoping to get paid for stirring up hatred against trans kids and their healthcare providers. The made-up story about kids identifying as cats is the right-wing’s infamous only joke, “I identify as…”, weaponised, and Carroll is offering cash for people willing to lie about it in print.

    The story is a hoax, and everybody reporting it knows it’s a hoax. Shame on them, and on the people who lap it up.

  • Don’t have kittens

    We’ve been in the “making shit up” stage of the anti-trans culture war for a while now, but this story takes the biscuit: the completely invented tale of a school pupil identifying as a cat has moved from the Telegraph and the Independent into Radio 4, because our media is hopelessly broken.

    Imagine calling yourself a journalist or editor and writing or publishing this as a news story.

    The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.

    She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.

    It took three Telegraph writers to write that, presumably with crayons.

    What’s particularly bad about this is that there’s audio of the supposed event, and that audio demonstrates that all the reports about it are lying: it’s a recording of a child being bullied. And nobody seems to care, apart from Mic Wright. He writes:

    Now the Mail, along with The Times, and The Telegraph — the three central pillars of anti-trans coverage in the UK — are pretending the story is about a child identifying as a cat rather than two students picking on another student by comparing their gender identity to “[identifying] as a cat or something…”

    [writers and editors know] that there was no child “identifying as a cat” and the claim that the teacher reprimanded students for not accepting the other student’s feline identity is totally in bad faith.

    The cat-child is an urban legend beloved of anti-trans campaigners, and it’s made the press in various guises in the US, Australia and the UK. Every single time, it’s been complete bollocks. The origin is simple and sad: a few years ago it was revealed that in the aftermath of a school shooting, one US school started keeping cat litter as part of its terrorist kit: in the event of another shooting, the litter would be helpful because kids trapped in an ongoing attack would be able to go to the toilet.

    But that’s not all. Our schools are also packed with children identifying as horses, dinosaurs and the moon. Except, of course, they aren’t.

    The Daily Telegraph does not have extraordinary evidence, it has anonymous sources, obvious horseshit, and an ideological motivation to push this story.

    What we’re seeing here is a particularly clear example of how the bullshit pipeline works. I actually posted about it on Twitter, only to be proved right about ten minutes later:

    The danger of that Telegraph article, as ever, isn’t that its few readers will believe the made-up story. It’s that it launders hate group propaganda into the mainstream. It’s sitting on a BBC researcher’s desk right now as a possible phone-in discussion or news item.

    Ten minutes later, I discovered that they were talking about it as if it were a real news story on the Today programme.

    Here’s the pipeline in action.  First of all an anti-trans pressure group invents a story and passes it to a tame journalist in the right-wing press, who is perfectly happy to print absolute shite if it enrages the readers.

    That newspaper then makes its way to the BBC, where it becomes an item on the Today programme and gets the attention of politicians and other media outlets.

    That in turn circulates the made-up story more widely, encouraging the right-wing press to push the story more with a little bit of help from rent-a-gob MPs. And before you know it, the Prime Minister is promising to take action against something that didn’t happen, doesn’t happen and won’t ever happen – action that will likely cause very real harm to the very real people the anti-trans pressure group concocted the whole story to attack.

  • Panic! At the newspaper

    I wrote about moral panics in my book:

    When I was younger, there were moral panics over heavy metal records and the board game Dungeons & Dragons; the former allegedly contained backwards messages to worship Satan and/or kill yourself, and the latter was accused of pretty much everything. Similar panics occurred around video games, the Harry Potter books, the urban legend of Killer Clowns and so on.

    I’ve lived through other moral panics too, including the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s and the attempts by the Keep The Clause campaign and campaigners against equal marriage to persuade people that gay, lesbian and bi people were dangerous predators.

    The problem with moral panics is that while the subject is fictional, the damage the panic does is not. And it can spread far beyond the original subject of the panic too. Scientific American on the current anti-trans panic:

    The anti-trans laws send a message that nonreproductive sexuality, reproductive health and bodily autonomy are not acceptable. Ultimately this tells a story about who has power: if we can erase trans people then we can erase anyone; if we can remove gay books we can remove any book; if we can silence drag queens, we can silence you.

  • Diamonds in the mud

    The UK edition of The Guardian and its Sunday sister The Observer is openly transphobic and effectively the house magazine of the “gender critical” mob; as Trans Writes reports, during its recent diversity and inclusion events a group of senior writers and editors discussed their plans to push anti-trans narratives “fearlessly” in front of an audience of around 120 employees. But despite their best efforts, sometimes The Guardian still manages to publish good journalism about trans people.

