Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • A loaded question

    Someone made the rookie mistake of asking writer and academic Julia Serano to come on air and discuss the bigot dog-whistle “what is a woman?” Serano declined, and explained why.

    “What is a woman?” is not intended to be a question. It’s a slogan created and championed by UK “gender critical” activists who strongly oppose the social and legal recognition of trans people, with some even calling for eliminationist measures that would morally mandate us out of existence. Whenever gender-critical activists pose the “what is a woman?” question to politicians, organizations, celebrities, etc. (as they are wont to do), they are not looking to start a nuanced discussion or debate. Rather, they want a yes-or-no answer to their real question, the only question that counts in their minds: Will you support our anti-trans beliefs, policies, and legislation?

    Serano’s right, of course. “What is a woman?” is a loaded, rhetorical question asked by the kind of people who praise the Taliban or Russell Brand for “knowing what a woman is”, and it’s asked in much the same way as “when did you stop beating your wife?”

    It is a question with an agenda, and it is based on an underlying assumption, a belief, that there is a single, immutable definition of what a woman is. And of course, that isn’t true.

    The term “woman” is a classification and as Serano says, it has different criteria and meanings in different contexts. So for example in genetics, the criteria might be chromosomes; in reproductive health, reproductive anatomy; and in everyday conversation, social class: “people who move through the world as women and are interpreted and treated (and sometimes mistreated) as such.”

    …if I mentioned having a conversation with a woman that I know from work or ran into at the store, you wouldn’t think at all about her chromosomes or reproductive organs (unless, of course, you were some kind of creep). 

    Serano writes:

    …we all understand that “woman” is a broad category that comprises roughly half the human population. By necessity, it includes all sorts of diversity and seeming exceptions to the rule.

    This is why, in everyday life, nobody ever asks the question “what is a woman?” In fact, the only people who bother to raise the issue these days are anti-trans activists.

    And the reason they raise it, and the reason so many cisgender men parrot it, is because it’s a distraction from the very real issues all women experience, cis and trans. Because if we were to focus on any significant danger to women, we wouldn’t be looking at trans women. We’d be looking at cisgender men and some cisgender women too.

  • Double danger

    The Guardian reports today that the latest social attitudes survey shows that the UK is becoming more liberal in almost every way – with the notable exception of attitudes towards trans people. Since 2016, the first time such attitudes were recorded, people have become much more hostile to trans people:

    The proportion of the British public describing themselves as “not prejudiced” towards transgender people fell from 82% to 64% between 2021 and 2022, when the latest survey took place.

    So the number of people who say they’re prejudiced against trans people has doubled in a year. That’s astonishing, and horrifying.

    What could possibly have happened since the apparent golden age of 2016? If you go through The Guardian and The Observer’s coverage of trans issues in 2016, you’ll see that it’s very different from what they published in 2018, and things are even worse now: it turns out that “occasionally publishes hateful shit”, which was those papers’ position pre-2017, was as good as it was going to get.

    The big change in this period, of course, was the arrival of faux-feminist anti-trans groups and their immediate embrace by journalists in the left-wing press as well as the right. That happened in mid-2017 and grew very quickly, and you can see the change in the coverage and the language used.

    Initially at least, the anti-trans charge was led not by the right wing press, but by the left – notably the Guardian and The New Statesman. By 2018, the editorial policy of most of the UK press was clearly and often ridiculously anti-trans as the moral panic got into high gear.

    This is exactly what we saw in the period leading up to the introduction of Section 28.

    As I wrote in my book:

    [by 2018] newspapers’ star columnists were regularly railing against the invented evils of “trans activists” who were “silencing women”, and evangelical groups were being given a platform to describe support for trans and non-binary teens as “child abuse”, deliberately and cynically conflating changing gender markers with having “mutilating surgery”. The level of coverage was ridiculously one-sided, completely disproportionate for a minor change affecting such a small minority of people, and was an attempt to direct public opinion rather than reflect it.

    And direct it they have: in a very short time the press-driven hate campaign has seen a massive change in people’s attitudes towards legal gender recognition – something that doesn’t affect you at all if you aren’t transgender. From the Guardian report:

    while 58% of the British public agreed in 2016 that transgender people should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate changed if they wanted, that figure had dropped to 30% by 2022, suggesting an overall gradual erosion in support towards transgender rights” since 2018.

    The law today is the same as it was in 2016. What’s changed is the obsessive coverage of it, and of us.

    There’s a long list of villains here: not just the pressure groups and the journalists but the US right, the BBC, Channel 4, social media, the cowardice of the Theresa May government, the skeptics movement, the “mummy bloggers” and Mumsnet, the Hands Across The Aisle coalition and many more. One day somebody who isn’t risking financial ruin under UK libel laws will write the damning exposé the whole sorry saga deserves, hopefully making some of its key actors unemployable in the process. But for now, here’s the issue in a nutshell: since 2016, The UK’s leading left-wing paper has been a crucial part of a highly successful right-wing campaign to promote intolerance of and prejudice against some of the most marginalised people in the country. Well done, everybody.

