Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • 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.

  • A century of “contagion”

    I’ve written many times about the entirely fictional phenomenon of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” which, despite not existing, is being used by right-wing politicians to justify their hateful assaults on trans healthcare as well as by UK culture warriors online and in newspaper columns and comments sections. This, in Scientific American, is yet more evidence that there’s no evidence.

    If ROGD is new to you, the short version is that it’s pseudoscience based solely on interviews with furious anti-trans bigots whose children don’t speak to them any more. And the longer version is that it’s the same old shit that bigots have been churning out for nearly a century now.

    Like most anti-trans bullshit, ROGD is a rebranded version of anti-gay bullshit: the belief that gay people were turned gay by “social contagion”. That’s a confection by the religious right, who want you to believe that being gay is not natural, not normal and not innate; it’s a deliberate choice, an immoral, unhealthy and freely chosen sin.

    They’ve been banging on like that for nearly a hundred years now. As this paper by Nancy J Knauer notes, the outcry over the 1928 novel The Well Of Loneliness, aka The Well, in which a lesbian character’s sexuality was “depicted as an innate, God-given and potentially noble characteristic” was greeted with “a hostile counter-narrative of homosexuality as contagion, resulting in sensational obscenity trials on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.”

    Those trials even enshrined the idea of social contagion in law:

    Courts in New York and London adjudged The Well obscene under the prevailing “Hicklin rule,” finding that it had the tendency “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall.”‘” Although the New York decision was overturned on appeal, The Well remained banned in Great Britain until 1949.

    As Knauer notes:

    The arguments used to suppress The Well are strikingly similar to those used today to silence positive images of same-sex desire, relationships, and identities in a wide variety of contexts including education, public employment, and 6 government-funded programs.

    The outcry over The Well established the six principles of the “contagion” argument. See how many you recognise from the anti-trans movement:

    1. Being gay is a freely chosen vice, not a medical or scientific category; nobody was “born this way”;
    2. Gays prey on innocent victims, particularly children;
    3. Gays have no shame and insist on flaunting their sexuality in public, infringing on the rights of others;
    4. Gays demand special rights, not just tolerance;
    5. This is a battle for the future of society, a war between good and evil (with gay people as evil, of course);
    6. Because homosexuality is so contagious, especially for children, any public image of homosexuality that is not negative or the presence of an openly gay person such as a teacher could transmit the contagion and therefore must be forbidden.

    Every time you read about rapid onset gender dysphoria you’re reading 100-year-old bullshit reported by people who either don’t know history or do know and simply don’t care.

  • “Oh, you know the ones…”

    Graham Linehan, the comedy writer who sacrificed his marriage and his career so he could hurl abuse at trans people and their allies on the internet all day, has been all over the press in recent days. But the only piece worth reading is this one, by Caitlin Logan in The National.

    Some of the explanations for the ­cancellation offered in mainstream news publications include: “concern about Mr Linehan’s views on transgender issues”; his “views on sex and gender”; and his “gender critical beliefs”. This just in: wolf banned from cottage for “Little Red ­Riding Hood critical beliefs”.

    I’m reminded of Andrew Lawrence’s joke about the conservative who claims they’ve been cancelled for their “conservative views”.

    Con: I have been censored for my conservative views!
    Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
    Con: LOL no… no, not those views
    Me: So… deregulation?
    Con: Haha! No, not those views either
    Me: So, which views, exactly?
    Con: Oh, you know the ones

  • A rook-y mistake

    I thought the panic about trans women in sport had reached its nadir when they banned us from badminton, but I was wrong: this week, trans women were banned from the famously physical endurance sport of… chess.

    I’m not making this up.

    The reason elite international chess has some gendered categories is for positive discrimination; there’s a huge drop-off of girl chess players around the age of 13, and there’s a lot of evidence that where boys are steered towards the game, girls are steered away from it. It’s not a biological issue but a social one. The gendered categories are designed to boost inclusion of people who are not cisgender men, which of course is a category that should include trans women.

    It’s interesting to note that while yet again there are no actual cases of trans women being a problem in this sport, there are currently multiple allegations against straight cisgender male chess players, including grand masters, with credible claims detailing misogyny, sexism and sexual assault of women players.

    What’s particularly galling about this is that the self-proclaimed “feminists” who support trans exclusion are all over this with claims that yes, trans women should be excluded, not because of physical strength this time but because of course, women’s brains are inferior to men’s. If you’re born in a female body you get a little lady brain, they argue, and that means you need your own special lady-brain category in chess so that the big strong clever men don’t win with their big science brains and make you go boo-hoo.

    I despair, but the little bit of me that’s still optimistic hopes that this will finally make people appreciate the bigotry behind trans sporting bans: the science has not changed but there has been a seemingly daily parade of sports lining up to ban trans women. That’s particularly true in England, which seems second only to Russia in its race to exclude trans women from everything. It does make you wonder what conversations are going on behind the scenes between the sporting bodies and Sport England, the government agency that funds so many of them.

    Update, 21 August:

    Some interesting developments here: the English, German, French and US chess governing bodies have rejected the policy set out by FIDE, the International Chess Federation; the German Chess Federation (FSB) issued a strongly worded statement making it clear that they believe the policy is discriminatory, probably illegal and utterly unwelcome.

    The president of FIDE is Arkady Dvorkovich, former deputy prime minister of Russia and a friend of Vladimir Putin. This isn’t the first time he’s been accused of using FIDE to advance Putin’s political aims; earlier this year the European Chess Union’s vice-president accused FIDE of running a “soft power game” that was being “directed by the Kremlin”.

    It’s clear that FIDE is at odds with most national chess governing bodies. And that makes the so-called feminists loudly supporting its policy look even more repellent as they stand proudly against chess players and with Vladimir Putin. But then, there’s a precedent here: in 2022, Putin praised JK Rowling and claimed that Russia was a victim of cancel culture. So he’d fit right in at a UK anti-trans event.

  • Tory in “lying” shocker

    I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the Tories’ culture war bullshit, of which a thinly disguised bathroom ban appears to be the current unlawful idea, but it’s always worth pointing out when ministers tell very obvious lies in support of their bigotry. Like this one, written in yesterday’s Telegraph by equalities minister and Satan’s little helper Kemi Badenoch:

    A decade ago, there was no need to clarify who could use which toilet.

    That’s a lie, and Badenoch knows it. The Equality Act was passed without alarm 13 years ago and clarifies exactly that. And the supposed woke push for gender-neutral toilets in schools that she rails against in the article was actively encouraged by, er, the Conservative government back in 2007 via the Department for Education. Here’s a BBC article about it.

    Here’s a more correct version of Badenoch’s line:

    A decade ago, far-right politicians and the press weren’t waging a war on trans women.

  • 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.