    Most of that journalism happens in the US edition, whose writers once wrote an open letter condemning the UK Guardian’s transphobia. Here are some examples:

    Republican attacks on trans people smack of fascism – Robert Reich

    Conservative attacks on US abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place– Moira Donegan

    But sometimes a lone voice manages to get something sensible published in the UK edition, and that lone voice is usually Zoe Williams. I’ve long admired Williams’ writing, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be a lone voice of sanity in an increasingly deranged organisation.

    Her latest article, why are trans rights in prison so rarely defended?, is very good.

    I also thought the furore was in such obvious bad faith that it would fizzle out: anyone with a sincere interest in the welfare of women in prison would also be interested in a host of other things, from staffing levels to self-harm and suicide, from mental health to the fallout post-Covid. The same year that White committed some of her offences, 2016, saw the highest number of female deaths in custody on record. If your only documented interest in the female prison estate is in transgender prisoners, surely it would be obvious that your real beef was trans rights, and your campaign would gain no momentum? That turned out not to be true.

    One of the points that Williams makes in her piece is that the danger of trans prisoners has been massively and constantly exaggerated: of the 97 sexual assaults in women’s prisons between 2016 and 2020, just seven were perpetrated by trans prisoners. What her article also said, but didn’t make it into print, is that five of those assaults were perpetrated by the same person. So this entire panic, which is being used to suggest that all trans women are dangerous to all women, focuses on just three people and ignores the much wider problem of women’s safety in prisons. Not only that, but since those three attacks, the rules have been changed.

    Since the prison regulation on trans prisoners was reformed in 2019, (which made it more difficult for those convicted of any violent crime to switch between estates) there have been no assaults by trans prisoners on women in prison. It seems pretty obvious that if the majority of sexual assaults in the women’s estate are committed by prisoners who are not trans, then a relentless focus on trans prisoners is not going to keep women safe.

    But as with the rest of the anti-trans panic, none of this is about facts; it’s about scaremongering and othering trans people.

    it just didn’t occur to me that the behaviour of trans prisoners would be used to tarnish the characters of all trans people and call into question their legitimacy in any single-sex space. You simply can’t infer anything broader from the behaviour of inmates: they are an outlier population. That’s why they’re in prison.

  • Spoil the child

    The idea that parental love is unconditional is just that: an idea. The reality is often much more harsh, especially for LGBT+ kids: although by most estimates only around one in 10 people are LGBT+, nearly one-fifth of all young homeless people are LGBT+. 69% of those kids have experienced violence, abuse or rejection from the family home.

    Multiple studies report that attitudes to LGBT+ people are improving in the general population, but that’s not much consolation if your mum, dad, stepdad or stepmum is one of the dwindling number of homophobic parents. And it’s even less consolation if you’re trans or non-binary, because understanding and acceptance of trans and non-binary people still has much further to go. Rates of domestic abuse and violence from family members are significantly higher for trans and non-binary people.

    As trans researcher and author Julia Serano puts it:

    Almost without exception, parents never expect that their children are transgender. And that disbelief may persist for a very long time.

    I think that’s common. In a workshop with parents carried out by Healthtalk.org, parents described their feelings when their trans or non-binary kids came out to them; many parents say they were surprised and shocked, fearful for their kids’ futures; some didn’t believe it was even possible for a young person to be trans.

    There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on here. Fear’s the biggie, because to be trans, even now (and especially now in some parts of the US and UK) is to go through life on hard mode. There’s fear that they’re making a huge mistake, that they may be discriminated against or face violence, that they may undergo treatment they might later regret… all the obvious stuff. And for many parents this is both frightening and new, because the information most people have about trans people is sketchy at best and a pack of lies at worst.

    So there’s fear. But there’s also guilt; one of the big questions my mum asked when she’d got used to me being trans was whether she’d been the cause of it. I was able to reassure her that being trans doesn’t work like that, but I recognise the feeling: whenever my kids are unwell, I agonise over what I might have done to cause it or what I should have done to prevent it. And that’s just when they have a tummy bug, not gender incongruence.

    And there’s another horrible emotion: shame. Here’s Jonathan L. Tobkes, M.D, writing in Psychology Today.

    I remember that when I discovered that my son was gay, I felt shame. I was not ashamed of him, but I thought his orientation might cause outsiders or friends to criticize our family. I did not want our family to be seen as “different.” If we were regarded as having a child, who is a member of a minority group now, I thought that this new definition could be a source of shame.