  • Seven kinds of rubbish

    The UK Prime Minister, as I’m sure you’ve seen, has promised to ban “heavy-handed measures” that don’t exist: “taxes on eating meat”, “sorting your rubbish into seven different bins”, and so on. He has previously spoken against other things that don’t exist, such as children identifying as cats, once again with the full-throated support of the right-wing press.

    It’s easy to mock this stuff, and I’m happy to, but it’s also very frightening: when politicians invent and rail against imaginary enemies, they’re not so much flirting with fascism as sticking their tongue down its throat. What we’ve seen in the war on trans people – the weaponisation of absolute bullshit – is now being used more widely. We’re in a very dark place.

  • Fake science, real cash

    The Huffington Post has an interesting exposé of the people making good money from bad takes and pseudoscience: you can make tens of thousands of dollars presenting pseudoscience in the employ of anti-trans religious extremists. And while the article is mainly about the US, the UK gets a look-in too. You may recognise the names here from their very frequent appearances in the UK press.

    The spike in anti-trans legislation means states need even more experts to defend it. And in order to deepen the bench, states have started enlisting academics who aren’t in health care or don’t even primarily research humans. One is a Manchester University professor named Emma Hilton, who mainly studies a particular species of frog and how it offers an understanding of inherited human genetic disorders. Hilton is a founder of a British group, Sex Matters, that advocates for legally segregating spaces by sex. She earned $300 an hour last year defending bans on trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams in Utah and Indiana.

    By way of explaining why she was qualified to weigh in on school sports, she told one court, “I participate keenly in sports at an amateur level, playing netball recreationally.”

    “Our understanding of human biology is in part a result of the study of animal models,” Hilton said in an email. She declined to address the relevance of netball, which is like basketball without dribbling.

    Another is Michael Biggs, an Oxford sociology professor who admitted in court to writing transphobic tweets under the pseudonymous handle @MrHenryWimbush and described himself as a “teenage shitlord [turned] Oxford professor.” “Transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons,” reads one representative post.

    Florida paid Biggs $400 an hour to defend its Medicaid ban.

  • All the right friends

    I’d like to introduce you to my friends Laura, Amy and Steven. I don’t understand why Laura loves incredibly derivative and often idiotic punk rock, and she thinks that my beloved REM are one of the worst bands in human history. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Amy’s veganism, and she obviously doesn’t share my love of barbecuing steaks. Other than that, we get on brilliantly. I don’t share Steven’s love of country music, and he believes that my book should be banned and that I am a predatory paedophile who should be tarred, feathered and hung from a lamppost. Other than that…

    Steven isn’t real, of course, although there are many people who believe exactly what I’ve described. But of course, I’m not friends with those people any more than I would be friends with animal torturers, wife beaters or any other horrific humans. And this apparently makes me a bad person.

    One of the most annoying topics in the current awfulness of everything is the trope that the woke censorious left won’t be friends with people who don’t share their political views. That trope is bollocks, and AR Moxon has written an excellent explanation of why.

    It’s a very common lament: that there is no civility left these days, as compared to earlier days, and the main reason appears to be that those on the “left” refuse to be friends with those on the “right,” shunning them simply because of their political views.

    This implies something rather startling: American conservatives want to be friends with the rest of us. Had you realized? You’d never know it to listen to them, but apparently it is so, and the notion that some of us don’t want to be friends with them is one of the most pressing matters to be found in the opinion sections of our nation’s great newspapers and magazines and newsfortainment television programs.

    Moxon argues that the supposed polarity of left/right isn’t accurate, and suggests humanist/supremacist instead. The supremacist political view is that “other types of humans do not matter, and shouldn’t have space to exist and thrive as themselves, and should are abused and punished for any refusal to be dominated.” And yet “they feel strongly that friendship is something they still deserve, though it feels like something they actually want, and more like something they believe they’re owed.”

    I think Moxon makes a very important point about the discourse around this.

    Something I’ve noticed about professional civility mourners is that when they mourn the divisions over political views, they rarely mention what those views are, or what effect they have.

    That’s very true of the reporting around this, which frames “views” as some kind of abstract thing without any actual consequences. So for example the “view” that there are too many trans people and that their numbers should be reduced, which is genocidal, is presented as if it were an opinion about wallpaper or a TV show. All too often, “views” are considered more important than the actual people those views are about and targeted towards.