    While the stigma around having a gay kid is lessening, once again understanding and acceptance of trans kids is far behind.

    So let’s imagine you’re a parent of a young boy or girl. One day, out of the blue, they tell you that they’re non-binary, or maybe trans. What do you do?

    Let’s assume that you’re not the kind of parent who’ll respond with violence, with abuse, or by throwing your kid out on the street. I think for a lot of parents, your initial reaction is going to be disbelief. This is a bombshell; there were no signs. And maybe all you know about trans kids is the shite that’s in your newspaper: trans people were invented on social media in 2017. It’s a phase, a fad, attention-seeking.

    So you go online, and you look for people to confirm what you believe: that your child is not non-binary; that your child is not trans; that no child of yours could be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual. And if you go online, you’ll find it.

    Welcome to the anti-trans parent movement.

    A huge amount of anti-trans stories are based on the testimony of or activism by parents who frequent a handful of websites, and who are absolutely convinced that their children are not non-binary or trans. Many of those parents swap tips on how to completely isolate your child from their friends and how to bully them into recanting. A handful will tell you it’s a conspiracy by paedophiles, Big Pharma and the Jews. Some, whose children are now adults, talk about how their child, and sometimes their friends and family too, no longer talks to them.

    The Julia Serano quote towards the top of this article is from her piece about those websites, and it’s typically well researched, interesting and frightening.

    Some parents come into these groups with strong pre-existing views on trans people (e.g., social conservative or GC/TERF), while many others are initially trans-unaware and simply seeking answers in the wake of their children coming out to them. Either way, because these online communities tell parents exactly what they want to hear (“your child isn’t really trans, they’ve just been influenced by an insidious outside force and we can help you dispel it”), many find these spaces and the misinformation they propagate to be quite compelling.

    The (made-up) theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria was invented on one of those sites, and the paper that attempted to legitimise it drew solely from users of the same website. The websites, as Serano puts it, are “steeped in science denialism and distrusting the medical establishment.” The most infamous were created as a backlash to older websites that helped parents learn how to understand and support their children; the anti-trans ones were created for the much smaller number of parents who don’t want to understand and don’t want to offer support.

    The menu available to you, a concerned parent, starts with misinformation and disinformation and ultimately leads to torture: some of the better known sites guide parents to practitioners of dangerous and discredited conversion therapies (described as “torture” by the UN) or offer advice on how to bully your kids without outside help.

    Serano’s article is an excellent guide to how the sites operate, how they recruit and radicalise parents and how those parents then spread their message through mainstream media. And I think a lot of what Julia writes about is pretty universal.

    I have never met a trans person whose parents weren’t surprised when they first came out. Trans people who were overtly gender nonconforming as children are told “we just thought you were gay.” I know trans people who insisted that they were really a boy or really a girl from a young age (only to be disaffirmed by their parents at the time) and who, upon coming out as trans as adults, their parents still acted shocked. I know trans parents who were surprised when their own children came out to them as trans.

    Given that surprise and disbelief, it’s not a shock that many parents are easy marks for the anti-trans obsessives and their associated crowdfunding grifts.

    Despite what you read online, most people who come out as trans or non-binary do so because they’re trans or non-binary. Kids who are experimenting with their gender expression are not necessarily trans (and are unlikely to do more than dress differently, change their haircut and try on a different name, all of which are of course easily undone), but kids who are insistent, consistent and persistent about being trans very rarely backtrack. Adults who undergo gender reassignment surgery – surgery that in the UK, only adults can access and which typically requires years spent languishing on ever-growing waiting lists – have a regret rate that’s incredibly low. The number of trans people who regret surgery/transition is vanishingly small – less than 2% – and of that number, most of the people who go back to their gender assigned at birth do so not because they aren’t trans or non-binary but because their world is incredibly shitty to trans and non-binary people. Most detransitioners will ultimately retransition and stay transitioned.

    That’s not to say that some kids don’t get it wrong. Of course some do. But very, very, very few. And if you start paying attention to media reports about detransitioners, you’ll soon notice that despite claims that there is an epidemic of detransition, that thousands upon thousands of people regret transition and have retraced their steps and will be suing their healthcare providers in huge numbers any day soon just you wait, you only ever hear about the same two or three people – people who, like the ex-gays of previous decades, just so happen to have strong links to social and religious conservative groups; Potemkin villages of gender.

    But the truth is not something that crusading journalists “just asking questions” about trans people want you to read. Serano:

    But when journalists only tell the parent’s side of the story, or when they pit a parent’s trans-skeptical account against that of their trans child — implying that the former likely “knows better” than the latter — that should be a giant red flag for audiences.

    And when articles and news stories mention trans-skeptical parents “seeking support” and finding “like-minded voices” online, that’s almost always a sign that said parents are involved in or interacting with the anti-trans parent movement.

  • A cabal

    Reality continues to make satire redundant.

    In mid-April, a group of senior writers and editors at The Guardian met as part of the company’s ‘Diversity and Inclusion Week’ to discuss pushing gender-critical narratives ‘fearlessly’… The meeting of four senior members of The Guardian’s staff (leader writer Susanna Rustin, financial editor Nils Pratley, chief sports writer Sean Ingle, and chief leader writer Sonia Sodha [was] watched by approximately 120 others from the company, including Guardian US, Guardian Australia, and The Observer.

    Taking place on the same day as their Pride event, I was told that ‘Untangling sex and gender’ was the most well-attended event of the week.

    What’s particularly galling about this is that The Guardian is still believed by many people to be a left-wing newspaper, so when its openly transphobic staff conspire to publish terrible articles demonising trans people those articles have an air of false legitimacy: leftish people are more likely to believe a Guardian story than a Daily Mail one, even if it’s written by the same kind of bigot.

  • Predators

    The New York Times has done what the UK press has refused to do: it’s exposed disgraced Observer and Private Eye columnist Nick Cohen as an alleged predator.

    Cohen has written multiple articles and posts accusing trans women of being a danger to women while, according to the NYT, sexually harassing multiple women. When the NYT put the allegations to him, he claimed it was a stitch-up by the Russians and trans people.

    Cohen’s behaviour was apparently an open secret in media circles: he had the nickname “The Octopus” and many women journalists have said other women warned them about him. The publications that knew about the allegations but chose not to expose him included those notable “we must protect women” publications The Guardian and The Observer – who let him go amid much secrecy – and Private Eye.

    It’s interesting, and predictable, to see who’s rushing to defend him. In a now-deleted tweet, former Guardian/Observer anti-trans columnist (now Times anti-trans columnist) and long-time Woody Allen defender Hadley Freeman was quick to excuse his serial harassment on the grounds that he was probably drunk when he did it, which makes it all okay, and anyway he said sorry. It’s a good example of Freeman’s tendency to write what she’d like to be true rather than what’s actually true: some of the allegations refer to harassment that he did long after he stopped drinking, and he hasn’t said he’s sorry.

    And also on Twitter, @euanyours is providing a list with citations of the “protect women” crowd who rushed to Cohen’s defence when Good Law Project head Jolyon Maugham attempted to get people to believe women. That list includes a who’s who of very high profile anti-trans voices of the I’m So Silenced variety. If they regularly appear in the right-wing press, they’re in the list.

    Mark Berry on Twitter:

    Hi, I’m a cishet Times/Observer journalist, privately educated, and am here to tell you why everything my friend Nick Cohen did both does not matter and was entirely the fault of Jeremy Corbyn and trans people, who must answer for it.

    The glee with which trans people – including me – are sharing the story is for a simple reason: it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-trans journalism, which may pretend to be about protecting women but which has no interest in protecting women from actual sexual predators. People who have written multiple columns about the need to remove human rights from entire marginalised groups to “protect women and girls” are on the side of the abusers, not the abused. And that’s because the so-called gender critical movement has never been about protecting anybody from anything; it’s about eliminating trans people from society.

    Also on Twitter, @scriblit puts it beautifully:

    Please support my campaign to get all opinion columnists banned from using public toilets and changing cubicles in case they’re ALL well known predators getting enabled by the industry (this might get some non columnists beaten up but collateral damage is acceptable)

  • Lying by implication

    Look at the photo, then the headline, then back at the photo. What kind of person do you think the police are cuffing?

    That’s right! A far-right, anti-trans, “gender critical” thug!

    But of course, that’s not what you’re supposed to see here. The Telegraph, very deliberately, is encouraging you to think that this is a trans person or ally. It isn’t. He’s a former member of the neo-nazi EDL, a thug who turned up in support of Kellie-Jay Keen’s anti-trans rally. Maybe he was there to offer a nuanced critique of the works of Judith Butler, as far-right thugs so love to do. Or maybe he just wanted to crack some trans kids’ heads. It’s a mystery!