    There is not a debate if one side believes that all Black people, all Jewish people or all LGBTQ+ people should be killed and the other side is the Black people, the Jewish people or the LGBTQ+ people that the other side want to kill. And yet all too often that’s exactly how these things are presented, and have been for a very long time. The BBC famously used the headline “Should homosexuals face execution?” in a piece about Uganda’s anti-gay persecution just over ten years ago. The “should” turns what should be absolute horror into a nice dinner party chat.

    Of course, not all views are so extreme. But many supremacist ones are, no matter how politely they’re expressed. And there is not an equally hateful and violent other side.

    Moxon:

    nobody is trying to strip supremacists of their vote, or ensure that they will go bankrupt over medical care, or force them to give birth to their rapist’s baby, or murder them at the border, or take away their children, or frame the continuance of their lives as a cost rather than a value, as something that must be earned, as something that is undeserved. In fact, these are things that the humanist spirit is trying to ensure even they will be safe from, which actually seems like the friendliest posture a person can take, toward somebody who has decided to be their enemy.

    And yet we’re expected to be friends with people who want those things for us. Moxon uses the analogy of schoolyard bullies who want us to sit at their lunch table as sycophants: “If you want to be friends, why don’t you ever come sit with us? Why is the demand that we come sit with you instead? Why do you want so badly for only some of us to sit over with you, and why aren’t the rest of our friends ever welcome at your table?”

    If you want friends, why aren’t you willing to be friendly?

    Do you want to be friends? Is friends what is desired here?

    I don’t think so, actually.

    I think what’s being sought is accomplices.

    And I think that’s true. It’s freedom of speech as a demand for freedom of consequences all over again: some of the world’s worst people demanding that the world conforms to what they want, and never the other way around. It’s portrayed as a basic human right when it’s nothing of the sort. Friendship is a contract, and the terms of that contract is that if you turn out to be an arsehole, the deal is off.

    In a previous piece, Moxon talked about the abuse of freedom of speech in more detail.

    It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.

    Moxon believes, as I do, that it’s perfectly appropriate for awful people to be shunned because of the things they say and do.

    There are worse things than shunning. There are shelves empty of books. There are people dying from deliberately manufactured medical policy. There are actual attacks upon freedom and speech. There is supremacy. There is genocide.

    …At a certain point, it seems to me that we have to conclude that what such people are actually advocating for is not to use sunlight to expose and disinfect our society of bigotry, but simply to have a society in which bigotry is free to dance in the sun.

  • Erasure

    It’s very hard to write about the grifters, bigots and assorted arseholes waging war on trans people and make it entertaining, let alone funny, but Liz Crash manages it with great aplomb in her piece about the supposed “erasure” of lesbian women by trans women, a claim beloved of far-right goons and their useful idiots. It’s as wise and well-informed as it is funny.

    Now, I’m something of a lesbian myself, and from my perspective—putting aside for a minute the housing crisis, COVID-19, the cost of living, psychiatrist fees, Sarina Russo, fentanyl in the pingers, climate change, and global fascism—there’s never been a better time to be a lesbian.

  • Taliban fans

    Last year, trans people wryly joked that it was just a matter of time before some anti-trans dolt praised the Taliban because “at least they know what a woman is”. That dolt turned out to be Julia Hartley-Brewer, who tweeted on 29 August: “At least the Taliban know what a woman is” in response to a tweet noting that the Taliban “beheads and murders women and gay people”. Hartley-Brewer’s tweet appears to have been liked by JK Rowling, whose people told the press earlier this year that she’d helped people trying to escape the same regime.

    Praising the profoundly, viciously misogynist, homophobic and transphobic Taliban is very much on brand for so-called gender criticals, and many of them display a level of ignorance and idiocy that’s truly impressive. Such as today’s post by “Joanna”, who told a trans woman that “you, as a man, would not be subjected to what women in Afghanistan are. Why? Because you are a MAN.”

    As the woman in question, Katy Montgomerie, pointed out, there are only two possible fates for trans women under the Taliban. If they pass – ie they’re perceived to be cisgender women – then they will be oppressed just like any other woman. And if they don’t, they will be treated like other LGBTQ+ people, many of whom are attacked or sexually assaulted because of their orientation or gender identity: abused, attacked, sometimes even tortured or executed.

    Human Rights Watch has an excellent and horrifying article about life for queer people under the Taliban.

    Despite making repeated pledges to respect human rights, the Taliban have engaged in widespread rights abuses since retaking control of the country, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and land grabbing. The danger now facing LGBT people in Afghanistan—in an environment devoid of legal protections, under authorities that have explicitly pledged not to tolerate LGBT people—is grave.

    As Foreign Policy reports:

    Since the Taliban takeover last August, members of the Afghan LGBTQ community have faced electrocution, torture, killings, and fear.