    The Telegraph knows what it’s doing and what he is, but it wants some of those sweet, sweet anti-trans clicks that it seems so dependent on lately. And now the far-right media ecosystem has burst into life and will forever circulate the photo as supposed proof of how violent trans people are.

    This isn’t journalism. It’s hatemongering. And if you write to the press regulator to complain, you’ll be told that it isn’t breaking any rules. And that’s true, because the rules don’t exist to protect the public; they exist to protect newspaper proprietors.

  • Why we decline

    I’ve written many times about the asymmetry of trans coverage: of the hundreds of stories and items published and broadcast about trans people every week, hardly any of them feature trans people or allies and most platform anti-trans activists, often misleadingly presenting them as ordinary mums or feminists with “reasonable concerns”. So you’d think that when trans people are given a platform, we’d gladly take it.

    Nope.

    With very, very few exceptions I stopped accepting invitations to talk about trans issues more than a year ago after it became very apparent that I was being set up. The best I could hope for was the chance to listen to an anti-trans fanatic spouting lies that I would only be given 30 seconds to try and counter; sometimes I would be ambushed, only told when I went on air that the item I’d been asked to come on was actually an excuse for someone from Spiked to talk shite about trans people for almost all of it. I’m much more cynical now, and on a few occasions I’ve listened to items I’ve declined to appear on and had my fears confirmed: mostly they’re intended to titillate, not educate; gladiatorial battles where the trans person is the Christian.

    It’s easy to fall for this stuff, though. Media people are so nice, and they’ll tell you how important it is for your voice to be heard, and how keen they are to show the real story. And then they put you in a room with a bunch of pissed bigots shouting “penis!” at you.

    You’d think I made that one up, but no. In May 2018, Channel 4 aired a programme called “Genderquake: The Debate”. It wasn’t a debate; it was more like an episode of Jerry Springer or Jerry Kyle. The trans participants were shouted down by an audience that appeared to be a bunch of pissed bigots; it later transpired that the audience was a bunch of pissed bigots. Posting on Mumsnet, audience member Posie Parker – yes, the same Posie Parker of “Adult Human Female” fame, an avowed anti-feminist who runs anti-trans events popular with neo-nazis – said that “we were repeatedly encouraged to heckle” by Channel 4’s floor manager. Professor Stephen Whittle, a trans man who was also in the audience, confirmed this.

    Sadly it seems that Professor Whittle has been tricked again.

    In October 2022, Trans Safety Network – a group of academics and researchers who do great work reporting in depth about trans rights, healthcare and anti-trans activism – posted on Twitter:

    We have become aware of a documentary being produced by Brook Lapping Productions, on behalf of Channel 4 that is currently attempting to recruit transgender people and allies to talk about “the trans debate”… [we] are very concerned at reports that the suggestion of including some transgender people on the production crew “wouldn’t be impartial”. We would strongly urge anyone contacted to think about engaging…”

    They also shared a document by one person who’d been invited to contribute, a document that laid out their serious concerns about the show.

    And those concerns have been proven correct.

    Rather than the documentary contributors were told they’d be in, a documentary trying to give a fair account of the trans “debate”, it turns out to be a puff piece about anti-trans activist, academic and author Kathleen Stock that frames trans people as sinister figures hell-bent on silencing the brave professor.

    Some of the contributors, including Professor Whittle, have put together a blog about it.

    On the documentary you will see many trans & non-binary (TNB) people & their allies. Most will be shown taking part in lawful but noisy protest. Only a few TNB people and one ally will speak, and only one is given any substantial opportunity to speak.

    There are some specific complaints about errors and what appears to be false framing of trans people throughout the documentary, which hasn’t been broadcast yet but the contributors have been shown. But the core issue is much more fundamental: the contributors simply weren’t told that they were being invited to contribute to a documentary about Stock, whose views are well known and endlessly publicised in print, online and on radio and TV, and had they known that was the subject they would have refused to have taken part. They may not have been put in front of bigots shouting “penis!” this time, but they were tricked just the same.

    In their conclusion, the contributors say:

    We took part in good faith hoping to find a way forward. We all had doubts about taking part, but in the end took the production team at their word.  

    We were misled and misinformed.

    This is horrifically unethical, of course, and it shouldn’t happen. But deception is something trans people and allies are sadly very used to. As Elaine Scattermoon, a trans woman who herself has been tricked by a supposedly friendly journalist, posted on Twitter:

    This keeps happening to the extent that most trans people in the UK I know will just refuse to take part in any TV or radio show just because there’s an extremely high chance it’s just a trap and the framing will be used against them. We’re jaded but for good reason.