    Here’s DW talking about Danish, a trans person.

    Danish has been living in semidarkness for weeks. Since the Taliban’s takeover in mid-August, he has been hiding in the windowless back room of a friend’s now-closed shop in Kabul. He no longer dares go outside. Under the Islamist Taliban, he and many like him face the death penalty… Everyday discrimination against LGBTQ individuals is ubiquitous, as is violence against them.

    But at least the Taliban know what a woman is, right?

  • Not fair. Not reasonable

    In the last few weeks, two stories have stood out to me among the usual avalanche of anti-trans content. The first story is the introduction of a new open category in the swimming World Cup for “all sex and gender identities”. And the second is the story of a trans woman who was turned away from a beauty salon and set up her own inclusive salon, marketed primarily towards trans and non-binary people.

    What they have in common is that both are examples of what anti-trans bigots claim would satisfy their “reasonable concerns”: they’re about trans and non-binary people being segregated from cisgender women.

    And yet both stories have been met with howls of protest and the usual online abuse.

    It doesn’t make sense. Or at least, it doesn’t if you think that anti-trans people have been telling the truth about their so-called reasonable concerns or their desire for so-called fairness.

    The thing about bigots, though, is that like the fascists they like to pal around with, they lie. They lie, and they lie, and they lie some more. They lie about statistics, about science, about the medical consensus. And most of all, they lie about what they want.

    It’s exactly the same playbook as the anti-abortion activists, who will claim that of course they don’t want to ban all abortion. They just want X, Y or Z. But they *do* want to ban all abortion. They’re just wise enough to know that the vast majority of people don’t want that, so they pretend to be more reasonable than they actually are. Given the reins of power, the mask falls off – as you can see in the US where there are serious attempts being made not just to ban all abortion, but to ban contraception and sex education too.

    It’s the same with anti-trans activists. Their goal is the complete elimination of trans people from the world, but again they realise that genocide doesn’t tend to go down well with most people. So they change the language to dehumanise – we’re never people; we’re a cult, an ideology, an agenda – and they pretend the multiple fronts aren’t connected.

    But when you look at the wider picture – attempts to ban trans people from sports, attempts to remove trans people’s legal gender recognition, attempts to ban trans people’s healthcare, attempts to remove trans people’s legal protections from discrimination, attempts to remove any references to trans people in schools, attempts to remove any books about trans people from libraries, attempts to censor the internet to prevent people from reading about trans people, attempts to incite violence against trans people by claiming they’re a danger to your women and children… you’d need to be a very particular kind of stupid to still believe that any of this is about “fairness” or “reasonable concerns”.

    To steal the old joke: how do you know when an anti-trans activist is lying? Their lips are moving.

     

  • The Sun sinks lower

    If you thought The Sun newspaper had changed its spots since the days of demonising AIDS sufferers and pissing on the Hillsborough dead, it would like to show you otherwise. Here’s its Sun Says column:

    Yes, it’s using dead babies as cannon fodder in its war on LGBTQ people. Those babies were not murdered by someone who was LGBTQ, and the lack of action was nothing to do with “wokeness”; quite the opposite, as it appears that racism played a significant part in the difficulty whistleblowers had in getting management to listen to them.

    Even by the Sun’s terribly low standards, to blame a murder committed by a straight, cisgender white woman and covered up by straight, cisgender white people on the LGBTQ community is utterly disgusting – and no different from the internet bigots calling LGBTQ people child abusers to try and incite violence against them. If you buy or work for any Murdoch property, you’re helping to pay for this.

     

  • We are trickster gods

    This superb piece by Niko Stratis is a must-read about the no-point-in-reading news stories telling you that some old rich guy or other thinks trans women are icky and probably murderous.

    We are trickster gods, barbed and poisonous, waiting to rip the seams of the tender fabric of this gentle world. But we are never the interviewer, never the storyteller, rarely the writer and seldom real.

    …After the run of Cooper news, it was announced that legendary guitar player and songwriter Carlos Santana went on a baffling on-stage tirade about trans people. This wasn’t the result of a poorly planned question, by all accounts this was unprompted. When I saw the news first, it was in Billboard, and it was in their “Pride” section.

    I ask you, what “Pride” do we take away from this knowledge? There is no value gained here certainly, and I am not surprised that Santana doesn’t like trans people because I am rarely surprised by such facts anymore. There is no easier path to a headline than making baseless comments about trans people into whatever microphone will have you.

    Stratis’s piece makes the well-worn but still important point that right now, trans people are among the most talked about and least listened to group in society: publication after publication uses us for outrage marketing by asking famous people whether they hate trans people and love JK Rowling, or the famous people do it themselves because they have a product to push. But the voices you never hear over the shouts of the supposedly silenced are those of trans people. Far too much media is about us, without us.